Second this. Medbeds are obvious scifi hallucinations of a Qanon faction. Why would the president push propaganda about something that is so obviously impossible?
01HNNWZ0MV43FF•4mo ago
He is gullible and wants to believe that there is a group of shadowy elites suppressing high technology, even though for the last 10 years, the shadowy elites have been backing him.
(And there isn't a huge spread in technology - Only in laws and money. Anyone could put up thousands of AI surveillance cameras, but only the government allows themselves to and can afford to)
UncleMeat•4mo ago
Why? Trump is an insane narcissist with no filter and sees people talking about how amazing he is in the context of this video, so he reposts it.
IAmGraydon•4mo ago
He (or whoever is controlling his social media, which I'm nearly convinced is not him) is trying to fracture our sense of base reality, which humans need to function as a society. He's trying to do this by posting such AI generated absurdity and conspiracies that no one knows what is actually real anymore. That is his goal. It's a malevolent psychological operation.
rsynnott•4mo ago
I mean, Occam's razor says that he's doing it because he's a senile old man reposting obvious nonsense, which is a thing that senile people frequently do.
There are, I'm sure, plenty of 4D chess explanations, but realistically "the guy who appears to be senile and does senile-guy things is in fact senile" seems far simpler.
treetalker•4mo ago
Well, let's consider some of the possibilities.
1. Either (a) Trump posted the video (by himself or through an agent acting at his direction), or (b) someone else posted the video without Trump's permission. If the latter, the POTUS does not control his "official" social media account (and you can ascertain the further implications as an exercise). If the former …
2. Trump either (a) knows the content of the video is false, or (b) he does not. If the latter, then the USA has a president who believes such nonsense and cannot distinguish reality from make-believe when communicating with the public and/or making policy decisions. If the former, then Trump is intentionally spreading falsehoods, in which case the USA has a president who is intentionally misleading the public about health matters.
He also recently said "aceto- … acetamin- … acetaminophen" use during pregnancy causes autism and has an administration railing against vaccines and cutting world health funding. So, we should all ask ourselves what conclusions we should be drawing and what ought to be done about this situation.
CamperBob2•4mo ago
Americans elected a President who is indistinguishable from a hostile foreign agent. What other explanation is needed?
UncleMeat•4mo ago
Far right communities are replete with conspiracy theories. One such theory is that there is a technology (medbed) that is pretty much just a cure-all and is being withheld from society by nefarious actors. The details are almost unimportant, as this sort of conspiratorial thinking fluidly moves between claims.
Somebody created an AI video of Trump talking about this technology. It is a fake video. Trump, presumably because he saw people praising in the context of this video, decided to repost it to his Truth Social account. This was apparently too embarrassing for the administration, so he deleted it.
The actual story should be that Trump's brain is completely cooked and that he platforms the most insane conspiracy theories and straight up false information to his audience of millions and millions people. No different than an off-the-deep-end person reposting insane shit they've seen on Facebook, except that this person is the president.
treetalker•4mo ago
Lest the sheer irony escape even some HN readers, the political right tends to actively oppose, and has stymied past attempts at, the broad provision or even expansion of reasonable and either free or affordable healthcare that is real and could make a real difference in our citizens' health. But no! The real problem, somehow, must be that some cabal is holding out on their Star Wars bacta tanks.
Chalk it up to lack of education — then ask who puts a professional wrestling executive in charge of the Department of Education and then hobbles it.
UncleMeat•4mo ago
I actually don't think that this is super meaningful. The qanon-esque conspiracies are free floating. The actual conspiracy does not matter and it will happily move to some completely different topic over time. The conspiracy could instead be that Hillary Clinton is using the Ring of Power to turn people's kids trans and it would serve the same function.
So I don't think that pointing out the ways that the Trump administration is materially harming people's health does anything. The point of the medbed conspiracy isn't to solve healthcare. The point is to define "them" as the source of general suffering faced by people.
Same as the adrenochrome conspiracies aren't actually about rooting out child abduction but instead let people define some external cause to why they lost their kids in a custody battle after losing their minds online and having their kids bathe in bleach.
ZeroGravitas•4mo ago
Also, people are surprised by this when he said things of a similar calibre of crazy during an hour long UN speech last week and everyone shrugged because about a third of the US population believe it too.
12_throw_away•4mo ago
I'm not sure I can explain more than is in the article, but I feel that writing it out helps me cope with the insanity:
"Med-beds" are a far-right-adjacent conspiracy theory. It posits that the rich and powerful have access to a secret medical technology that can heal any disease. Descriptions vary between Star-Trek-ish magic future tech on the one hand, vs new age woo magic crystal healing on the other. There are a variety of scams around this preying on the medically ignorant and desperate [1], one of which has even been posted on HN! [2]
The president's truth social account posted a fictional AI-generated Fox News segment purporting to announce that the president himself is making this "technology" broadly available. The segment includes deepfake of the president himself, which raises some alarming (although not, at this point, surprising) questions about who posted the video and why:
- Did the president himself post this or direct someone to post it? If so, does he think that it was real, despite the clips of him saying things he never said?
- Or, did someone post it without the president's authorization, and if so, did they believe it was real?
wellthisisgreat•4mo ago
bediger4000•4mo ago
01HNNWZ0MV43FF•4mo ago
(And there isn't a huge spread in technology - Only in laws and money. Anyone could put up thousands of AI surveillance cameras, but only the government allows themselves to and can afford to)
UncleMeat•4mo ago
IAmGraydon•4mo ago
rsynnott•4mo ago
There are, I'm sure, plenty of 4D chess explanations, but realistically "the guy who appears to be senile and does senile-guy things is in fact senile" seems far simpler.
treetalker•4mo ago
1. Either (a) Trump posted the video (by himself or through an agent acting at his direction), or (b) someone else posted the video without Trump's permission. If the latter, the POTUS does not control his "official" social media account (and you can ascertain the further implications as an exercise). If the former …
2. Trump either (a) knows the content of the video is false, or (b) he does not. If the latter, then the USA has a president who believes such nonsense and cannot distinguish reality from make-believe when communicating with the public and/or making policy decisions. If the former, then Trump is intentionally spreading falsehoods, in which case the USA has a president who is intentionally misleading the public about health matters.
He also recently said "aceto- … acetamin- … acetaminophen" use during pregnancy causes autism and has an administration railing against vaccines and cutting world health funding. So, we should all ask ourselves what conclusions we should be drawing and what ought to be done about this situation.
CamperBob2•4mo ago
UncleMeat•4mo ago
Somebody created an AI video of Trump talking about this technology. It is a fake video. Trump, presumably because he saw people praising in the context of this video, decided to repost it to his Truth Social account. This was apparently too embarrassing for the administration, so he deleted it.
The actual story should be that Trump's brain is completely cooked and that he platforms the most insane conspiracy theories and straight up false information to his audience of millions and millions people. No different than an off-the-deep-end person reposting insane shit they've seen on Facebook, except that this person is the president.
treetalker•4mo ago
Chalk it up to lack of education — then ask who puts a professional wrestling executive in charge of the Department of Education and then hobbles it.
UncleMeat•4mo ago
So I don't think that pointing out the ways that the Trump administration is materially harming people's health does anything. The point of the medbed conspiracy isn't to solve healthcare. The point is to define "them" as the source of general suffering faced by people.
Same as the adrenochrome conspiracies aren't actually about rooting out child abduction but instead let people define some external cause to why they lost their kids in a custody battle after losing their minds online and having their kids bathe in bleach.
ZeroGravitas•4mo ago
12_throw_away•4mo ago
"Med-beds" are a far-right-adjacent conspiracy theory. It posits that the rich and powerful have access to a secret medical technology that can heal any disease. Descriptions vary between Star-Trek-ish magic future tech on the one hand, vs new age woo magic crystal healing on the other. There are a variety of scams around this preying on the medically ignorant and desperate [1], one of which has even been posted on HN! [2]
The president's truth social account posted a fictional AI-generated Fox News segment purporting to announce that the president himself is making this "technology" broadly available. The segment includes deepfake of the president himself, which raises some alarming (although not, at this point, surprising) questions about who posted the video and why:
- Did the president himself post this or direct someone to post it? If so, does he think that it was real, despite the clips of him saying things he never said?
- Or, did someone post it without the president's authorization, and if so, did they believe it was real?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/28/us/politics/far-right-mir...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34050557