Dealing with dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters was difficult enough when he was in office, but now that he is gone, such cultists have doubled down to a state of psychological mania that beggars belief. I have seen Twitter feeds and forum comments that make me incredibly sad. This isn’t a watershed moment of getting the US to a state of unity and moral and policy decency, this is an excuse to dive even deeper into conspiratorial and ideological nonsense the likes of which should make one’s skin crawl.
Hell hath no fury like a Trumpista scorned.
I don’t want to linger too much on the type and level of comment and claim I have seen; it makes me feel dirty. But I will look at a couple of claims made by resident right-wing ideologue Anjasha Freed on the comment threads here. This is the first set of claims:
Will you be able to stop talking about him, Jonathan? Or will you spend the next four years like you spent the last four years?
Here are some new stories for you to cover:
1. There is mass distrust in the US media. They will never get it back. What will the result be?
https://news.yahoo.com/trus…2. Biden cancelled the oil pipeline with Canada, destroying thousands of US jobs and creating a diplomatic rift with Canada. What will happen to the world economy if Biden spins us into a depression by destroying our current oil and gas industry?
https://www.aljazeera.com/n…3. Alternate social media paradigms are going to arise that will be resilient to government and corporate takedown.
https://itsfoss.com/mainstr…4. Biden has signed an executive order allowing transgender athletes to play on female teams. One state has drafted opposing legislation. Eventually, transgender integration demands will go global.
https://thehill.com/changin…5. Biden has re-instituted critical race theory training at the federal level. What is critical race theory? My guess is that most of your readers only think they know. Racist Kristen Clarke will be a big purveyor of it and so will Biden’s new education nominee Cindy “Spirit Murder” Marten.
https://www.city-journal.or…
I talked a lot about Trump because he was compulsive viewing, just like terrible horror movies, or rubber-necking a road traffic incident. He was and is also morally abhorrent and I felt it my duty to point this out.
The claims from Freed above require a short rebuttal – they aren’t worth much and I have little hope of removing the shackles from their own political imprisonment.
1) You reap what you sow, you lover of FOX, Breitbart and all the other lowest value news sources. More to the point, the claim that Freed makes, and the data collected, is nothing new (going back to the time of Washington and Lincoln). See “POV: Many Americans Distrust the Media, but It’s Not a New Phenomenon” by political media consultant. When FOX News’s answer to this problem is to replace the primetime news slot held by Shep Smith (who has moved to MSNBC) with another opinion show, you know the media is becoming a consumer-led affair to an even greater degree.
But who are the ones denying facts and science more? Climate change, Covid, the election? FOX, OAN, Newsmax, Breitbart or MSNBC, CNN and PBS? Chris Ruddy, in his very illuminating interview with Mehdi Hasan, admitted his own Newsmax channel is not accurate (“Like all the networks, and networks you’ve been on, there’s a lot of opinion hosts, and they have all sorts of things that I don’t subscribe to,” Ruddy replied. “I do believe in free discourse, I believe in people having their opinion. We’re not saying that that is accurate.”):
The question is, who is most responsible for the lack of reliability in the news media?
2) How about the US government takes the $649 billion subsidisation (including through negative externalities) payments to the fossil fuel industry and pumps that into green and renewable energy so that we still have a liveable world. Obama was right in trying to make the US the global leader in green tech. And now much of the rest of the world has a head start. Trump has set you back four years.
It’s comments like theirs that show that naysayers like them don’t have an ounce of critical thinking capability in their bodies.
See: “United States Spend Ten Times More On Fossil Fuel Subsidies Than Education“. A whopping $649 billion was spent subsidizing the fossil fuel industry in 2017 in the US. Renewables didn’t even come close. They weren’t on the same page. Read my article: “Renewables, Going Forward“
Freed later said to me about this point:
10,000 US jobs mean nothing to you, hmm? Well that is not surprising because you are not an American and you don’t have to watch your fellow citizens weeping as their financial lives circle down the drain while China and India churn out fossil emissions and we subsidize them with millions of dollars from our economy to do it. I’m sure China will give Biden some nice kickbacks for putting taxpayer money back in their pockets.
And that misses the entire point. Rather than try a muted Obama drive for green jobs but be hamstrung by the continued bullying from the fossil fuel industry and continuing to subsidise it to insane levels, take on something like the Green New Deal. Be bold. Be gutsy. Be on the right side of history. Look, you could create 10,000 jobs by going to war with Canada, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing to do.
I guarantee you, Freed, that if you ignore the climate from now onwards, it will bite you on the arse.
I would then invite you to, with your children if you have any, go and live and breathe the air for a year of a coal-fired power station and compare that with breathing the air around a wind farm.
I take your 10,000 jobs and I would raise that a whole heap more in sustainable industries.
3) “Corporate takedown”? Says someone who favours information funded by Heartland, AEI, Kochs, etc etc. You love corporations until they don’t peddle the ideological nonsense in your head. See my article “It’s a Climate Change Conspiracy!“
4) Ah, the culture wars. When the right has nothing else, it’s always safe to, you know, during a pandemic and impending economic collapse, worry about the culture wars. Get over your culture wars whingeing. We’ve got bigger things to worry about right now. I see you said the square root of f*ck all about Trump not turning up for a Covid task force meeting for six months whilst 400,000 people died, and then going AWOL to play golf.
That indefensible attitude makes me sick.
5) See 4).
Whinge whinge whinge yet not a word spoken about 45, who sat and sulked and did nothing (but invite insurrection) whilst his country sank deeper into pandemic chaos.
This is where I just get angry: Go sound off at Gab or something. Fester in some pool of alt right-wing slime.
Let’s see if it got any better. I’ll reply inmterlinearly to Anjasha Freed’s next comment found here.
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