Hypocrisy On Steroids, the ‘Reality TV Era Of Politics’ Is ‘On Both Sides’

This is both siderism with mathematical notation, it is so far out there conceptually. Kat Cammack, the GOP dancing queen, gets in front of the Fox News cameras to tell the world that we’re living in the “reality TV era of politics.” The hell you say. And how did we get there, I wonder. Somebody whose name rhymes with cuckold chump, maybe?

Both of these clips are the same person, two weeks apart. pic.twitter.com/sm5PFy01Wk

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 1, 2023

Here are a few paragraphs from a years old Medium article, The Banality Of Evil; the Mainstreaming Of Both Siderism. Both sides don’t do it. That’s Fox News’ and right-wing media’s fiction. The RWNJs do it.

When a white teenager in Kenosha, Wisconsin fatally shoots two racial justice protesters after he and other armed vigilantes are given water and thanked by local law enforcement; when he’s allowed to walk away from the killings despite multiple eyewitnesses and video identifying him as the shooter, and he himself approaches a police car with his hands up; when he’s not arrested until the next day — we should be appalled, saddened, outraged. But we should not be surprised.

Self-appointed paramilitary formations, jacked up by conspiracy theories and internet hoaxes, armed with military-grade weapons and homemade bombs. Police forces sympathetic to — and sometimes colluding with — these domestic terrorists. Elected officials, civic leaders, the business community: either silent or caught up in the false neutrality of both-siderism.

This template for the destructive drama now playing out in America’s city streets has been on clear display in Portland, Oregon since 2017. The escalation of extra-legal paramilitary targeting of non-violent protesters was fueled by a President who responded to George Floyd’s murder by reviving the racist exhortation, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” It was abetted by elected officials and law enforcement spreading internet hoax panic about “antifa invasions” of small towns. But a more troubling culpability lies with the municipal leaders — elected officials, law enforcement, the business community, civic organizations — that have remained neutral as far-right domestic terrorists have mounted their assault on the rule of law and the constitutional rights to free speech and assembly.

Obama or Clinton never said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” But Republicans say it all the time. Ron DeSantis said it in the past 24 hours, “you loot, we shoot.”

There is no Democratic analogue for Kyle Rittenhouse. He is a product of MAGA. There is no leftie gathering that I’ve ever been to personally or know of, where a speaker gets up and suggests that a public figure be “hung with a stiff length of rope.” But at a convention in Las Vegas over the weekend, Stew Peters suggested that that very thing be done to Anthony Fauci.

Speaking of Dr. Fauci, the demonization of that good man is the most appallingly unfair thing not only in the Trump administration, which was a non stop circus, but in the history of American politics. There is no analogue for that either.

So when Kat Cammack says on both sides, I say “show me.” Because all the lunacy is being piped in from one place only and that is Trump world, stage right.