Thread by @Dreamweasel

Welcome to life in 2021, where the lion’s share of what passes for political discourse consists of Explaining Extremely Obvious Things to People Who Refuse to Listen

- Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Any “fraud” detected was minimal, & did not affect the outcome in any state.

- Several states were not allowed to count mail-in ballots until the Election Day ballots were complete. They were not mysteriously “found” in the middle of the night.

- There was no valid evidence for fraud; just hearsay and viral rumors on the Internet.

- Despite 60 attempts to prove fraudulent behavior, none of Trump’s evidence was considered legitimate in a court of law.

- The public “hearings” held to make Trump’s case were not legally binding. There was no penalty for submitting false information. They had no purpose other than to sway the court of public opinion.

- Trump spent two months fighting tooth & nail to overturn the election

- After his lawsuits failed, Trump put pressure on state legislators to disregard their citizens’ vote at the polls

- The Electoral College cast their votes on December 14, confirming that Biden won the election.

- Trump remained angry, defiant & confrontational. He taunted GOP opponents as a “surrender caucus”, as if he were fighting a war against the American government to remain in power.

- Trump devoted supporters were fully anticipating a cataclysmic event on January 6th. They eagerly awaited “The Storm” or some other anti-democratic upheaval that would cast aside the Deep State & keep Trump in power.

- The purpose of Trump’s January 6th rally on the National Mall was to pressure Congress into rejecting the choice of the Electoral College.

⁃ Congress did not give Trump what he wanted, so his mob retaliated. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in a blatant act of sedition.

- There were no Antifa interlopers at this rally; that is wishful thinking. Antifa is now a default GOP scapegoat.

- The property damage that happened at BLM rallies is in no way comparable to the deliberate insurrection of the U.S. Congress to overturn a Presidential election.

- Contrary to what many elected Republicans are saying, “dividing our country” is not the main problem we’ve had in the weeks since the election.

- Trump has been openly trying to overturn the election. If you bemoan those who “divide our country”, you’re making excuses for him.

- Twitter is not censoring conservative ideas. The only message that was consistently flagged & banned by Twitter is “The election was rigged & must be overturned”.

- There was no “conservative” basis for this belief; it was aggressive MAGA propaganda, and nothing more.

- Twitter also refused to link to a dubiously-sourced attack on Hunter Biden, published in the New York Post three weeks before the election. Despite what many Trump supporters would have you believe, “Destroy Hunter Biden at All Costs” is not a conservative idea per se.

- Any elected official who says they’ve never heard of QAnon is lying.

- The only political figures who say they’re not familiar with QAnon are Republicans who stand to gain the most from propagation of QAnon conspiracy theories. They are lying about it to evade responsibility.

- The people who endured four years of Donald Trump and still supported his re-election are the exact same people who believed he should have been allowed to overturn an election and seize the Presidency by force. There is no real distinction between these two categories.

- Nobody cancelled the Muppet Show. Disney Plus added a disclaimer to 18 episodes where the content has aged poorly after 40 years. You can still see them all.

- Nobody cancelled Dr. Seuss. His family’s publishing company has ceased to publish 6 older titles with racist images.

- The “Cancel Culture” boogeyman falls apart when you realize that there really is no target or organizing body for the broadsides against it. There isn’t anyone who decides who gets “cancelled”; it’s now just an umbrella term for negative public reaction to offensive behavior.

- Conservatives’ biggest problem with “Cancel Culture” is the critical reevaluation of things that they had previously considered acceptable

- If your reaction to such reevaluation is “But we considered that normal at the time!”, that may be part of the problem

- Mr. Potato Head has not been cancelled. You can still buy Mr. Potato Head and Mrs. Potato Head. The parent company is now simply called “Potato Head”.

- There are no tangible effects of this decision other than infecting Fox News acolytes with a terminal case of the vapors.

- “Defund the Police” is not a platform of the Democratic Party. It has about as much to do with the Democrats as Antifa and “cancel culture”.

- The misconception that Democrats are responsible for these issues is entirely a product of the conservative echo chamber.

- There is nothing in President Biden’s climate plan about limiting meat consumption. The source of this rumor was an article in The Daily Mail, a right-leaning British tabloid. Like many conservative talking points, it is nothing other than wild speculation masquerading as fact.

- There is no official edict to distribute Kamala Harris’ picture book to migrant children at the border. (A single copy of it was donated during a book drive in Long Beach.) That is another paranoid fantasy of ideological brainwashing that fuels the engine of the modern Right.

- Continued support for the Electoral College is based on a misguided notion of “fairness” in that rural areas & urban areas deserve equal representation in selection of our President. As there are far more urban voters than rural voters in this country, this is patently untrue.

- There is no gasoline shortage in 2021. A ransomware cyberattack has caused a temporary shutdown of an East Coast petroleum pipeline. Hyperbolic reporting has led to panic-buying & price gouging, but the scenario is in no way comparable to the gas shortages we had in the ‘70s.

- The GOP mockingly compares “The Big Lie” to the allegations of Trump’s collusion with Russia. As a reminder: the Senate refused to act on the Mueller Report because the GOP wanted to protect Trump. That is not synonymous with “The Mueller Report proved Trump did nothing wrong.”

- Thanks to the echo chamber of Fox News et. al, the Democratic Party will forever be expected to answer for That One Thing That Liberal Said That One Time

- If they amplify “A liberal said [X]” frequently enough, their viewers will eventually believe “All liberals support [X]”

- It’s not as elegant a turn of phrase as “Whataboutism”, but That One Thing That Liberal Said That One Time is among the more potent weapons of RW media.

- It isn’t quite a strawman - they can usually find at least one example - but it does not represent liberals as a group.

- The conflict in Israel has lasted thousands of years; there are no simple solutions.

- Terrorism is unconscionable. Airstrikes of civilian settlements are also unconscionable.

- And no, criticism of the Israeli government’s actions is not necessarily rooted in anti-Semitism.

- “Critical race theory” is an analysis of how the U.S. legal system was and is affected by the nation’s white supremacist origins.

- Very few conservatives can explain what “critical race theory” actually is.

- To Republicans, “critical race theory” is an all-purpose boogeyman that suggests our academic institutions are indoctrinating students to hate white people. This fear is weaponized to intimidate educators away from pursuing a curriculum where racism is acknowledged in any way.

- A January 6 Commission would necessarily involve an investigation into how Donald Trump’s Republican followers chose to respond after Trump spent months telling them the election was stolen.

- The GOP collectively opposes a January 6 Commission for this very reason.

- Republicans claim to oppose the January 6 Commission because they do not wish to see the attempted insurrection used as a partisan attack. But the siege of the Capitol Building was partisan by definition; no fair investigation into this event could avoid addressing that.

- There is no honest assessment of the January 6 insurrection that in any way references last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests

- Contrary to what many Republicans will tell you, last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests were not an orgy of rioting, looting, & all-out mayhem

- When Republicans lecture you to “LEARN YOUR HISTORY!” it’s usually to distract you from what they’re doing now

- One can use this guideline to understand the current focus of Ted Cruz et. al in their determination to conclude that China deliberately infected us with COVID-19

- COVID-19 required sweeping action in the arenas of health care & public safety. The GOP has zero interest or competence in either of these things.

- Trump treated it mainly as an immigration issue, in keeping with “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

- The Republicans’ renewed focus on Wuhan reframes the pandemic as an act of aggression. They are now the party of 12-year-olds pointing fingers: “IT’S THEIR FAULT!” They never cared about slowing the spread of the Coronavirus; all that mattered was finding someone else to blame.

- In the early days of the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci was unsure about the need to wear a mask. He revised his opinion when new information became available.

- That does not make Fauci a charlatan or a fraud; only those with a political agenda against him believe this.

- You can “trust the science” while continuing to wear a mask after you’ve been vaccinated. It may be unnecessarily cautious, but it is not anti-science, as there is no scientific research which suggests that there is anything harmful about wearing a mask in public.

- “Critical race theory” is a very specific doctrine that the Right has demonized and broadened to encompass pretty much anything liberals say about race that they don’t like. It’s a lot like what they did with “Antifa”.

- America has a long history of institutional racism which very much affects our lives today. Under no circumstances does today’s GOP want this history taught in schools.

- CRT is a very specific subset of this idea, but as far as the Right is concerned they’re interchangeable.

- In general, Presidential press conferences tend to be dry, relatively drama-free events; not exactly Must-See TV

- There is no correlation between the TV ratings of Biden Administration press conferences and the number of people who voted for him

- There is nothing in critical race theory that teaches people that there is something inherently wrong with them if they are white

- Nobody is teaching CRT to children

- There are no immediate or future plans to use Juneteenth as a replacement holiday for the Fourth of July

- Biden had predicted that 70% of American adults would have the COVID vaccine by the 4th of July

- Our failure to meet this goal was not Biden’s fault, as the vaccine was available to those who wanted it

- We did not meet this goal because of the people who refused to take it

- The protests in Cuba were incited by a combination of factors, including the repressive acts of the Cuban government and the U.S. economic sanctions, as the nation suffers under the pandemic. Citing them as an example of “SOCIALISM BAD!” is reductive and overly simplistic.

- Actual recorded incidents of voter fraud are in no way proportional to the urgency with which the Texas GOP is rushing to implement voter ID restrictions

- The Texas GOP wants these new laws to make it harder to vote, and to give them veto power over which votes count

- Anyone who tells you “Critical Race Theory flies in the face of what Martin Luther King taught us” understands as little about Martin Luther King as they do about critical race theory

The longstanding GOP platform on race:

- Institutional racism doesn’t exist
- Anyone who suggests otherwise is a “race hustler”
- The police can do no wrong
- Any black person killed by police must’ve done something to deserve it

And they think MLK would’ve been on their side.

- “The mainstream media is lying to you” is the defining mantra of modern conservatism. This common thread conntects Rush Limbaugh to Fox News to Donald Trump.

- Rather than teaching conservatives to think for themselves, it just made them susceptible to deceit & demagoguery.

- The Coronavirus vaccine is not being “politicized” by both sides. Democrats want all adults to be vaccinated to minimize further outbreaks. Whereas Republicans grasp at increasingly absurd politically-driven conspiracies to justify why they shouldn’t have to take the vaccine.

- The only circumstances under which Republicans treat COVID as a threat is when they can link it to immigration. That’s why they continue to focus on its Chinese origins, and why they are now Very Deeply Concerned about the Central American origins of the Lambda Variant.

- There is nothing cruel or inhumane about requiring children to wear masks in school. It is probably an improvement over another year of remote learning.

- Like all mask mandates, resistance to it is fueled primarily by the bedrock conservative principle of “WE DON’T WANNA.”

- The only way to prevent the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan again would be to establish a permanent U.S. military presence; this is too much to ask of our armed forces

- As it stands, it wouldn’t make much difference if we withdrew 10 years ago or 10 years in the future

- A year and a half into the pandemic, the effective GOP plan has not deviated one iota from “Stop mask mandates, stop vaccinations, reopen everything & we’ll all pretend the Coronavirus never happened.”

- They’re still treating it like a hoax perpetrated by the Democrats.

- The defining characteristic of MAGA conservatism is: Never back down, and never admit you’re wrong.

- When facts emerge to contradict their original assumptions, the bulk of their energy will be expended in the service of explaining why these “facts” should not be trusted.

- The overwhelming majority of new patients hospitalized by COVID are unvaccinated. One would think this would unimpeachably bolster the conventional wisdom about the vaccines, but to dogmatic Republicans it’s just another suspicious story propagated by the pro-Deep State media.

- Larry Elder’s pre-emptive dismissal of the California recall election results indicate that Trump has dragged “Never Admit You Lost, Ever” into the GOP mainstream.

- They clearly fancy themselves a party of predators, and they deserve to be treated as such.

“Vaccine hesitancy” is not the fault of the following people and organizations:

- President Joe Biden
- Dr. Anthony Fauci
- the CDC

It is the fault of Donald Trump, Fox News, and other conspiracy-driven individuals who oppose these institutions for purely political reasons.

- “Herd immunity” is not necessarily synonymous with “Do nothing, and eventually we’ll all be immune to this highly contagious disease.” The term is traditionally used in reference to diseases we have proactively controlled, if not flat-out eradicated, with the use of vaccines.

- “Focus on obesity” is the “Focus on mental illness” of the COVID pandemic. It’s just a hollow declaration of Whataboutism.

- As they demonstrated during the Obama Administration, the GOP has about as much interest in eradicating obesity as they do in addressing mental illness.