Friday, October 16, 2020

REPUBLICANS GO OFF MESSAGE, FOR ONCE

This is true, more or less:



The foreign-op aspect of this isn't quite the story of the day, but it's true the right had most of us talking about Hunter Biden, and then we weren't so much talking about Hunter Biden as we were talking about what Twitter and Facebook did in response to the New York Post's Hunter Biden stories.

Right-wingers are usually very good at driving America's political conversation, but this time they got sidetracked.

There's a reason for that.

Right-wingers are used to arguing among themselves that "the left" -- which, to them, includes leftists, liberals, Democrats, Hollywood, the non-right-wing media, and academia (and occasionally big business and pro sports) -- is one giant, unified octopus, a single evil being with multiple tentacles, operated by one brain.

So when they got distracted by Twitter and Facebook, they seemed to forget that they were no longer trying to communicate with like-minded wingnuts who think Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine and China and social media giants' occasional efforts to mute irresponsible right-wing messages are all the work of the same many-tentacled left-wing monster.

They forgot they were trying to reach people who don't see the world that way. They forgot that the few remaining undecided voters in America don't automatically hear a denunciation of social media companies and think, I hate the Democrats -- the way right-wingers do.

They should have tried to keep the focus on Hunter Biden. But they didn't quite realize that they'd lost focus, because to them, it's all one Antichrist.

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