It’s turtles lies and lunacy, all the way down
You’d have to be crazy to believe this stuff…all of which just happens to be verifiably true and accurate.
The Democrats’ Insanity Defense
Republican activists say they have to water down the reality of their opponents’ agenda in focus groups. ‘They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.‘In the September debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said something so ludicrous that many viewers must have dismissed it out of hand. “She did things that nobody would ever think of,” Trump said, while rattling off a list of some of the vice president’s most radical past positions. “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”
The idea that the vice president “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” seemed so patently absurd that The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser cited it in a column posted the next morning as an example of Trump’s lunacy: “What the hell was he talking about?” Glasser wrote of the trans operation lines. “No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’ point.”
That reaction was understandable—the idea of the operations was, as Trump himself said, a “thing nobody would ever think of.” The problem was that it is true. As CNN had reported that week, Harris, when running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, had written in an ACLU questionnaire that she supported publicly funded “gender-affirming care,” including transition surgeries, for federal prison inmates and detained illegal immigrants. Follow-up reporting from The Washington Free Beacon revealed that while serving as California attorney general, Harris had in fact implemented a statewide policy of taxpayer funding for prisoners’ sex changes, born out of a settlement in which she agreed to pay for the transition of a man convicted of kidnapping a father of three and then murdering him as he begged for his life. Harris later bragged, on camera, about this policy as evidence of her commitment to the progressive “movement”—in a clip that has since become a staple of Trump campaign ads.
The sequence of events neatly encapsulated a pattern that has played out countless times since Trump entered American political life. Trump says something seemingly insane, to many people’s outrage and disbelief, only to have his supposed “lie” revealed to be wholly or at least significantly true. Often the specific truth revealed—that the outgoing Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team in order to gather information for what later became the Russiagate hoax, to cite another example—is in fact “crazier” than Trump’s exaggerations or garbling of the details. The insanity of the policy becomes the front line of defense against potential blowback: Who would believe that anyone would actually propose or support something so obviously at odds with public opinion and basic common sense? Trump must be a raving nutjob, just like we told you he was.
The reason that this strategy has worked is because Democrats rely on all nonexplicitly right-wing media to adopt their framing of issues and cite the party’s preferred experts, which they do. The party’s influence over the country’s communications apparatus has, for the past decade, emerged into something like a political superpower, allowing it to act outside the normal bounds of American politics without suffering from political blowback.
“All of it,” said a Republican congressional staffer, “is insulated by their absolute confidence that they can just use their control over communications institutions to just say words, including change of language, right? Flip a switch and it’s now gender affirming care. Flip a switch and it’s now undocumented migrants, or undocumented Americans. Flip a switch and now you can change people’s pronouns.”
The result, for anyone skeptical of the Democratic Party yet bound to operate within the consensus reality of its discourse, is akin to living in a wilderness of mirrors. How to explain, for instance, that elected Democrats from the Biden White House on down support not only taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens, but policies that allow schools to “socially transition” children without informing their parents? How to explain, without sounding like a lunatic, that the newspapers and expert bodies that recommend life-altering surgeries for children, and defend them as “life-saving” or “medically necessary” care opposed only by cranks and Bible thumpers, either don’t know what they’re talking about or are lying to you for political reasons? That the claim that such surgeries were rarely if ever performed on children was also a lie? That when President Biden, the kindly old moderate, directed his Department of Health and Human Services to address the “barriers and exclusionary policies” keeping children from accessing “gender medicine,” what he was describing was a policy that would see members of his own administration pressuring medical agencies to allow procedures such as breast and penis removal be performed on young children, despite the lack of any proof that these measures contribute to greater mental or physical health?
The same GOP staffer, who is currently working on a competitive congressional race, told me that one problem his campaign regularly faces is that aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. “When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it,” he said. “They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.”
Ahh, but there’s the rub. Shouldn’t be, naturally, but can’t? Sorry to bust any bubbles or anything, but…well, there it is.
Via AoSHQ, the article is a long ‘un, but be sure to stick with it to the very end. This next section I have a couple of quibbles with, which problematic statements I’ll put in bold for y’all fine folks.
A similar dynamic plays out in foreign policy. On the one hand the Democrats conjured out of thin air the claim that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, which was, we now know, a conspiracy theory concocted by ex-spies and Clinton campaign operatives and seeded in the intelligence agencies and media by the outgoing Obama administration to cripple the new administration. That is to say that it is not a matter of partisan political opinion; it is simply false. Yet as of 2022, nearly half of U.S. voters, and a majority of Democrats, still believed that Trump was elected in 2016 due to Russian interference, and the hoax remains a mainstay of Democratic rhetoric. It even played a major role in the 2020 election, providing the predicate for the Biden campaign to collude with tech companies and retired spooks to censor reporting about Hunter Biden’s foreign influence-peddling schemes, which turned out to be entirely real.
SO, let’s do this then.
- QUIBBLE 1: It was NOT a “conspiracy theory,” but a deliberate stratagem, a ploy in the age-old Clinton mold
- QUIBBLE 2: They were NOT Hunter’s “schemes,” but his worthless father’s; Pedaux Jaux used Hunter as his bagman; Hunter is much too dull-witted, careless, and crack-damaged to come up with any sort of “scheme” on his own hook
Semantics aside, the author’s overall point still stands.
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