There’s an enormous backlog of MAGA weirdness dating back to Trump’s first campaign, so eight plus years of material to with. And the internet doesn’t forget.
Technically Make America Great Again dates back to the Reagan era. (Surprising to some maybe, I voted for Ronnie.) Now that was an actual landslide, during a time of economic stagflation people rallied together and as a nation compromised their way into being more unified than we are accustomed to now.
Also technically it was Let’s Make America Great Again. Also, also technically it wasn’t even original then. But for purposes of a comparison we’ll start there.
Arguing about economics and politics will always be fashionable. My own personal vote was influenced by going along with the crowd (Asch’s conformity experiment again.) But 525-13 is hard to deny that as a democracy the result was the right decision at the time. We can argue about Trickle Down Economics being terrible and leading us down the road to destruction, etc…. But there’s a couple of key differences to why we have a flawed democracy now instead of a democratic democracy.
First of all, we didn’t get the sense of, “Vote for my guy or I’m crazy enough to take my gun to the convenience store and shoot at you.” that we have now. More importantly, the overall disregard for actual evidence. If you have the privilege of embracing scientific principles, and don’t instantly take an originalist interpretation of the Constitution you realize that more information is available now. More evidence is in. And if your hypothesis is wrong, you take the L and move on.
Amidst the barrage of anti MAGA don’t call us weird memes is gematria.
Yes, gematria is weird. And stupid. And became weaponized for political purposes. If you are starting off your space alien cult with the story of Xenu it’s going to turn off a lot of potential members right away. Ease them into it; some call it brainwashing. Then talk about overthrowing the government after losing your reelection bid later as they’ve been eased along the gradient to build up to that point.
If gematria was just weird and stupid it would be fine. Your own private dwindling bank account from getting scammed on shitty sports picks is of no concern to those around you, unless maybe it explodes into a life of crime to try and supplement your income to make up for prior bad decisions. If gematria gets turned into January 6th style violence, the most undemocratic act imaginable, without being called out for it then we have the old adage, “All that evil needs to prevail is for good men to do nothing.”
If you find the need to go enjoy some fun memes poking at the weirdness I remind you that I’m not some lone anti gematria voice randomly taking potshots by myself. There are people smarter than me who invested a lot of effort in communicating the dangerous aspects of conspiracy theories and blind faith towards lack of real evidence. You will see some meme type posts as they too need to blow off steam and touch some grass every now and then. But for as long as Twixter remains available here are some solid accounts to check out:
@Qorigins
@QuacksAnonymous
@2022_Karma
@PokerPolitics
@StephinDOUBT
@BrentLeeSDCIC
Some of those are “ex-conspiracy theorists” with first hand knowledge of what it’s like to be drawn in - and then escape.
These people are resources for explaining just with their past content alone for explaining how meme quality not really evidence but pretends to be evidence can balloon from just being weird into dangerous and counterproductive ideas.
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