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:

So Nancy Pelosis husband is secretly gay and his Grindr hookup ended up being a lunatic who attacked him

Talk about an October surprise https://t.co/kWxtsWMYRd

— Alexander Cortes PhD, Fitness, Nutrition, Fat loss (@AJA_Cortes) October 29, 2022

And this:

When your Grindr match

"Let's get hammered and fuck"

goes wrong.

— AcctBannedIn321 (@AcctBannedIn321) October 28, 2022

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

You may be correct, but what if it turns out to be a grindr hookup gone terribly wrong for Paul?https://t.co/oAAKT9lNa8

— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) October 29, 2022

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

The Pelosi attacker’s social media is filled with anti-Semitic memes, Holocaust denial, links to far-right websites, QAnon content, vaccine and election conspiracies.

But the MAGA disinfo line going around with big and verified accounts is they were gay lovers who had a spat.

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) October 29, 2022

The emrgent counter-narrative on the right to the attempted Pelosi assassination is that Paul Pelosi's assailant was in fact his lover. There's no evidence behind this, of course, but it'll be gospel across MAGA internet by tomorrow.

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) October 29, 2022

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.