Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Big Trump supporters ignored a lot of bad things about Trump, but then when they get into fights with him, they are suddenly open to criticisms of Trump and start voicing them. They say something like ‘I just have to say the truth here’ as if they regularly do not tell the truth, which seems to be the case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtYO8euqzxQ
Our inability to figure out what’s real is an important social problem. We are being driven crazy by our technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5QuO_wKPhk
“a detailed examination by POLITICO’s E&E News found that the report obscures key facts about climate change. It relies on outdated studies and cites analyses that were not peer reviewed. It cherry-picks mainstream research and omits context. It revives debunked arguments in an attempt to cast doubt on long-term warming trends.
The result is a report that promotes ideas starkly at odds with the vast majority of scientific evidence. That prompted a remarkable response from the National Academies last week that stated, “Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases and resulting climate change harm the health of people in the United States.””
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2025/chris-wright-doe-climate-change-report/
When asked basic questions about the administration’s use of Signal, to avoid basic transparency and oversight of their actions, administration officials attack the questioner or Democrats on tangential issues rather than honestly answer the questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yu0vd7ZT7E
Lindsey Graham, along with many Republicans, have turned over all integrity and honesty for Trump. Trump’s power over the Republican Party, and over Republican Senators who used to have strong independent opinions, is amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBhR99pdHps
Trump supporters thrive in falsity and anti-democratic attitudes.
“If Trump loses, about a quarter of Republicans said they think he should do whatever it takes to ensure he becomes president anyway, according to a September PRRI poll.”
“among Republicans, Trump proved by far the most trusted source of information about election results, well above local and national news outlets. In an Associated Press/NORC/USAFacts poll from earlier this month, more than 60 percent of Republicans said they believe Trump himself is the best place to get the facts about results.”
“Trump’s long-running insistence that he won in 2020 appears to be having an effect over time, with several surveys measuring greater buy-in of his lies about the election from voters today than in the past. A December Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that 36 percent of US adults did not believe Biden was legitimately elected, compared to 29 percent two years prior. And in a Pew Research poll conducted earlier this month, 27 percent of US adults said that Trump did nothing wrong in trying to overturn the election results, up from 23 percent in April.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/372863/2024-election-lies-trump-overturn-harris
“It seems clear that neither Trump nor Vance is interested in a rational conversation. “With this rhetoric,” Bettina Makalintal noted on Eater last week, “the Republican party is picking from the most predictable xenophobic playbook and invoking time-worn fear mongering.” The idea that “immigrants ‘eat pets,'” she wrote, “is meant to signify their backwardness, danger, and inferiority, ” which “then justifies the Republican party’s efforts to curtail immigration.”
For politicians “perpetuating this false narrative,” Makalintal observed, “the truth has taken a back seat to the intended message: that immigrants are not ‘like us’ and therefore pose a threat to hard-won American lives.” Trump and Vance, she said, are implicitly drawing a contrast between “white ‘Americans’ with household pets like Fluffy and Fido as members of the family” and dark-skinned immigrants who are “trouncing on that which is held dear.”
Implicit racism aside, Vance is proving to be just as impervious to reality as the man he once condemned as a “total fraud” who was shockingly xenophobic, “reprehensible,” “a moral disaster,” and even possibly “America’s Hitler.””
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“All of this is reminiscent of Trump’s attitude toward claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which he was eager to accept no matter how outlandish and unsubstantiated they were. During the notorious telephone conversation in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in that state, for example, Trump mentioned a rumor that election officials had “supposedly shredded…3,000 pounds of ballots.” That report, he conceded, “may or may not be true.” Yet within a few sentences, Trump had persuaded himself that the allegations were reliable enough to establish “a very sad situation” crying out for correction.
Where does Vance stand on Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen through systematic fraud? He recently argued that Trump had raised concerns that were valid and troubling enough to justify “a big debate” about whether electoral votes for Biden from battleground states should have been officially recognized, although “that doesn’t necessarily mean the results would have been any different.” Alluding to “the problems that existed in 2020,” Vance said that if he had been vice president at the time, “I would’ve told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should’ve fought over it from there.”
Just as he refuses to definitively say whether he believes Hatians actually have been eating people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, Vance has declined to explicitly endorse or reject Trump’s stolen-election fantasy. In both cases, he seems to think the fact that someone made a wild allegation is enough to justify “a big debate” about whether it might be true, even when there is no evidence to support it.
You can either live in the real world or be Donald Trump’s running mate. Vance has made his choice.”
https://reason.com/2024/09/15/j-d-vance-says-it-does-not-matter-whether-rumors-of-pet-eating-migrants-are-true/
https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/2021/8/9/22605855/vox-conversations-martin-baron-washington-post-media-democracy
“you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring…I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories.”
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“If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.”