I’ve been debating this with myself, and my conclusion is that Trump might be worse because Vance is at least a politician. He has some knowledge and “respect” (maybe) for the trappings of the office, whereas Trump gives no shits for rules or regulations and is all too happy to trample on every right and freedom we have.

But who knows, I could go both ways on which would be worse.

It’s like with cults - it’s a source of affirmation that their opinions and emotions are the right ones. It pairs really well with fascism because the fascists give you somebody to blame, and then the Twitter cult content farm tells you that you’re righteous in your hatred.

And that’s also why it’s so hard to break people away from it. To break away, they’d have to recognize and admit that they’re wrong, that everything they’ve done up to that point hasn’t been justified, and that they’ll have to face the consequences of what they’ve done (“are we the baddies?”). After a certain point, the sunk cost fallacy sets in, and people will double down on the cult rather than admit that they were wrong, even when they know it.

This is like tying a dead rat to your door to keep the plague away.

And yet these same news organizations reporting on this will conveniently ignore their own culpability in spreading the hateful propaganda for profit.