Here's what I think will matter from tonight's speech/this convention:
The premise of the RNC is that everything was going great, COVID has been a blip, but we're totally past it and back to fine now.
That's comforting to an audience that wants to believe it. But it's fleeting.
It's nine and a half weeks until the election. That's a really long time. Particularly now, when every week brings another disruptive horror.
Nine and a half weeks ago was June 16th. What news do you recall from June 16th? What has stuck with you that long?
Reality is the unavoidable problem for the Trump campaign.
They just spent four weeks utterly ignoring reality. I'm sure that felt nice for the supporters who tuned in -- it sure felt infuriating to us critics!
But, tomorrow, reality will start setting in again.
What's happening in the NBA and MLB right now will probably have a deeper impact.
Professional athletes -- the people we turn to for a distraction from the dismal news -- have gone on strike, refusing to offer that distraction.
I don't know how the election will turn out.
I don't know because this is not going to be a normal election. It will be waged mid-pandemic. It will be waged amidst foreign interference. It will be waged amidst unprecedented voter suppression - both legal and illegal.
But as people rev up their hot take machines, something to keep in mind:
This convention will be barely remembered. This speech will evaporate from memory. They were built upon the paper-thin foundations of escapist lies. The reality of 2020 is too harsh for that.
This election is a fight over whether the USA continues to be a (badly bruised/barely functional) democracy at all.
The fight will be hard, and unfair. The results will be far too close for comfort. But that's not because of their speeches. It's because of their abuse of power.
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The #TwitterFiles are just fan service for aggrieved conservatives who exist in the Fox News Extended Universe.
This entire installment from Taibbi is just “ZOMG senior Twitter leaders met with government agencies to identify threats?!? And they considered CONTEXT when evaluating high-profile strategic communications?”
…man, you know that’s just a description of competence, right?
Again, fan service.
It’s December 10th. Trump has lost the election and is loudly spewing The Big Lie that RESULTS IN AN INSURRECTION.
How brainwormed do you have to be to think “the scandal here is Twitter executives developing new tools to deal with Trump’s rhetoric”?
Frequent Alex Jones guest… thought NASA had a secret slave colony on Mars… protocols of the elders of zion… QAnon… COVID conspiracy theorist who died of COVID in 2021.
The thing to understand about the Hunter Biden laptop story was that it was SUPPOSED to be the Trump campaign’s “October Surprise.”
Mainstream media and social media were supposed to take the bait and focus on the appearance of scandal for the last weeks of the election.
(1/x)
They didn’t take the bait. The New York Post story was shunned. Social media platforms treated it as manufactured propaganda with questionable sourcing.
And conservative elites have been PISSED ever since.
(2/x)
They’re supposed to be these brilliant media manipulators.
Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and the rest of the Pepe Patrol pretend at being these incredibly sophisticated actors, injecting precision memes to bend the public will.