Witch hunt not defeated by facts / reason; Must re-frame as attempt to over-turn fair election

A lot of Trump supporters are looking forward to the political theatre du jour starring the former FBI Director, whose prepared remarks are going to clear the President of the charge of trying to shut down some investigation or other. It's going to shut up the Russia conspiracy theorists since the testimony will be coming from a source hostile to Trump and therefore with no motive to lie. So the end result will be to dispel a major part of the conspiracy theory, and let Trump get on to pursuing his agenda in the government.

Right?

We've already heard this naive cheerleader argument before -- after the Pentagon sent missiles into that airfield in Syria two months ago. Remember? -- whatever you though of its military worth, everyone can agree that it finally shuts down the Trump/Russia collusion story, right? If Trump were in league with Putin, or at all sympathetic to him, why would he bomb a client state of Russia's, let alone with real-life Russians there on that very airfield? Checkmate, conspiratards.

I warned at the time that there would be no such shutdown of the Russia narrative:

If you thought the Russia-Trump conspiracy theorists would hang it up after Trump looks tough against Putin, guess again:

https://twitter.com/Lawrence/status/850420599428198400

MSNBC anchor, not even 24 hours after the strike, saying how convenient of Trump to deflect the Russian connections by appearing to look tough.

Commenters are discussing how little damage was done -- true, but they're taking that as paranoid proof that he is soft and cozy with Putin after all!

If he *really* wanted to prove once and for all that he's not controlled by the Kremlin, he has to launch an all-in pre-emptive nuclear strike on Moscow!

These people are paranoid, insane, and will never forgive Trump for anything.

It's a typical witch hunt -- any proof that is offered that the suspect is not a witch, is all the more proof that they actually are! Why are they so desperate to offer proof of innocence? That level of anxiety proves a guilty conscience!

That has proven to be 100% true. The Russia narrative has only grown to encompass more possible "links" and "angles" and "leads" if earlier ones turned out to be dead ends. More Americans now believe that Russian hacking changed vote tallies on election machines -- a majority of Democrats believes this (some poll cited on Tucker recently). And now there has been appointed a Special Counsel whose authority allows for a totally unbounded and never-ending witch hunt.

Why didn't the airstrike on Syria shut down the Russia narrative? Why has the narrative and the witch hunt only grown in intensity?

Quite simply, a witch hunt does not respond to collections of facts, logical coherence, or statistical reasoning. It comes from an emotional urgency to soothe cognitive dissonance in the wake of some event that severely damages a person's ego and worldview.

Trump's victory on Election Day was such an unimaginable shock to the mental schemata of Democrats and liberals, whether on a moral basis ("how can someone win, who stands for those things?") or on an information basis ("how can someone win, who every expert and poll assured us was destined to lose in a landslide?"). With the moral order turned upside-down, and with the most certain of predictions getting things backward, they were wandering around their daily lives literally disoriented.

To restore their familiar sense of order in the world, they needed to invent a story about why the victory wasn't a real shock to their system after all. If the Russians somehow rigged the outcome, then Trump's win would not challenge their sense of moral order -- Americans did not choose someone who "stood for those things," they chose the opposite candidate, but had their vote canceled out by outside interference. Nor would Trump's win challenge their faith in prediction models based on BIG DATA -- the predictions were totally correct, but they could not adjust for the fact that there would be outside interference to flip the outcome from the true one to the rigged one.

Shitlib schemata: intact again. *deep sigh of relief*

That is why there will never be any testimony, reporting, leaks, physical evidence, or mathematical proofs that will cure the Democrats and liberals of their conspiracy obsession. It is holding together their fragile understanding of how the world works, and their place in it all. Giving up the conspiracy would utterly destroy their minds, whereas now they can at least go through their daily lives without constantly contemplating suicide.

If one piece of the narrative is definitively disproven, that's fine -- something else will fill its place. It is shape-shifting and adaptive to whatever facts it is presented with, because the goal of this mental program is not to understand what is actually happening in the world, but to make the facts fit their worldview and allow relatively normal emotional functioning.

We can expect worse developments, based on the decline of the situation over the past two months. At first, the Russia conspiracy was just a way to make themselves feel better after a horrendous loss. Now that their moods have picked up, and now that more and more of them have internalized the narrative to the degree of "changing vote tallies," they will soon shift from defense to offense.

They've defended their worldview enough to get by in daily life -- now they're going to use the narrative to try to get the election result changed to what it "really" ought to be, absent the Russian interference. That will be the ultimate mental satisfaction -- not just feeling better about your worldview, but seeing your candidate in the White House after all, pursuing whatever you sent her there to do.

Worst-case scenario is that the Democrats and Republicans (99% of whom are opposed to a populist and nationalist agenda) team up to remove Trump and strike some kind of grand bargain that puts Hillary and Pence in the White House together. Given the degree that the Democrats and their zealous base are going to, combined with the complicit silence of the Republicans, that is no longer a distant possibility.

Even in the best-case scenario, this witch hunt drags on for the entire term, wasting what precious little time we have to make major sweeping changes. It will make absolutely no difference if the Democrats get punished for this in the mid-term elections -- they are already the loser party in the House, Senate, and White House, and that isn't stopping them or the media or the Deep State. Nor is Republican control over both houses of Congress emboldening Trump's "own" party to defend him and attack and neuter the opposition party.

Only by substituting Trump loyalists for Democrats and cuckservative Republicans will the mid-terms affect the direction the witch hunt takes.

Aside from voting, we need to show that our zealous minority will make life more miserable for business as usual than their zealous minority will. The longer the witch hunt drags on against the people's President, the more likely the elites are to see what happens when it's those on the Right who "become ungovernable".

In any case, Trump does not want to hear any smug rationalizing by happy-go-lucky cheerleaders in this matter. He has always taken a negative view of the witch hunt, not that it presented an opportunity to do even better (4-D chess). He's given up pointing out the actual Russian connections with Clinton, Podesta, etc., because he understands by now that it isn't a factual argument but a plain old witch hunt. It's dead weight on the Trump train, and it needs to be cut loose ASAP.

Trump does not want us to snicker at how the Comey testimony is going to shut down the libtards, because he knows it will do no such thing. And now that their goal has moved beyond feeling better about their worldview, into over-turning the election results, that must be our focus in discussing the witch hunt. It is now a shameless anti-democratic attempt to over-turn the election that the Trump side won fair and square, and Americans should respond to it as an attempted coup -- the plotters in the government, and their propagandists in the media.

Smiling complacently about how "Trump's got this" while his agenda gets consumed by a witch hunt, aided by disloyal Republicans pursuing their own typical bullshit, is leaving your leader wounded on the battlefield.

The first step toward taking the fight to the enemy is re-framing the Russia probe as a witch hunt designed to over-turn a fair election result. That will get more normies on board, at least remaining neutral rather than getting infected by the witch hunt narrative by osmosis. Any response that treats the witch hunt as a sincere endeavor to figure out facts, form logical arguments, or apply statistical reasoning, is conceding ground to the enemy.

They must not only be mocked as sore losers, but must now feel our righteous anger over their attempt to over-turn the fair election. Again, not so much to convince them but to persuade the big middle that ours is the just side and worth joining -- or at least, staying out of the way.