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I saw the following exchange between Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, and it made me angry. So instead of getting over it and going and doing normal things like a well adjusted adult, I decided to complain about it on the internet.
First of all, I'm at least glad to see that reality is starting to set in. Trump is going to get his nonsense "absolute immunity" claim promptly rejected 9-0 by the Supreme Court. He's going to go on trial on March 4, he's going to get convicted, and he's going to go to prison. This has all been obvious for some time, and people do need to come to grips with it instead of telling themselves "it can't happen, so it won't".
But there is a stark mismatch here between the acceptance on one hand that the jury will convict Trump but the insistence on the other hand that "the charges aren't real". DC is an overwhelmingly democratic voting jurisdiction, but you would need to be cynical indeed to think there is no chance that even one Democrat juror would refuse to imprison a political opponent on obviously baseless charges. But of course, the charges are not nearly so baseless as Carlson suggests.
No, the reason that Kelly and Carlson know that Trump is going down is not because they think there is not one honest soul to be found in DC. They can have confidence Trump will lose this case because both his conduct and the law have little mystery about them. On the facts, there's little if any dispute about the actions that Trump took. On the law we have seen similar charges applied to many January 6 defendants, and it has not gone well for them. If Trump is to get similar treatment for similar conduct, he must be convicted.
Carlson and Kelly know that he's guilty and yet they pretend otherwise. Carlson rants about how outrageous it is to render people's votes meaningless, and yet when Trump is charged for conspiring to do exactly that he flatly states it's "not even a real crime". I emphasize that his contention here isn't even that Trump didn't do the awful thing he's accused of - he's saying that the things he's accused of aren't awful. This lays bare how empty and fake Carlson's feigned defence of democracy is. You can believe that it's outrageous to deprive people of their democratic rights or you can believe that conspiring to deprive people of their democratic rights isn't a "real crime", but it's incoherent to claim both.
But worst of all is the "warning" of violence. Carlson tells us that the man who incited a riot must not be punished or else we'll get more riots. This is the logic of terrorism. Give us what we want or there will be blood. Sure, he phrases it as a prediction rather than a threat and says he detests violence... but he knows full well that many of the people who might actually commit it could well be listening to him, and he knows he is fanning the flames of their resentment and putting the thought of violence in their heads. This would be irresponsible even if Carlson were sincere, but the fact that he's obviously being cynical makes it worse. This is a man who passionately hates Trump and couldn't wait for him to get kicked out of the White House - and yet here he is inventing excuses for him, pre-emptively trying to discredit the verdict he knows is coming, sanewashing Trump's "rigged election" claims, stoking anger, and telling people that violence is the inevitable response if Trump gets locked up. All, one presumes, so he can maintain his position in the GOP media ecosystem. What a worm.
Smith and Chuktan will obviously not allow themselves to be swayed by threats of violence, so we will unfortunately get to see if the dark talk turns into action. I for one hope Trump's most volatile supporters will at least recognize the truth that Carlson acknowledges - it will go extremely badly for anyone who takes it upon themselves to shed blood.
When did Trump incite a riot? I listened to his speech that day. At no point did he call for violence. Anything he said is 100% protected free speech. If Trumps guilty then Biden, Kamala, every member of congress, and every Senator is guilty.
To me the only real case is the one in Georgia where he may have crossed some lines. He is also probably guilty of some things with classified documents but since Biden, Pence, Hillary have similar issues that feels a lot like lawfare and should be thrown out because the law hasn’t been equally applied.
The Georgia thing feels pretty much identical to the "very fine people" comment, where he supposedly called neonazis "very fine people", but in context actually said the opposite.
In the call where he was supposedly pressuring Brad Raffensberger to "find votes", he is very clearly saying that his team thinks there is fraud, and is asking for permission (or help) in investigating that fraud. The "finding" votes he's talking about is not a euphemism; he is literally saying that if fraud is investigated, that there will be at least enough to flip the state.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript/index.html
This seems so blatantly inbounds ethically that it amazes me that this is what they're going after him for. Even the wikipedia page (not exactly unbiased) seems to clearly state that the was trying to get fraud investigated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_phone_call
Sure he may have been pressuring Brad Raffensberger to do something, but the something he was pressuring him to do doesn't seem illegal, or even questionably ethical.
I feel like sometimes I’m good at this where you say something in a scissor statement way. I usually do it in a playful way. Trumps good at this. His comments here can come off how you say but also outrage the left. He did it with the Proud Boys in the debates with his stand back and stand by. He did it with Russia and hacking. It’s a fun way to communicate where your meaning has a very mild and what you mean meaning but people can see a way to get offended by it.
I highly recommend listening to that call and/or reading the transcript -- there's very little room for the alternate interpretation, he goes on for like an hour about all the ways he thinks fraud was committed, and how many votes can be 'found' just by looking into one or two of these things. It doesn't really support the idea that he didn't believe what he was saying to be true either, he's very vehement.
I think it's more that he says a lot of stuff, and there's an army of people employed at sifting through it to snip out bits that make him look maximally evil out of context.
And that he is imprecise and careless about what he says, especially when he's regurgitating things he has only vaguely committed to memory, so he leaves a lot of room for others to figure out what he meant.
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On the latter part I think he does both. “The fine people” thing seemed to me that he was actually trying to be nuanced. The proud boy thing seemed more like a scissor statement and as is it was weird he was asked to condemn an org as white supremacists who had a black man as their president. The Russian stuff maybe a scissor statement.
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