Outrage overload: You will be assimilated into the rage machine

Here’s an even more amazing thing than Carlson’s amazingly misleading claim: Tim Scott is not just some woke bloviator going with the herd, as Carlson insinuates. He’s the Republican point man on police reform (and his full statement wasn’t just reasonable, it was patriotic and laudable). His bill, which has pretty much the full support of the Senate GOP, was filibustered by Democrats last year and is at the center of negotiations right now. Carlson didn’t address the bill—or even acknowledge its existence—despite the fact it’s pretty full of specifics about what Scott has in mind when he says “there’s more work to be done.” He just made it sound like Scott is spouting woke boilerplate and—crucially—that this should make viewers very angry. On a personal level, I do wonder where the people who were mad at me for being insufficiently outraged by a Washington Post fact-checker taking an unfair shot at a black man suddenly disappeared to when Carlson singled out the same black man a couple of days later as some kind of wokescold telling Americans—you know, real Americans—“You’ve got a lot of work to do.” Maybe Twitchy’s power went out. But there’s a much larger and more important point to be made here. Whether it’s Black Lives Matter and their apologists throughout elite left-wing media or the constellation of MAGA propagandists and their apologists throughout elite right-wing media, the order of the day has gone forth: You must be pissed off. You must think the other side hates you and you must hate them for it. If the facts help in that effort, great. But if the facts aren’t readily available, then don’t worry. We'll work around that or just invent them.