Saturday, October 29, 2022

YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHY GRINDR IS TRENDING ON TWITTER RIGHT NOW

One of the trending topics on Twitter this morning is Grindr. No, it's not because Twitter is becoming a sex site in the era of Elon Musk.

If you click on Grindr on the trending topics list, you get gay porn clips, but you also get this:


And this:


And this (from a blue-check right-wing actor):


I'm not the only one who's noticed this:


I searched for "paul pelosi lovers" on Twitter and got this narrative in bulk:


These people are evil, but they're like a basketball team or jazz group full of real pros: They know what to do, fluidly and as an ensemble, at any given moment, in response to anything that happens. They have a repertoire of go-to moves, and they know how to work as a team to support someone taking the lead. I'm sure bots and professional disinformationists are amplifying these messages, but the messages make sense to ordinary right-wingers because those people have been primed to believe that liberals are evil and deceitful in every thought, word, or deed, in ways that press every hot button -- if not homosexuality, then race or wealth or power or cruelty to children.

You might not care about social media and you might find this all fairly ridiculous, but this is why it's absolutely impossible for our society to come together across ideological lines and say that some things are simply unacceptable. We can't reach the right because this is the nature of the right's information sphere.

We need to ensure that everyone on the left and in the center understands that conservatives aren't just people like us who happen to be less comfortable with societal change or activist government -- they're people who believe that their allies are incapable of evil and we are capable of nothing but evil.

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