So now, liberals, the media, Democrats, apparently anyone who thinks Palin is a buffoon of almost world historic proportions (which gets you to something like 80% of the country) are all abominable hypocrites for ‘laughing’ at what is now fairly preposterously portrayed as a violent assault against a woman. If you listen to the police interviews, which occurred just as the brawl had barely ended, all the witnesses beside Bristol said she attacked the homeowner.

 

But this is actually a common tendency on the right with issues of gender, race and much else. If you don’t actually take the issue seriously in the first place, it comes naturally to flip it around in a cookie cutter kind of way. You say we are hostile to women? Well, I saw you be mean to a woman, too! So there! Whether it’s treating women by different standards or bearing animus toward women as a group doesn’t really matter. If you don’t really care about the issue in the first place it’s easy to turn it on its head. Because you don’t see it as a problem but a cudgel, just another weapon in the brick-a-bat of partisan or ideological combat.

 

Conservatives routinely accuse liberals of jumping to accusations of racism or sexism with no cause or when other explanations are equally plausible. And sometimes they’re right. But it has always been the case that the self same people are the first to scream sexism or racism in cases where it is demonstrably false. Again, if you don’t care about the issues in the first place or don’t think it’s real, it comes naturally.

 

In very broad terms, the origin of Fox News is analogous. Conservatives in the ’70s and ’80s looked at the mainstream media and saw it as liberal and against them. That was largely bogus but not entirely. The mid-late 20th century elite ‘media’ did generally buy into a series of cosmopolitan assumptions about public and private life. That worldview generally aligns more with liberalism than conservatism, but the two are by no means identical. And this did shape coverage in significant ways. But many conservatives genuinely believed that most people in media were and are little different from Democratic political operatives writing propaganda. So when they went to create “their” media, that’s basically what they created, a propaganda network. The reality is as much a matter of genuine misperception as bad faith, though it’s both and together they make for a toxic brew. But again, if you see these issues as just a cudgel that people hit each other with, it’s easy to say things that are basically nonsense. Because who cares? None of it means anything anyway.