That’s some video to use to launch a campaign! If, like me you’re a fan of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Huxley’s Brave New World, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Kafka’s The Trial or books like The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Maze Runner by James Dasher, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, The Running Man by Stephen King, The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigaulpi, Divergent by Veronica Roth, V for Vendetta by Alan Moore, The Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, The Children of Men by P.D. James… well, then you probably like what Kinzinger has done here.
What I don’t like about it is that Kinzinger insinuates some kind of choice between two extremes, as though there was anything on the left equivalent or even approaching the MAGA movement. His bothsidesism is a ploy but a very clumsy and unconvincing one. Olberman is not Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity. And MSNBC and CNN are nothing like Fox News. There is no Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Traitor Greene or Paul Gosar in the Democratic congressional delegation. A “mainstream” Republican is closer to the edge of political insanity than the most left-wing Democrat is. There’s probably ONE actual moderate left in the entire Republican House conference, Brian Fitzpatrick. So not these guys:
I can name 100 insane extremists in Congress— every single one of them is a Republican. NOT ONE is a Democrat. I hate plenty of congressional Democrats… but none of them are extremists. If Kinzinger doesn’t understand this— after serving with Jamie Raskin on the Select Committee investigating the Trump coup— he’s missing something and still deluding himself into thinking the GOP is salvageable post-Trump. Right now I’m skeptical of his BreakFree organization, even if I like some of what they’re trying to do.
Nicholas Wu, a conventional wisdom kind of journalist, wrote, without insight or comment that Kinzinger’s “political organization is launching a nationwide campaign urging voters to reject extreme candidates on both sides of the aisle ahead of the 2024 election.” Needless to say, Wu has no examples to back up his acceptance of a misleading both sides perspective, just this kind go stupid perspectives: “In the political ad’s twist, people are forced to wear blue- and red-tinted goggles showing them divisive images and broadcasts from a ‘Big Brother’-type character until they take them off and escape. A monologue from Kinzinger urges Americans to reject political extremes.”
These people dressed like characters from the video running around Capitol Hill are part of Kinzinger’s campaign launch deriding political extremism. Andrew Solender talked to Kinzinger, who told him "We call them 'drones'. They're just kind of droning around, they really don't have a purpose at the moment ... because they just feel unrepresented. They feel like government is just kind of going along." By "grabbing attention," Kinzinger said, they're also meant to satirize the "desperate need of every lawmaker and staffer there" to get onto television and go viral on social media. Kinzinger said the purpose of them staying silent at first was to cultivate mystique.
Dems accepted legitimacy of W/Cheney despite the series of dubious dealings that put them in office. John Ellis calling FL for his first cousin on Faux News and thereby stampeding other networks into calling for W/Cheney was one of those dubious dealings. GOP didn't accept Biden's legitimacy even though he won the popular vote AND the electoral vote by solid margins in a remarkably free and fair election under the circumstances. The Dominion lawsuit has conclusively shown that Faux News hosts consciously lied in propagating the myth of a stolen 2020 election. Hell, an element of the GOP questioned Obama's legitimacy after he was elected resoundingly.
There is no moral or practical equivalency at work here.