Nihilism and the fascist style
By 
JD Vance’s incendiary lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield are classic MAGA in both their racism and their misinformation:
Vance’s proud adoption of spreading false memes may have shocked people. But if you’ve been watching these people as closely as I have over the years, you know it’s not new. The ploy of using false memes to direct mainstream media attention has a storied tradition. For years, right-wing internet influencers—self-described trolls—have deliberately aimed to use “shitposting” to get the mainstream media to cover their favorite topics.
Details of this ethic, and how it can be used to sway an election, came out in the 2023 trial of right-wing influencer Douglass Mackey.
In 2016, Mackey used his popular Twitter persona, “Rickey Vaughn,” to induce Hillary Clinton supporters to text their vote rather than cast a legal vote in person. Mackey deliberately pitched his hoax to women voters of color, including Spanish speakers.
Mackey was charged and convicted of conspiracy to violate people’s right to vote, under Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code, and sentenced to seven months in prison. He remains out on bail pending an appeal.
At trial, prosecutors used the planning from chat rooms in which Mackey participated and testimony of Mackey’s co-conspirator, who testified pseudonymously under the name Microchip, to explain how the trolling efforts worked.
Microchip described how these chat rooms gamed Twitter’s algorithm to get things trending so journalists would cover it: “I wanted our message to move from Twitter onto regular society” so journalists would “develop stories based on it.” He (and Mackey, who took the stand) described how they’d take memes developed in far-right chat rooms on 4Chan or Reddit and make them go viral on Twitter. They used memes—very much like the various cat memes the former president posted on his social media account—because “people when they’re laughing, they’re very easily manipulated.”
When a prosecutor asked about his role in making John Podesta’s emails go viral back in 2016, Microchip admitted that the emails “didn’t … have anything … particularly weird or strange about them, but my talent is to make things weird and strange so that there is a controversy.”
“Did you believe what you were tweeting was true?” federal prosecutor Bill Gullotta asked about the Podesta emails. “No,” Microchip answered. And like Trump’s veep candidate, he “didn’t care.”
The Podesta emails are the most remarkable triumph of the Republican misinformation industrial complex, because they were able to effectively what should have been a decisive scandal (Trump admitting to sexual assault on a live mic) although the emails contained absolutely nothing of any substantive or prurient interest. Of course, they succeeded because the political press that should have been playing a critical role in assessing a huge ratfucking operation decided to become its enthusiastic collaborators.
At least we know that the standards established in 2016 would be applied going forward!