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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.
This has been far from obvious. Actually going ahead with the prosecution and sending Trump to prison, i.e. letting his entire voting base know that they aren't allowed to pick their representative and their votes are worthless, is not going to be a decision without serious consequences. Most people believed that they wouldn't go through with it not due to some opinion on the matter of the law, but the political and societal consequences that would ensue. My personal belief was that the whole point of these prosecutions was to hamper his campaigning efforts - and the dates they chose for the trial were as close to confirmation as I thought possible barring another wikileaks incident. I didn't think they would actually send him to prison simply because that would be so good for his re-election chances, but if they actually go ahead with it I'll be extremely surprised. To quote a joke made by another poster, maybe he could use the time in jail to write another memoir about his political struggles.
Have you read the news anytime in the past two decades? Are you high? I unironically cannot model the mind of someone who believes that a motivated prosecutor and judge couldn't round up twelve people willing to convict Donald Trump, a man who most members of the blob consider to be worse than Satan, on charges that don't quite hold muster. They were already willing to bend the law much further than allowing a lying democrat into a jury pool with the crossfire hurricane investigation and the bogus Carter Page warrant - they've already gone well beyond what you seem to believe is plausible, and that was in 2015! You have a comical level of faith in an institution that has already been demonstrated as helplessly corrupt - how can you possibly look at the prosecutions of SpaceX for failing to hire enough illegal immigrants for a job they're forbidden to work under law, or the soft-walking of Hunter Biden's countless, impeccably documented felonies, and think that the legal system in the US is actually functioning on legal principles?
Yes, and there isn't actually a contradiction here - they don't believe that Trump was actually conspiring to deprive people of their democratic rights (rather that he was attempting to thwart a conspiracy to do so by others).
I'm not going to deny that's one way of phrasing the message being sent. But a more accurate one would be that they believe the government and the democrats are defecting from the political and democratic order - that they're corruptly using their current authority in order to prevent the opposition from gaining power. Functioning democracies generally don't lock up and arrest the leaders of the opposition party! When the social contract that stipulates democracy and a peaceful transfer of power is torn up, why should they continue to bind themselves by rules that their opponents are clearly not respecting? They're saying "If you don't play by the rules, we won't play by the rules either." - which is not exactly the kind of terroristic threat that your interpretation implies.
I don't think you've seen much recent conservative social media activity. Do you really think the Trump base needs Tucker Carlson to put the thought of violence in their heads? If the Biden administration announces that the Republican party doesn't get to contest the next presidential election, I don't think the republican base would just sit there and go "Aww shucks, guess that's what the law says! Nothing we can do." if it wasn't for Tucker Carlson whispering in their ears.
I think that he is absolutely a true believer when he makes that claim, no matter his feelings towards Trump the man. I think Trump is flawed, albeit not as flawed as he's often painted to be, but even if I passionately hated the man I would still have no trouble believing that his incredibly passionate base would get extremely violent if they were told that they weren't allowed political representation anymore.
Why not? What "serious consequences" do you have in mind, and what reason do our elites have to fear them (as opposed to, say, welcoming them as casus belli to crush the hated enemy tribe even harder).
Again, what consequences, other than his supporters giving up and quitting the political scene?
So what if people stop thinking our legal system is principled (assuming they haven't already)? The Chinese, for example, rejected the entire concept of "rule of law" and "equality before the law" (the core positions of the "Legalist" school) a bit over 2200 years ago, and soldiered on as a civilization just fine.
Greece? Ukraine?
Because the alternative is being subjected to severe punishment for no possible gain?
Except I think, based on my experience with my "republican base" family and friends, that is what most will do. After all, quite a few already think that 2020 was outright stolen, expect some manner of repeat in 2024, and have given up on voting in favor of one (or more) of three things:
Preparing for the imminent Second Coming/End of Days that is now guaranteed to happen in our lifetimes.
The "Benedict Option" (even if they don't use the term): preparing and strengthening their family and church in hopes their descendants a century or two from now will be better prepared to survive and rebuild in the inevitable Dark Age to come. (I think it was Dave "The Distributist" Greene who argued that the entire right needs to accept that we cannot and will not ever win politically any time this century, and the only possible politics for the right is either forming families or becoming a (Catholic) priest, then preparing said families and Church for the eventual collapse.)
Wait for "someone else" to "fix everything" for them.
This last — the immense "free-rider" problem — cannot be overstated. My Dad, for example, holds that, should this sort of situation come to pass, that "local church groups" will provide all the organization the American right-wing will need to "fight back" and win… while he's (AFAIK) never attended a church service in his life. (He's certainly never attended one in my lifetime. For that matter, he has no friends or social life at all outside our family.) Others confidently that our military will certainly step in and set things right… in between breathlessly repeating the latest thing they watched on Fox News about the Woke-ification of our armed forces.
This was one of the more common right-wing criticisms I used to see of all the Q-Anon nonsense — that, besides being an exercise in unbounded apophenia, it serves as a call to passivity, asserting that right-wing citizens need do nothing at all, because the "patriots" secretly at work behind-the-scenes will fix everything for them.
Others (like the people at Sarah Hoyt's blog comments) will go on at length about how doing anything but hunkering down is "playing into the Marxists' hands," and that we just need to wait until "Zhou Bai-Den's Marxist thugs" come busting down our individual front doors, at which point we need only shoot back in self-defense, and then we automatically win.
I think that, for all their passion, very few of them will get violent. Sure, some will, but those that do will do so entirely in the form of "lone-wolf" terrorism, blind lashing-out so poorly targeted and sloppily executed as to make Breivik's assault on Utøya look good in comparison. They will accomplish nothing but giving our government even more excuses to crack down on the right and limit political expression further still.
You've got to remember, post-2020-election the Republican machine did not declare "stolen election, government illegitimate". McConnell outright condemned Trump right after squelching his impeachment trial. You're right that a few lone wolves aren't much of an issue, but if the Republican machine as a whole flips into "rebellion" mode that's quite a different story, and having elections be stolen for real is the sort of thing that might push them over (remember, if the fix goes in that means all their hopes of accomplishing anything via the system - the whole reason they are politicians - just caught on fire). In particular, once one state declares secession or the equivalent, all the other red states are faced with the choice of "join the rebels" or "be made to fight the rebels and then be crushed politically in the ensuing witch-hunt". Texas is the obvious spark, but not the only possibility.
Complicating matters is the fact that the PRC is probably looking to have a Taiwan invasion ready and waiting next year, precisely in order to take advantage of possible chaos in the USA.
Most of my hope is on "the SCOTUS nixes attempts to remove Trump from the ballot". Outside of that scenario... well, I'm sure glad I don't live in the 'States.
Of course not; that would not be keeping in their role as the Outer Party; the Washington Generals to the Democrats' Globetrotters. It would threaten their cushy jobs and ongoing access to the proverbial gravy train.
As the Spartan ephors said to Philip II, "if." I don't think they will, because enough of the long time party establishment are, to use wrestling terminology, jobbers. They're paid to make a show of opposition, to maintain "kayfabe," and then lose. And they likely know it. It doesn't matter how blatant any future "steal" is, they know their continued access wealthy donors, personal influence, and those famous "DC cocktail parties" depends on insisting that the elections were still free and fair.
No, that's far from the whole reason. Again, there's the many benefits of the job itself — the pay, the perks, the status, the influence. I think it was one of Chris Rufo's essays that pointed out how the Democratic party has shown a willingness to accept short-term electoral losses in pushing through long-term legal and social changes, highlighting the particular example of LBJ. In contrast, the GOP, most especially the party establishment, trend very much in the opposite direction — they consistently prioritize protecting their phony-baloney jobs (to borrow from the great Mel Brooks) over "making a difference." There are benefits to being in the Outer Party. There are reasons that generally-competent basketball players play for the Washington Generals.
(Then there's the ones like Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich (can you tell I'm Alaskan?), for whom politics is literally the family business. The latter was being "groomed" for his eventual Senate seat all the way back when he was in high school. They were raised to be politicians. There are reasons I say that an openly aristocratic system is just being more honest about the ruling class.)
Plus, even if the GOP establishment does want to accomplish things in office, those aren't necessarily the same things that their voters — especially the Trump base — want. As someone once put it on a lengthy youtube video I once watched (analyzing county-level maps and breakdowns of biennial Congressional elections from the end of WWII to the end of the 20th century), the Republican Party began as the party of New England bankers… and that's what it always will be. They only "picked up" white working voters because the post-Nixon Democrats "dropped" them, as Matt Stoller describes at length in his 2016 Atlantic piece "How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul." The job of GOP elites is to falsely pander to the voter base when campaigning, then deliver for the elite donor class in office — and I remember sometime last year or so a quote floating around the web from an interview with a Republican campaign strategist where he pretty much said that.
Assuming they aren't able to delay it from reaching them until after the election.
We seem to have very-different models of these people. I guess if there's an obvious steal and the GOP just rolls over and plays dead, I'll have to give this more credence than I currently do.
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