In what has to be a new standard for her worst possible take, Meghan McCain has equated the Reddit traders buying up GameStop stocks with the MAGA rioters who assaulted the U.S. Capitol building earlier in the month. The hot take was so bad that even McCain recognized that it wasn’t her best thought and quickly deleted it. However, as everyone knows, nothing gets deleted on the internet, and a screencap has been bouncing around social media, earning McCain well-deserved criticism for the false equivalency. Here’s what she wrote via The Daily Beast:
“The same thing that drove people to the Capitol is driving Redditors to buy GameStop. The system feels rigged. And the little guy is trying to take back power in any way.”
Interestingly, the deleted tweet was a follow-up to a previous thought that’s still up on Twitter, and frankly, the two practically say the same thing, but without the first one mentioning the Capitol. “The GameStop stock story is like a mirror to the world of everything that is wrong,” McCain tweeted. “This is what happens when the system feels rigged and nothing seems to work anymore. It’s what has fueled the rise of populism in America. The story shouldn’t be dismissed because it is nuanced.”
The GameStop stock story is like a mirror to the world of everything that is wrong. This is what happens when the system feels rigged and nothing seems to work anymore. It’s what has fueled the rise of populism in America. The story shouldn’t be dismissed because it is nuanced.
— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) January 29, 2021
Where McCain went wrong with the deleted tweet is justifying the attack on the Capitol based on the Big Lie that the election was rigged, which has been proven wrong in court over sixty times before January 6. As for Wall Street being rigged, that’s obviously a much more tangible and provable assertion even if the populist veneer of the Reddit traders is debatable.
Of course, this wasn’t McCain’s only false equivalency. Just 24 hours earlier, she attempted to equate Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell being targeted by a Chinese spy with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s violent rhetoric and harassment of school shooting survivor David Hogg. That hot take also involved McCain playing fast and loose with the facts by accusing Swalwell of sleeping with the spy, which he did not.
(Via The Daily Beast)