To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. – Charles Krauthammer
Glenn Greenwald’s substack published an essay from Darryl Cooper – the martyrmade tweeter who published a series of 35 tweets last week trying to explain where Trump supporters were coming from - further elaborating on his tweet stream.
NOTE FROM GLENN GREENWALD: On Friday, a relatively obscure Twitter user with fewer than 7,000 followers — posting under the pseudonym MartyrMade — posted one of the most mega-viral threads of the year. Over the course of thirty-five tweets, the writer, a podcast host whose real name is Darryl Cooper, set out to explain the mindset that has led so many Trump supporters to believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent and, more generally, to lose faith and trust in most U.S. institutions of authority.
You can read the whole thing here, click “Let Me Read First” option if you don’t wish to subscribe, although you might want to as Glenn is one of the few sources on the left still practicing some level of actual journalistic integrity.
Back to Cooper’s piece: mind you, he is not one of us, and may even come off as a bit condescending at the end. But at least he rejects the prevalent belief of the left that we are all a batch of deluded rubes – which is a brave position to take in these dangerous times.
From the perspective of Trump’s supporters, the entrenched bureaucracy and security state subverted their populist president from day one. The natural guardrails of the Fourth Estate were removed because the press was part of the operation. Election rules were changed in an unconstitutional manner that could only be challenged after the deed was done, when judges and officials would be playing chicken with a direct threat of burning cities. Political violence was legitimized and encouraged. Major newspapers and sitting presidents were banned from social media, while the opposition enjoyed free rein to promote stories that were discredited once it was too late to matter. Conservatives put these things together and concluded that, whatever happened on November 3, 2020, it was not a free and fair democratic election in any sense that would have had meaning before Donald J. Trump was a candidate.
Amen, amen, amen brother. I don’t hold out a great deal of hope but it’s a start. And let’s face it, we are never going to Make America Great Again without winning the hearts and minds of some on the left.
Someday we might hope to find ourselves in a place where truth shapes peoples politics rather than politics shaping what we believe to be true.
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