Here was the disaster playing out second-hand on CNN.
You know it's a bad night for Rachel Maddow when even Fake News CNN is making fun of her.#TrumpTaxReturns#ThisIsUs#TrumpsTaxes#MSNBCpic.twitter.com/BPceVORC3I
— Tennessee (@TEN_GOP) March 15, 2017
Rachel Maddow had promised to deliver the holy grail of the left, President Trump's tax returns, instead she rambled on with an endless opening and offered shocking proof that President Trump paid a lot of money in taxes. After first managing to get scooped on the story by the Daily Beast. Not to mention the White House.
How did this train wreck happen?
Rachel Maddow went from nearly running MSNBC to seeing her version of what the news network ought to be nearly vanish. She's been upstaged by louder voices, including the return of Michael Moore. So she needed a big win. And instead became a joke.
The descent into conspiracy theories makes it all too easy to treat information as gnostic, to be convinced that finding the right document will confirm your biases and justify your anger. The left's obsession with President Trump has long since become a fact-free matrix of conspiracy theories attacked very loosely to pieces of information. And conspiracists are adept at constructing fantasies based on stray pieces of information. Conspiracy theorists are incapable of judging the value of a piece of information because it's a quasi-religious item to them that proves the "truth". They're not rational.
Rachel Maddow tried to pass off the idea of Trump's taxes as a scoop. But the reality was deeply disappointing because it not only failed to affirm the cult's conspiracy theories, but actually undermined them. Which was the #Resistance cult quickly donned its #Ally safety pins #BlacklivesmatterMuslimlivesmatterTranslivesmatterVirtuesignalingmatters and retreated to urging that we focus on ObamaCare. It's the first rational thing that they've done in some time.
It's easy to mock Maddow, but it's not as if the rest of the media is any better. We've now witnessed several elections in which the media scrambled for any attack material which being incapable of judging its value, e.g. Troopergate, the Romney haircut, because it needed it to reaffirm its hatred and conspiracy theories.