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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25878 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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I do not think that even Trump's followers believe that his claims are literally true. "Oh, I invested my life savings in a Ukrainian company, because Trump promised that if elected he would settle the conflict before he even became president" is not something which happened a lot.

This is not rational. Your idea of what true MAGA would believe if they believed Trump is not how people actually observably act. The fact that people don't invest life savings in Ukrainian companies (???) is actually good evidence MAGA is serious, because MAGA is grounded in some kind of reality. What you are describing is how people would act in a cult, which, despite all sorts of ideas current online, is not actually how MAGA behaves.

Are the immigrants eating our cats? Is Denmark guarding Greenland with a dogsled? Were the Epstein files on Bondi's desk, or did they not exist at all? Did Pretti plan to shoot ICE officers? These look like claims over physical reality, but for the people making them, they are not. They are more like the hallucinations of a freewheeling LLM. They do not seek to deceive followers into having a wrong but coherent world model, but try to persuade them that trying to have a coherent world model at all is just not worth the trouble.

This is cope, plain and simple. MAGA is real and believes the things it says it believes. Trump is real and believes the things he says he believes. It's you who's hallucinating by conflating factual disputes (they stopped counting votes in several swing states simultaneously) with obvious poetic license (Oh, Denmark didn't actually send a dogsled?).

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