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- Failure to Imagine Stupidity
Josh Marshall writes about something I’d never imagined:
There’s a good piece in the Post today by Philip Bump making an important corrective point which is that, no, we shouldn’t assume that millions of people going out and protesting against Donald Trump is actually great news for Donald Trump. The issue is sort of over-learning the fairly questionable lesson of the George Floyd protests, thinking that they somehow redounded to Trump’s benefit. As Bump notes, there’s pretty little evidence that this is true. At least in the short- to medium-term most evidence suggests the opposite.
If I told you this idea came from the Wall Street Journal, I’m sure you wouldn’t be shocked:
One aspect of the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Saturday’s protests offered an odd lens, postulating that Democrats were worried that the mass activism would spark a reaction that aided Republicans. Or, as the online headline put it, members of the opposition party are “wary of playing into Trump’s hands” by supporting the rallies.
“Some Democratic leaders are feeling the long shadow of the Black Lives Matter protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd,” the Journal’s Elizabeth Findell and Annie Linskey wrote. “Those demonstrations galvanized anger at police violence and calls for reform, but Republicans effectively cast rioting in some cities as Democratic-led chaos.”
I’ve always liked the way that the Brits use the term “perversion,” as in “perverting the course of justice” instead of “obstruction of justice”, because it’s a more expansive meaning of how people fuck with the administration of justice. The piece by the WSJ, and the notion that some demonstrations about the murder of a person by police, somehow redounds against the interests of the Democrats in some deep, meaningful way is perverse. And if I’m a pervert, I’m not that kind of pervert, because I would have never thought of it until I read Marshall’s piece.
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