Breaking my own pledge, because IMO it’s important to keep a hairy eyeball on the MAGAts trapped ‘in a doom loop of disinformation’…
I recommend posting his speech transcripts in their entirety in newspapers. When you write this down it is even more apparent that it’s utterly insane rambling. pic.twitter.com/5iYv6J1ywT
— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) April 15, 2024
I'm so zonked from the day I forgot to send a gift link — here https://t.co/SD1t5Mpjoo
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) April 14, 2024
Will Bunch, at the PPhiladelphia Inquirer — “‘Trumpstock’ brings peace, unity, and a ton of disinformation to Schnecksville”:
Even 30 mph wind gusts whipping down from the nearby Poconos couldn’t move the bubble of Donald Trump-scented awe and alternative reality that descended on this hilltop village for about eight hours on Saturday…
This Schnecksville extravaganza was the fourth Trump rally in the Mid-Atlantic I’d attended since 2016. I go largely because I think the media still fails to understand America’s most important story of the last 10 years. U.S. democracy is staring out into the abyss not so much because of the narcissistic bluster of one alleged billionaire ex-president, but because of the people with fleece hoodies over their MAGA hats who spent hours in an April windstorm to see him.
These rallygoers are the vanguard of the 74 million who voted for Trump in 2020, and who still have him in a dead heat with Biden, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released hours before the event — despite or maybe because of the two impeachments, the 88 felony charges, or the Project 2025 blueprint for a “Red Caesar” dictatorship. If the American Experiment grinds to a halt after Jan. 20, 2025, it will ultimately be not the fault of Trump, but the everyday citizens I met Saturday who are so eager to put him back in the White House…
In a sense, Trump himself is almost like the MacGuffin, the plot device that gives these characters an excuse to get together. “We already know what the spiel is, we know what he stands for,” one man, a middle-aged Canadian American executive, told me. So why wait in this massive line? It’s partly that a rally gives supporters a chance to get off the couch, shut down the TikTok app, turn off YouTube, and prove to themselves they are actually not alone in thinking that everything has gone to heck. But there’s an even more insidious reason for coming out.
“Look, they’re going to steal the election again,” said one friend of the Canada native, who, like many of the Trump voters I spoke with, didn’t want to give his name. “They need to see a larger number of people supporting a different kind of candidacy than the one they’re trying to throw down our throat.” They are smitten by the theory that the Big Lie that Trump actually defeated Biden in 2020 is proven by their mass willingness to stand in a line in a howling wind for four hours, while Biden couldn’t even fill a high school gym…
… Most have constructed an elaborate worldview about what is happening in America today around the issues that matter most in Trump World, like the southern border or the part of the economy with high grocery prices (but not the part with plentiful jobs or a record stock market). Never mind the inherent contradictions, like the one 69-year-old woman from upstate New York who told me that “America looks weak” on foreign policy,” but also “not one more dollar for Ukraine.
I asked one gaggle in the line where they get their sweeping narratives, considering what they were also telling me about their contempt for the legacy mainstream media. “TikTok!” one immediately blurted. “There’s a lot of information on TikTok.” His neighbor quickly recommended YouTube, while others promoted obscure websites or the right-wing Patriot channel on satellite radio…
We've already spent the past eight years reading think pieces with anecdotes about how these same racist right wingers would be just fine with ushering in a regressive religious theocracy led by Trump.
The question is: what are the other 266 million of us gonna do about it?
— Ragnarok Lobster ?? (@eclecticbrotha) April 14, 2024
Cult!
Triple take at the Charlotte GOP's handle https://t.co/D8go4oWZQp
— zeddy (@Zeddary) April 17, 2024
eclare
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5zijzPxxJk/?igsh=MWNjenl3bWU0eGJsZQ==
The Gettysburg speech, it left me speechless.
Shalimar
Trump’s gonna steal the erection, because no amount of money can pay for one anymore.
piratedan
AL, I’m seeing that Mr. Johnson over at LGF is now able to embed Bluesky posts, so apparently Bluesky has enabled that capability now, if you’re still looking to give us an X-free experience.
Jay
@Shalimar:
2 blue pills, call your doctor if it lasts for more than 4 hours,…..
NotMax
@piratedan
Oh please, oh please….
eclare
@piratedan:
Does it work for people not on Bluesky?
eclare
Oh, the man who set himself on fire has died.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/man-who-set-himself-fire-near-nyc-courthouse-holding-trump-trial-pronounced-dead
Sounds like he had some sort of mental breakdown. And as usual no help. It’s sad.
Tony Jay
It’s the eternal human paradox of scale. We can stand in a stadium amongst 50,000 people and our brains translate that noise and bustle and energy into ”OMG this is so huge! I’m part of something!” but then stumble at the realisation that all those thousands of true believers could leak out into any mid-sized city and vanish from sight, swallowed up by the really big numbers.
MAGAts do rallies because they need to believe that they’re not alone in their hate/revenge fantasies. They can see the evil Dems winning elections all over the country and the remorseless vice of virtue tightening on Stench and it scares them. So they want to stand in a crowd where people don’t look at them funny and their pre-defeat wails of “Election Theft!” get echoed, rather than ignored.
A MAGAt without a crowd to disappear into ends up dying of self-inflicted burns on the steps of a NY court. It’s no surprise they wrap that comfort-blanket of togetherness around themselves so tightly.
piratedan
@eclare: What the dealeo is that Bluesky has structured the posts on that platform to where you can capture a post there and embed said information/snark onto your platform now. So this means that the ability to surf posts/posters of import on Bluesky and share them here is now doable. It wasn’t before.
Over on LGF, they had to enable/activate some code in order to allow the post and its format to be imported and linked back to the original source.
It probably means that there’s a tool/utility that will allow that to happen now. It coincides with the push that Bluesky is making to reach out to journos to start using their site and ditch the Nazi-friendly site and embedding and linkage was a hurdle that needed to be cleared.
eclare
@piratedan:
So as a non-user of Bluesky, I would be able to see everything that AL, for example, embeds?
Yes, I do need it broken down that simply!
piratedan
@eclare: yes, that’s the idea. Granted AL and WG have to make sure that they can make that happen. Considering our passion to not even give passive attention to Meet-A-Nazi, I’m guessing that will happen. Just that bsky is trying to move into that void for rational discussion that Twitter used to be. Takes time.
eclare
@piratedan:
Thanks!
David 🏀Caitlin Clark🏀 Koch
Martin
Sounds like then NYPD arrested the legal observers at Columbia as well.
USC has cancelled all commencement speakers to further try and cover up their fuckup. Note, these graduates had their HS graduations canceled 4 years ago due to covid, so USC is fucking up their one chance to have their family watch them walk because there’s a 50/50 chance they have to cancel the commencement entirely as they continue to dig this hole.
I hope we can all finally re-asses the ‘liberalness’ of our coastal private universities.
And it was pretty impressive that the president of Columbia appeared to get out of Congress with her job intact and then 12 hours later threw it away.
Tony Jay
@David 🏀Caitlin Clark🏀 .
Baud
@Tony Jay:
I want this to be real so bad.
BethanyAnne
I’d love to read DougJ’s tweets in time order, does anyone know a way without an “X” account?
NotMax
@eclare
Not hinting at a connection without proof but noting Judge Merchan’s role as the designated magistrate of the Manhattan Mental Health Court.
mrmoshpotato
@Martin: USC? Columbia? Are you talking South Carolina?
NotMax
@NotMax
The linked page has not yet been updated to reflect the change from Fridays to Wednesdays.
Phylllis
@mrmoshpotato: I think he’s talking about Southern Cal and Columbia in NYC. Nothing on the news here about the real USC canceling graduation speakers.
Sanjeevs
@BethanyAnne: https://nitter.poast.org/DougJBalloon
Tony Jay
@Baud:
Just takes one kitten, years of effort and a training montage set to the music of Republica.
eclare
@Baud:
Me too!
NotMax
@Tony Jay
A moment of silence, please, in remembrance of the Bowling Green Meowssacre.
//
eclare
@NotMax:
Hmmm…I read somewhere else that the guy’s friends said that he started to decline after his mother died two years ago. He had a masters degree in city planning from Rutgers, and it sounds like he just lost it. Not MAGA.
Baud
@eclare:
Well that’s sad. But I’m kind of glad it wasn’t political. Things are tense enough as it is.
Shalimar
@Baud: It sort of was political in that he thought all of government was out to get us, but he also thought Republicans and Democrats were conspiring together so he didn’t have a political side in real-world issues.
NotMax
@eclare
The very little I’ve come across within the general coverage of the present proceedings dominating the news is that Merchan has a reputation for solicitude toward those before his bench at hearings of the MMHC and also for the imposition of treatment programs over sentencing to direct punishment.
eclare
@Baud:
Agreed on all. There is a photo of him holding a poster that said both Biden and Trump were plotting a fascist coup. I guess he just killed himself in the place where he would get the most attention.
Betty Cracker
I’ve been rooting for Bluesky to emerge as the successor to the platform Musk ruined. Embed capabilities help, but users still can’t share or embed video content. You can’t really be a breaking news player without that, IMO.
Threads has those utilities, but as I learned recently, if you embed multiple posts on a platform like this, it can break things downstream, like mobile functions. Also, Threads is affiliated with another frog-faced oligarch, which makes it less than ideal. Bleh.
ColoradoGuy
The Republicans are no longer a political party. They are a religion.
Martin
@Phylllis: No human outside of South Carolina thinks of Columbia or USC as being anything other than the universities in NYC and Southern California. I’m skeptical even a majority of people inside South Carolina do.
different-church-lady
I’m so old I can remember when TikTok was the thing the youngs were going to use to save us.
different-church-lady
@ColoradoGuy: Cult.
Betty Cracker
@Martin: I think your skepticism is misplaced, especially as regards the usage among South Carolinians. My grandma and countless aunts, uncles, cousins, etc., went to the University of South Carolina, and it’s fairly common to hear it called USC and for folks to refer to “Columbia” without specifying they mean the SC city, since it’s almost always perfectly clear in context.
eclare
@Martin:
I don’t assume USC means the school in CA, and I live in TN.
Do you want their national championship women’s basketball team to come out there and give you a talkin’ to?
Dorothy A. Winsor
My niece’s husband is a docent at Gettysburg battlefield. I haven’t yet had a chance to ask him what he thinks of Trump’s analysis.
To me, it sounds like a book report from a student who didn’t read the book.
prostratedragon
@eclare: His field of study might explain the NYU fixation; they’ve done a lot of reshaping of Village-area neighborhoods in recent years about which disagreement is possible. Something that started out fairly logical but became a rabbit hole. My, my.
Tony G
@Tony Jay: Nuremberg Rallies, without the fancy uniforms.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Aside from CLT_GOP not recognizing Cult Leader’s words, are they sure they want to mock “can’t find countries on a map”? Have they met their own voters? Hell, I’ll bet half the Republicans in Congress would flunk that test.
How long before somebody starts saying what’s-his-name’s deteriorating version of the English language is just brilliant rhetoric and comparing it to Finnegan’s Wake?
Tony Jay
@NotMax:
Betty
@Sanjeevs: DougJ is so prolific. The courtroom “incidents” really got him fired up. I hope everyone appreciates that the Biden headline is real. Talk about a desperate media.
Tony Jay
@Tony G:
Oh, they’ve got the uniforms, as the writer of that piece recognises. Trumpy hoodies over their Redcaps, with store-bought Tactical Cosplay gear for the wannabe Waffle-SS. But yeah, far more tacky than fancy.
LiminalOwl
@Sanjeevs: ooh, thank you!
eclare
@Tony Jay:
Hahaha…
BethanyAnne
@Sanjeevs: Thanks so much!
RevRick
@Tony Jay: The Trump rallies are, for many MAGAts, a sublimely spiritual experience. It’s more than the fact that they’re among the likeminded. It’s that they get swept up in the collective emotion.
Human life is nurtured by five different levels of spirituality. There’s the spirituality of solitude, that of the dyad (such as marriage), that of the small group (6-12 people), the medium-sized group, such as is typical in a classroom or most places of worship, and lastly at mass gatherings, such as rock concerts or ballgames. The purpose of these latter gatherings is to have one’s identity swept away, to become an organism greater than oneself.
Dyadic relationships often begin by the dissolution of identity, which is what happens in falling in love, but in healthy relationships the identity boundaries must be reestablished.
Trump rallies are all about merger, that they and Trump are one, that they have a chance to participate in his story and his version of our story. Rock concerts and ball games are usually fairly benign, as Taylor Swift fans swoon in an afterglow of the experience. But we all know of soccer matches gone awry.
Trump rallies are not about facts or truth but about emotion fueled by grievances.
NotMax
@RevRick
Repeating from earlier, Sluremberg rallies.
Gvg
@eclare: I work for a University and am used to always trying to specify which state is meant by initials. Certain initials always require more data. Florida doesn’t have the problem because we are the only state that starts with F.
The USC business has been in the news most of the week.
Omnes Omnibus
@eclare: I don’t live in the south or in California. To me, USC and Columbia are first and foremost the universities in LA and NY.* Also, contest matters here. Both of those have been in the news this week for disgraceful actions.
*UW is Wisconsin not Washington as well.
Geminid
@Dorothy A. Winsor: As others have pointed out, Lee showed no special aversion at Gettysburg to fighting uphill. That was pretty much all the Confederates did, and Lee gave the orders.
Marcopolo
@Betty Cracker: Since we’re speaking of “twitter” replacements, yesterday I read that Post was shutting down after 18 months. Anyone out there know how Spoutable (so?) is doing?
https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/post-news-the-a16z-funded-twitter-alternative-is-shutting-down/amp/
Kay
@Shalimar:
The focus on Dukakis was odd – how he thinks Bill Clinton and George HW Bush conspired to take down Dukakis and how he wrote that Dukakis was a public servant – and the only politician he liked, apparently.
lowtechcyclist
@Phylllis:
Preach it, sister!
ETA:
@Martin:
Sez you. :-D
lowtechcyclist
@Omnes Omnibus:
You bet! And the USC women’s hoops team has won a few of those. ;-)
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
As someone born/raised in Los Angeles a very long time ago and then being stationed in Charleston SC in the military, and having had a sibling who taught at USC (the western one) I have heard of this two USC business. I think growing up near either one of them is going to put a concept of misunderstanding in some noggins.
Ruckus
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Might you think that SFB possibly no longer can actually read and/or comprehend a book?
I might. Because he now seems to only be able to form some sort of speech for about one short, incomplete, moronic sentence and then he runs out of whatever the hell it is that goes on in that orb atop the blob that wears his suits.
Honus
@Geminid: Lee gave the order and insisted on attacking uphill at Gettysburg, against the explicit advice of his second in command, James Longstreet.
Chris T.
@Ruckus: To avoid ambiguity, spell out the California one: “University of Spoiled Children”.
wjca
@Chris T.: 👍
Hob
@Kay: I read it as more of a Clinton fixation, but I agree that it stands out because you just don’t often hear Dukakis mentioned in conspiracy theories— and Azzarello is (was) too young to have looked up to him personally at the time.
But in a weird way, I think that explains it. Finding an angle that not everyone else is talking about is a thrill. I mean, I can’t speak to the experience of conspiracists, but that’s how it has been for me in writing other kinds of things, and I think it drives a ton of thinkpiece writing online. Latching onto a not very popular conspiracy theory could have a special attraction to someone who still wanted to think of himself as a real “researcher” and not just another Q-head. And there’s a special kind of nostalgia that can happen for things of the generation before yours, that you feel have been discarded and given no respect.
I can’t read the whole thing, it makes me too sad. Especially the part where he talks about “desperately trying to get friends, family, and the public to believe the proof of a totalitarian con I’m trying to show them, and they’ve turned away with hostility, apathy, disbelief, and partisanship”, because it reminds me so much of a former family friend whose descent into Q-like stuff (from an initial entry point of anti-war & anti-imperialist politics, exploited by that awful Australian blogger whatshername) has been accompanied by a lot of “I can’t believe that you all have such closed minds, why would you accuse me of being in a cult, I’m just asking questions” stuff in exactly the same tone… and I believe he’s largely sincere, even though I think there’s still a kind of willful self-deception involved. I don’t imagine him self-destructing, so far, because he’s remained active in his (very impressive) creative work and engages with people in real life that way. But that tone of righteous despair still scares me.
Geminid
@Honus: The Union really needed the victory, too, after so many flops. That was a political war, not just a military one, and Lincoln would have had a tougher re-election the next year had it not been for the Battle of Gettysburg.
Tehanu
Brilliant!
@Chris T.: University of Second Choice — but I’m a UCLA grad, so YMMV.