RED, WHITE & WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?

When the loudest “Americans” aren’t even in America.

X’s new “About This Account” feature didn’t just cause a stir — it ripped the mask off a whole ecosystem of loud, flag-waving avatars who’ve been thumping their digital chests about “saving America” while typing from places where the closest thing to a Cracker Barrel is a goat tied to a metal pole outside a convenience store. One minute these accounts were demanding the FBI be abolished; the next minute their location tags were blinking “Bangladesh” like a neon sign over a roadside bar. It was the cleanest, most unintentional self-own in the history of the platform. And watching these self-proclaimed patriots try to explain why their “real American movement” is being orchestrated from a wi-fi hotspot in Southeast Asia was like watching a drunk man try to argue with a revolving door. Every spin made it worse.

The comedy practically wrote itself. Accounts with names like “1776 General” were suddenly revealed to be operating from non-EU Eastern European countries whose idea of democracy involves whatever the local oligarch felt like that week. The MAGA faithful are now contorting themselves into new shapes of denial, insisting the feature is bugged, hacked, compromised, infiltrated, manipulated, misread, misinterpreted, or a trap set by the deep state. Anything except the obvious: they’ve been screaming into the void with digital fist pumps coordinated by people who don’t even live in the same hemisphere, let alone the same country. It’s a global cosplay performance, and the supposed “patriots” are just the overeager extras.

FACEBOOK: WHERE PROPAGANDA EVOLVES INTO ITS FINAL FORM

Meanwhile, Facebook continues its role as the slow-moving brain rot machine that turns ordinary Americans into semi-sentient loudspeakers for whatever garbage happens to drift across their feeds. The platform has essentially become a nursing home for paranoia where misinformation grows mushroom caps and spreads spores across every timeline. The same people who believe their phones are spying on them because they once googled “constipation remedies” now treat every post from an obviously foreign troll account as gospel truth delivered from Mount Sinai.

What makes Facebook uniquely dangerous is that it takes foreign manipulation and marinates it in emotional overreaction until it becomes indistinguishable from legitimate concern. People who once posted baby pictures now post doom-chains about secret plots in the Department of Agriculture. Every headline gets filtered through the soft, gelatinous remains of a brain that’s been pummeled by algorithmic ragebait for a decade straight. The ugliest part is that Facebook rewards this deterioration — it pets the back of your skull and whispers “more” every time you panic-share something incoherent. It’s a psychological assembly line where the raw material is fear and the final product is a person who can no longer tell the difference between foreign propaganda and a relative’s birthday photo.

THE ACCOUNTS ARE FAKE, THE DAMAGE IS REAL

The revelation that countless MAGA accounts are being operated overseas isn’t new to anyone who’s been paying attention, but this is the first time the evidence has been shoved directly into users’ faces in big, bold, unignorable letters. And still, a massive portion of the population reacted with instinctive denial, because acknowledging the truth means admitting they’ve been manipulated by people whose only exposure to America is reruns of Duck Dynasty and the occasional Marvel movie. The propaganda is embarrassingly low-budget: the same recycled talking points, the same copy-pasted sentences, the same desperately transparent rage-posts written by someone who uses English like it’s a rental car they didn’t purchase insurance for. But low-budget propaganda works when people have been conditioned to let anything with an American flag emoji glide past their defenses.

The saddest part is not that foreign operatives are doing this — it’s that Americans have become such ripe fruit for plucking. The cognitive vulnerabilities didn’t appear overnight. They were cultivated. Nurtured. Fed by algorithms that respond to outrage the way junkies respond to a needle. Eventually, when your entire worldview has been rearranged by years of fearmongering, strategic misinformation, and culture-war hysteria, the truth stops feeling real. What feels real is whatever jolts your nervous system the hardest. The result is a country where facts are treated like intruders and lies are treated like houseguests.

What X has accidentally exposed is not just the foreign influence — it’s the ease of it. It shouldn’t be this simple to steer a portion of the electorate like cattle, but here we are: foreign agents reshaping American discourse from thousands of miles away because too many users trust anything that flatters their beliefs or triggers their anxieties. And the moment a platform shows them the receipts, they don’t reevaluate. They double down. They claim the exposure is fake. They claim the tech is wrong. They claim the truth is a lie and the lie is holy writ.

This is the psychological collapse that foreign propagandists bank on. A society where evidence makes people angry instead of curious. A society where confusion feels safer than clarity. A society where the loudest political voices may not even be speaking from the country they pretend to represent.

---

If you want more sharp, scathing, profanity-laced truth bombs detonated directly under the rotting floorboards of American disinformation, subscribe to Closer to the Edge. Free or paid, every subscription helps keep this fearless journalism alive while we keep ripping the masks off the bastards ruining the national conversation.