https://jessicar.substack.com/p/donald-trump-is-the-reason-i-left

And then, for some reason on that morning, it was like another level of awareness kicked in and I saw myself seeing myself rage out at this screen. And I was horrified.

I realized in that moment that I had been programmed by the ‘advertising power’ of Facebook. I had had no idea. I had been kind of brainwashed - for lack of a better word - to “hate Trump”: a man I had never met, never spoken to, never made eye-contact with, and pretty much knew nothing about. Regardless of my created ‘feelings’ toward this man I had never met, it was the effect on me that really bothered me. I found myself asking questions like: Was I so ‘influenceable’? How was it possible that I was so ‘simply’ ‘made’ to have such a negative and visceral response to an image on a screen? I decided to do something about this because - now aware that I had been under some kind of social media/propaganda spell - I could un-bind myself from it.

I don’t know why I was able to reflect in such an important way on that particular morning. It was pretty much a life-changing day for me and I still don’t know why it was that day that I was able to see myself in this way.

After this day, I started to ask myself even more questions - the questions that I came to realize through self-reflection that I should have been asking myself - Why were those posts about Trump there in the first place? Why were there so many ad hominen interjections? Was there an intention to polarize people against him using social media as a tool? If I could be swayed so easily, why wouldn’t it happen to others? How many others are still caught in the polarization trap? Is Facebook being used as a political weapon?

I had to start asking myself these questions because of my own experience, regardless of how I felt personally about Trump. But having said that, I did start to ask myself important questions about Trump himself. If he is just an orange baboon as portrayed on many social media posts, then why would he need to be discredited? Wouldn’t a baboon simply retreat back to the forest - a threat to no political agenda? Maybe the things being said about him on social and legacy media aren’t true? Or horror of horrors, maybe they are completely false!

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