We’re seeing a lot unfold all at once today. It seems overwhelming and it’s meant to seem overwhelming. That’s the central point — not just a side effect of a lot of things happening at once. I think of it like being in an iMax theater. Maybe even one of those more immersive ones where there’s percussive sound and the seats shake. One of those movies where you’re on a roller coaster or maybe hang gliding. You know you are sitting in a theater, not in motion at all. But the visual stimulus is so overwhelming you cannot help gripping the arm rests like you’re a thousand feet in the air or in free fall.

Of course it’s not exactly the same. This isn’t just a movie. Something real is happening. A lot of real things are happening. We’re not just sitting in a theater. But the point of all of this is to create the apparently overwhelming and unchallengeable feeling that Trump is all-powerful, that his team is all-knowing and have everything figured out, and that nothing can stop him.

That’s simply not true. So don’t forget that, entirely by design, you’re being overwhelmed with sensory stimulus. It’s not real.

You’ve likely seen that Mark Zuckerberg, newly re-branded as Donald Trump’s fluffy lap monkey, has announced that Facebook and Meta’s other properties are getting out of the content moderation business. They’ll move in the direction of “community notes,” semi-functional community moderation which Elon Musk pioneered at Twitter. What interested me much more was the Axios run-down of the news: “Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are of one mind. The most powerful global information platforms should be governed by free speech — and the people — not by the platforms themselves.”

Who are we kidding here?

I’ve always been wary of the whole concept of “misinformation” in the context of corporate platform moderation. Not against precisely, but highly skeptical that you can actually come to such open and shut definitions at scale. But it’s all basically an impossible skein to untangle because of the unavoidable scourge of the platform monopolies themselves. These are private companies, not any kind of actual public square. Let them do whatever they want. Don’t do them the favor of granting the premise that their advertising and data platform is a public good. And yet the freedom to spin up untrammeled monopolies makes the conceit half true. There’s simply no extracting a “free speech” from these engines since they’re algorithms all the way down.

But again, who are we kidding here?

From TPM Reader JB …

Trump has promised to do a bunch of things on day 1. Why aren’t Democrats taking the worst of them and raising the cost of doing them? It is political malpractice. The easiest would be to say that Trump is going to pardon the cop killers of January 6. No deep thinking, no multi clause sentences,  no saying there was or wasn’t an insurrection, just that he is going to pardon the violent cop killers of January 6. Over and over. Let him split hairs. He can deny it. Then direct the press to the officers themselves.  That mob killed Capitol Hill police. Tell the press to go talk to the Capitol Hill police who were there on January 6. Then say he is anti-police. He is with the criminals. Over and over.

Next: Tulsi Gabbard loves Syrian dictators who gas their own people. This is who is going to keep us safe?

We don’t have to win everything, we just need to push back where he is soft. He is flooding the zone. We can do the same. Cop killers and dictators who gas people…those are his kind of people.

The group is one big eye roll.