Inside Trumpworld’s Reality Distortion Field

The longer-term focus from the White House, the lawmaker close to Trump tells me, won’t be limited to just one social media site, such as Bluesky, where scores of posts were compiled and cataloged by the since-offline site “Expose Charlie’s Murderers,” as WIRED reported. Trumpworld wants to come for them all.

“You’re going to continue to see this: Whether it’s Meta, Reddit, Bluesky, Roblox—all of ’em that are actually taking down any content that’s literally calling for more violence and/or recirculating that horrifying video,” the lawmaker told me. They also mentioned Discord as a target for the administration, alleging without evidence that the attack was “coordinated” there. (“These were communications between the suspect’s roommate and a friend after the shooting, where the roommate was recounting the contents of a note the suspect had left elsewhere,” Discord VP of trust and safety Jud Hoffman said in a statement last Friday.)

Fighting against the perception of hypocrisy around cancel culture has already become a focal point of the right wing’s spin.

“There is a big difference between the left canceling people and the right canceling people,” conservative influencer Matt Walsh tweeted over the weekend. “The left cancels you for saying things that are true. To the extent that the right cancels you, it is for saying things that are abhorrent and sick. A pretty important distinction.”

For DiResta, the pendulum swinging from maximum free speech and minimum content moderation to something approaching the very thing Republicans once opposed makes sense from the perspective of being caught in a conspiratorial information bubble.

“Their opinions on content moderation, for example—redefining labeling and fact-checking as censorship—were always part of a political project to advantage their movement when viewed through that lens,” she says. “It makes sense that now they would be in favor of more censorship—I should say, more actual censorship, because in this particular case, what you're seeing is sitting agents of the government calling for the suppression of speech.”

Plug and Chug

Some officials in the Trump administration have gone beyond calls for Americans to be banned from social media or be fired from their jobs.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy on paper and unofficial “prime minister” of Trumpworld, went as far as to call for RICO or conspiracy against the United States charges for those “fomenting riots, that are doxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, or committing wanton acts of violence.” In remarks on Fox News over the weekend, Miller promised that “the power of law enforcement, under President Trump’s leadership, will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

By Monday, Miller was on Kirk’s podcast describing, in his uniquely dystopian way, a “vast domestic terror movement” and promising to use the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to “identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks” in Kirk’s name. There is no evidence the movement he describes exists.

This type of rhetoric—a push for a no-holds-barred crackdown with the full force of the federal government—was shared by high-profile figures on the tech right such as Musk and Curtis Yarvin, who tweeted, “The firings are just the beginning!”

“This is really the moment they can claim persecution again,” a source in the tech and crypto space tells me, having seen both on- and offline how their colleagues have radicalized over the past half decade. “Everything has to have some sort of conspiracy tie-in. Nothing can be simple, it has to tie into some broader narrative … This has to be indicative of an underground transgender terrorist network, as opposed to [anything else].”

Whether they believe any of this or not, my source says, is immaterial.

“I don’t know,” they say, “whether they believe what they’re saying, or if they just think it’ll get them the attention they want.”

For now, it might be both.

This is an edition of Jake Lahut’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.