Before we begin, I have a challenge for you. I want you to switch from reading this article over to your email application. Once there, I want you to permanently destroy one email (doesn’t matter which) using bleach. Then, when you’re done, we’ll continue.

Did you do it? Did you destroy the email with bleach?

You didn’t? Why not? Because you can’t? Because the idea doesn’t make sense? Because emails are digital and not physical and therefore impervious to chemical destruction? Yeah, exactly.

And yet there is some portion of the American public that believes maybe this can happen — that somehow emails — or maybe hard drives? — can have bleach poured over them to destroy them. They believe that this is something Hillary Clinton did, in fact — because they have internalized one of the least credible claims made by Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election and, despite the ludicrousness of the idea, have never actually interrogated the viability of the idea. Trump said it, they believed it, and now — in the urgent rush to whatabout the search of Trump’s home in Florida — they’re presenting this idea of destroying emails with acid or bleach as not only possible but a matter of fact.

There are perhaps few better examples both of how confidence in the claims made by Trump depends on his supporters refusing to consider them in any critical way and how even his goofiest claims simply blend into an ecosystem by now optimized for defending and echoing what he says.

What...

Read Full Story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/11/trump-fbi-search-hillary-c...