Conservatives live in such a bizarre fantasy world.

You’d think that sooner or later it would filter through to at least some of them that it’s meaningful that essentially without exception, if they just let information flow freely, whether on a website or a forum or in public comments or via an AI or whatever - it ends up skewed against conservatism.

But they never seem to get it. Instead, they go to great lengths to carefully censor and silence and astroturf and manipulate to force it over to a pro-conservative position, and they then have to constantly monitor and censor and astroturf to keep it there because if they relax their guard it starts drifting anti-conservative again.

In one sense, yeah - it’s easy and obvious - they lie, and often even to themselves.

But that doesn’t really explain anything. It goes so far beyond just lying that I really have a hard time making sense of it. Glib answers just don’t hack it.

It just doesn’t seem possible that they can sincerely believe that opinion consistently turns against them through some sort of near-universal conspiracy and that their constant manipulations and censorship and astroturfing can really be in support of truth. Sure, individuals can be that delusional, but that many of them?

I just can’t make sense of it. It’s like they believe that gravity is a conspiratorial lie that everyone else pretends to believe in just to stop them from flapping their arms and flying to the moon.

And this is why DOGE gutted the Office for Vehicle Automation Safety at the NHTSA.

Of course, what she actually means is that people have been brainwashed in a somewhat different way than she would’ve preferred, but at least she’s right about the brainwashing part. Since she’s incapable of self-reflection, that’s not going to mean anything to her or change anything for her, but still… for someone as willfully and angrily ignorant as she is, that’s almost sort of impressive.

Israel is a rogue state.

To the degree that fascism has a distinctive economic system, one of its most notable qualities is a combination of private ownership of the means of producton with government/corporate partnership and a “revolving door” by which powerful individuals pass back and forth between business and political leadership positions.

I propose a new term - “malscurrocracy” - government by evil clowns.

If only it was that simple…

At the least, some considerable part of the problem is that angry, stupid bigots who used to be mostly limited to cringey drunken solo rants are now able to network with each other and cheer on each other’s anger and stupidity and bigotry.

I was with you right up until the end.

Hillary’s gender is a weak excuse that the DNC and the establishment Dems trot out to try to duck the blame for sabotaging a sincere progressive in order to run a neolib weasel who gives paid speeches to international bankers and idolizes Kissinger.

That thread is creepy.

Trump not only promised to bring down prices, but promised to do so “on day one.” In fact, in the final days of the campaign, that was likely the promise he repeated the most.

So not only is he somewhere between delusional and dishonest (which I already knew), but every single person who responded to insist rising prices is indeed what they signed up for is also somewhere between delusional and dishonest.

Why? What compels them? What do they expect to gain?

I’m beginning to suspect that there’s some environmental factor or something in the US that makes people delusional, angry and stupid, because this has gone way beyond anything that can be explained by political partisanship alone.

The timing here is what makes this move particularly baffling…

It’s only baffling if you cling to the ever-more-laughable belief that the Democrats are any sort of meaningful opposition.

If you instead simply shift to the ever-more-supported belief that they are in fact essentially oligarchic co-conspirators, then the timing makes perfect sense.

That whole family is just rich white trash, aren’t they?

Well I assumed it was the crybaby hiding behind his mommy since it’s his chatbot.

But now that I think about it, the manbaby in the leaky diaper is just as fragile, so it’s possible that it all started with him boo-hooing to the crybaby.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other…

Such a fragile little manchild.

Of course they’re ideological.

Seriously, did nobody else connect the dots back when Trump tried to strongarm Congress into raising the debt ceiling before he even took office?

He’s NEVER had even the slightest intention of actually reducing spending. In fact, he plans and has planned since even before he took office to not only increase it, but to increase it even more than Congress is willing to go along with.

This isn’t complicated.

Mm… that makes sense.

I knew there had to be something there, and specifically related to the prison-for-profit system and the kickbacks they pay judges, but I couldn’t figure out an angle that made it especially advantageous to imprison kids.

And yeah - that does fit.

Hmm… I wonder why.

Broadly, it’s safe to assume that sentencing kids means the judges get bigger kickbacks from the prison industry. Why though? Do the prison contractors charge the government more for kids? Or do the corporations pay the prisons more for child slaves? Or what?

Surfaces?

It’s been there all along - it’s just been routinely ignored by the legacy media.

That said - there is a sort of interesting meta-topic here.

It’s arguably likely that there’s a relatively powerful and serious opposition to Trump coming together, simply because the NYT is so craven and cowardly and ethically bankrupt that there’s basically no way that they’d publish something like this unless there was somebody other than Trump that they could suck up to by doing it.

For whatever that’s worth.

This is a coup.

In a way, doesn’t that mean that it would be more accurate to say that the bot stopped being rogue and went legit?