My colleague Kyle Becker highlighted a moment that I think is really interesting, because it shows you the state of the Left right now.
As I've been highlighting lately, the Left's entire strategy for America isn't to give them facts to help them decide who to vote for or what to support. The real aim is to give them something to react to emotionally. While this doesn't work on people who are even a little informed, for everyone else, this is a perfect strategy to help you garner support.
Becker reported on an interview between The Daily Show's Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow. The two were exchanging in the run-of-the-mill "Trump is an evil dictator" talk we've been hearing since even before he was elected. What makes this crazy is the lengths Maddow goes to with her scenario:
The discussion began with the administration's abandoned plans for a large immigration detention center in Social Circle, Georgia, where local opposition helped derail the proposal. Maddow described the government's proposed detention facilities as enormous warehouses capable of holding thousands of people, raising concerns about detention without adequate legal protections.
Stewart joined in, suggesting that many people facing immigration enforcement were guilty of little more than overstaying visas or committing minor infractions. But Maddow took the conversation considerably further, suggesting that the administration's immigration detention facilities could eventually be used against people who aren't immigrants.
"With a president like this, if you give him seven to 10 prisons around the country that hold 10,000 people each, where he can hold people without trial, without access to lawyers indefinitely, you think he's only going to leave immigrants in there?" Maddow asked.
Now, to people like you and me, this reads as uncut Columbian fearmongering. There's no factual evidence that Trump can do any of that, or that he even planned on doing something that comes remotely close to it.
The thing is, this little moment here is actually very, very effective.
Let's break this down. First off, it's The Daily Show, and it's Jon Stewart. This allows a sort of soft sell to apolitical normies who can't pay attention to CNN or Fox News because of their stuffy, news-like nature. Moreover, they're both operating on the pre-established ground of years of anti-Trump claims of dictator-like behavior that never manifested. Not that it needed to. A lie told enough times can easily become the truth to the uninformed.
Maddow used the detention centers reserved for illegal aliens as the location, which is always easy to make look like a horrible place where innocent people who just want a better life are put. Oh, and they're usually brown, which really sells the idea.
Then she slides into speculation. She doesn't flat-out say that Trump will do this; she says he could. That's a lie, but again, she doesn't need to tell the truth. That's not the goal. She's not trying to inform the audience of anything. She's treating them like idiots by trying to get them to feel afraid and hate Trump. That's all she needs. She can be caught in a lie and outed all day. It won't matter if too few people see the correction or look for the truth anyway.
People watching at home, especially younger folks, will watch this and get a sort of feeling of dread they'll forget about after they change the channel or start doing something else, but the sentiment attached to Trump in that moment will remain. They felt negative feelings when Trump was presented, and so that negative feeling carries itself every time he's brought up.
So you see the strategy. It relies on ignorance and emotion. If facts were as easy to access as feelings were, the entire leftist platform would collapse tomorrow. The thing is, emotions are really easy to generate in people. It's a lot easier to make someone feel anxious, angry, or suspicious than it is to inform them of the nuances of a situation.
It's why Maddow can lie with impunity, and she'll still be one of those trusted figures people listen to. It's why Jon Stewart can effectively air the lie and not challenge it and still have a job the next day. The emotion is the goal, not the facts.
They want people to decide to support or condemn something based on how they feel, not anything grounded in reality. Reality is bad for business.
