{"id":36471,"date":"2016-11-30T03:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-11-30T08:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36471"},"modified":"2016-11-29T12:25:05","modified_gmt":"2016-11-29T17:25:05","slug":"swept-along-in-the-wake-of-trumps-election-victory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/11\/30\/swept-along-in-the-wake-of-trumps-election-victory\/","title":{"rendered":"Swept along in the wake of Trump&#8217;s election victory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/takimag.com\/article\/a_burgeoning_civic_religion_kathy_shaidle\/print#axzz4RQ1Y6oSa\" target=\"_blank\">Kathy Shaidle<\/a> didn&#8217;t make any friends among the alt-Right with her most recent column:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Weeks later, Trump\u2019s triumph still seems slightly unreal; I permitted myself to purchase <em>Time<\/em> magazine\u2019s special commemorative issue \u2014 can you imagine how much it pained them to put <em>that<\/em> out? \u2014 to serve as cerebral smelling salts and snap me out of those sporadic \u201cHoly shit, he\u2019s the president!\u201d flashes.<\/p>\n<p>But that lapse aside, I put not my trust in princes.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, not everyone shares my horror of personality cults, or the man never would have won. Twitter\u2019s upstart counterpart Gab, for example, is overrun by Trump cheerleaders, for whom fun memes like that \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mediaite.com\/online\/donald-trump-jr-roger-stone-and-david-duke-share-weird-deplorables-memes\/\" target=\"_blank\">Deplorables\u201d Photoshop<\/a> or \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theburningplatform.com\/2016\/11\/10\/sorry-snowflake-but-its-not-over\/#comment-1332872\" target=\"_blank\">Donald Crossing the Delaware<\/a>\u201d aren\u2019t just a split second\u2019s amusement, but the bunting of a burgeoning civic religion.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Whatever the benefits of a Republican presidency, one of the unavoidable side effects is an emboldening of our side\u2019s flakier elements, who weave two most unsavory obsessions \u2014 the occult and \u201cpedophile rings\u201d \u2014 into singularly elaborate and ultimately groundless conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n<p>Sure enough, right on cue: Type \u201cPizzagate\u201d into YouTube\u2019s search engine and soak in the overblown paranoid hysteria.<\/p>\n<p>These kooks and simpletons were harmlessly wrong about <em>Harry Potter<\/em> turning your kids into witches, and tragically mistaken about the \u201cSatanic panic.\u201d At the very least, they\u2019re a colossal embarrassment, but they also undermine serious business undertaken by serious people.<\/p>\n<p>A big difference this time around is that the president himself won\u2019t be immune to the lure of such twisted, empty-calorie distractions. Trump used to be Birther-in-Chief, <a href=\"http:\/\/takimag.com\/article\/obamas_bumbling_nemesis_kathy_shaidle\/print#axzz4RKOyJxN8\" target=\"_blank\">remember<\/a>? And he\u2019s on Twitter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kathy Shaidle didn&#8217;t make any friends among the alt-Right with her most recent column: Weeks later, Trump\u2019s triumph still seems slightly unreal; I permitted myself to purchase Time magazine\u2019s special commemorative issue \u2014 can you imagine how much it pained them to put that out? \u2014 to serve as cerebral smelling salts and snap me [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,13],"tags":[1079,127,1037,299],"class_list":["post-36471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-usa","tag-altright","tag-conspiracytheories","tag-donaldtrump","tag-paranoia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9uf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36471"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36472,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36471\/revisions\/36472"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}