Consider this:
Someone at the Washington Post commented that Elon Musk was a “chaos magician, practicing chaos magick.” Now, discussions about magick aside, what Musk clearly is doing is throwing industrial-sized monkey wrenches into as much of the machinery that he personally can.
This one man.
(Psst! That’s too much concentrated power. That’s called outsized influence.)
On Deadline: White House, Nicolle Wallace’s flagship afternoon show on MSNBC, one of her guests (possibly Miles Taylor) said that these types of conspiracy theories were “all the GOP had left.” The tone of voice was almost pity; but I think that misses the mark a bit.
They—the whole RW media apparatus—have turned a circular echo chamber into a wind tunnel. They’ve sown the wind; they mean now to reap the whirlwind.
Why did the various personalities in the RW media sphere—Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Laura Ingraham, and the others who joined in this atrocious ganging up of Mr. Pelosi, insult after injury—why did they all swing into action all at once? That question awaits an answer, but the main thing is that they all did so. They all did so within something of a 72-hour window.
And this is key, because with all of that external reinforcement, that constant injection of doubt of a crucial story, disoriented their audiences to where they could not separate fact from rumor. And that’s the whole point.
The story had the great probability of turning an emotional or visceral tide against the GOP at a critical moment in the electoral calendar. If the story had been allowed to “land” and sink in as a regular news story normally does, the outrage and revulsion would have been pretty substantial and widespread by now.
But because reporting on the story as it was unfolding meant possibly disillusioning many of the MAGA folks out there, especially the QAnon folks, the story had to be stomped on immediately to transform those visceral feelings and try to turn them into something else. They tried their best to turn Mr. Pelosi’s attack into a joke. Like a prank gone wrong (but worse than that: they had to load every invective possible into the story in order to smear both Mr. Pelosi and the assailant, who is erstwhile one of their own).
If the media apparatus on the RW had not swung into motion just as it did, the story ran the risk of indeliably altering the voting environment.
Why did Carlson et al. say those despicable things? Because it worked, and they knew it would work—they’ve pretty much perfected this formula by now. But also because they couldn’t allow their followers to develop empathy for the victim and, by extension, Nancy Pelosi. She plays too large a role in their psychodrama for their perception of her to change, even for a moment. That’s why you saw Glenn Youngkin rattle off his stump speech the other day, reach the point where he normally would castigate Ms. Pelosi and then kind of stumble and mumble some words about her husband’s situation. Then went right back to the invective that the entire GOP field has been launching at her.
Youngkin is agile enough to have shifted what he ultimately said. But he stuck to the script—demonize Pelosi. He couldn’t navigate away.
I watched several different debates this season, something I rarely do during a midterm, and across the board all of the GOP candidates—in regional races, mind you! state-wide races—all contrasted themselves against “Washington”, “Joe Biden”, and “Nancy Pelosi”. The villains in their play are called by name! They enemize their opponents in order to justify savaging them. (Enemize: to actively create an enemy, especially where there was none before.)
Consider that Musk’s actions are this season’s equivalent of the Comey letter.