The Broken Minds of the Anti-Anti-Trump Right

Gavin Newsom’s concern about live artillery fire over Interstate 5 was “performative.”

Then a CHP vehicle was hit by shrapnel.

Let’s be precise about what happened here: The Governor of California warned that firing artillery rounds over a civilian highway posed unacceptable risks to public safety. The Vice President of the United States mocked those concerns. The exercise proceeded. A police vehicle was struck by shrapnel. If the timing had been slightly different, we’d be discussing the Vice President presiding over the manslaughter of American citizens on American soil.

But according to the sophisticated skeptics—the anti-anti-Trump chorus, the “reasonable” voices who’ve built entire brands on being above partisan hysteria—the real performance was Newsom’s concern. Not the military spectacle designed to demonstrate federal dominance over state objections. Not the Vice President’s contempt for democratic accountability. The concern was what offended their calibrated sensibilities.

At what point does their framework become unfalsifiable?

This is where we need to talk about the catastrophic reasoning error these people are making. In Bayesian terms, they’ve inverted the burden of proof. They’re treating authoritarian escalation as the null hypothesis—demanding each violation be proven beyond reasonable doubt before they’ll update their priors. They’re treating the accumulating pattern as noise until individually proven otherwise.

This is lethally backwards.

When JD Vance cites Andrew Jackson defying the Supreme Court as a model, that’s a data point. When he talks about “getting pretty wild” and purging civil servants, that’s another. When he oversees military operations over civilian infrastructure against state safety objections, that’s a third. When those exact warnings prove accurate and civilians are endangered precisely as predicted—at what point does the probability that he means it approach certainty?

For anyone operating with functional epistemology: about three data points ago.

But the anti-anti position has constructed a framework where no amount of evidence counts as overwhelming because every piece can be individually dismissed and the pattern itself denied by treating each data point in isolation. Jack Smith’s findings? Partisan. January 6th? Riot not coup. Purge threats? Rhetoric. Yarvin citations? Edginess. Bolton raided? Both sides weaponize DOJ. Artillery endangering exactly who was warned? Performative concern.

At what point does sophisticated skepticism become systematic denialism?

Here’s what makes this particularly obscene: These aren’t stupid people. They’re often very intelligent people who’ve built intellectual frameworks that protect themselves from correction. Every new violation gets explained within existing assumptions. The framework doesn’t get tested against reality—it gets reinforced by sophisticated explanations for why reality doesn’t count.

This is the epistemological structure of denialism. Not honest doubt but motivated reasoning dressed as intellectual rigor. Not skepticism but systematic refusal to update beliefs in response to evidence. Not objectivity but a framework carefully constructed to make authoritarian escalation seem like ordinary politics requiring ordinary responses.

And it’s more dangerous than MAGA enthusiasm because it provides permission structure for collapse. When intelligent people with platforms dismiss accurate warnings as “performative concern,” when they invoke “both sides” in response to constitutional violations, when they treat democratic accountability as partisan theater—they’re not maintaining neutrality. They’re making fascism seem reasonable.

But here’s the actual mechanism driving this madness: they hate the left, liberals, and Democrats so much that even when they’re empirically, demonstrably, undeniably right, they still can’t acknowledge it.

When Kamala Harris warned that Trump would send military into cities, the anti-anti crowd dismissed it as “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—hysterical exaggeration from people too partisan to think clearly. Now federal agents conduct warrantless raids in American cities. Now the Vice President oversees military operations over civilian infrastructure against state objections. The warnings proved accurate. The predictions came true.

But they still can’t acknowledge Harris was actually right. Instead, she was “right for the wrong reasons.” She was being partisan, exaggerating, suffering from the same derangement they’ve spent years diagnosing in others. At best, she was accidentally correct—a stopped clock finding its moment, not someone who actually understood the pattern unfolding before us.

This is the pathology at the core of the anti-anti position: they cannot possibly believe that people outside their cynical, smug bubble could have been seeing patterns they were paying no attention to.

The sophisticated skeptics weren’t tracking Vance’s Yarvin citations. They weren’t reading the neo-reactionary manifestos. They weren’t connecting the dots between Peter Thiel’s investment in authoritarian politicians and his explicit statements that democracy and freedom are incompatible. They weren’t paying attention to the systematic intellectual infrastructure being built to justify democratic overthrow.

So when people who were paying attention started warning about authoritarian escalation, the skeptics assumed those warnings must be partisan hysteria. Because if the threat were real, surely they would have noticed it. If the danger were genuine, surely they—with their sophisticated frameworks and balanced perspectives—would have seen it first.

The idea that Kamala Harris might have understood something they missed is unthinkable. The possibility that Gavin Newsom’s concern about military operations over civilian infrastructure reflected genuine pattern recognition rather than performative partisanship cannot be acknowledged. Because that would require admitting that their sophisticated neutrality was actually sophisticated blindness, that their balanced skepticism was actually motivated reasoning, that their rise above partisan capture left them captured by their own contempt for the people trying to warn them.

So instead they’ve built an epistemological prison where liberals are always wrong even when they’re right, which means they must have been accidentally right, which means their reasoning was flawed even when their conclusions proved accurate, which means we can safely ignore them next time too.

This is motivated reasoning achieving escape velocity from reality. This is what happens when hatred of liberals becomes more powerful than commitment to truth. When the need to avoid agreeing with Democrats overrides the capacity to recognize patterns. When sophisticated skepticism becomes a defense mechanism against having to acknowledge that the people you’ve spent years dismissing as hysterical were actually paying attention while you were performing objectivity.

They’ll construct any explanation, however tortured, to maintain this framework. Newsom was performatively concerned even though his concerns proved accurate. Harris was exaggerating even though her warnings came true. The people screaming about authoritarianism were deranged even though authoritarianism is exactly what we’re watching unfold in real time.

And the sophisticated skeptics? They maintain their posture of balance, their reputation for nuance, their brand as the reasonable voices who rise above partisan capture—all while providing intellectual cover for the very constitutional collapse they claimed to oppose.

So instead we sit still and wait for Mitt Romney to return. We wait for some imaginary reasonable Republican who’ll save us from having to make uncomfortable moral choices. We wait for the adults in the room who never arrive because the anti-anti framework keeps explaining away why each adult who does arrive doesn’t count—too partisan, too alarmist, too compromised by having actually taken a clear stand.

The sophisticated skeptics have built a machine that can’t recognize patterns, can’t update beliefs, can’t distinguish between accurate warnings and partisan theater, can’t admit when they’re wrong, and can’t acknowledge when the people they despise were right all along.

And they’ve convinced themselves this cognitive paralysis represents the height of rational objectivity.

It doesn’t.

Their brains are broken.

Broken by hatred of liberals so visceral they’d rather watch artillery endanger civilians than admit Gavin Newsom saw the danger clearly. Broken by contempt for Democrats so deep they’ll explain away authoritarian escalation rather than acknowledge Kamala Harris understood the threat. Broken by investment in their own sophistication so complete they can’t recognize that their framework has failed catastrophically, repeatedly, in exactly the ways the people they dismissed as hysterical predicted it would.

They’d rather watch the republic burn than update their priors.

And that’s exactly what’s happening.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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