When you find your own side of the political spectrum harbors extremists and others who are digging up the very foundations of government, well, if you can’t admit to it, this is what Erick Erickson speaks, he claims on the air:
The Democrats have internalized orange man bad. The Democrats fundamentally believe that Donald Trump is the villain. They really believe people like Jay Rosen, the well-respected New York University journalism professor who admitted he believes that the United States is on the verge of turning into a white Christian nationalist state. It’s bet [sic] poop crazy nonsense, but the Democrats have internalized it.
Let’s see: Charlottesville, Covid-19 response (it was all magical thinking), NATO, 2017 “tax reform”, climate change, there’s probably a dozen more examples of Trump doing nothing more than playing to the biases of his base rather than doing what’s best for the nation. Orange man bad? Incompetent, unjustifiably boastful, mendacious, oh so many other adjectives, or bad? Pick it, Erickson.
The same people who are scared of a virus and can’t take their mask off are, of course, emotionally and mentally scarred by the events of January 6th and have internalized the worst possible scenario. They have no reason to want to know or understand Donald Trump’s voters. They think they’re all racist. They have internalized that it’s a bunch of white people and white people are bad, therefore, Donald Trump’s supporters are all bad and need to destroy them. They are overplaying their hand on this.
Look at that first sentence and then start reciting the Holy Litany: Smallpox, TB, polio, measles, mumps, whooping cough. Hell, let’s add Long Covid, Just To Freak Erickson Out. All of these are caused by pathogens[1], and Erickson trying to portray them the independents and Democrats as weak-minded over a serious health problem that not only is directly threatening to our personal health, but to the stability of our societal health system, marks this passage as desperately broken and ineffective – unless you’re emotionally inclined to believe his fallacious first point. This is not known as leading; this is known as playing to the audience, and it’s not an honest thing to do when it comes to the important subject of governance.
I think this generates backlash. I do think when the New York attorney general, the Manhattan district attorney, and a Georgia district attorney, all pile on Donald Trump, it begins to look like a vendetta, not a legitimate prosecution. It looks like they’re trying to punish Donald Trump for existing and that draws a backlash from the American public, who tends to get outraged by this sort of stuff.
This is probably in reaction to this news:
The New York attorney general’s office said Tuesday that it is pursuing a criminal investigation into the Trump Organization, in addition to the ongoing civil probe.
“We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time,” Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the office, said in a statement. [NBC News]
This may be the terror point for Erickson. If a jury were to find Trump guilty of a criminal offense, well, then his radio audience would be faced with a real dilemma: do we continue to believe Trump is some great leader? Or do they finally recognize him as the greedy man-child that he is to the left?
And, either way, does Erickson retain his audience?
And notice how Erickson dispenses with context. Trump has been to court many times over his refusals to pay for work done, which is easily interpreted as fraud. His charity admitted to fraud. He’s been caught perjuring himself in Court. These are all indicative of a personality which pays little attention to the law and could easily have committed a criminal offense because he thought it profitable – as if refusing to pay people who’ve done work for him isn’t really criminal when it comes right down to it.
Yes, Erickson doesn’t want his audience to think about the central terminal sickness of what constitutes the conservative movement these days. He’ll lose listeners.
So he says, on the radio, crap like the above.
1 Anyone quibbling over some of these diseases being caused by bacteria may go sit in the corner until they learn to understand overarching points.
