A red-herring strategy

James Surowiecki, “Trump Wanted to Join the Mob at the Capitol, and All Right-Wing Media Wants to Talk About Is a Steering Wheel”:

This is, of course, a classic red-herring strategy: by focusing relentlessly on this one minor detail, Trump supporters are trying to draw attention from the substantive, and damning, aspects of what Hutchinson said. And the really striking thing is that they’re doing this even though no one has actually refuted what Hutchinson said.

And trying to parse the blurry footage of Trump in the SUV, as if it were the Zapruder footage of the JFK assassination, is a pointless exercise.

[I always like reading Surowiecki’s one-pagers in The New Yorker. So lucid. They made great models for teaching students how they might construct an argument.]