BOTH SIDESISM NOW

By Ruth A. Sheets

Republicans, trying to pretend they are in some way moderate have a technique that has been gaining ground for a while.  I think of it as “both sidesism.”  It usually appears in lines like “well, you know they all do it” or “politicians are all alike.” Or “both sides are trying to shove their preferred social values down each other’s throats” and other such statements.  If a Republican is accused of something, say, lying, the response, if the respondent acknowledges the lie at all is, “they all lie and none of them are any good.”  My guess is it serves the purpose of making Republicans look a little less radical and maybe it is working with some folks.

Our media display their both sidesism with their “fair and balanced reporting,” which is clearly neither fair nor balanced these days.  I first took notice of it 9 years ago when Donald Trump entered the 2016 presidential campaign and the media, not too excited by his presence at the beginning (you know that escalator ride), came to be consumed with Trump and his shenanigans, normalizing comments, insults, and anti-American rhetoric while covering other candidates as though they were just as disruptive.  Hillary Clinton got the biggest blasts of media frenzy when everything she said was ignored in favor of Ben Gazi and emails.  They were portrayed as worse than Trump’s diatribes against women and Clinton in particular  with “lock her up” and anti-abortion rhetoric,   claims of immigrants being rapists, mocking of anyone different from himself, calling the press “fake news.”  I’d have thought the press would have fought back, but instead doubled down on Trump coverage.

For the past 8+ years, Republicans have an agenda that is so far outside the realms of decency in a democracy they have decided they must change direction and let us see “a kinder gentler side.”  In the meantime, the media have portrayed President Biden as too old to function, inept, the cause of inflation, which for our media made it look like both candidates were equally bad, but Trump a bit better because he didn’t seem as old.  The June 27^th “debate” cemented that in many people’s minds, even though Biden had trouble, he didn’t spend the entire affair lying to the American people as Trump did, which the media noted only in passing. 

Trump survived an “assassination attempt” with hardly a scratch but the media projected him as a hero because he kept standing with his fist up (I have heard it said it looked like a Hitler salute).  We were told Trump was going to be “nicer” from then on and the Republican Convention was billed as the way for Republicans to unite the country, even better than Democratic claims.  All kinds of headlines poured out that message, but the convention actually presented none of that “unity” or “niceness.”  In fact, Trump, himself, recently told a crowd of his worshippers that if they thought he was becoming “nicer” after the incident in Butler, PA, they were wrong and he asked them if they minded.  No Democrat would have done that.

A few days ago, I was responding to comments on a piece by Joyce Vance on her Substack page.   One of the respondents was complaining that she should not have to have drag queens reading books to kids in her public library.  She could give  no explanation, other than that children shouldn’t have to be exposed to something as corrupt as those people.”  Than a guy chimed in that drag queens are groomers and children would not be safe around them.  He, of course had no evidence of this and when I challenged him with actual facts that if anyone is ”grooming” it is conservative clergy, he tried to defend his statement with insults and claimed that somehow I just couldn’t understand the logic of keeping kids safe and away from drag queens, (targets for right-wing self-righteousness). 

How the thread decayed into people being forced to attend drag shows and that the “left” gets to force people to do things against their religion is still unclear even after rereading the various comments.  My comment back to him was probably not as “civil” as I might have done at another time, but here is what I said.

“no one on the left is forcing anyone to go to Drag queen or drag king story hours or to bake cakes for LGBTQ couples. However, on the other hand, the right-wing IS trying to keep a lot of us from voting, to let a president have the powers of a dictator to do whatever he wants to anyone he does not like. No left-wing policy is an anti-American diatribe against this nation with an entire plan for systematically taking away people’s rights, as Republican-written and supported “Project 2025” from the Heritage Foundation is designed to do.  No Democrat intends to undermine our public schools in favor of rich private corporations who want to control what our children learn. No left-wing people want the ten commandments posted on classroom walls which is against our Constitution (OK, left-wing kids might enjoy checking off all the commandments Trump, their state's governor, and representatives have already broken and speculate which they will break in the future(. No left-wing person wants to impeach opponents they don't like because they just don't agree with them as they are trying to do to Kamala Harris (I guess in response to Trump having been impeached for actually committing crimes against this nation). No Left-wing people lie incessantly and enjoy the media ignoring that in favor of denigrating a president and vice president (Biden and Harris), who have improved lives for most Americans in the 3-1/2 years they have been in office. No left-wing politician is trying to wreck social security or Medicare or to deny struggling people Medicaid or SNAP.  Republicans have proposed all of these, but the media, it seems, since it can’t blame Democrats for such actions ignore them in favor of covering Trump’s rallies even though nothing Trump says is new.  That is until Kamala Harris stepped in as Democratic candidate for president when President Biden decided not to run.

I think you get the idea. Both sidesism is just ridiculous no matter what right-wing people believe. Those folks alas, already believe a lot of things that aren't true.  Unfortunately, I suspect that both sidesism will continue.  I keep hearing it’s because the media is now corporate.   Maybe so, but both sidesism is a lie no matter who is doing it.