From Vance’s penchant to ‘create stories’ to Trump’s false claims, lies are brazenly flaunted as a tactic to win support
JD Vance was holding court on CNN’s State of the Union programme. “The American media totally ignored this stuff,” he complained last Sunday, “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.”
But it wasn’t just a meme, objected interviewer Dana Bash. The Republican vice-presidential nominee gave a telling response: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”
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 – rumours that led to bomb threats and evacuations of schools and government buildings in Springfield.
But Vance’s willingness to “create stories” to grab attention before the November’s 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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As demonstrated by the same kind of barrage of insane shit Trump and his administration did when they were in power. It was just rapid for crazy shit to drown out whatever bad story they wanted attention away from, constantly.
It amazing that half the voting population wants that back.
I call those people “electoral cicadas.”
They stay buried underground for four years, then poke their heads up two months before the election and try to figure out what’s going on.