[bgun]

Republicans have learned to weaponize attention far better than Democrats. Negative attention is still attention, and where Democrats shrink from "gaffes" or criticism, Republicans just recognize that public criticism is still a form of attention. Even among each other. Whoever gets the most eyeballs, top stories, and headlines for longest wins this game.

Vicious, vindictive, petty, nonsensical, random, and trolling tactics are all strategically useful in this media landscape.

[outside1234]

Republicans have the benefit of not having guilt around saying things that are patently not true while the Democrats are still trying to act within norms.

It is asymmetrical warfare on the truth.

[cooper_ganglia]

It astounds me that anyone is capable of sincerely believing this.

[rayiner]

It's a response to the fact that democrats can create widespread misperceptions through their control of traditional media. For example, in 2018, 66% of Democrats believed that "Russia tampered with vote tallies to get Donald Trump elected President." https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/20383-russias-imp.... Hillary Clinton never went out and said quite that. But the barrage of coverage from all angles in the media created the same impression as if she had said that.

In another example: how many people know that, after the 2000 election, the Supreme Court found 7-2 that Al Gore's proposed recount strategy was unconstitutional? Nobody knows that Al Gore had employed a strategy of hand-counting ballots only in counties he had won to find more countable votes that would swing disproportionately in his favor.[1] The media completely blacked that out, and everyone now only remembers the 5-4 part of the decision addressing how to fix that constitutional violation. There's more people under the misimpression that Kathleen Harris or Jeb fixed the election in Bush's favor than understand the sneaky maneuvering by Gore that precipitated the whole mess.

[1] E.g. if Gore won a county 2:1, then statistically, every vote rejected by the machine that could be hand counted would be twice as likely to be a Gore vote than a Bush vote. Gore found a loophole in Florida election law that allowed him to use that principle to find more votes in his favor by seeking hand recounts only in two large counties he had won.

[nuancebydefault]

Another example of whataboutism, this time about a guy who ran for presidency many many years ago. He's the one who gave attention to this now obvious unconvenient truth. Back then they criticized the energy use of his house, which still compares very pale against the consequences of this, still swept under the carpet today, inconvenient truth.