Rachel Bitecofer: We Didn't Start The Fire

[ancianita]

9. Thanks! What's not to love about Bitecofer?! Her whole analysis is well worth the read.

"... You want proximate cause for today’s rhetorical temperature? It’s the ecosystem that taught millions that Democrats are an existential enemy, not a loyal opposition. That is why thousands of Republicans stormed into our nation’s Capitol building to hang Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence.

That same ecosystem radicalized audiences on COVID, vaccines, elections—everything. I saw it up close in 2022 when I debated Charlie Kirk on his show. I watched a crowd fully convinced the vaccine killed people because their movement told them so—relentlessly, lucratively. And now, in the wake of Kirk’s killing, the same machine is already trying to flip the script and claim our rhetoric is the real problem.

Let me be crystal. Calling out authoritarianism and proto-fascism is not “escalation”; it’s diagnosis. The academic case has been on the shelf for years: Republicans moved further and faster right; the party’s incentive structure rewards constitutional hardball; the media arm radicalizes the base with moral-panic narratives. Pretending it’s symmetric is a luxury belief we can’t afford.

And because I can already hear the bad-faith reply—“So your side never does anything wrong?”

Of course they do. We do plenty wrong but when we do we admit it and make changes, we don’t ask people to not believe their lying eyes.

Democrats pass bills. Republicans pass torches.

A gay Democratic governor is honoring Charlie Kirk and his 1st Amendment right to be a bigot for profit by lowering Oregon’s flags at half mast.

When Democratic state senator Melissa Hortman was assassinated by a Trump supporter, she didn’t receive half staff flags and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, she received a sick joke from a sitting U.S. senator.

One side’s excesses mostly show up as intraparty squabbles over how far or fast to move; the other side’s excesses show up as fake electors, purges of civil servants and the FBI, and routine defiance of lawful process. Courts, inspectors general, and congressional investigators have receipts. We didn’t choose this terrain. We adapted to it.

So yes, we’re going to keep calling it what it is. We’re going to keep reminding voters who lit the match and who’s been fanning it. Because if you don’t name the threat, you can’t build the counter-narrative that neutralizes it.

If Republicans want the rhetoric to ratchet down, there’s an easy test: stop lying about Democrats being socialists in a country that doesn’t even have national health care, stop telling people “liberals” support “mutilating children,” stop trying to nullify elections you lose, stop using public office to make billions, , and stop breaking the law because you think courts are for other people.

When they do, we’ll meet them in the reality-based middle.

We didn’t start the fire, but we have to be the ones that put it out."


I hope MSNBC and Lawrence O'Donnell (who first named her as his go-to predictor of elections) post a lot of YouTube videos of her doing variations of commentary on this.