Lynch mob

Back in 2002, author Michael Crichton—the creator of Westworld, ER, and Jurassic Park among many other famous pop culture touchstones—delivered a fascinating lecture to the International Leadership Forum in California.  Asking the question, “Why Speculate?” Crichton observed the current state of the news media, which even then he didn’t view favorably.  Aside from noting their dismissal of any kind of standards for accuracy and their lackluster knowledge of the subjects they were purportedly covering, he also lamented the growing trend of news programming that pushed guesswork over facts.  As Crichton explained it:

Talk is cheap. And speculation shows are the cheapest thing you can put on television, They’re almost as cheap as running a test pattern. Speculation requires no research, no big staff. Minimal set. Just get the talking host, book the talking guests—of which there is no shortage—and you’re done! Instant show. No reporters in different cities around the world, no film crews on location. No deadlines, no footage to edit, no editors…nothing! Just talk. Cheap.

Mind you, this was almost twenty years ago, before social media rushed in to pour gasoline on that particular fire—but even Crichton, with all of his prescience, never envisioned how speculation, while still rampant in so-called news coverage, would be supplanted by a more insidious trend:  outrage.  These days, rather than just trying to keep everyone in a state of fear, the media seem determined to keep them in a state of perpetual anger, with headlines and stories meant not to inform but rather to incite.  Never mind that there might be context or countervailing facts that tend to undermine the narrative.  The goal is to gin up the mob, consequences be damned.
That’s why it’s kind of ironic that the latest episode of media vapors, echoed loudly by their Democrat cohorts, centers on another one of Donald Trump’s tweets that is just so beyond the pale they can’t even:

So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching. But we will WIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 22, 2019

That’s right.  Because the Left condemned the President as a racist—using their own standards, of course, for which proof is optional if not an impediment—Trump invoking the imagery of a lynching to describe the sham that is the current impeachment “inquiry” is an expression of that racism.  In other words, you’re racist because we say you are and therefore everything you say is racist.
The media, for their part, could frame all this more honestly by showing how a whole parade of prominent Democrats—among them Harry, Reid, Jerry Nadler, John Kerry and Joe Biden—trotted out the lynching rhetoric when the Republican House impeached Bill Clinton.  But then that might calm everybody down, instead of ratcheting up the heat on a President they desperately want to see driven from office.
And therein lies the strategy.  That’s because this outrage isn’t meant so much for public consumption—it’s meant to target weak-kneed Republicans in the Senate, without whom any move on impeachment is doomed to failure.  Democrats are in the minority, and would need a minimum of twenty GOP defections to secure a conviction.  To be sure, there are already a handful of NeverTrump Republicans who would happily cast their lot with the Dems on this one (I’m looking at you, Mitt Romney), but most of them wouldn’t dare unless they knew a two-thirds majority existed.  Dialing the outrage up to eleven is meant to accomplish just that—and already Republicans are falling for it, with chaps like John Thune referring to the President’s remarks as “inappropriate.”
Well, perhaps Trump was being inappropriate—but in a political arena where Democrats routinely brand their opponents as racists and Nazis and accuse them of the most vile misdeeds, who cares?  It’s all inappropriate, all the time, and yet another example of how conservatives are held to a different standard by the very people who want to see us eradicated from the electoral map.  Democrats also understand that weakness is provocative, and that by showing it Republicans are only rewarding bad behavior.  Unless they want to keep letting the Dems steal their lunch money, it’s long past time they stood their ground.

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