re: #4 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

He is just feeding his base some raw meat

I think Tucker has really adopted the positions he asserts because it’s the natural end point of a lifetime of contempt for the idea of expertise and formal assaying of truth.

If you first accept that your spite has the quality of disproving that which you view with contempt, it eventually follows that that which causes self-satisfaction is true.

Before you ever get to science you can seen conservatives do this with their own sacred texts: quoting mining as exegesis has become an accepted, normalized practice, as has not even engaging with the primary text without a mediating layer of authority-figure…not an expert, just someone designated higher with the social structure…parsing the meaning.

In this case, Tucker is doing Snapple-Fact hubris: he’s adopted an argument that feels valid and has no curiosity about detail because the point of the exercise was never to explain the world in full complexity but simply to confirm his worldview.