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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.
That is not what Carlson is saying!
"The heinous crimes that they are accusing Trump of are in fact the heinous crimes that they themselves committed" is an argument that you can make, and I've seen variations of it elsewhere. But Carlson isn't making that argument. He's saying they're "not real crimes". Tried to steal an election? Pfft, that's nothing, next you'll arrest him for littering.
It's the difference between "I didn't kill the guy" and "Nobody liked him anyway."
I disagree - he's claiming that Trump's actions aren't actually real crimes and never rose to that level. I'm extremely certain that if you offered the deal to Trump, he'd be perfectly fine with a scenario where Biden, losing the election, makes a series of phone calls saying roughly the exact same things he did, and Carlson would be too. Even the actual charges against him are reliant on the idea that he knew he was lying, and I fail to see why the idea that Trump made a mistake is so outside the realms of possibility.
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