Dark MAGA Rises

Trumps return to rally at the site of his assassination attempt had a darker different tone. Even for him.

Donald Trump returned to Butler, Pennsylvania, to hold a rally at the site where he had faced an assassination attempt. He was joined by none other than Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, whose vast wealth and influence have grown so immense that he has become a threat to U.S. foreign policy, given his ability to act independently in dealing with U.S. adversaries.

The rally was filled with the usual Trump lies - so many, in fact, that documenting them has become an impossible task. We’ve lost the capacity to track, fact-check, or debunk them all, and even if we were inclined to, it’s clear that the only ones paying attention are those who care about the facts anyway.

At some point, it feels like being a cashier helplessly trying to ring up stolen goods during a looting spree. It’s not only impossible, but I have to wonder -  what is the point anyway?

The rally occurred amid one of the most intense misinformation onslaughts of the last eight years. The deliberate, weapons-grade disinformation effort targeting the Biden-Harris administration’s response to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and Georgia. It has been a next-level attack on the truth at a time when suffering people desperately need help, not politically motivated lies flooding right-wing media. Despite traditional media sources and both Republican and Democratic politicians calling out the lies - they continue unabated.

These untruths range from the anger-inducing to the absurd. Rumors that Biden was not providing resources, rescue teams, or financial assistance have dominated right-wing media circles. All demonstrably false. Worse, a conspiracy theory that Democrats were responsible for the hurricane damage to harm Republican electoral chances by destroying GOP strongholds has grown more pervasive than one would possibly imagine during the time “B.T.”, (that is, Before Trump and the propaganda warfare machine).

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene even tweeted a not-so-subtle reminder of her previous antisemitic conspiracy about “Jewish space lasers”. Sort of an “I told you so” to the Q-Anon crowd.

All of this must make one wonder - when decades of efforts to debunk the evidence that shows human behavior has affected the climate have left many unconvinced, how is it suddenly believable that humans are deliberately creating climate disasters as revenge on their political enemies?

This is the new phase of our reality, I believe…a moment when the radicalized are being called to act. The conditions are ripe for a sustained attack on election systems long before Election Day. Disruption of mail-in and absentee voting seems like the likeliest point of attack, and I suspect we’ll start hearing stories about discrepancies from key battleground states soon. It’s too easy an opportunity for the purveyors of misinformation to miss using catastrophe to their advantage and cast doubt on the integrity of our elections.

As Voltaire once said, “If you can get people to believe absurdities you can get them to commit atrocities”.

So why am I thinking this now? The entrance of one particular soldier on the battlefield of misinformation marked the signal. A wealthy, influential figure who not only feeds the disinformation pipeline but also bought the supply chain: Elon Musk.

The moment confirmed what we all knew to be true. A $44 billion deal financed by the Saudi Arabians and other nefarious actors allowed Musk to privately own the public square and use it to impose his version of free speech - meaning his speech - onto the masses. The daily barrage of propaganda is a direct assault on national unity because we can’t have a functional discussion between those who believe in reality and those who choose their own reality.

Musk, who awkwardly reminded us of his own ‘weirdness’ by jumping up and down on stage erratically – behaving like only a multi-gazillionaire might when being introduced as a surprise speaker – took the microphone and proclaimed, “As you can see I’m not just MAGA - I’m dark MAGA.”

Dark MAGA.

‘Cause the original MAGA wasn’t dark enough.

Actually, for their aims and purpose, it wasn’t enough. This is when Elon Musk and Donald Trump try to become the antihero - leaning into their deeply flawed character traits and trying to pass them off as virtues. They have dropped the pretense of aspiration, even if it’s for the mythical golden age of America’s past - Make America Great Again and all of that.

No, we are now in full dystopian mode. Breaking the rules for victory isn’t just allowed, it is now expected. We have witnessed the movement from vaccine skeptics willing to watch their family members die rather than accept modern medicine, to believing that the leftist villains in their imaginary world are conjuring up Category 5 hurricanes to destroy MAGA communities.

A very rich multibillionaire with nefarious aims controls one of the largest communications platforms in the world. He has satellite systems that can determine the winner or loser of the battle between Russia and Ukraine. His latest company SpaceX is seeking gazillions of dollars of US taxpayer money to move our species off of this planet while denigrating the majority of us who disdain his politics. He is outwardly campaigning for Donald Trump who has committed to using our dollars to finance his projects. Today, Musk announced he will pay $47 for each person the millions of followers on his platform find to support Trump in swing states.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Dark MAGA is rising. We’re now watching it all unfold as we all guessed it would.

A democracy can not survive when we allow the ultra-wealthy to own infrastructure used by our enemies to divide us, be they social media platforms, satellites, or space technology - when they become partisan actors we’ve entered a whole new world of danger.

Surprise. It’s October.