Trucks Drive and Explode By Themselves According to the Media

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Trucks Drive and Explode By Themselves According to the Media 1

No matter how much you hate the media, you don’t hate them enough. 

One day, I want that saying to be false, but that day is certainly not today. In the wake of two terrorist attacks on America, the headline writers at our so-called “mainstream” media outlets outdid themselves, finding every which way in the book to downplay facts that are inconvenient to The Narrative™ and emphasize irrelevant facts that fit the one that they are feeding you. 

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People were rightly outraged when they woke up on New Year’s Day to read that a “truck” killed and injured tens of people in New Orleans as if it drove itself. 

As far as I know, Ford Lightning vehicles, whatever automation they may employ, do not drive around police car blockades, accelerate into crowds killing people and then eject robot drivers to have shootouts with police officers. That would a quite the programming bug. 

And these trucks don’t fly ISIS flags by themselves, either. 

But from the headlines that splashed across America’s newspapers, you might think they did. 

In some ways, the headlines about the car bombing attack on Trump’s Las Vegas Hotel were even more deceptive, given that readers were actively misled into believing that the car explosion was a mechanical failure instead of an attempted mass murder. With the New Orleans headlines, readers could do the mental gymnastics, simple as they were, to figure out that a “truck” didn’t kill those people, but a murderous terrorist did because human agency was obvious. 

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But the Las Vegas headlines led you to believe that the Cybertruck involved in the attack literally did explode on its own since such events are plausible. Mechanical failures happen, although if you understand how electric vehicle batteries work, then you know that explosions are not their failure mode but rather rare but extremely difficult to extinguish fires. 

Printing headlines describing the truck bombing as a “fire” or a truck “exploding” grossly distorts the reality, and it was a reality that anybody who knew much about lithium batteries and EVs immediately knew was not a mechanical failure. 

In other words, a Tesla Cybertruck didn’t explode–somebody tried to blow it up. Ironically, if the vehicle hadn’t been a Cybertruck, the damage would have almost certainly been much, much worse. The truck is built like a tank, and since the explosives were in the bed the force was directed almost entirely upward. The body of the truck remained intact, and most ironically of all the lithium batteries did NOT catch fire. 

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In other words, visitors to the Trump Hotel were extremely lucky that the bomber, likely in an effort to make a political point against Trump and Musk, chose to rent a Cybertruck. Almost any other vehicle would have resulted in much more damage. 

But that isn’t the point the headline writer wanted to make. They wanted you to believe that Elon Musk built a dangerous vehicle that could spontaneously explode, and one did so ironically right outside a Trump hotel. 

These sorts of misleading headlines happen all the time. And in many cases the very articles underneath them undermine or contradict the headlines.

But that doesn’t matter, because most people only read the headlines or the first 100 or so words. The impression, not the full truth, is what they want people to be left with. 

It’s a powerful propaganda tool. There is so much information flying at us that we can only digest a tiny fraction of it, and headlines are by far the largest fraction of that tiny fraction. 

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There is so much power in so few words. 

Posted in Republican News