From November 27th to December 15th 2020 I got nearly all my news by way of Trump’s tweets. It is hard for me to take more than 15 minutes at a time of right-wing media. I was hoping that by immersing myself in it, by breaking through my initial revulsion, I would gain some kind of insight into right-wing thought. Well, I did, but not the uplifting sort.
The Trumposphere is a massive con. This is the main thing I learned. Trump is a flimflam artist. It does not go any deeper than that. There is no there there except for that. Well, okay, there is an added layer of narcissism, defending his fragile ego. Even to call him a fascist or a proto-fascist is to give him way too much credit (not that he could not lead the US into fascism – many White people seem more than ready for that).
In the 1980s, the left and right wings in the US shared the same set of facts, more or less, but had different ideologies, different interpretations of those facts.
By the 2010s, thanks to the Republican Bubble – Fox News and all of that – they did not even share the same set of facts. Birtherism, which Trump himself pushed, is a good example. So is the climate change debate – the debate is not over the best policies, as it would have been in the 1980s, but over whether man-made climate change is even true!
Now in 2020, in the Trumposphere – Trump’s tweets, Newsmax, OANN and the remaining blowhards on Fox News – the facts are whatever Trump wants them to be. A good example of that is the slandering of Smartmatic.
Smartmatic makes voting machines. In the US 2020 presidential election they were only used in California, a deep-blue state on the Left Coast that Trump had no chance of winning. Despite that, his lawyers blamed Smartmatic for his loss. Rudy Giuliani said:
“Dominion is a company that’s owned by another company called Smartmatic through an intermediary company named Indra. Dominion is a Canadian company but all of its software is Smartmatic software.”
Not true. Smartmatic and Dominion are competitors with their own software. But Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News Network (OANN) did not even do a basic Google search. They just blindly repeated Trump and his minions – and accused the White Liberal press of trying to hide the truth about the election.
It took the threat of a lawsuit for Fox News and Newsmax to do a fact check and issue a correction.
Facts are whatever the Dear Leader wants them to be. This is a step beyond the Koch Brothers, who at least laundered their lies through think tanks.
Tribal epistemology is the polite name for this blind follow-the-leader approach to the truth. George Orwell said it takes a national disaster, like military defeat, to wake up people from it. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a Mussolini expert, thought the pandemic would do it. Not so.
– Abagond, 2020.
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Abagond 
Fuck off you worthless fucking liberal. Trump is the best.
Then again a stupid nigger like you wouldn’t know what a good President is .
My ancestors used to enslave niggers like you.
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^^^ Letting this one through.
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Anyone remember the scene in The Princess Bride with the poison?
Is the post from a Russian troll? With a name like “Ivan” it makes one wonder. Except, the post is so obviously over-the-top that it makes me wonder if it’s from a left-wing troll pretending. Or maybe a Russian troll after all, one that’s pretending to be a liberal that’s pretending to be a Russian… poison in both cups?
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