Freestyle | General

I have a weakness for words. Doublenegative“Double” or “double” in Portuguese, which I learned from a German friend who signs his artwork with a different name than the one on his passport.

I’ve always loved this word and maybe that’s why I bought it a few days ago. Doppelganger: Journey into the Mirror World“, by Naomi Klein, who just won the 2024 British Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award – is about the current political climate, dominated by polarization and conspiracy theories.

The book begins with two bullet points. “There have been a terrible number of duplicates,” Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in 1846, and “How many of each will there be?” American actor and director Jordan Peele said in 2019.

When I browsed it, I found this passage: “To Hannah Arendt, it is when people lose the capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate Logos And the contradictory vulgarity, that evil arises.” That is, as Klein says, “when people lose the ability to perceive the points of view of others,” or as Arendt put it in the article Truth and Politics“To make the absent points of view present to my mind.” In this state of literal lack of thought (i.e., the absence of one’s own thoughts), totalitarianism begins.

All because of Donald Trump. I went to the index and saw, to my surprise, that Klein’s book had 40 entries for the former president.

One of the first mirrors is the problem that brought me to this. the news – And I bought the book lookalike… similar person Hours before the attack, I had no idea I wanted to write about the mirror problem.

The problem of the mirror – which is mentioned in the book’s subtitle “Journey to the World of Mirrors” – was honored the current On the more traditional television channels in the Western world, there was almost no news about the attack.

It was on CNN. I saw three democratic womenwith above-average vocabulary, were interviewed at a rally and said that because there was no truth, not even the slightest bit of evidence, they could not “rule out” the hypothesis that the attack on Trump was a premeditated act created and carried out by Trump himself.

“It’s terrible that I have to say this, because one person died and there were serious injuries,” says one Democratic congresswoman, puzzled. “It’s terrible to see where this country has come to.” Terrible because, she says, she is doing the same thing that many Trump fans do, repeating wild, illogical, irrational, and absurd conspiracy theories and hypotheses. Worse: She knows they are illogical, irrational, and absurd, and the Democrat repeats them, in an interview with CNN, knowing that they will be watched by millions of people around the world, including her friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues. The three friends are not speaking anonymously in an obscure corner of the social network. They are, however, joining the crowd of ordinary citizens who are throwing lies into the public space with the alacrity of someone whistling on the stairs.

Even more alarming: Hours after the attack, on Saturday the 13th, Congressman Mike Collins, a Republican from Georgia, Accused President Joe Biden gave the order. “Joe Biden gave the order,” wrote X. Why?

And two days later, on the fifteenth of this month The New York Times to make The second news About the conspiracy theories in circulation ConnectedThe text begins: “Four minutes after the first report of gunfire at a Donald J. Trump rally on Saturday, an anonymous X account posted: ‘Antifa Joe Biden shot President Trump.’” It continues:

Half an hour later, another Biden narrative emerged: “They tried to kill Trump.” An hour later, with official details of the assassination attempt scarce, the narrative that Biden and his allies orchestrated the attack was amplified by Republican lawmakers, Russian sympathizers, and even politicians. Within 24 hours, posts about the unverified claims had been viewed and shared millions of times.

After 48 hours Influential From TikTok, which has four million followers, he said in a video: “I mean, it’s kind of weird that this is America, shooters don’t fail unless they’re set up to fail.” He then suggested that the Secret Service was involved in orchestrating the shooting. CNN says that as of Monday, the video had been viewed more than eight million times:

“To further the conspiracy theory that it was a ‘stitched up’, a photo that had been manipulated to make it appear that one of the Secret Service agents rushing to Trump’s aid was smiling began to circulate. An influential anti-Trump user, X, with 250,000 followers, shared the image with the message: “Looks like everyone here is having fun, laughing and smiling for the cameras.” The image was quickly debunked by fact-checking organization Lead Stories, which said it was a digitally manipulated version of an Associated Press photo.

I can write a thousand Newsletters On this issue there were incredible examples that were excluded.

The “state of literal lack of thought” has become common. Klein writes in lookalike… similar person:

“Democrats talk about the big lie (the idea that Trump won the election); Steve Bannon talks about the big steal (the idea that Biden stole from them). Democrats talk about how Trump fomented the January 6 insurrection; Bannon says Democrats allowed rioters to burn cities during the 2020 racial justice riots. Democrats who were scandalized by Trump’s failure to recognize the legitimate election results;

Tbecause of The sane Democratic voter who said conspiratorial horrors on CNN about the attack seemed to say, “This is where we’ve come to.” It’s the raw mirror Klein is talking about, in this world where we’re all criticizing conspiracy theories while feeding conspiracy theories. A world full of duplicity. The conspirators.

It is no coincidence that the Russian disinformation network is responsible for millions. Supports The disinformation about European politics, which operates through companies from at least ten European countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic, is called… lookalike… similar person.