The Bullying Pulpit
It’s not exactly breaking news that social media can be a nasty place where cruelty and personal attacks carry more viral value than thoughtfulness and decency. And in the last few months, this trend is being led by example from the very top. “Since the Trump administration assumed power in January, the official White House social media accounts have taken on a sinister style of posting.” DHS sharing a photo of alligators in ICE hats to promote a new detention center or the The White House posting a supposedly funny ASMR video of deportees being shackled represent a fetishizing of cruelty, as an administration supposedly driven by a sentimentality for the past is actually breaking new ground when it comes to political trolling. Nathan Taylor Pemberton in the NYT (Gift Article): Trolling Democracy. “The key ingredient to this online soup is extremism: from nativism to racial science to casual neo-Nazism and textbook misogyny. Presented to followers via livestreams, memes and X posts, this deluge of far-right content has been called ‘slopulism’ — a vibes-based politics designed for social media and born from social media. These vibes, of course, are harsh. They’re antidemocratic. And they’re increasingly being embodied in the presence of figures staffing the second Trump administration.” What Lincoln called the better angels of our nature has been wholly replaced by the demonic bullying of our trolling.
+ This debasing of decency and celebration of bullying not only degrades our democracy, it’s also out there as online representation of America for the whole world to see. This is who we are now. And sadly, the words are being matched by the sticks and stones. We’re not just being desensitized to how we talk to one another. We’re being desensitized to how we treat each other. The Atlantic (Gift Article): In Trump’s Deportation Machine, Children Are Fair Game. “More systematically than in his first term, Trump’s administration is reaching into the federal immigration bureaucracy to roll back an array of protections for undocumented children, not only recent arrivals but also those who have only ever known life in this country. More and more, children are being picked up on family vacations, at traffic stops, and at worksites, and winding up in detention.”
+ Scheduling Note: After tomorrow’s edition, I’ll be taking the last couple of weeks of July off from NextDraft (unless, of course, there’s any really bigly news). I’m confident you can moan without me for a few days.
