this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
313 points (97.3% liked)

Not The Onion

16015 readers
1143 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from...
  2. ...credible sources, with...
  3. ...their original headlines, that...
  4. ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Please also avoid duplicates.

Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] jedibob5@lemmy.world 99 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (2 children)

It's important to remember that Jones is a grifter first and foremost. He has never sincerely cared about anything in his life beyond his own enrichment, and I don't think this is a sign of him starting now. That said, I think it may still be significant that even hardcore grifters like Jones and Fuentes are starting to publicly speak against Trump. Grifters are always going to follow the money, so if Trump's ship is sinking so fast that even Alex Jones sees it to be more profitable to start to move away from him, maybe the MAGA cult of personality really is starting to finally fall apart...

Granted, that's all speculation, and Trump has managed to defy every previous prediction of the fall of his influence, so I don't want to jump to any conclusions here, but after the Canadian elections, I feel like I have a bit more reason to afford myself a little optimism for the future...

[–] DaedalousIlios@pawb.social 20 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Cults follow a life-cycle of explosive growth. Then once they reach a certain threshold, they slow. And either they become something like Mormonism or Jehovah's Witnesses, where they face slow growth/decline, close to equalibrium, or they begin collapsing in grotesquely spectacular fashion like Heaven's Gate and Jone's Town.

MAGA is falling into this latter category, in which the cult grows desperate as it loses members and clamps down harder, making ever-higher demands, making more members nope out, locking the cult into a vicious cycle of free-falling desperation. This is good.

What is not good is that the precedent set is Heaven's Gate and Jone's Town, both of which did something absolutely tragic and evil, and MAGA has great political power right now. They will absolutely be doing something truly and historically evil on the way out, and we need to be prepared.

[–] WYLD_STALLYNS@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 9 hours ago

Sad but this is likely what we'll see. This is why you need to let them cut off their noses, so they can start turning on each other. It's not what you want to see, but interfering only gives them new targets to try placing blame on.