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Reality Bites: Fake News Hits Both MAGA and Never Trumpers

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File

It grows increasingly clear by the day why America is getting the rematch the vast majority of voters claim they did not want.

Let's leave aside for the moment the barnacle-like tenacity of bitter-ender progressive Democrats still clinging to the Dark Brandon theme. In their defense, they never were allowed much in the way of alternatives.

But Joe Biden, the full-employment machine for fact-checkers/correctors, is only half the dance. It's his partner in what's turned out to be the Not Again Cotillion who wasn't inevitable. (Until he was.) And the runaway foolishness on X this Wednesday is symptomatic of why Republican primary voters Bill Buckley would not have recognized served up Donald Trump for the Big Dance.

Simply put, and with apologies to Ronald Reagan, it's no longer just Democrats who believe things that simply are not true.

Resurrected Tuesday, in conjunction with the phantasmagorically overblown conjecture about the FBI’s plans to assassinate Trump during agents’ Mar-A-Lago raid, was the equally goofy claim, from March 2023, about Gov. Ron DeSantis being in cahoots with Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Thanks a bunch, Real Raw News.

Leading the merry band of ill-tuned tweeters (if we can still use the word) is precisely whom you’d expect: 

Never mind about the instantaneous pushback. The delivery method may have changed, but humans haven’t, leaving Mark Twain’s comparison of lies to truth perfectly intact. By my unofficial count, for every one of these attempt to correct the record:

There were four dozen more of these atomizing kerosene on the flames of ignorance:

As well as these:

Sigh.

You must not tell the Magaverse their source material — the aforementioned Real Raw News — traffics in “humor, parody, and satire.” That is, its creator and sole author, Michael Baxter, unabashedly makes stuff up.

Magaversians prefer to believe outlandish stuff, the wackier, the better. It fits their view of the galaxy when U.S. Marines are skirmishing with FEMA relief workers in the aftermath of natural disasters; Delta Force operatives foiled an assassination attempt by a Secret Service agent on Trump at his New Jersey MAGA; and Russia destroyed Biden-supplied Stinger missiles Ukraine intended to use on “Deep State assets in Eastern Europe.”

U.S. Navy JAG investigators arrested special counsel Robert Hur on charges of treason for letting Biden off the hook over purloined top-secret documents? Sounds legit. 

And, of course, any snark about old Gov. Pudding Fingers, especially when it suggests he’s surreptitiously plotting to thwart Trump’s claim on a second coronation — er, inauguration — must be accepted without question, inspection, or thoughtful doubt. Because he is DeSanctus, still. Meatball. He-who-wears-lifts.

And his wife probably did fake breast cancer for the attention and sympathy, because a candidate for president who gives a pass to an attorney general ordering a raid on the home of his political rival is capable of anything. Especially one who, while incontrovertibly successful in the realm of conservative policy, gives off a certain icky anti-charismatic vibe.

OK. Deep breath. This would be a good time to pause and remember X is not real life, X is not real life, X is not real life, X is not real life.

X. Is. Not. Real. Life.

But sometimes, X feels representative of a fair amount of real-world thinking. And the ability of the Magaverse to believe, endorse, and spread vile nonsense about peripheral threats to Their Guy — which excludes the very real threat of weaponized lawfare, which is anything but peripheral — seems to have carried the primary season.

So, you want to know why we’re getting getting Grumpy Old Men II? Evidently, because a critical mass of voters embracing conspiratorial nonsense is why we’re getting Grumpy Old Men II.

Meanwhile, the bitter clingers plan an insurgent strategy.

We are in so much trouble.


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John Stossel 1:00 PM | June 15, 2024
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