re: #25 HappyWarrior

Take any text…video, written document, speech…

…one way to engage with it critically, applying language skills and reasoning skills to tease out meaning, or many permutations of meaning, consciously using a framework of analysis and a modicum of skepticism. It’s not guaranteed that you’ll understand the text, and it may be that the text cannot be refined to a single clear meaning (and even the author stating their intent does not perfectly translate into “the text has only one meaning).

…but one can also engage with a text in bad faith, working backwards from an decided-on position and curating the text to meet their needs. And at the deepest level of bad faith, there is no engagement with the text, just the invocation of the text as authority. We’re seeing a lot…a lot…of the latter these days. The Bible, the Constitution, the song “Born in the USA”: all are invoked but not engaged with. In the era of Trump and instantaneous communication, right-wing bullshit hinges on fast turn-around of talking points: repeat the new thing with full conviction until it stops works, take up the new assigned bullshit and repeat it with equal intensity. Bad faith…and Frankfurter’s “On Bullshit”…define the conversation.

Read the transcript isn’t a call to action to read the transcript, it’s a ritualized disavowal raised specifically as a substitute for doing the thing. It means “don’t read the transcript, accept as axiom that this document exonerates Trump, that is just as good as reading the document.” Even individuals that do read the transcript have been told what it means beforehand, and do not have to extract meaning from the text through thought and reflection.