Faced with a defamation lawsuit, MSNBC’s chief conspiracy theorist is forced to admit that the claims she makes on her show are not in any way based on fact.
Did you know that Rachel Maddow is being sued by One America News? Apparently this summer Maddow claimed OAN is “really literally paid Russian propaganda.”
Naturally OAN is now really literally suing Maddow for defamation.
And the Maddow defense is really literally laughable.
See, she can’t be sued for what she said because her words are “rhetorical hyperbole, incapable of being proved true or false.”
So when Rachel said, “really literally,” what she actually meant was “not really and not literally. It’s just my opinion.”
Well, then maybe Rachel would be wise to avoid using words like “really” or “literally.”
I’m sure it will come as a surprise to all the devoted members of the Resistance who really literally take every word this hack burps out as the gospel truth.
You gotta admit, this is quite a confession by Maddow. She is really literally acknowledging that there is nothing factual in her
From Cul+++ure:
UC Santa Barbara linguistics professor Stefan Thomas Gries said, “it is very unlikely that an average or reasonable/ordinary viewer would consider the sentence in question to be a statement of opinion.”
Gries added that, “I am the second most widely-cited cognitive linguist and sixth most widely-cited living corpus linguist. The field of cognitive linguistics draws from both linguistics and psychology and studies how language interacts with cognition.”
After analyzing Maddow’s segment and identifying and analyzing linguistic markers including words, tone, and cadence used by Maddow, Gries found “Maddow did not use any typical opinion-markers when she stated that OAN ‘really literally is paid Russian propaganda.’”
Now, I’m not a cognitive linguistics expert, but I do occasionally use words. And it seems to me if someone prefaces a statement with “really literally,” then she is saying “what I’m about to state is real and literal.”
One doesn’t ordinarily preface “dubiously figurative” statements with “really literally.”
Then again, perhaps her audience already knows that their beloved conspiracy theorist is bull-shitter. Months before her defamation of OAN, Maddow’s faithful viewers learned for themselves that Rachel’s two and a half year’s of “reporting” on RussiaGate and Mueller were dubiously figurative.
Thanks to the Mueller Report, her viewers probably already realized that, despite Rachel presenting her programming as really literally proving Trump was a Russian asset who is wholly in bed with Putin, Maddow was full of rhetorical, hyperbolic bullshit.
Not that Rachel changed her rhetorically hyperbolic ways.
Nope. She just kept plugging away at it like a dishonest, rhetorical Energizer Bunny.
(Not that she was really literally the Energizer Bunny. She was just figuratively the Energizer Bunny.)
But now, faced with a defamation suit for her reckless garbage, Maddow is forced to admit that she is full of crap.
No wonder this silly woman’s ratings are in the toilet.
Is it wrong that I really literally hope OAN takes her for every penny she has