Take your ball and run.
The right is playing us. They don’t care about facts—they make those up. If you win the debate anyway, the goalposts move. While we debate whether Tyler Robinson’s bullet engravings are clearly Groyper, or merely Groyper-adjacent, they’re celebrating a touchdown.
You’re exhausting yourself playing a game you didn’t agree to.
Yesterday, I wrote that Black men don’t hang themselves from trees, but even if one did, racial violence is native to America. Condemning our systemic history of lynchings—and their calls to bring it back—should be easy.
A friend replied to that essay—about not getting distracted—by asking my opinion on the authenticity of the Robinson text exchange. My opinion is it doesn’t matter.
The Washington Post documented 30,573 lies Trump told in his first term. [1] We reelected him.
Facts don’t stop fascism.
The truth matters, but the question matters more.
They don’t care if Tyler was a leftist. That’s not the question. They condemned education over his semester at college, while ignoring his NRA poster-child upbringing. Argue over the texts’ authenticity and you still lose: Trump already argued that the FBI was corrupt!
The argument is the point.
Facebook serves me food-related prepper posts. A few years ago bad canning advice proliferated. From “oven-canning” to water-packed potatoes, experienced canners fought deadly disinformation and botulism. For every carefully researched explanation, there was a link dropped by the OP “proving” it was safe.
I followed one. It went to a badly built site monitized with Chinese advertising.
The posts were designed to drive engagement and clicks. Expert canners obliged, fueling extended comment sections where (the internet being itself) real people insisted their grandma oven-canned raw potatoes.
Lying openly is a good way to drive engagement.
Get led down the path a bit, and you’re invested. First we argued that they couldn’t blame transgender people without a suspect. Then, we pointed to extensive right wing ties, which they brushed aside. Now we’re arguing about whether he might have been moving left.
You know it doesn’t matter, right? They want you to argue every detail, real or imagined. Take them up on it and you help move the Overton window: left-wing violence is now something reasonable people debate publicly. That moves it from “absurd lie” to “difference of opinion” — a win for them! Charlie Kirk was famous for this tactic, setting the terms of debate and then cheating: his team never published the times he got trounced.
You can’t win by their terms, so change them.
An authoritarian takeover of our democracy is well underway. That has to be our focus. Recognize what they’re doing: escalating and distracting.
While you debate text authentication and animal onesies with people who don’t care, congress is negotiating a bipartisan budget extension. ICE crystalizes while the left defends itself from specious allegations of violence. We quibble; they act.
Don’t let them assign your battle plan to you.
Identify the truths that matter, and fight for those.
