Here's the thing: It's almost always okay to ask questions. It's definitely okay to ask questions when it concerns politicians or the media. So when a television host posing as a journalist - who also occasionally sounds like a tinfoil hat wearing theorist - does an interview where he says there's a "subculture of conspiratorial thinking among Democrats," you have to sit in awe at the extreme case of self-unawareness.
In an interview published Sunday by The New Yorker, MSNBC host Chris Hayes actually admitted that the conspiracy theory mindset the media likes to denigrate for lack of integrity of thought isn't exclusive to the right, of which the media always puts said tinfoil hat on.
Following a comment from New Yorker interviewer Isaac Chotiner saying that "#ResistanceDemocrat" types take what they see or hear on MSNBC and/or Twitter and ascribe a "conspiratorial mindset" to it, Hayes made an admission. However, Hayes didn't seem to be able to pinpoint what attributes to that mindset.
Here's Hayes' answer:
There is absolutely a subculture of conspiratorial thinking among Democrats, or the broad anti-Trump coalition. I would a hundred per cent concede that. That is borne of a lot of things. I think, again, I do think—I’m just speaking for myself—and this is . . . I don’t know. The world’s confusing, and I don’t feel like I know all the answers. What I try to do, to the best of my ability—I know that I fail all the time—is to try to maintain the best habits of mind, if that makes sense.
Hayes appears to have stuttered or stammered through his explanation, the conclusion of which ended up being "I don't know." Either Hayes is complete moron, he's 100 percent self-unaware or he knows and he just won't say what he knows to be true - he is part of the problem.
This is a guy who one question earlier delegated blame for the hyper-partisanship in the U.S. to MSNBC's all-time favorite scapegoat for everything they deem wrong with the country - well, besides President Trump - and that is Russia.
"So I also don’t want to take the agency away from the actual actor here, which is the Russian government doing these things in 2016 that really had very profound, tangible effects, and have produced some amount of craziness and paranoia," Hayes said. "I don’t want to lose sight of their agency in producing that state of affairs. I think that, in some ways, was the seed that has flowered into whatever we’re dealing with now."
Hayes or Rachel Maddow or Chris Cuomo or Don Lemon could have a migraine headache, and they would find a way to blame it on the Russians. Why do they do it? Because it's easy and lazy journalism. They know the people are already skeptical of Russia, so to blame everything on them doesn't take much in terms of brain power.
H/T: Timcast