Obviously I'm way out of date, but I learned something new today from Charles Homans' big Donald Trump piece in the New York Times. The setting is one of Trump's campaign rallies:
As the speech neared its conclusion, the room once again filled with music, a stately cinematic swell of synthesized strings. This recording, an instrumental composition called “Mirrors,” was also thick with subtextual information.
Several years ago it was appropriated, seemingly at random, by devotees of QAnon, the conspiracist cosmology that holds Trump to be the central figure in a world-historical battle against a cabal of Democrats, business leaders and celebrities trafficking and torturing children.
In 2022, Trump appropriated it, too, using the song for a video he released on social media, and later at a rally in Ohio, as a soundtrack for the rousing finale of his speech. Although a spokesman denied that it was a wink at the QAnon faithful, supporters at the rally responded by raising their hands in a familiar QAnon gesture.
This has been extensively reported before, but I missed it. It's just another log on the bonfire of vileness that is Donald Trump.
The Decline of Western Civilization Part Douche
touche
Figures for Trumpilini the King of all assholes.
Kitties say...Trump is nothing more than a Hairball. What do you do with a Hairball...you purge it from your system. Purge Trump. Kitties know!
According to a meta-study, conspiracy theories have a single causal explanation which is the tendency toward a perception of oneself as being superior to others.
Ref: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-bul0000392.pdf.
According to the first scientific principle, immunization against the tendency to form conspiracy theories has a single causal explanation which is the perception of oneself as tied for first place with roughly eight billion other soles as the most important person on Earth.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method.
To be more specific, real scientists are as rigorously skeptical of their own assumptions as they are of other people's assumptions.
Translation: If you are a department head in Harvard's Division of Science, and objective observers agree that you are rigorously skeptical of your own conclusions, then you are a real scientist and otherwise a Trump Train passenger.
For the record, William F. Buckley, the father of neo-conservatism, thought he was one of a small number of super people.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Baldwin/Buckley_Debate.
And will any mainstream media outlets tell us this? No, of course not. Of course, it would mean nothing to most voters if they did because the media doesn't explain what QAnon really is, except to repeat what trump said, which is "I hear they don't like pedophiles." So there.
But we will hear wall-to-wall coverage of the "pro-Palestinian" protestors, who have chosen that moniker so that anyone who disapproves of them is automatically "anti-Palestinian."