Donald Trump says he doesn't know what Ghislaine Maxwell was in for, that the briefing on Russian bounties never crossed his desk, and he's pushing a story about Beirut that has no basis anywhere, no confirmation anywhere.

At what point do reporters stop amplifying him?

If he was not occupying office, no one would think his opinion on what was happening in Lebanon needed airing.

And he is in office, but he makes a daily spectacle of both not knowing or caring what intelligence says, and lying.

At what point do reporters stop amplifying him?

He has less idea what's happening than the average person on Twitter. All the top secret reports and daily briefings and intelligence don't matter, because they all agree with what he already thinks, or they don't.

That Axios on HBO interview laid bare, more bare than ever before, how much he simply does not know and does not care, how much the truth does not matter in the face of what he wants and needs to be true.

And yet. It changed nothing. Reporters still talk to him like he matters.

Reporters still talk to him like it matters, like he's got something to say worth hearing, like he knows things that the American people need to hear.

He holds the power of the presidency and will at least through January 20th, almost certainly no matter what.

But just imagine if we all stopped treating this corrupt, monstrous, rapacious, mendacious clown of a gangster like he's the president of anything.

There may be personal agenda or geopolitical purposes being served by the narrative he pushed but just as likely, that's what fit the story in his head when he hears the words "Lebanon" and "Beirut". They fit what he wants to be true about the world.

And it fits a lot of people in the US's personal stories, so it's going to resonate, and so a lot of harm gets done every time it gets boosted, even if it's to dunk.

I remember watching some 9/11 truther celebrity, maybe it was Charlie Sheen? I don't know and I don't care. But I remember him saying he watched the towers come down on TV and said to his brother, "That doesn't look like a collapse. That looks like a controlled demolition."

And when I saw that, I yelled at the TV: "HOW WOULD YOU KNOW WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN THE TWIN TOWERS COLLAPSE?"

What makes you think you would recognize what that "really" looks like? What's your point of reference? What's your relevant experience here?

We can't do much about reporters but we can choose what we amplify. I'm going to amplify a friend from Lebanon who asks that we don't amplify the conspiracy theories and the amateur forensic demolitions experts and Trump's chosen narrative, even to QT it to disagree with it.

...anyway, getting back to where I was before I got distracted.

So this guy on TV is saying he's suspicious of the "official story" on 9/11 because the collapse of the towers looked unreal to him.

The two largest objects he's probably ever seen, falling down.

To him, it doesn't look right, when an event neither he nor anyone else living has ever witnessed before, happens in front of his eyes, twice in a row.

What he means is it didn't happen the way he'd imagined it would, and it's possible he'd never even imagined it until he saw it actually happening.

And this is a very human impulse. Very human, very natural. It's hard to process something like that.

And there was a lot of that happening today, as people saw a very complicated explosive event happening in a way that didn't quite map to anything else they'd ever seen.

And there's something understandable about that. But also something dangerous and harmful and a bit callous.

For most of human history... it didn't matter how big the explosion or how big the tragedy, only a few people would see it. For a very brief blip in the scale of things, there was the possibility that someone would get a picture, or catch it on film.

At the time the towers fell... that was the world before everybody had camera phones and data connections. There was a lot of different video angles, especially given how far away they were visible from, but not literally everybody had a camera and a way to broadcast footage.

In much the same way that I lost my cool earlier in this thread because of a communication snafu that would have been MIND BOGGLINGLY IMPOSSIBLE to anybody in my entire evolutionary line...

We are not ready for an explosion the whole world can see. As a society. As a species.

So I urge you: be selective about what you read, what you boost, who and what you engage with.

It's probably useful to boost people explaining how and why we know it's not/can't be nuclear. It's less useful to boost arguments about it being nuclear, even to "help" "win" them

I'm sorry for getting snippy earlier. I realize that I am usually much clearer about when I'm asking a question vs. when I'm making a point.

I just wish we could do better, be better.

(This tweet definitely does not contain a question.)

Most of us have never seen an explosion like this before. Most of us will never see an explosion like this again. If there's a normal explosion, this wasn't it.

We don't know what to look for. We don't know what it's "supposed to" look like. But what we see on video is it.