From Vanceās penchant to ācreate storiesā to Trumpās false claims, lies are brazenly flaunted as a tactic to win support
JD Vance was holding court on CNNās State of the Union programme. āThe American media totally ignored this stuff,ā he complained last Sunday, āuntil Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.ā
But it wasnāt just a meme, objected interviewer Dana Bash. The Republican vice-presidential nominee gave a telling response: āIf I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then thatās what Iām going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.ā
If ever there was a case of saying the quiet part out loud, Vance had perfected the art. The cat memes he referred to were prompted by baseless rumours about legal Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio eating house pets ā rumours that led to bomb threats and evacuations of schools and government buildings in Springfield.
But Vanceās willingness to ācreate storiesā to grab attention before the Novemberās election hinted at a new frontier in post-truth America, where a lie is no longer slyly distributed but rather brazenly flaunted as a tactic to win political support and stir up social chaos.
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Republicans are more authoritarian on average, and authoritarians tend to value in-group cohesion more than anything else. They are, by some reasonable metrics, bad people.
If I remember correctly, there was a study where they did like a model UN, and they secretly put all the people who scored high on authoritarian personality tests in group A, and everyone else in group B. Group B did fine- no wars, dealt with climate change and what not. Group A, with the authoritarians, caused a nuclear apocalypse. And after they got a do-over (after they had to sit in silence for a few minutes to think about what theyād done), they still fucked it up. edit: I found it: https://theauthoritarians.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/TheAuthoritarians.pdf , page 30
Weāre all at least a little susceptible to authoritarian, in-group-above-all thinking. But some people have it bad, and those people suck. Theyāre really ruining it for the rest of us.
This is shown quite clearly in their belief that people get gender reassignment surgery just because of (liberal) peer pressure. It shows how important the opinions of others are to them.
The realization that there is nothing we, as individuals, can really do about it hits like a brick š§± But, yet, we keep fighting. Because to give in is defeatist, and frankly, boring.