Quote (IceMage @ Mar 9 2023 08:11am)
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/choose-your-own-adventure/Weird that some random blogger(Allahpundit/Nick Cattagio) is probably the best analyst/commentator on what's happening on the right. Not sure if people have to sign up for The Dispatch to read, but either way you should.
Some of the useful points include the idea that with something like January 6th, Trump cultists have several routes to choose from to arrive at the desired end point, which is that Trump and the right are not responsible in any way. They can think it was just a tourist visit with no violence, or that Nancy Pelosi should be criticized for not securing the Capitol against the violence from secret antifa agents, or that the violence was completely justified because of a stolen election, or they might believe a mix of all three of these. Trump cultists are comfortable with contradiction, as long as the end goal is that Trump deserves no blame and his enemies deserve all the blame. Another point was that when Sean Spicer opened his career as White House Press Secretary and lied about the inauguration crowd, it offered Trump cultists a choice: go with the obvious facts or go with Trump's narrative. When the only media you trust are Trump propagandists, and everyone else is saying grass is green, why is Trump wrong for saying it is bright orange? You can't side with Trump's enemies. So they aren't intellectually capable of separating from him on any issue.
And this great commentary, which I entirely agree with, aligns with my view that Trump will win the Republican primary(even if he's indicted) and he's the most likely person alive right now to win the US presidency.
More on this:
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Carlson’s demagoguery about January 6 isn’t ultimately about telling true believers what they want to hear. It’s about convincing right-wingers who aren’t sure what to think that what happened at the insurrection is, at a minimum, debatable. It’s a matter of dispute and always will be. The truth is unknowable.
It’s scarcely an exaggeration to say that the point of conservative media writ large is to render uncomfortable information unknowable. Typically that’s done via extreme gatekeeping: As of last week, just four of the top 26 most popular conservative platforms had covered the Dominion revelations about Fox News. (A few reproduced wire stories about the matter.) The right’s media industry is an all but vacuum-sealed “safe space” for the most tender of snowflakes, as Jonah Goldberg rightly says.
But when a story is too big to be gatekept and reeeeeeeeally bad for the right and comes packaged with mountains of damning video evidence, as January 6 was, it needs to be dealt with. And the way to deal with it is to muddy the waters however you can. If you can’t convince people that the insurrection was good or an Antifa psy op or a deep-state set-up or a product of the negligence of Capitol Police, you can at least cast doubt on a few cherry-picked claims made by their ideological enemies and leave them to deduce that the truth of what happened is opaque. Who were those guys in red MAGA hats waving “Trump 2020” banners and beating cops with flagpoles? Did they decide to go sightseeing at the Capitol and just happen to do so on a day when Congress was certifying a presidential election?
Who can say?
“The facts are unknowable and therefore must remain forever in dispute” is just another path in the “choose your own adventure” decision tree that leads to concluding that it’s unfair to fault Trump and the Republican Party for the insurrection. Not coincidentally, House Republicans are now planning “multiple probes” of January 6 “including looking into the Democratic-led select committee’s actions from the last Congress, the security failures from that day and potentially even the treatment of January 6 defendants.” None of those probes will upend the terrible facts of what happened that day but they’ll all serve the basic narrative that we still don’t know the full truth. And we can probably never know it.
I think most right-wingers on this forum fall into this group.
This post was edited by IceMage on Mar 9 2023 07:35am
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