MAGA nitwits hate it when mainstream Americans laugh at them. But sometimes they make it so darn easy.
Late Friday afternoon, the New York judge who presided over Trump’s criminal trial got wind of a random comment that had recently been posted on the state court system’s public Facebook page. Somebody named “Michael Anderson,” writing on May 29, the day before the jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts, announced: “My cousin is a juror on Trumps (sic) criminal case and they’re going to convict him tomorrow according to her. Thank you New York courts!!!!”
Judge Merchan didn’t know whether the post was true – thanks to the wonders of modern technology, anyone can publicly say anything at any time about anything – but he duly informed the convicted felon’s lawyers about the post’s existence in a public letter.
And that’s when all hell broke loose inside MAGA’s dumbo bubble.
Did any bubble denizen expend an ounce of energy to determine whether the poster indeed had a cousin on the jury? Nope. Or that this purported cousin had spilled the beans in advance of the verdict? Nope. Did they endeavor to find out who “Michael Anderson” was? Nope. in the digital dystopia we are now compelled to inhabit, all too often facts and verification are as archaic as the videocassette.
So the post went viral. Seemingly within minutes, a right-wing columnist named Phil Holloway typed this on X: “Uh oh! It looks like there was juror misconduct in the Trump trial! We knew these jurors would not be able to avoid telling their friends and relatives that were going to get Trump. It’s time for a mistrial ‘with prejudice’ and no retrial!”
We got this told-ya-so from MAGA Sen. Marsha Blackburn: “We all knew Trump’s trial was decided before it began.”
We got this from the convicted felon himself: “MISTRIAL!”
We got this tweet from Fox News host Greta Van Susteren: “Wow!! This is BIG TROUBLE”
And so on. For several hours MAGAts exulted that their lord and savior was miraculously in the clear…until 6:42 p.m. That’s when Michael Anderson resurfaced and tweeted this:
“Take it easy…I’m a professional shitposter.” Followed by a laughing-crying emoji. The troll proceeded to explain his raison d’etre: “Shitposts are generally intentionally designed to derail discussions or cause the biggest reaction with the least effort.”
This is the world we live in. Such is the debased state of our civic dialogue. Indeed, according to Anderson’s Facebook profile, his chosen nickname is “fuck you.”
But this little story didn’t end at 6:42 p.m. Hours later, some MAGA apparatchiks were still flogging the shitpost, treating it as real, decreeing that der leader would soon be absolved. At 8:03, right-wing commentator Mark Levin announced, “Surprise. Surprise. Crooked juror in Trump case.” And at 9 p.m., on Fox News, Sean Hannity pounded the drum for brain-dead viewers. Did he know the shitpost was a crock? If so, he clearly didn’t care.
“This (post) is, by far, a very alarming development,” he babbled. “Was the fixing from the beginning? Is this cause for a mistrial?…This is huge.” He was joined by “legal” analyst Gregg Jarrett, who said: “It also suggests that, perhaps before deliberations even began, the jurors had already decided to convict.” Ex-Arkansas governor and Trump lickspittle Mike Huckabee also joined the celebration. Hannity, referring to the shitpost, said to Huckabee, “Let’s assume, Governor, that it’s true.” Huckabee replied: “Absolutely has to be.”
Let’s assume that it’s true…Absolutely has to be.
There you have it, the cult mindset in a nutshell.
The shitpost episode flared and blessedly fizzled within hours, but the cultists are locked and loaded for the long run. This is not new, of course. George Orwell – whose 1984 novel debuted 75 years ago this weekend – once lamented in a letter that far too many people have “a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.” So the fight is universal. The only choice it to win it.