WHO'S AN EVIL ELITIST? LET'S ASK THE FOLKS ON THE HORSESHOE

An NBC News survey claims that over the past decade there's been a significant increase in the percentage of blue-collar Americans who identify as Republicans, and a significant decrease in the percentage who identify as Democrats. Whether or not this is the case, it has led to much crowing among Republicans -- particularly non-blue-collar Republicans like Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani boasted about this survey on Twitter, to which I responded with a snarky photo tweet -- at which point a Trumper responded to me:

This is why I believe that a large portion of America will just shrug if Donald Trump is charge with financial felonies, even if he's sent to prison. Forty years of Reaganite propaganda has persuaded much of America that people in business are doing the Lord's work, while history's greatest monsters are (ick! ptui!) politicians (who often become quite financially comfortable, but rarely live the lifestyle Trump has lived, unless they were wealthy before they ran for office). But that's right-wing "anti-elitism" -- it isn't anti the most elite of elitists.

And at the other end of the horseshoe are the liberal-hating leftists Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper, and their podcast guest Aaron Maté. I won't dwell on the first part of this clip, in which, among other things, Maté chortles over liberal concerns about Russia, such as the fear, once expressed by the hated Rachel Maddow, that Russia could possibly shut down part of the U.S. power grid with a cyberattack (even though Russia did precisely that to Ukraine in 2016). Maté regards the belief that Russia is dangerous as QAnon-level crackpottery -- he calls it "BlueAnon." Which leads to Taibbi's comments at 1:17 in the clip below.

Matt Taibbi claims that "there's a core of emotional truth animating the Qanon conspiracy theory... but the Russia thing... doesn't really have a correlation to anything that makes any sense."
Maté agrees. pic.twitter.com/lzMMs7o3m4

— Matthew Dimitri 🐍🧪 (@themattdimitri) February 23, 2021

Taibbi says:

I mean, it's funny because QAnon, in its specifics, is about as crazy as a thing can possibly get. I mean, it's -- the explanation is so we-- you would need, like, a chart this big to be able to diagram the ostensible plot to it.

But the underlying thought is that it's, you know, sort of a coalition of Trumpists who are taking on these elitists who, you know, want to take over the rest of society. So there's a core of, like, emotional truth animating the QAnon theory....

Yes, there's "truth," or at least "emotional truth," in the QAnon notion that "elitists" bent on global domination are being challenged by heroic "Trumpists" -- who are, we are to assume, totally not elitists and who totally don't "want to take over the rest of society."

So the MAGA right and the liberal-hating left agree: there's a dangerous cabal of elitist enemies, but it sure as hell doesn't include the previous Republican president -- who is a billionaire, or at least lives like one -- or his rich Republican allies.