Governing For The Gram

Republicans are obsessed with finding non-existent connections between Democrats and "the violent left" Meanwhile...

It’s been a vexing thing for many months. The vice president of the United States follows, and appears to be parasocially close with, prominent online neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists. But nobody in the mainstream press corps, or the wider world of professional Washington, seems to care. Through this indifference, it’s safe to say many people who should know about JD Vance’s associations and ideas are totally unaware.

Thanks to Elon Musk, the platform formerly known as Twitter is a social media superfund site for people like Vance and his acolytes. But every now and again, when Donald Trump says or does something offensive to the sensibilities of decent people, it’s instructive to pop in for a visit, and count up all the Musk-boosted accounts tweeting their new favorite phrase of vice-signaling: “I voted for this.”

Some of these accounts are anonymous, some are not, some are surely bots and foreign trolls, others are bona fide American rightists who want to encourage yet-more antisocial dreck from the Trump administration.

But they now exist in a toxic-but-functioning symbiosis.

The whole regime has come to operate in a closed loop, where internet-poisoned men and women in power abuse their authorities to thrill their creepy online followers, and those followers perform online in ways designed to get those same bad actors to push the envelope farther.

It’s governing for the gram, but instead of racking up likes and reposts on pictures of food or feats of strength, they’re generating content for a community of hateful sadists.

VOLK MIND VIRUS

This, to me, was the most illustrative thing about Politico’s bombshell exposé of a Republican group chat replete with Hitler encomia, rape fantasies, and variations on the n-word. It shouldn’t be news at this point that the pipeline into Republican politics is clogged with maladjusted freaks. But the way that ecosystem interacts with the ruling party, which now operates to scratch their itches, will be news to most.