From Jonathan Chait's 9-11-24 NEW YORK MAGAZINE article entitled "How J.D. Vance and the Online Right Sabotaged Trump at the Debate":
The worst moment of the presidential debate for Donald Trump was likely the point when he began ranting about the imagined epidemic of pets being kidnapped, murdered, and eaten. “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs, they are eating the cats, they are eating the pets of the people who live there,” he shouted wildly.ABC moderator David Muir gently noted that the Springfield town manager reported nothing of the kind had taken place. “I’ve seen people on television,” Trump replied feebly. “The people on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’”
The term presidential has always been elastic, and in the Trump era, its meaning has been stretched out like a pair of pants worn around for a week by a man 20 pounds too heavy for them. Yet, even by the distended contemporary standards, Trump’s claim about the dogs was weird, ridiculous, and the opposite of presidential.
There is poetic justice here. Trump is the victim of the sealed-off information ecosystem that produced and sustained his political career.
The conservative movement was built on the premise that the main organs of knowledge — journalism, academia, science — are hopelessly and even consciously biased toward liberalism. In response to this belief, the right constructed its own bubble in which only a claim originating from within the movement can be taken as true. Julian Sanchez once called this “epistemic closure,” meaning that its beliefs were not open to correction from outside sources.
The lie that migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, is a classic example of that method in operation. The story originated from white-supremacist sites online, which relentlessly promote the idea that non-white immigrants are dirty and dangerous. It quickly worked its way from the far right into mainstream conservative channels...
To read Chait's entire article, click HERE.
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