Rick Wilson, The Daily Beast; Trump Fans Are Suckers and QAnon Is Perfect for Them
"Conspiracies are hard. They're even harder when you're stupid.
They
are, however, deeply compelling. Some people need a single, grand
unifying theory of why the world refuses to line up with their
expectations. When difficult realities confront people without the
intellectual horsepower to understand and accept the truth, some turn to
conspiracy theories to paper over the holes in their worldview. No
matter how absurd, baroque, and improbable, conspiracies grow on their
own like mental kudzu where inconsistencies aren't signs of illogical
conclusions, but of another, deeper layer of some hidden truth, some
skein of powerful forces holding the world in its grip...
[Q] works because stupid people are stupid and because Donald Trump's
Administration loves what QAnon does to stoke the fires of paranoia,
resentment, and division. QAnon works for Trump because people who are
not knowledgeable about the world, politics, government, the
intelligence community and reality more broadly are desperately looking
for confirmation that they're on the winning team. Q tells them that
they're on the right side of history and that for once in their dreary
little lives they and only they possess the secret, hermetic knowledge
from inside the esoteric cult."
Showing posts with label Trump supporters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trump supporters. Show all posts
Saturday, August 4, 2018
Friday, November 18, 2016
Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’; Washington Post, 11/17/16
Caitlin Dewey, Washington Post; Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’ :
"You’ve been writing fake news for a while now — you’re kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer. Well, I’d call it hoaxing or fake news. You’d call it parody or satire. How is that scene different now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral? Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it. You mentioned Trump, and you’ve probably heard the argument, or the concern, that fake news somehow helped him get elected. What do you make of that? My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything."
Thursday, August 11, 2016
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