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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1: Trump has just run one of the most hysterically alarmist presidential campaigns in history.
The whole thing was an attempt to use a baseless crime panic to build a red wave, propel his anti-immigrant crackdown, and reintroduce cartoonishly regressive law and order policies.
2: The crime panic's main function, of course, has been to get him reelected.
It’s why he killed an immigration bill earlier in the year that accommodated nearly every Republican demand and was negotiated by conservative stalwart James Lankford.
3: Passing the bill would’ve disarmed Trump of a narrative critical to his attempts to retake the White House. So he torpedoed the implementation of everything Republicans had been asking for in order to prioritize getting reelected.
1. During the VP debate earlier this month, JD Vance spent the entire evening audaciously attempting to recast himself, and the MAGA philosophy he champions, as the embodiment of common-sense normalcy.
It was preposterous.
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2. Vance’s aim was to project a cogency and coherence onto Trump that is fundamentally alien to him, and a governing seriousness onto MAGAism that would be wholly absent in a second Trump term.
As @JVLast said, Vance sought to come off as “an entirely normal political persona.”
1: Since replacing Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, @VP Kamala Harris has attracted ungodly levels of racist disparagement posing as solemn concerns about her qualifications and merit.
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2: It’s all just a recycled outrage campaign from before—a rehash of the same treatment she got when Biden picked her to be VP.
Only, instead of “She’s a DEI candidate!” … it was “She’s being picked due to identity politics!” then.
3: Of course, this rhetorical strategy isn’t Kamala-specific.
It’s a time-honored template right-wing race-baiters routinely deploy to cast doubt on the governing, legislative, or presidential readiness of minority candidates, especially black ones, on the basis of their race.
1: On Sunday, Joe Biden announced he was withdrawing from the 2024 race.
Following that announcement, there was an immediate consolidation behind Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee.
Republicans criticized both developments as undemocratic. They’re wrong.
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2: The following is just a sampler. There’s a million other examples of Republicans—along with some brain-addled Democrats—claiming this was all undemocratic, or that it was tantamount to a coup against Biden, or that Harris lacks democratic legitimacy.
1: In a much-discussed essay, @ezraklein argues that @JoeBiden is too cognitively compromised to run an effective campaign for reelection.
I think Ezra’s wrong, but even if we grant his argument, the media deserves a significant portion of the blame for getting us here.
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2: Before I set out why the media’s to blame, I want to respond to Klein’s contention that Biden’s camp declining primetime interviews is necessarily indicative of a fear that his interview performances would indelibly confirm he’s in steep decline.
3: Another possibility is that Biden’s low-profile strategy isn't primarily due to fears he may fall flat on his face; it’s possible this is a deliberate strategy based on who his opponent is—a strategy Biden would be implementing even if he were in his 50s instead of in his 80s.