By Michael Woyton
I’ve long said that in this administration cruelty is a feature not a bug.
Nothing makes that point more than a glance at the social media the convicted felon/adjudicated rapist’s evil minions are creating.
“This is, at the moment, the official voice of the U.S. government: a rancid mixture of trolling, cruelty, propaganda, and crass jokes about the human suffering they’re creating, as Wired’s Tess Owen recently put it, to turn actions like mass deportation into ‘one big joke’,” Mother Jones writer Anna Merlan said in an article published Friday.
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Her examples included turning a photograph of a crying woman arrested by ICE into a cartoon illustration in the style of Japanese animation.
“The tweet got 155,000 likes, a mix of outraged and delighted responses, and, as it was designed to, a lot of attention,” with 76 million views so far, Merlan wrote.
Quoted in the article is Jason Stanley, a former Yale University professor now in Toronto, who studies fascism.
He said the memes about brutal detention and deportation are designed to show audiences power over liberals “by having as much fun as possible.”
“What they’re offering people is not health insurance or economic security,” Stanley said in Mother Jones, “They’re offering them delight in the torture of others.”
It goes along with the bedrock principals of the GOPmagas: as long as it is policy that hurts the people they don’t like, then it doesn’t matter how much supporters of the felon-in-chief get hurt as well.
These are the same people who consistently vote against their own best interests.
There is much more in the article, which is not behind a payroll, including comparisons to tactics used by neo-nazis.
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Let’s see how much longer we are actually going to get data upon which we can rely from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In any event, Forbes published some bullet points Thursday, one of which said wholesale prices went up an unexpected 0.9 percent in July.
Also increased were the prices for services and goods — 1.1 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively.
Forbes notes that the price increases for services was the largest since March 2022.
Didn’t some recent candidate for the highest office in the land promise he would bring all these prices down?
Oh right.
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Pew Research Center said the grifter-in-chief’s current job approval rating is now 38 percent, which is down from 41 percent two months ago.
His rating slipped more among his younger voters than among the older ones who votes for him.
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Lead art by Michael Woyton.
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