I mean, I’m here for the anger at Americans who support Trump, but did the article need a “/s”? It’s pretty obvious this article is a sarcastic take completely aligned with what you’re saying already, but you seem to be taking it at face value?

Imagine showing this to anyone at all in the US in 1980 or 1990, or 2000, or 2010, and tell them this is an official statement from America’s president. And then tell them in 2026 it barely even makes headlines.

It costs next to nothing to include Lemmy in a social media astroturf and propaganda campaign, and is even easier and more effective because the small userbase means people’s posts are viewed less suspiciously (case in point: Your entire “the userbase is too small lolol” argument here). I am absolutely certain a few people I interacted with during that time were astroturf, MAGA-in-disguise or propaganda accounts. Re-read the part of my reply about necessary but not sufficient causation, to address your “third party vote” argument (I said nothing about third party voters, note, but you also ignore depressed turnout).

But to get a little meta: I’m engaging in good faith discussion and giving reasons for my arguments. And you come here, respond to me twice (edit: three times?) with condescending derision when I wasn’t even talking to or about you, and are making an illogical claim that a 50K userbase somehow means Lemmy is immune from propaganda (whether state or individual). You then downvote me, which I didn’t do to anyone I disagree with here. It’s childish and petty.

We are two people who probably want the same left-based outcomes and have disagreements on the method to get there, but you’re ranting to me about random things in this thread that I didn’t even say. You’re being extremely unpleasant, unkind and uncivil. I stand by what I said.

Second edit: Seeing your profile and comment about being banned, here’s a direct question: Did you go by the username UniversalMonk prior to the election? The MO, aggressive response style, and AI-generated profile stuff is almost identical.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s how it happens for a lot of people, and it’s super important not to assume we know what’ll happen for any individual. I’d say statistically, there’s likely a bias to generational ignorance, but that environment can individually create the opposite effect.

The reason why I’m not sure that statistical bias will be removed in the social-media era is that gen-alpha is extremely algorithmic-feed-influenced, and feeds are now very efficient in taking users down right-wing rabbit-holes. So 'Bama pawpaw’s racist/xenophobic views may end up influencing them by a circuitous route just the same.

That’s a strawman version of what I said and I’ll explain why. First, I blame propagandists and bad-faith posters. That means, foreign actors paying troll farms, accelerationists, MAGA-in-left’s-clothing. Second, multiple causes can be necessary but not sufficient to an outcome.

Did online propaganda of this type help Trump’s victory? Certainly. Was it a sufficient cause on its own? Probably not. But we’ll never know, hence the “probably,” which you’ll note is different from what you imply my comment said.

I realize I’m late so am just responding here for posterity, but - while I’m open to evidence - in my experience the people who were banned were clearly or very likely bad faith astroturf and propaganda accounts. They were clearly trying to split the vote, depress left turnout, and would just repeat LLM-generated junk rather than respond to any good faith debate.

And I think the bans were right in retrospect because the timed (not typically perma) bans expired and those people still magically disappeared completely from Lemmy after the election.

In the end, they probably did their job. Trump is in office destroying the country/world, and right now there are probably real people in this thread who think their “both sides” opinions are being censored in part because of the echoes of the noise those bad faith agents made way back in 2024.

I think it statistically is accurate that groups of demographically and geographically similar kids often grow up to have similar worldviews to their parents, but for humans, you can only condemn the individual, not the statistic. Plenty of them will see their 'Bama pawpaw and run in the opposite direction, sure. (Social media may help that trend or hurt it, as algorithmic feeds start to become so customized they replicate local prejudices.)

At least I think they are innocent until proven 18, at which time they can be judged.

For instance, he sought to deploy soldiers to carry out shows of force along the border with heavy weaponry; he ordered us to paint the border wall black so it would get boiling hot in the sun and burn the hands of anyone who touched it; he demanded the we install flesh-piercing spikes at the top — so that those who attempted to climb would be visibly bloodied, sending a message to the others; and most ludicrously of all, Trump toyed with digging a 2,000-mile moat along the southern border and filling it with deadly snakes and reptiles to devour the arriving asylum seekers. (Inquiries were also made from the White House about heat-ray devices that could be pointed at the migrants to make them feel like their skin was on fire.)

This may all sound draconian — and it was — but the President seemed to settle on a simpler demand than elaborate booby traps and military spectacle to scare people away from the border: just shoot them. Trump proposed, on more than one occasion, having authorities fire upon the migrants. What better way to deter them than to kill some of them? When told that using deadly force against unarmed civilians was illegal, Trump bristled, as if we were weak-willed.

“Yeah, yeah yeah” was the tenor of his response. […] While I was on a flight to New York, I watched live on television as the President responded to footage of migrants throwing rocks at border authorities. Trump erupted. He publicly declared that if migrants threw rocks, the American soldiers he’d sent to join our border agents wouldn’t hesitate to respond. They’d open fire.

“They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back,” the President said. “We’ll consider — and I told them — consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say consider it a rifle.”

If this sounds familiar (beyond 2019-era politics that we experienced, but have been washed away by scrubbing our memories with insane new stories a few thousand times), it’s because this is how ICE has been treating protestors for the last year.

We have an administration that is entirely psychopathological. Empathy is a concept that Trump doesn’t understand or value, and at each level of the reporting structure, sycophancy reinforces that psychopathy. People like Hegseth, Noem and Bondi (and the reincarnated phantasms of Trump’s id currently doing the latter two’s jobs) repeat and revel in that psychopathy because it was currency to show their loyalty to an unprincipled madman.

The thing that is so demoralizing is that the only people that matter in this world are Trump, Trump’s power-hungry throne-sniffers, and billionaires. Regular citizens, much less valid asylum-seeking immigrants like above, are already the untouchables that don’t even rate as humans to these people.

I would absolutely expect the GOP to withdraw (or use congressional procedure to effectively withdraw) the subpoena, however.

The Times‘ Tyler Pager had previously reported that “President Trump has discussed firing Attorney General Pam Bondi in recent days as he grows frustrated with her leadership at the Justice Department and her handling of the Epstein files” on Wednesday. “Among his top complaints is Ms. Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files, which has become a political liability for Mr. Trump among his supporters. He has also complained about her shortcomings as a communicator and vented about what he sees as the department’s lack of aggressiveness in going after his foes, according to people who have spoken to him recently.”

Well, about the only catharsis we get is watching the most awful people stab each other in the back.

Bondi should be in jail. But Trump’s complaints are incredible here. They were:

• the Epstein files? So apparently Bondi released files where his name appears over a million times instead of the original probably three million+, but not the desired zero. Has Trump tried not being BFFs with a lifelong pedophile, and almost certainly also being a pedophile himself?
• her communication? She was already criminally non-responsive in congressional testimony, which is to say, utterly and completely sycophantic and combative - how much more can he even ask.
• not going after his foes? No attorneys save freaking Habba and Halligan would even sign onto ultimately frivolous, grand-jury-rejected indictments.

So the lesson to Zeldin (and Rubio and anyone else still trying to ride the power train) is: sycophancy isn’t enough. It’s not enough to swear on your life that the naked emperor has clothes and maintain the lie even in the face of basic grade-school knowledge.

No, Zeldin will be tasked to gouge out the eyes of anyone who might be able to see it.

Played it today, it’s excellent!

They’re following the Hungary model, which in turn was a variation on the Russian model.

What they’re attempting is a “legal coup,” which is the typical modern democracy-to-authoritarianism transition. They want to retain the facade of constitutionality and lawfulness, to avoid creating an armed insurgency situation, and to avoid burning the value of the current economic system by crashing the stock market or causing investment to flee.

If you’re evil nowadays, you can just buy a Mar-a-lago face to short circuit the whole process.

Heroes of Science and Fiction

Oh, this looks great!

I’m more excited for this than I have been for a game in years. It looks like HOMM3 with modernized QOL updates and graphics. That’s really all I need.

And he said securing the throttled Strait of Hormuz is “not for us — that’ll be for France,” Trump said. "That’ll be for whoever’s using the strait

Shocking, I know, but I don’t think he knows how global markets work.

Also, just a fantastically on-brand “I shit in your punchbowl, sounds like a you problem” psychopath response.

Well, I suppose we should be grateful this is happening early enough for a court challenge to play out instead of a last minute EO that will just make be followed automatically by red and purple (with red governors/AGs) states.

But no doubt the timing is because there are twelve additional fascist election moves in Trump/Miller’s playbook, any of which can subvert the election, and they’re just giving themselves time to run down the list.

Seems like timing is a bit early to move to “center” for the general, Gavin, seeing as how we haven’t had 2028 presidential election primaries yet.

Thanks, sorry, I must have scanned the article three times before I saw it.

You’re technically correct. The best kind of correct. Thanks.