1: It is difficult to overstate how utterly unhinged the right’s reaction to Tuesday night’s presidential debate has been.
I have never seen a collective freakout about the media this embarrassingly frivolous.
🧵
2: Let’s use a sitting U.S. senator as our starting point.
30 minutes in, Mike Lee asked who else was annoyed by ABC. Hours later, he ran a poll getting 10K votes at 93% disapproval for ABC. Then, last night, he suggested that we “reexamine the laws” regarding TV broadcasting.
3: Obviously, social media polls run by ideologically self-segregated hardliners will always be plagued by insuperable selection bias.
But that’s exactly what makes it valuable here: it’s a window into the right’s widespread—and entirely ridiculous—contempt for the moderators.
4: The reality is that, since the night of the debate, no one, not even Kamala Harris, has attracted more scorn from conservatives than ABC.
theunpopulist.net/p/maga-wants-t…
5: During and after the debate, MAGAworld was *seething*.
To be honest, the slate of examples of this that I provide in my brief @UnPopulistMag piece barely scratch the surface:
theunpopulist.net/p/maga-wants-t…
6: This is just insane stuff:
7: Were Scott Adams and Charlie Kirk competing to see who could produce the most hysterical reaction?
8: MAGA evangelical Megan Basham solemnly invoked FDR’s sentiments after the Pearl Harbor attack to describe the ABC debate’s future legacy. Very measured and very fair.
9: Trump, not to be outdone by anyone, and with utter disregard for the First Amendment, called for ABC to lose its broadcast license.
10: I can’t stress to you how many unreservedly batshit takes have been permeating throughout right-wing discourse these past couple of days. It’s truly incredible stuff. And what I've shown you here is just a sampler.
11: But while the right’s collective hysteria over ABC is remarkable, it’s not in the least bit surprising.
theunpopulist.net/p/maga-wants-t…
12: The conservative persecution complex, which takes many forms but is always powered by the dogmatic conviction that the right is forever doomed to face unfair structural disadvantages, was in full swing on Tuesday night.
13: It’s easy to understand why: In a race that is now neck and neck, the right needs Trump to come across as competent and coherent to whatever number of persuadable voters remain.
But that can’t happen unless the media plays ball.
14: Instead, when the media rightly dispenses with the idea—one that so many of its practitioners have uncritically adopted in the past—that Trump’s overwhelmingly higher falsehood count shouldn’t correspondingly attract a higher measure of journalistic scrutiny, Trump suffers.
15: From that perspective, the collective flip-out among conservatives over the moderators’ performance makes a certain amount of sense: withholding preferential treatment for Trump represents an existential challenge to his candidacy.
16: As I put it the night of the debate:
17: Trump needs special treatment from the media in order to clear even a minimal threshold of presidential fitness.
When moderators challenge his assertions more than those of his opponent, he is denied the special privileges he relies on to stay electorally competitive.
18: The reason it feels to Trumpists that the debate moderators were biased is because the right operates under an absurd and self-serving notion that fairness can only be achieved by pre-committing to an equal number of fact checks for both candidates.
19: Proper journalistic scrutiny, however, doesn’t actually require that both candidates be challenged the same number of times—in fact, it requires actively rejecting that idea.
20: To antecedently commit to challenging Harris and Trump the same number of times would jeopardize a journalist’s responsibility to the truth, since such an idea is undergirded by the demonstrably false assumption that the two candidates are equivalently dishonest.
21: If one candidate tells 100 falsehoods and the other 10, for the moderators to settle on an equal number of journalistic interventions would show contempt for reality and thus do a great disservice to viewers.
22: In fact, the moderators took it easy on Trump, relative to the number of falsehoods he uttered.
As @TimAlberta put it:
23: The real Trump Derangement Syndrome was on full display on Tuesday night and ever since then—but the afflicted are conservatives, not ABC’s moderators.
24: It’s the right that believes it should get to put forward a far more dishonest candidate but not receive a correspondingly higher degree of pushback.
That’s MAGA privilege, and at least for one night, the media didn’t accede to it.
25: More from us at @UnPopulistMag here:
theunpopulist.net/p/maga-wants-t…
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