CSotD: The Divine Right of Trump
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Jimmy Kimmel is apparently back on the air, or will be tonight. I’m holding off my belief until it happens, but, even if it happens, Sinclair’s ABC stations won’t carry the program and we’ll see how viewers like that, but I’ll bet the FCC won’t land too hard on them for failing to serve their audience.
If their viewers call their local station to complain, they’ll be thanked for their comments, but if they call local advertisers instead, that could shake things up.
Meanwhile, a whole lot of political cartoons have lost their sting, but Ramirez is right to suggest that the federal government seems to be leaving greater priorities unaddressed while they work to stifle Dear Leader’s critics.
Broelman does well to touch on the issue without naming names, because the fact that Kimmel is apparently back on the air is a detail within a wider context. For one thing, we don’t know if he’s coming back as Jimmy Kimmel or as some cleaned-up inoffensive Rodney Dangerfield clone telling jokes about his wife.
But mostly, if you think Dear Leader’s minions are going to ease up on censorship of comedians and journalists, your optimism outweighs your realism.
The administration is very good at proclaiming its support of freedom, but what they call “freedom” is what Thomas Hobbes called “liberty.”
Hobbes used the metaphor of a river, with liberty being the right to go with the flow however you wish, but within the flow. Freedom, by contrast, was anarchic and to be tightly controlled.
Bear in mind that Hobbes based much of his political theory on the Divine Right of Kings, which proposes that God puts the king in power in order to carry out His wishes.
I haven’t seen a survey that asks if people think God made Trump president, but I’d be surprised if the proposition didn’t get significant backing.
It’s very clear that the administration sees compliance with its policies as good and sees its mission not as reconciling with other opinions but as stifling them. This doesn’t always mean locking up critics. As Sorensen suggests, it can also mean “debating” them with sophistry and assumptions and, yes, by begging the question.
Fran Lebowitz famously said “Donald Trump is a stupid man’s idea of a smart person, a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and a weak man’s idea of a strong man.” That certainly extends to people not versed in political theory accepting firm-but-fatuous explanations through faith in authority rather than logic.
In Meet John Doe and A Face in the Crowd, charismatic fakers lose the massive crowds they’ve assembled, but that’s Hollywood. In real life, true believers are hard to shake, and while MacLeod sums up Trump’s bizarre, rambling, hostile remarks at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, there seems little evidence that his acolytes were put off by the contradictions.
Bagley posted what seems like a straight-forward challenge to the brutality of the masked government agents assaulting people on the street.
When the Chicago police attacked civilians during the Democratic National Convention of 1968, the televised images created dismay and disillusionment.
But that was then and this is now. The cartoon drew a comment from someone who said Bagley had to draw it because there were no photographs and it had never happened. You can’t “debate” someone who is so deeply siloed that he either hasn’t seen footage of beatings or is in denial of what he saw.
But here we are, and there are a significant number of people who believe what they are told even when it is clearly, obviously false, and who refuse to accept “disloyal” facts even when they are clearly, obviously real.
The Moon landing was faked, Elvis is alive and nobody is beating civilians in the street.
Except maybe when they deserve it. And that’s where the facts get a little squishy.
Darkow’s character is correct: Kirk had called for release of the Epstein files. But there are all sorts of things Kirk said that aren’t being brought up by his supporters, including those who’d never heard of him until he was murdered.
It doesn’t matter, because in the moment of his death, he became a product, not a person, and he’s being marketed, not mourned.
If Charlie Kirk had driven off the road on his way to that college campus and died in a one-car accident, would flags be at half-staff? Would legislators in Oklahoma propose that all state colleges there have statues of him?
It might have led the news that day, or it might have been the second story, but I doubt it would have stopped the world the way his murder did.
Remember that what Jimmy Kimmel commented on was not Kirk’s death or his life, but, rather, the way his murder was being exploited. Nobody laughed about his death except maybe a few Internet trolls. Beckom’s response is divorced from anything that actually happened.
But any newspapers that choose to run this cartoon are unlikely to run opinions that aren’t on the same ideological path, and so people who see this may not see anything that would cast doubt on it.
How they feel about the Moon landing or the death of Elvis Presley won’t have an impact on how they vote in the midterms. But this might.
I used to praise the Internet for allowing left-handed flute players to gather and share their tips, but now we’re seeing who else it allows to gather and form a group.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The original nonsense about vaccines and autism was denounced and disproven, and the researcher lost his medical license over it. But by the time Lancet retracted the study, it’s crank beliefs were all over the Intertubes, and the theory was embedded among people who wanted, and perhaps needed, to believe it.
Goris is right that, while we’re unwilling to address the connection between guns and child deaths, Dear Leader is happy to give anti-science crackpottery the power to shape our healthcare.
But placing restrictions on firearms would lose the votes of 2nd Amendment hardliners, while promoting screwball science delights another set of voters.
This ain’t rocket science, folks. It’s political science.
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