Anne Applebaum

That's the stuff they react to.

That's what they care about.

And I think that is more real to them than reality.

I mean, in that sense, they're already living in, I don't know, the AI generated world where what's online is the only thing that's true.

And what's offline is irrelevant or doesn't necessarily penetrate what seems real when you look at your screen.

Very much so.

I mean, and I think that's deliberate.

They are consciously seeking to shape information and shape propaganda and shape the story in a way that has almost nothing to do with reality.

And that, I think, is a difference between pretty much all previous administrations.

I mean, you've had people try to spin, right?

We used to have spin doctors where something would happen and people would try and make it look good and explain it in a way that made it look good.

Here, we're talking about people who aren't even interested in that because they're

A spin doctor was spinning a real event.

Right.

And these are people who are who are spinning things that may or may not have even happened, you know, or trying to create new realities.

Yeah, exactly that.

You know, that their candidate was doing really well online and he was making, you know, TikTok videos or other videos that were doing really well on X. And that to them was the campaign.

And the fact that this was a this was an election campaign in Los Angeles, which is a blue city in a blue state, and that their candidate in the end did no better than

Trump had done in the last election seemed somehow jarring to them because for them, the real reality is what they see on X in particular.

And X is, of all the forms of social media, X is the one that's the most skewed.