Thanks for being frank. The reason it's a popular target is because it's such an embarrassment, denying it or diminishing it makes it more powerful as a war dr

Thanks for being frank. The reason it's a popular target is because it's such an embarrassment, denying it or diminishing it makes it more powerful as a war drum. It makes it more excusable for the drummers to exaggerate it, to the extent that the audience feels the alternative view is just flat out wrong. When there legitimately is no issue then it is what it is, when there is an issue and we can respond "we know, we're working on it, here are the difficulties we face" that's also understandable. But when a political opponent is committed to outright denying something that many people can see for themselves, that's manna from heaven. I think if you default to seeing things in terms of "alignment" it means that every time your opponent has a point, even a weak one, it harms all the positions that you've bundled together because it's a wedge for someone to go "well team yellow clearly has a point on X while team green is gaslighting, so ...". Especially when we generalize on one set of opinions to conclude the person we're talking to is 'the other team' and are according evil unpersons devoid of moral value. Every false positive on that judgement call sends another person in to the arms of people who don't jump to conclusions on them. To depower a political faction we must depower political factionalism -- because factions are primarily created by their opponents.