No, George Soros Didn't "Endorse" Ron DeSantis

In case you saw this going around, no, George Soros did not endorse Ron DeSantis for the Republican nomination -- at least, not in the way the Fake News clip that some dishonest Trump supporters intended people to think he did. Soros said he hoped Ron DeSantis won the nomination so that Trump would run as a third party candidate, and then the Democrat candidate would score a "landslide" victory over the both of them.

That's a lot different than the edited clip, which just shows Soros saying he hopes DeSantis wins the nomination, wants you to think he's saying.

I really do not like this level of low dishonesty. Superficially the lie works -- you watch the video, you see Soros say the words.

But then two days later you see the full clip and you see you've been duped. Now you know the guy who put the video together is a liar, and you have a bad taste in your mouth about the candidate he's supporting.

It's just so stupid and it winds up boomeranging back against the candidate it's supposed to be helping. People remember when other people try to trick them, and when other people act as if they're fools.

Treating people as if they're fools to be duped is treating them with disrespect.

And no, that doesn't mean Trump is treating people with disrespect. He didn't create this meme. (I assume.) He has nothing to do with it... unless he retweets it.

I hope he doesn't retweet it.

I've seen this over and over again in politics. There are some people who think they are smarter than everyone, and think therefore they can fool most people.

But these people inevitably turn out to be among the very stupidest people in politics. They always think they're tricking people, and if you point out that most people see through their tricks, and that their tricks then backfire, they will say: "Our deceptions work on people whore dumber than us."

And I always try to tell them: But there are barely any people who are dumber than you. When you talk about tricking the Stupid Voters -- you are the Stupid Voters, idiots. You are the people you're trying to fool.

This is Dunning-Kruger Politics. Dunning-Kruger Syndrome describes the situation where smart people tend to imagine that their competitors and colleagues are as competent as they are, or even more competent, so they tend to evaluate themselves lower than their actual level of ability.

But incompetent people are incompetent enough at their jobs that they don't even know what competency looks like, so when asked to evaluate themselves, they think they're very competent -- and don't think that their more competent colleagues are competent. So they rate themselves higher than their actual ability.

These obvious lies don't work. They may work one day, but in the next several days when someone sees they've been lied to, they hold it against the person who lied to them.

But they don't understand that lies have consequences.

Because they're stupid.

And they will just keep putting out these stupid, cheap deceptions, and keep thinking they're Super-Crafty for doing so.

And they'll just keep thinking they're #Winning.

I don't want anyone to feel implicated by this, if you didn't know or if you believed it. Hey, stuff gets passed around on the internet. We can't all do fact-checks. When I first heard of this -- I heard of it, I didn't see it -- I didn't know if it was true or not.

I personally assume that a lot of leftwingers or Bill Kristol types will actually endorse Ron DeSantis, precisely to screw him over.

So it seemed to me perfectly believable that Soros had, in fact, "endorsed" DeSantis. One of these days, these guys will get crafty and start doing just that.

By the way, I certainly don't want to suggest that this lie is about Trump, just because it was offered on Trump's behalf.

Because this crap has obviously been around long before Trump.

Stupid, easily-disproven lies are always part of politics.

One thing I've noticed, though, is that there is a contingent of people online whose interest in politics is almost incidental to their actual primary passion, which is shitposting. And among those shitposters will be general contrarians, actually, kind of antisocial discordians.

Some of these guys really like lying and tricking people; it's part of their psychological make-up. They like opposing "the system" and lying feels like a satisfying transgression to them.

You know what I mean? Like, the shame is part of the kink. Lying isn't a cost of playing the game; lying is the game.

A lot of these guys work for the Establishment. They love, love, love Conning the Rubes.

I've sometimes talked with people who consider themselves real "Political Gamemasters" and their eyes really light up at the deception/"spymaster" aspects of politics. I've had people "leak" me polls that turned out to be fake. I don't mean a poll that was cherry picked from a series of polls that showed different results; I mean a poll that was simply made-up out of whole cloth, completely fictitious, just totally made up of imagination and lies. When I confronted this person, he wasn't even apologetic about it -- they acted like we were all in this Great Game together, weren't we? Shouldn't I be happy that I'd been used as a pawn in his maneuvering to get people to pay more attention to a race in this state?

A lot of the most passionate online supporters are attracted to whoever appears to be the most oppositional candidate in the race, whoever that is.

Rand Paul, for example. Now Trump. That doesn't actually reflect on the men they support -- as Rand Paul said of his more repellent supporters, "They endorsed me, I didn't endorse them" -- unless Trump retweets them or supports them or something.

Anyway, that's obviously not the average Trump supporter. I'm just saying, Memelords and Sh!tposters do particularly like Trump. People who are fed up with the system. Like most of you, like me.

(I'm not always attracted to the most oppositional candidate, I'm 20% cvck, so I usually pick a candidate who is the second-most oppositional. That's why I preferred Cruz. But when Trump won, I backed him, wholeheartedly, and liked him more and more as the weeks passed.)

And whatever group has the most passion, will attract a lot of amateurs interested in cheap and dirty aspects of the game, of course.

The pros will work for the big money the Establishment offers, but the amateurs will work for candidates they feel passion about. The guys who fancy themselves to be Political George Smileys, moving the 4-D political chesspieces around the internet game-board, one lie at at time, hoping to one day bring the whole rotten system down and, of course, emerge as the conquering Hero of Deliverance.

They just really like lying. Telling them that lying is counterproductive won't dissuade them, because producing a positive political result isn't the point of the lie -- they're lying for the thrill of imagining the power they have over the Rubes' minds when they get to "program" their inferior brains with the message they've concocted. They're mostly in the game of politics for the game, not for the politics.

posted by Ace at 04:19 PM

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