A new but related thread to the last one: I think a lot of people who consume a lot of media (via social, mainstream media, whatever) sometimes fail to understand how most people do. They think of the media ecosystem as a big conjoined thing.

And they think of political news in particular as having some shared basis of fact and reality, even if particular sectors of the media that are more partisan are prone to distorting it.

And there are also a lot of assumptions that right wing media is just a mirror of left wing media. There might be some acknowledgment that conspiracy doesn't flourish in the same way but there's still an underlying assumption that "both sides" use factual ammunition the same way.

The upshot of which is, if a Dem reacts to a bad faith narrative the way the bad faith actor expects and conforms with the narrative they want to push that it must be inherently bad to do that.

So why publicly skewer Ted Cruz for something stupid you know he's going to use to market to his base? There are two assumptions built into that question that I think are wrong.

One is that it matters ammunition-wise to his base, which right is clearly the Trumpist base. He's not trying to persuade R "moderates." And what he tells them is largely divorced from anything that happens in the real world.

If you have family who are part of the base, grew up with them or live in a community now that's culturally & politically dominated by what, for shorthand, I'll call the Trumpist base, you know this. If your only personal interaction w Trumpists is covering them, you might not

The people Cruz is talking to have no interest in what liberal pundits and tweeters and journalists have to say. They don't know who we are. All they need is a message that comports with what they already believe to be true and Cruz gives them that whether it exists or not.

Any Dem policy Cruz doesn't like is going to be "socialist", a product of the "radical left." No one in his base will fact check this because they want it to be true and they don't care. He went to Harvard but he tells them they're being persecuted by elites who went to Harvard.

Do they eat that up because they're stupid? Sometimes. But more often they know he went to Harvard and they choose to look the other way. Or they think he's *their* elite.

They have no interest in what you said on Twitter because they already made up an insane version of it and propagated it all over Facebook.

Cruz doesn't need what Dems actually do and say for ammunition because the base will accept less than that: a rhetorical hug from Cruz and a made up story. And they do.

I know this both because I've worked in red states for Democrats and I have a family and hometown full of Trumpists who like to explain to me what NYC liberals believe. (I am the only NYC liberal they know.)

And they are not talking about Cruz trying to dunk on Seth Rogen. (They love Seth Rogen.) They are talking about the same shit they always have: guns, abortion, and the economy--the latter of which they base on whether everyone around them "feels" is going well or badly.

That is who Cruz is talking to. That is who Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene is talking to. That is absolutely who Mo Brooks, who reps some of my relatives, is talking to.

When Cruz whines about it on Twitter, he's not pursuing some grand strategy, even via earned media. The person who writes about the Rogen spat is not the person writing the legal analysis about whether what he did constitutes sedition.

And secondly, some liberal pundit slamming him is not what he uses to market to his base. That wouldn't be effective. His base hates liberals as a class. They do not privilege pundits or people with big twitter followings or *gasp* journalists.

They hate the media as an industry (except Fox), and journalists as a class, and trust neither. But it's rarely individualized and when it is, it applies pretty much exclusively to cable news commenters. Jake Tapper. Rachel Maddow. Chris Hayes. Don Lemon.

Sorry, but they don't know who the rest of you are. I was a journalist for a long time and I never got over the fact thata lot of media people don't realize that 99% of everyone can't name a single non-columnist byline in any newspaper, except possibly their very local one

So why does Ted Cruz tweet dumb shit? First, Occam's Razor: Ted Cruz is subject to the same narcissistic tendencies as the rest of us. And he thinks he's good at it! He tries to make jokes regularly! They're terrible, but still.

Systemically, he's doing it to feel out his peers and donors, and be visible in ways they like, especially when he engages in the culture war stuff. And they see it whether you dunk on it or not.

It gives him some automatic earned media coverage in conservative outlets that talk to those people. And they will write about him no matter what fight he's picking today.

If you're still here, thanks for not muting, lol. I guess this would be better as a column. But then again about a third of my columns start out as tweet threads, so.

(Also: just a P.S.: Dems don't have any equivalent of this. It's completely asymmetrical.)