“Out of whack.” Totally
by tristero
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jeff Goldberg talk about the hiring (and subsequent letting go) of a writer for the Atlantic who believes it’s reasonable to consider the question of hanging women for abortion. Coates makes the most salient point right near the beginning:
…we set ourselves up with I think a pretty admirable value that says, OK, we are going to debate different poles of politics in this country. And we want that well-represented, and we want people that can do it effectively, write well. But if one pole is — and again, I’m only speaking for myself here — if one pole is batshit crazy, you’re in trouble. It actually throws the whole endeavor out of whack.
Indeed it does. And to his credit, Coates recognizes this. But then they both fall into the rabbit hole of discussing why the question of hanging women for having an abortion might be a mainstream idea and why it may or may not be a good idea for The Atlantic to consider people who hold such ideas.
But that’s neither an intellectually interesting discussion or of any substantive value. “Batshit crazy” is by definition an incoherent position.
Instead, the really interesting question is:
What do Republicans gain from the deliberate creation and perpetuation of a batshit crazy discourse?
We need a good answer to that. And we need to find a way to stop them. Stat.