.@realDonaldTrump, we’re debuting this ad on @Morning_Joe, and taking it to other morning shows you watch, too! pic.twitter.com/LVINhUenaV— VoteVets (@votevets) February 6, 2017
“The question is not whether he’s vengeful,” conservative columnist Ben Shapiro told me. “The question is how willing he is to use the levers of government to exact that revenge.”He goes on to talk about Glen Beck, and his paranoia, and his worry that people have taken what he said too seriously.
Ah I see we've shifted swiftly into the "openly bananas dictator" phase. Happy Monday, America! pic.twitter.com/FxCudtoGdO— Hadley Freeman (@HadleyFreeman) February 6, 2017
Breaking: Jill Stein announces demand for a re-match because Russia hacked the football. Send her lots of money. #NotMySuperBowlChamps— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) February 6, 2017
— Yashar (@yashar) February 6, 2017
It's difficult to express both the audacity and the insidiousness of what Conway's doing here (what she's been doing for months, really). Her comment about the nonexistent Bowling Green Massacre is a masterwork of calculated mendacity, the kind of thing that would be admirable if it weren't so dangerous. You can't help but wonder if Conway didn't do the Italian chef finger kiss to herself after she came up with it. Go back and read it one more time. She creates a phony event that she uses specifically to assault the media for its unwillingness to cover, knowing full well that four things will quickly happen: 1) The fake event will immediately become "real" for Trump's people, lodging in their collective consciousness, especially as the lie is repeated again and again as it becomes its own story; 2) they'll assume the reason they had never heard of it was precisely because of a full-on conspiracy by the dishonest media, making it a self-reinforcing delusion; 3) Trump loyalists and media shills will begin reverse-engineering facts to fit the lie, giving it "credibility," or at the very least providing her enough plausible deniability to feign outrage; 4) she'll get double the bang for her buck because once journalists begin calling her out on the lie, she can again slam them for not accepting her apology or asking her to clarify her comment.
It's genius. Evil genius. Which is exactly why it needs to be fought against tooth and nail.
Here's why: not simply because Kellyanne Conway's lie wasn't an accident but because it was a strategy. The goal of Conway is to deliberately muddy the waters between fact and fiction so that the two are indistinguishable. The reason for this? Because doing so debases the truth to the point where it simply doesn't matter anymore. This is important because the truth -- cold, hard fact -- is the Trump administration's worst enemy, as it is the enemy of authoritarian governments in general but of Trump specifically because he lives his life complete unmoored to it. What's more, the truth is what a free press derives its power and authority from, and the Trump administration has already declared the press "the opposition." What better way to destroy that opposition, then, than to take away the importance of that for which it stands.Bob and Chez podcast - twice a week, the episodes are usually up late-ish in the evening every Tuesday and Thursday.
