Biden claims that those who are opposed to the Dems' voting rights reform bill are with Jefferson Davis. (See here.) Making exaggerated claims is all the rage these days among the elites. The continual talk about white supremacism would lead one to believe that there are Ku Klux Klan marches every Saturday in every major city, and of course there are in fact none. Probably, the number of white supremacists is growing, but that is only because of the heavy-handed tactics of the elites. Another exaggeration is the claim that the little nothingburger on January 6th of last year was an insurrection. If it was anything like that, it was a counter-insurrection, given all the violence and destruction that went unpunished during the summer of 2020. Why doesn’t burning down a police station count as an insurrection? Still another is the claim that democracy was under threat when Trump was president, and will be under threat if he wins again. Or that democracy is under threat if this, that, or the other condition isn’t dealt with exactly the way that the far left wants it to be dealt with. It’s hard to know if they actually believe these claims, or if they hope to influence independents, but their exaggerations poison the national discourse.
Elites can get away with these exaggerations because they have power, and because no one on their side will disagree with what they are saying and insist that they be reasonable. Ok, the author of the article at the link, Ruy Teixeira, says it is an “unhinged level of hyperbole,” but he is probably alone on that. The point is that because they can get away with making these wild exaggerations, we who are victims of them must respond, except that we don’t have the Megaphone that the elites do, and so our responses feel weak and ineffective. If they were effective, then the exaggerations would stop. Only when non-elites get enough power to demand that such exaggerations stop will they actually stop.
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