Read on Twitter
The most painful thing on Twitter in the wake of a Big Thing happening is watching earnest liberals spend hours & hours crafting arguments & offering citations & cross-linking threads as though there is an actual good-faith debate happening.
Like JD Vance takes a dump on his feed and I've seen probably a hundred people arguing with the dump, as though Vance or anyone else in the cult is open to rational persuasion, as though they wouldn't, if this dump is discredited, just take some other dump.
Over 20 years of covering climate change I have, needless to say, become *very* familiar with all these dynamics. I've seen people of good faith pour so much time -- I mean 100s of 1000s of labor hours -- into crafting arguments trying to "persuade deniers."
And it never worked. Literally. A 99.99999% failure rate. Because deniers can just say "nuh UH" & go on arguing. There's no ref to step in & say "you lost this one." Or if a particular denier myth is, finally, with enormous effort, buried... they just pivot & make up another one!
It's a microcosm. The deniers were always just defending their tribal position...so they assume that's what everyone's doing. The climate scientists were trying to reason from evidence to conclusions...so they assume that's what everyone's doing. Ships in the night.
People say the deniers delayed action, & that's true, but the other thing they did, which no one's quite put a term to or quantified, is simply drain the time, effort, & emotional energy of tens of thousands of climate-sane people.
It takes virtually no effort to toss some lie or misleading bullshit out into the public sphere; it takes enormous effort to craft an evidence-based argument against it. Just multiply that asymmetry over & over & over & over again & you get a sense of the cost of all this.
All of which is to say: the Trump cultists are going to make up reasons why his stealing nat'l security secrets is no big deal, or why Hillary is worse, or why ... look, a squirrel! ... and trying to argue against them as though history or reason or evidence is relevant ...
... is just a huge, huge waste of time. Dems need to be certain that they are acting to enforce the rule of law (the indictment makes the case) and then they need to act, decisively & confidently. Arguing with Vance-style turds is pure cost, no gain. Don't bother.
Addendum: John-Paul Sartre nailed this exact dynamic, in reference to anti-Semites. 
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