The posts are ominous.
“Pick a side, or YOU are next,” wrote conservative talkshow host Dan Bongino on the Truth Social media platform in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions.
The replies were even more so.
“Dan, seriously now,” one user wrote in response to Bongino. “I see no way out of all this mess without bloodshed. When you can rig an election, then weaponize the government and the courts against a former President, what other alternative is there? I’m almost 70 and would rather die than live in tyranny.”
That’s a common version of how many people on the US right reacted to the ex-president’s verdict, drawing on a “mirror world” where Trump is seen as the selfless martyr to powerful state forces and Joe Biden is the dangerous autocrat wielding the justice system as his own personal plaything and a threat to US democracy.
Calls for revenge, retribution and violence littered the rightwing internet as soon as Trump’s guilty verdict came down, all predicated on the idea that the trial had been a sham designed to interfere with the 2024 election. Some posted online explicitly saying it was time for hangings, executions and civil wars.
I’ve been thinking the same thing every day for the last 10 years or so…
David Bowie and Prince were holding this all together. When they went, the world lost its mind.
It sent me into a deep depression when everything revealed all at once how dire things really are. We had a lethal pandemic that killed MILLIONS of people become disputed, a meme and political slogan. We had a third of our people elect a literal stereotype of a con-man and try to overthrow the US Government to keep him in power, we’ve seen the return of nazis and sleazy pickup artists, we have people eating dangerous chemicals for social media attention, people deciding rules are no longer applicable to them, and it seems like anyone who babbles nonsense in a confident tone will gain a rabid cult following, while outside the world is literally starting to burn around us while people deny the very shape of our Earth.
And on top of all this, while people are struggling to find a path to truth and get through this, with any shred of belief in our potential and capability to rise above our worst natures, we now have a machine that can fool anyone into believing anything and it’s only getting more powerful, and it’s in the hands out-of-touch billionaires and mega-corporations and being distributed out to anyone who wants to use it for a small price.