POLI•RANT: Our New Normal is a Firehose of Lies
LA fire disinformation is a precursor of what's to come.
Thank God these LA wildfires happened while Joe Biden is still president.
We already know that during his first term Trump tried to withhold natural disaster aid from states that didn’t kiss his ass. That’s likely to happen for real during Trump 2.0. So, from a practical standpoint California is lucky we still have Biden. Maybe Trump will try to cut off the ample aid he’s committed. Like so much else, we’ll see.
There’s another benefit for all of us here too: Getting prepared for nonstop lies and propaganda from Trump and others with both X and Facebook now fully embracing the disinformation business model.
Like millions of others, I left X/Twitter soon after the election and joined BlueSky. We all know what had happened to the platform after Musk took over. Whether purposefully or not, he drove it into the ground allowing Nazis and foreign bots swarm the place and killing any fact-checking guidelines they ever had.
Now, Mark Zuckerberg is doing much the same on Facebook and Threads. Then there’s Trump himself on “Truth” Social spewing lies that are being amplified even more on FB and X.
The LA fires were the first big event that went down since these changes all came together. And what it shows is that we’re in for a mountain, a firehose, a hurricane of lies, propaganda and disinformation.
If you’re like me, maybe you thought things would calm down a bit after November. MAGA did win after all. But, that was a naïve, fleeting wish. The reality of the situation is that it’s never going to stop.
Because they can’t let it stop.
To hold onto their delusional cult they’ve got to keep pumping out the disinformation 24/7 — because if it’s not non-stop, some of these people might actually take a minute to think about the craziness of the shit they’re being fed.
So, they can’t let that happen. Even if it’s a natural disaster of the type that used to bring us all together as Americans.
Those days are over, and the sooner we accept that this is the sad, new normal the sooner we find ways to overcome it.
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