How else can you explain last weekend’s progressive delusion that President Trump suddenly died and the truth was being hidden for some unexplained, yet undoubtedly nefarious reason while his predecessor President Biden was healthy as the proverbial horse?
While I have never been a fan of so-called scientific theories that claim we are living in a simulation rather than the real world, sometimes it certainly seems that way in the media and social media echo chamber, but instead of a realistic drama, the genre is set to satire. How else can you explain last weekend’s progressive delusion that President Trump suddenly died and the truth was being hidden for some unexplained, yet undoubtedly nefarious reason? While no one is sure precisely where these rumors originally came from, sometime on Friday night into Saturday morning, X was aflutter with claims that the President was dead under presumably mysterious circumstances. The proximate cause of these rumors was a lighter than usual schedule for the holiday week and an apparent bruise on his hand, a small black and blue spot that has generated reams and reams of coverage, making it the bruise heard round the world and back again in this iteration of the social media simulation at least. As People Magazine helpfully described the overall situation and its apparently bizarre origins, sliding from one right to the other as if it were perfectly normal for people to drop dead of a simple bruise, “Rumors about Trump’s health dominated the internet conversation over Labor Day weekend, days after the president was spotted with a large bruise on his hand. On Friday, Aug. 29, ‘Trump Is Dead’ and ‘Where Is Trump?’ even began trending on X. Social media sleuths pointed to Trump’s cleared schedule over the weekend, as well as Vice President JD Vance’s recent interview with USA Today, where he spoke about being prepared to step in if anything should happen to the president.” Needless to say, they completely failed to mention that the fake news based on a ridiculous combination of a few days off and a bruise plus an anodyne comment about being ready to serve should a tragedy arise, one that could have been delivered by any Vice President, ever, was met with outright glee as progressives figuratively danced on a non-existent grave for no apparent reason except the simulation they live in loathes the Orange man. “if trump is dead ill give 1,000$ to anyone who likes or retweets this tweet,” “if 𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩 𝐢𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐝 i will give 20 𝐝𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐬 to anyone who likes this tweet,” “Me liking every Trump dead post even if it ain’t true cause I never gaf” typify the phenomenon.
We might forgive his detractors a little false fun on a holiday weekend after months of desperation for someone, anyone to do anything about President Trump merely existing, but even after it was confirmed he was alive, the insanity continued. If anything, it metastasized, somehow managing to slip from the simulation of social media to the real world and ensnare a prominent Democrat politician in the process. On Monday, former Vice Presidential candidate and current Minnesota Governor Tim Walz even went so far as to claim he knows people are disappointed that the President is living and breathing, but don’t worry, he might die soon. “You get up in the morning – the last few days, you woke up thinking there might be news! Just saying…There WILL be news, some time!” he said in public at a local event. In the meantime, People was certain to assure their readers that the media had nothing whatsoever to do with this – save allowing it to continue unchecked for almost a day and then promptly adding more fuel to the fire now burning in the real world, where adults are supposed to decry this sort of thing as beyond the pale, by noting “Trump was not seen in public for multiple days in a row last week, which added more fuel to the otherwise unfounded theory that he was gravely ill.” To be sure, it might well take a computer powerful enough to run a real life simulation to parse that statement and make any sense of it. What does an “otherwise unfounded theory” mean when they begin by noting that the President wasn’t seen in public, which was somewhat false in any event because he was seen at the White House on Thursday and did an interview on Friday with a conservative outlet? A theory is either unfounded, or it’s not. There is no escape clause for unfounded, except this is what supporters of the unfounded, completely ridiculous idea believe.
This does. however, get to the real purpose of this exercise. Simulations, whether all encompassing as in full-on virtual reality or on social media, need stimuli to prompt behavior. When you play a video game, the game itself gives you hints to take certain actions, explore certain areas, do certain things, complete certain quests. Thus, the fake death scare has been recycled by the media in the real world to prompt general assertions about the President’s health that would not have occurred otherwise even as the media itself admits they are almost entirely unfounded and even though he was photographed Saturday at a freaking golf course, not exactly a death watch location. Somehow, however, we are supposed to believe that the health concerns are real even if the original story wasn’t, meaning the simulation becomes at least partially real, or at least that’s what CNN claimed earlier this week when they reported on how the “White House pushes back on speculation over Trump’s health.” Beyond the subtle hint that there is a problem with this health no matter what they say, they began, “President Donald Trump was back in public Tuesday to announce a new location for US Space Command headquarters — and prove that rumors of his demise have been greatly exaggerated. Trump held court in the Oval Office this afternoon, breaking a weeklong absence from the spotlight that gave rise to viral theories that the president was seriously ill or had even died. The rumors took over social media, rocketing around BlueSky and X among conspiratorial influencers who had already raised questions about recurring bruising seen on Trump’s hand.” Objectively speaking, it seems obvious that there is a dramatic difference between some mild bruising on the hand of an almost 80 year old man and either being dead, mostly dead as Billy Crystal quipped in The Princess Bride, or on the verge of death, but instead of recognizing the obvious, CNN uses the hand bruise to justify some form of broader speculation, just another prompt in the simulation as it slips over into real life at their own intentional prodding. Incredibly, they do so even as they admit that the claim the President hasn’t been active or in public that supposedly caused these rumors was completely false to begin with, one again managing to make an unfounded theory seem real. “Even as he kept out of the public eye, Trump was anything but silent. On Friday, he sat for a lengthy interview with the Daily Caller, weighing in on a range of topics from his crime crackdown to the war in Ukraine to his expanding White House renovation project. He also posted compulsively to Truth Social over the weekend, at one point on Saturday publishing a 247-word missive — with attached video — recounting his confrontation with a subcontractor who he claimed had scuffed the new stonework in the Rose Garden.”
Regardless of reality itself, “the evidence across the weekend that Trump remained very much alive has done little to quell speculation in conspiracy-minded corners of the internet that have fixated on his health since photos circulated earlier this year showing bruising on his hands, along with images from earlier this summer showing swelling in his legs.” From there, they continued with an in-depth analysis of the bruise itself, making it perhaps the most significant such occurrence in modern history, as though no elderly person had ever bruised before, while not surprisingly subtly blaming it on President Trump himself. “The attention paid to the bruise has bothered Trump and made him self-conscious, and until recently he had taken to covering the bruising with heavy makeup. Issues with his hand, multiple sources say, date back to the campaign, when in one instance he bled after getting cut while he shook hands with a woman with a ring and long nails,” and “On Tuesday, Trump appeared to have discoloration on the back of his hand, possibly from makeup or from a bruise that had healed slightly,” and “The bruise’s visibility during last week’s Cabinet meeting — combined with Trump’s conspicuous attempt at times to cover it with his other hand — had revived the chatter online about his health.” As if this intense coverage about the bruise itself and President Trump’s potential feelings about it weren’t enough, CNN then managed to blame the President for the rumors that he died, claiming “his intensive schedule seemed to only help fuel speculation when he did not list any public events on his official agenda for six days. Trump lunched with Vice President JD Vance last Wednesday and signed executive orders on Thursday in a session that was closed to press, before spending the long weekend shuttling between the White House and his golf course.” While it’s “not unusual for the president, who often spends his weekends on one of his many golf properties, to eschew the press over the weekend and on holidays,” it is once again, his fault that deranged individuals declared he was dead and proceeded to dance on his grave because “his reluctance to engage with questions about his mortality, combined with often-over-the-top testaments to his vigor by those around him — Rep. Ronny Jackson, Trump’s former physician, in July called him ‘the healthiest president this nation has ever seen’ — has only heightened scrutiny of his health and fitness.” On a side note, when was the last time a politician engaged in questions about his freaking mortality? Is the President as Hamlet giving the “To be or not to be speech” a common occurrence that the rest of the world just didn’t happen to notice?
Oddly, CNN doesn’t seem to care much precisely who these denizens of the “conspiracy-minded quarters of the internet” are. Are they simply deranged individuals on street corners who believe they and they alone seen the truth of our Matrix-like existence? Of course not, they are in fact, many prominent anti-Trumpers and some former Democrat officials, which generally speaking should make any comment they have on the topic suspect from the beginning. Jen Psaki, for example, was President Joe Biden’s former Press Secretary, who currently maintains her status as both a Trump-detractor and a progressive influencer. She’s not exactly an under the radar creator like your humble author, and yet she found time to claim the real conspiracy was being perpetrated by Donald Trump himself. After declaring “you can’t make this stuff up sometimes” because President Trump alternated between claiming he’d heard the rumors he was dead and hadn’t heard them at his event on Tuesday, she claimed “we may never know why he suddenly spent a week hiding from the American public,” which is part lie – she certainly knows he held a three hour cabinet meeting on Tuesday before a publicized golf round on Saturday – and part alluding to the idea that the conspiracy is really on President Trump’s part, pay no attention to how they used the social media created simulation to introduce the idea that the President suffers from some massive, secret health problem no one has ever heard of because it manifests as an ordinary bruise on the hand. The Never Trump social media reporter Angry Staffer commented on the size of President Trump’s pupils for some bizarre reason, perhaps suggesting that the non-existent illness is worse than we thought, “if those things get any bigger, they’re gonna need their own zip code,” claimed the President was “currently pumped full of enough uppers to power the international space station,” “Aside from looking very puffy, sniffing a ton, and rambling off track even more than normal, Trump doesn’t look bad. He seems to be recovering well from whatever the White House was hiding,” and noted “Not a single reporter has asked about Trump’s health yet. Doocy asked how ‘he found out he was dead’ this weekend, and that’s as close as it’s gotten” to his over 500,000 thousand followers. Fellow Never Trumper Bill Kristol, also claimed “I don’t know if Donald Trump has a personal health problem” to his million followers, recycling the story while pretending he wasn’t.
There were, of course, others in prominent positions who did the same, but not only did CNN simply dismiss them as if they had no influence, they completely failed to mention that many participated in an actual cover up of the President’s health less than a year ago when Joe Biden was in office. Before his disastrous debate performance, it was as if we were living in a completely different simulation, one where the President’s excellent mental and physical health was a fixed, unassailable fact and any who questioned it was a conspiracy theorist at worst, a partisan fraud at best. Back then, as in barely a year ago, any and all questions including a report from his own Justice Department that concluded no jury would convict a senile old man who couldn’t remember when his son died, was a Deep Fake, a Cheap Fake, or a partisan conspiracy theory designed to undermine a man who ran rings around those half his age. The mainstream media provided plenty of coverage and support for this previous version of the simulation as well – up to and including The New York Times claiming that President Biden’s advanced age was a “style” not a liability and concerns about it were a “manufactured panic.” Someone even put together their headlines when President Biden vanished for a few days compared to now. The difference is so stark they could come from two completely different worlds. In one, “President Trump is Alive. The Internet was Convinced Otherwise. In the world of presidential health, distrust and speculation run so rampant that even Mr. Trump’s online assurance that he was fine was immediately explained away as part of the cover up.” In the other, “Far Right Spreads Baseline Claims About Biden’s Whereabouts. President Biden, who has been sidelined with Covid, is set to address the nation this week.” Of course, this two different, non-conforming worlds is a classic feature of a simulation, not a bug. A simulation can be altered or updated at any time, what is true one day can be false the next, and what is false can suddenly become true based on the will of the designer. In the context of the simulation, you aren’t supposed to notice. As a participant, you are supposed to simply play along as if nothing has happened, but we – fortunately or unfortunately – are outside observers and can’t help but noticing that the world didn’t start on January 20, 2017, the first time President Trump was inaugurated, stop on January 20, 2021 when President Biden was inaugurated, only to start again this January 20 when Trump was inaugurated for the second time. They may like to pretend this is true, but all simulations are ultimately fake and some of us live in the real world where the President is alive, well, and kicking ass on a daily basis.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 