Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

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Far right communities are replete with conspiracy theories. One such theory is that there is a technology (medbed) that is pretty much just a cure-all and is being withheld from society by nefarious actors. The details are almost unimportant, as this sort of conspiratorial thinking fluidly moves between claims.

Somebody created an AI video of Trump talking about this technology. It is a fake video. Trump, presumably because he saw people praising in the context of this video, decided to repost it to his Truth Social account. This was apparently too embarrassing for the administration, so he deleted it.

The actual story should be that Trump's brain is completely cooked and that he platforms the most insane conspiracy theories and straight up false information to his audience of millions and millions people. No different than an off-the-deep-end person reposting insane shit they've seen on Facebook, except that this person is the president.

Lest the sheer irony escape even some HN readers, the political right tends to actively oppose, and has stymied past attempts at, the broad provision or even expansion of reasonable and either free or affordable healthcare that is real and could make a real difference in our citizens' health. But no! The real problem, somehow, must be that some cabal is holding out on their Star Wars bacta tanks.

Chalk it up to lack of education — then ask who puts a professional wrestling executive in charge of the Department of Education and then hobbles it.

I actually don't think that this is super meaningful. The qanon-esque conspiracies are free floating. The actual conspiracy does not matter and it will happily move to some completely different topic over time. The conspiracy could instead be that Hillary Clinton is using the Ring of Power to turn people's kids trans and it would serve the same function.

So I don't think that pointing out the ways that the Trump administration is materially harming people's health does anything. The point of the medbed conspiracy isn't to solve healthcare. The point is to define "them" as the source of general suffering faced by people.

Same as the adrenochrome conspiracies aren't actually about rooting out child abduction but instead let people define some external cause to why they lost their kids in a custody battle after losing their minds online and having their kids bathe in bleach.

Also, people are surprised by this when he said things of a similar calibre of crazy during an hour long UN speech last week and everyone shrugged because about a third of the US population believe it too.

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