When the New York Times published a recent exposé about Jackson Hinkle, perhaps Twitter’s most repulsive fascist demagogue, it merely confirmed something I already understood: spewing hate can be an extraordinarily lucrative business in the online attention economy, where incentives are skewed to reward the loudest, ugliest, and most fanatical voices imaginable.
Political extremism is essentially baked into our social media algorithms. That’s been clear for some time, even as the far right’s voluminous online propaganda infects and distorts our actual body politic. This latest generation of fascist activists and influencers is gleefully translating online hate and political disinformation into real world political power in America and beyond, as our democracy suffers grievous damage.
Unfortunately, liberalist electoral democracy has shown vanishingly little ability to confront or contain this existential threat, as it mutates and metastasizes in an effort to destroy our society from within.
America’s larger political conversation is currently dominated by a newly consecrated online army of rabid anti-reality militants, trolls, fabulists, and zombie extremists. The more extreme, outrageous, patently false, and septic their ideas are, the more exposure they seem to get. From Alex Jones to Tucker Carlson to Steve Bannon to Trump himself, they’re all part of a sprawling cohort of ideologues who are rewriting America’s history and future, and redefining our informational ecosystem and our politics, as our democracy suffers what could very well be a terminal decline.
It’s not pretty.
None of this would have been remotely possible without Trump’s radical reimagining of the Republican Party, his grand departure from truth and reality, and his abandonment of any and all ethical constraints whatsoever.
The Republican presidential nominee is a veritable one-man factory, mass-producing lies and conspiracy theories, leaving us choking on his vitriolic miasma, which has seeped into every part of our civilization. And his career has become the template for all the many unhinged narcissists and political outcasts attracted to his bleak vision of absolute power, elevating people once consigned to the distant fringes of our politics, those who had been rightly mocked and dismissed, just like Trump himself, before suddenly becoming dangerously relevant.
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