After any political debate, it’s customary for news outlets to do some fact-checking, sometimes on the spot. During CNN’s post-debate coverage, anchor Dana Bash caught up with GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and confronted him with facts.
Ramaswamy had quite a newsworthy night – maybe not the way he would have wanted to be covered or exactly the way he wanted to be covered, with many fiery moments while he was on the debate stage. Bash, who dove right in with “Where do I even start?” started by asking Ramaswamy about why he attacked everyone including the Republican National Committee and NBC, which aired the debate that gave him a lot of camera time. He responded with his frustration with his party and then launched into the fantastical theory that President Joe Biden was not going to be the Democratic candidate in 2024:
Yeah, except I feel like he’s a standard deviation further beyond even MAGA and Trump. He’s the guy in the room with casual conspiracy people who starts racing about how the moon is a holographic projection. He’s an unironic parody of the entire MAGA movement, and I know a few MAGAs who like him and think he’s smart*, but not enough to pick him over Trump.
*Basically, if you can talk faster than they can think. Ramaswamy has a very Ben Shapiro gish-gallop style of just saying bullshit way faster than anyone can deal with it. To somebody who’s already MAGA, it sounds “truthy”, so a lot of it just slides right past any filters. To somebody who’s not MAGA, though, building a second, even stupider wall between us and Canada was an “Oh, wait, you’re serious, let me laugh harder” moment.
People said the same thing about trump on 2016 when he got on the “vaccines cause autism” train. This isn’t some outlier, it’s exactly where the base is.
Fair enough
Beat me to it. I was going to compare this dipshit to Shapiro - he seems to be intentionally lifting his style. Shapiro is a stupid person’s idea of a smart person because he just firehoses out a bunch of bullshit so fast that it’s hard to keep up. And of course, the Gish Gallop is something so many conspiracy theorists/conservatives do all the time, because they just love their logical fallacies and making a mockery of real debate and intellectual pursuits.