The power of ignore-ance

I don't give a flying leap what Dinesh D'Souza has to say about anything. Ever. And I'm probably one of ten people on the entire internets that isn't a huge Dave Weigel fan. It's not that I dislike Dave, I just don't find him as hot as everyone else seems to so I don't read him that often and I stopped following him on twitter. But he nails the liberal noise machine today.

And that's the answer to the "Why publish D'Souza?" question. It should be obvious by now that there is literally no conservative argument too "crazy" to be obsessed over by liberals. Every time a new one surfaces, they try to run it out of the mainstream by drawing extra attention to it.

This dynamic has been driving me crazy for a while now. The justification is "one must debunk the crazy with endless snark and/or analysis" in order to marginalize it but as a practical matter by deeming it sane enough to bother to debunk at length, it ends up widening its exposure and gives the Village media an excuse to put it on TV because "everyone is talking about it." Which ends up giving it more legitimacy, not less.

Not saying people should ignore the lies altogether, but can't help but think launching into a days long competition to see who can mock it most cleverly, or most thoroughly, isn't really helping. It still allows the nutcakes to drive the narrative. I'm guilty of this myself to some extent, but it strikes me it might be more helpful if we pushed our own narratives instead of constantly reacting to and reinforcing wingnut memes.