Chris Buskirk: William Barr Was Right and the Media and Ruling Class Were Wrong About Everything. It's Time for Them to Admit It.

Nice.

Read the whole thing.

Chris Buskirk of American Greatness, writing at the New York Times:

For nearly four years, members of America’s ruling class, especially those in the media, the academy and government, have operated on one central, unquestioned assumption: orange man bad. This stifling orthodoxy led to a blind, counterfactual faith in the theory that Mr. Trump had somehow colluded with "the Russians" (never well defined) to win the election. Again, the specific charges were always amorphous -- plastic enough to change as needed. That's hardly surprising: That's the way conspiracy theories always work. The Russian collusion hoax was in fact nothing more than a massively multiplayer coping mechanism for people who couldn't accept the results of the 2016 election.

But why is it not enough to simply acknowledge that you dislike Mr. Trump and disagree with his policies? What psychological purpose does adding the fiction of a conspiracy serve?

The French philosopher and literary critic Rene' Girard held that such scapegoating and ritual sacrifice is an essential part of group identity and solidarity. That seems to apply here. Mr. Trump ran against American elites and their insular culture. Their response was to load onto him all of the sins they see in American society and attempt to sacrifice him to appease their gods.

Mr. Girard asked a question that is pertinent today: "Why is our own participation in scapegoating so difficult to perceive and the participation of others so easy? To us, our fears and prejudices never appear as such because they determine our vision of people we despise, we fear, and against whom we discriminate."

But the ritual sacrifice of Donald Trump didn't work -- at least not in the sense of removing him from office. It certainly did have the effect of catalyzing and uniting his opponents. Still, one of the many ironies here is that the Trump-hating media has handed him an incredibly powerful weapon for the 2020 campaign, one that may ensure his re-election.

Again, the operating principle was that of the zealot: Believe the narrative regardless of the lack of evidence, squint to see justifications where there are none and then in an intoxicated frenzy of moral superiority use any weapon at hand to destroy your enemy.

He also briefly talks about the NeverTrumpers, always eager to be Useful Idiots for their true political allies, the upper class left.

Speaking of, let's check in with another NeverTrump Collusion Truther, deftly mutating his conspiracy theory to avoid previous refutations:

posted by Ace of Spades at 02:08 PM

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