Rules of rhetoric set out that you tackle the message rather than trying to shoot the messenger. Unfortunately they don’t hold for audiences who haven’t internalized those rules, and who would rather reinforce their prevailing narrative of media bias than confront the fact that reality occasionally disagrees with stump speeches.

What the hysterics of the week showed most clearly was the depth of the victimhood complex to which the Republican Party, establishment and Tea Partiers alike, have sunk. And why should any rational Republican candidate nowadays voluntarily answer a tough question when he can simply cry discrimination and protect his poll numbers?

It’s a neat paradox: Substantive questions are denounced as unfair and the questioners blackballed till there’s no one left to ask them.

Then the base descends into a mess of conspiracies and confirmation biases, the primaries grow ever polarized, and the nominee does not win.

You’ll be able to read all about it in the next RNC autopsy.

Idrees M. Kahloon ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an applied mathematics concentrator in Dunster House. His column runs on alternate Tuesdays.