{"id":116683,"date":"2024-10-30T17:05:35","date_gmt":"2024-10-30T15:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=116683"},"modified":"2024-10-30T15:19:41","modified_gmt":"2024-10-30T13:19:41","slug":"30-05-94","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=116683","title":{"rendered":"The Democrats\u2019 Insanity Defense"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The Democrats\u2019 Insanity Defense<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Park MacDougald<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Republican activists say they have to water down the reality of their opponents\u2019 agenda in focus groups. \u2018They just don\u2019t believe it\u2019s true. It can\u2019t be.\u2018<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

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\nMario Tama\/Getty Images<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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In the September debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said something so ludicrous that many viewers must have dismissed it out of hand. \u201cShe did things that nobody would ever think of,\u201d Trump said, while rattling off a list of some of the vice president\u2019s most radical past positions. \u201cNow she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The idea that the vice president \u201cwants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison\u201d seemed so patently absurd that\u00a0The New Yorker\u2019<\/em>s Susan Glasser cited it in a column posted the next morning as an example of Trump\u2019s lunacy: \u201cWhat the hell was he talking about?\u201d Glasser wrote of the trans operation lines. \u201cNo one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris\u2019 point.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That reaction was understandable\u2014the idea of the operations was, as Trump himself said, a \u201cthing nobody would ever think of.\u201d The problem was that it is true. As CNN had reported that week, Harris, when running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, had written in an ACLU questionnaire that she supported publicly funded \u201cgender-affirming care,\u201d including transition surgeries, for federal prison inmates and detained illegal immigrants. Follow-up reporting from The Washington Free Beacon\u00a0revealed<\/a>\u00a0that while serving as California attorney general, Harris had in fact implemented a statewide policy of taxpayer funding for prisoners\u2019 sex changes, born out of a settlement in which she agreed to pay for the transition of a man convicted of kidnapping a father of three and then murdering him as he begged for his life. Harris later bragged, on camera, about this policy as evidence of her commitment to the progressive \u201cmovement\u201d\u2014in a clip that has since become a staple of Trump\u00a0campaign ads<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Many Americans still have trouble accepting these facts, because the underlying predicate\u2014that Barack Obama purposefully sought to ally the United States with a terror-sponsoring, America-hating theocracy\u2014seemed too insane to credit.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The sequence of events neatly encapsulated a pattern that has played out countless times since Trump entered American political life. Trump says something seemingly insane, to many people\u2019s outrage and disbelief, only to have his supposed \u201clie\u201d revealed to be wholly or at least significantly true. Often the specific truth revealed\u2014that the outgoing Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team in order to gather information for what later became the Russiagate hoax, to cite another example\u2014is in fact \u201ccrazier\u201d than Trump\u2019s exaggerations or garbling of the details. The insanity of the policy becomes the front line of defense against potential blowback: Who would believe that anyone would actually propose or support something so obviously at odds with public opinion and basic common sense? Trump must be a raving nutjob, just like we told you he was.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The reason that this strategy has worked is because Democrats rely on all nonexplicitly right-wing media to adopt their framing of issues and cite the party\u2019s preferred experts, which they do. The party\u2019s influence over the country\u2019s communications apparatus has, for the past decade, emerged into something like a political superpower, allowing it to act outside the normal bounds of American politics without suffering from political blowback.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAll of it,\u201d said a Republican congressional staffer, \u201cis insulated by their absolute confidence that they can just use their control over communications institutions to just say words, including change of language, right? Flip a switch and it\u2019s now gender affirming care. Flip a switch and it\u2019s now undocumented migrants, or undocumented Americans. Flip a switch and now you can change people\u2019s pronouns.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The result, for anyone skeptical of the Democratic Party yet bound to operate within the consensus reality of its discourse, is akin to living in a wilderness of mirrors. How to explain, for instance, that elected Democrats from the Biden White House on down support not only taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens, but policies that allow schools to \u201csocially transition\u201d children without informing their parents? How to explain, without sounding like a lunatic, that the newspapers and expert bodies that recommend life-altering surgeries for children, and defend them as \u201clife-saving\u201d or \u201cmedically necessary\u201d care opposed only by cranks and Bible thumpers, either don\u2019t know what they\u2019re talking about or are lying to you for political reasons? That the claim that such surgeries were rarely if ever performed on children was\u00a0also a lie<\/a>? That when President Biden, the kindly old moderate, directed his Department of Health and Human Services to address the \u201cbarriers and exclusionary policies\u201d keeping children from accessing \u201cgender medicine,\u201d what he was describing was a policy that would see\u00a0members of his own administration<\/a>\u00a0pressuring medical agencies to allow procedures such as breast and penis removal be performed on young children, despite the lack of any proof that these measures contribute to greater mental or physical health?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The same GOP staffer, who is currently working on a competitive congressional race, told me that one problem his campaign regularly faces is that aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. \u201cWhen you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don\u2019t believe it,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are critical of things like boys in girls\u2019 sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don\u2019t believe it\u2019s true. It can\u2019t be.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Another Republican operative made a related point on the failure of the party\u2019s attempt to message on trans issues in 2022, which was that the reality of the procedures was so gruesome that voters simply preferred not to think about it. \u201cPhrases like \u2018genital mutilation\u2019 are disgusting and viscerally off-putting, even to voters who may be sympathetic to the Republicans\u2019 position but will just write you off as a freak for talking about it that way.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A similar dynamic plays out in foreign policy. On the one hand the Democrats conjured out of thin air the claim that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, which was, we now know, a conspiracy theory concocted by ex-spies and Clinton campaign operatives and seeded in the intelligence agencies and media by the outgoing Obama administration to cripple the new administration. That is to say that it is not a matter of partisan political opinion; it is simply false. Yet as of 2022, nearly half of U.S. voters, and a majority of Democrats,\u00a0still believed<\/a>\u00a0that Trump was elected in 2016 due to Russian interference, and the hoax remains a mainstay of Democratic rhetoric. It even played a major role in the 2020 election, providing the predicate for the Biden campaign to collude with tech companies and retired spooks to censor reporting about Hunter Biden\u2019s foreign influence-peddling schemes, which turned out to be entirely real.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Outside the pages of a handful of news sites, however, you will look in vain for coverage of the Biden-Harris administration\u2019s disturbingly close relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran, an authoritarian and explicitly anti-American regime currently waging a multifront war against Israel. Like the Obama administration, of which it is a continuation, the Biden-Harris administration has attempted to\u00a0realign<\/a>\u00a0the United States away from Israel and other traditional allies and toward a revisionist-Islamist bloc led by Iran but also including Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood, and various Palestinian radical groups. This orientation is reflected at the level of policy\u2014including nonenforcement of Iranian oil sanctions, flooding Hamas and Hezbollah with cash through cutouts, and, since Oct. 7, the relentless undermining of Israel\u2019s war against Iran and its proxies\u2014as well as at the level of personnel. The Biden administration\u2019s envoy to Iran, who was suspended last spring for mishandling classified information later published in Iranian state media, also hired a confirmed Iranian influence agent into the U.S. State Department. And the White House\u2019s coordinator for intelligence and defense policy on the National Security Council\u2014i.e., the man who would normally be responsible for investigating the recent leak of Israeli military plans to Iran\u2014is a former affiliate of not one but two fronts for the Iranian proxy Hamas: Students for Justice in Palestine and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. The Iranian regime has repaid the Biden-Harris administration for its generosity, hacking the emails of Trump campaign employees and handing them off to a Democratic PAC, which\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0them last week.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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These are all demonstrable matters of fact. Yet many Americans still have trouble accepting them, because the underlying predicate\u2014that our country is purposefully allying with a terror-sponsoring, America-hating theocracy in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, which it has already promised to use to wipe America\u2019s most powerful regional client, Israel, off the map\u2014seemed too insane to credit. Why would Barack Obama have put that into motion, and why would everyone else let it happen? There are plenty of conceivable answers to these question, of course. But you can\u2019t get at any of them if the underlying reality itself is too insane to accept.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Americans do not, as a rule, pay much attention to foreign policy, but the White House\u2019s orientation abroad is inseparable from its politics at home. Within the United States, the Democratic power vertical has cultivated allies and sympathizers of the Iranian \u201caxis of resistance\u201d as\u00a0donors<\/a>,\u00a0fundraisers<\/a>, \u201corganizers<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0clients<\/a>, and street muscle. It has protected them from law enforcement scrutiny, invited them into the\u00a0policymaking process<\/a>, and directed both federal money and funds from party-aligned megadonors such as George Soros and the Tides Nexus into their nonprofits, as I\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0for Tablet in May. These nonprofits have in turn played a major role in organizing the pro-terror protests and encampments that erupted across blue America in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, which have drawn on activist networks previously mobilized to organize anti-Trump protest movements (e.g., the Women\u2019s March and Black Lives Matter) during his first term and anti-Supreme Court protests in the wake of the\u00a0Dobbs<\/em>\u00a0decision in 2022.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The idea that the radicals and thugs shutting down a bridge in your city are part of the Democratic machine is not a particularly difficult idea to wrap one\u2019s head around, particularly following years in which we were constantly warned about the threat of supposed Trumpist \u201cmilitias\u201d like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. The problem is that the Democrats\u2019 alignment with these thugs strikes most Americans as too bizarre and obviously destructive to be true\u2014a thing that \u201cnobody would ever think of.\u201d \u201cYou cannot get people to pay attention to the idea that the Biden-Harris machine is plugged into the Democratic machine, which is plugged into campus antisemitism,\u201d a staffer told me. \u201cIt\u2019s not because it\u2019s too complicated. Voters understand that the same people fund the same things. It\u2019s just that Americans find antisemites weird. We\u2019re not in Europe, right?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It does appear that this insanity defense may finally be breaking down. Polls and early voting returns suggest that Trump may be poised to recapture the White House and potentially even win the popular vote, despite a near daily\u00a0stream of invective<\/a>\u00a0from Democrats and their press allies\u00a0casting<\/a>\u00a0him and his supporters as some version or another of Hitler. Some of this is a product of objective factors hurting the incumbent administration, such as a middling economy and popular anger of its deliberate opening of the southern border, a crisis that eventually became too glaring for the White House to spin away. And some of it, no doubt, is the legacy of nearly a decade of hysteria and overheated propaganda on every topic under the sun, from Trump to the pandemic to race and the relations between the sexes. At some point, voters outside the bubble simply\u00a0tune out<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Joe Biden, whatever his faults and infirmities, played an important role as a symbolic figurehead for what functioned in practice as a radical bureaucratic regime. Even as his administration pursued policies far outside the Overton window of American politics, it was difficult for anyone, let alone moderately engaged voters, to believe that \u201cScranton Joe,\u201d the avuncular centrist and Irish bullshitter, believed in any of the things that his party was said to be doing. Noting the sudden success of the campaign\u2019s transgender ads, one Trump campaign staffer told me, \u201cWe were making this attack on Biden, but it was through some sort of convoluted process because of, like, some sort of Department of Education regulation. But everyone perceived Biden as what he was\u2014an establishment moderate. Maybe he\u2019s had to take up some radical positions for political reasons, but no one thinks Joe Biden sincerely cares about trans rights.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That seems to have changed when Biden was overthrown in favor of Kamala, whose 2020 primary campaign\u2014pitched at party activists and powerbrokers\u2014led her to make the mistake that both Biden and Obama for the most part managed to avoid: openly pandering to the party\u2019s activist base, often on camera. Defund the police. Decriminalize illegal border crossings. Ban fracking. Confiscate guns. Transgender surgeries for illegals.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Harris has since tried to walk many of these positions back, which only creates the new problem of appearing inauthentic and weak\u2014a bad combination when the opponent is Donald Trump, especially when he\u2019s also trouncing you on every issue of substance. It is of course too early to say whether Trump really will return for a second term, though his campaign couldn\u2019t have hoped for better odds back at the\u00a0DNC in August<\/a>, when it looked as if Obama and the rest of the party\u2019s messaging machine might successfully reinvent Kamala as a patriotic moderate and champion of the middle class. That machine is slick and sophisticated, to be sure, but eventually, the laws of political gravity do reassert themselves. You can piss on the shoes of the American people for one term or maybe two, but eventually, they\u2019re going to figure out it isn\u2019t raining.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Park MacDougald<\/strong> is senior writer of\u00a0The Scroll<\/a>, Tablet\u2019s daily afternoon newsletter.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Democrats\u2019 Insanity Defense Park MacDougald Republican activists say they have to water down the reality of their opponents\u2019 agenda in focus groups. \u2018They just don\u2019t believe it\u2019s true. It can\u2019t be.\u2018 . Mario Tama\/Getty Images In the September debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said something so ludicrous that many viewers must […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116683"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=116683"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116695,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116683\/revisions\/116695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=116683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=116683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=116683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}