Liberal abandonment of accountability vacuums gets filled by Mirror World justice fantasies.

Evidence

It’s pipikism in the extreme to hear MAGA Republicans describe the various show trials underway in the House as a new “Church Committee”—a reference to the Senate select committee convened in 1975, and chaired by Democratic senator Frank Church, to investigate some of the intelligence world’s most notorious dirty tricks at home and abroad. But what did Democrats do, when they controlled the House, to investigate the ways that intelligence agencies have cooperated with tech giants to invade privacy and surveil us in countless ways? Or to pardon whistleblowers like Snowden? Have we given up on justice on this scale? If so, we can hardly be surprised to see the impulse resurface, in warped form, in the Mirror World. A vacuum has been created, and if my doppelganger has taught me anything, it is that vacuums tend to get filled. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 790

Categorization

• XREF: Directly advances the Mirror World thesis from earlier chapters: what the left abandons, the right metabolizes in distorted form.
• FICTION: The phrase ‘vacuums tend to get filled’ as a narrative principle: any unoccupied political ground is claimed by something worse.