Thread by @normative

One thing that’s increasingly clear is that our hyperpolarized media ecosystem is also providing cover for abuses of power. How outrageous you find Trump’s ask to Zelensky is probably at least PARTLY a function of how seriously you take the underlying accusation against Biden.

Not entirely, of course: Even if the charge had merit, Trump making a personal request to work with his personal attorney on the matter, and directly linking the ask to aid approved by Congress, would still be grotesque.

But suppose DOJ now opens a more formal probe. That would also be abusive, but the fact that you have major outlets pushing a bogus narrative creates a veneer of plausible deniability about whether the relevant officials at least BELIEVE there’s a potentially meritorious case.

The Russia inquiry gives you the same phenomenon in reverse. To me, it seems obviously reasonable that —given Russia’s interference on Trump’s behalf & the campaign’s many, many Russian contacts—FBI would investigate whether there was explicit coordination.

If your media diet is telling you the whole idea is preposterous and decisively disproven, then probably that investigation seems pretextual.

Ditto Barr’s “investigating the investigators.” To me, it looks like a bogus attempt to undermine the extremely well-established finding that Russia intervened on Trump’s behalf, the consequence of which, if it succeeded, would be to encourage Russia to continue interfering.

But if we’re asking whether it qualifies as an *abuse of power* rather than merely a foolish allocation of resources, then it does sort of matter whether Barr is acting on a false but sincere belief that there’s something here that actually merits investigation.

Here, again, the polarized media ecosystem creates a patina of plausible deniability. If millions of Fox viewers now believe maybe Russia didn’t actually interfere, well… it seems at least conceivable that Barr too falsely but sincerely believes it.

It doesn’t make the belief any more reasonable, but it does make a difference in how unambiguously you can say his actions are pretextual and abusive as opposed to foolish.

Which is to say, the more Fox & co give air to these dubious narratives, the more latitude they create for the administration to deploy state power against their opponents & claim permissible motives.

Functionally, of course, it doesn’t matter whether they’re concocting dishonest pretexts or drunk on their own Kool Aid: The result is the same. But in terms of convincing the public conduct is impeachable rather than merely misguided, it seems like it matters quite a lot.

If you wanted to put it in trendy theory terms, you could say: As long as our checks on “abuse” are sensitive to subjective intent (and people are bad at concealing intent), then power will manufacture subjectively sincere beliefs that rationalize the reproduction of power.