Veteran 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley reported on Donald Trump’s efforts to strong-arm some of the country’s top law firms into doing his bidding on Sunday night’s episode of the embattled CBS newsmagazine.
Pelley’s segment pulled no punches in describing Trump’s efforts and reminding viewers that Trump is the “first felon” ever to sit in the Oval Office.
Because their propaganda game is laser focused and extremely well funded. Propaganda works. They convinced half the population that if you like guns and are a Christian you must vote red or the blues will take it all away. It’s almost that simple.
THIS should be the top comment. I’ve seen friends and family fall for the BS because it was perverse and they never bothered to actually check things out. Republicans have worked overtime propagandizing the population since Nixon. No lie was too outrageous, no dirty trick too vile and eliminating liberal voices was top on their agenda, all backed by big dirty money.
Sure, but that view makes it sound like they are helpless victims in all this. They have access to the internet just like we do. They fall for the propaganda despite all evidence to the contrary and I only see two possibilities that can explain that; they are stupid or they want all that hateful stuff to be true so badly that they choose to shut out everything else. Neither explanation makes them anything other than shitty, selfish people.
Let’s say you have this test. If a few people fail, you can blame them. If half of them fail, you have to blame the teacher or the curriculum
If when you do something to a population, then get consistent results statistically, it’s not fair to blame people for not being outliers
Also, a lot of people are in a bubble when they go online. Maybe they go to their favorite news site, maybe it originates from Facebook, Instagram, tik Tok, even reddit at this point.
Their Internet bubble isn’t the same as yours, and a handful of people are purposely manipulating what people see. They edit Trump’s speech and package it by explaining what he actually meant, and so when they hear “Trump said he’s not sure if he has to uphold the Constitution” they’ve already got it ready to go in their heads “oh, that was out of context, he meant his lawyers are interpreting the constitution”
If you still think like this after a first 4 years term in which Trump already showed his antidemocratic tendencies and another 4 years in which he only attacked his opposed political party doing nothing to find common ground with the other aisle in the interest of the common good, well, I don’t know how to tell you this but you are part of the problem as the 77 millions of people who voted for Trump in the last election.
If you’re unable to burst a bubble like the one surrounding the current GOP you shouldn’t be allowed to vote or express your ideas publicly. You don’t have the mental acuity necessary to form a coherent thought and you should be treated as such, until you prove yourself to have become better than whatever you are today.
It’s time to end this weak ass way to look at people who are actively supporting a fascist regime, stop justifying them and hold them accountable for their choices. Cut all contacts with them, work against them, antagonise them in any way you can. Stop pretending they are good people being lied to: they are bad people looking for someone who will lie to allow themselves to follow their worst instincts and then turn around when everything will be over saying “I was just following orders”
You can’t just write them all off. Some of them are just raving bigots and cultusts, fuck them. Let them the first step themselves, otherwise
Most of them were just lied to. Constantly, for all their lives. They don’t realize they’ve been lied to constantly, they don’t know to question it
They don’t have much interest in politics, because it’s long been the uni party fucking them over in different ways. Everything just gets worse, and they just want to live their lives
If anything, I think most people are leftists, they just don’t realize it yet. They just have to be woken up. They need to wake up to the lies, and they’re now woke. Most people can’t achieve that without a push, most people can’t even examine their own beliefs to that extent - they need someone to break things down for them and help think for them
You can be angry at them, but they’re angry too. We have to live with them. You can blame them, but that’s unproductive… We’re not going to kill them. They’re still going to exist. They’re still going to vote.
We can use them, their anger, their need for change. We offer what they don’t know they want. Winning is what matters
Those people are not leftists, they are children who never grow out of their egoistic phase and are unable to see the world through any other point of view than theirs. They want it all and they don’t care about other human beings, especially if those are not in their “tribe” or “family”. They see life as a zero sum game where if they see someone gaining something this must mean they are loosing something else of the same value.
They need to be excluded from society and reformed if they wish to return to be a part of it. I’m not blaming them, I’m calling for their punishment and exclusion from any and all part of a just society, independent from them being lied to or not. You can be fooled only for so long if you don’t want to know the truth; if you are still being fooled after decades of lies you’re not being lied to, you want to be lied to and this, to me, makes you as culpable as the one telling you you his lies. Why could there be so little “reformed” maga today if this wasn’t the case? (And be careful, those who today say to have understood the pain inflicted by this administration we’re only able to do so because they were the recipient of such pain. Would Trump not have messed with the prices of their trinkets they would still be foaming at the mouth at his rallies)
We tried to re-educate nazis here in Europe after WW2 but, as you can see from the most recent election results, this has not bore any fruit. Nazis don’t understand reason, they only understand violence and strength. The sooner you realise you have more in common with a bonobo than with a nazi the sooner you’ll realise they deserve nothing but scorn, contempt and a massive dose of violence to be kept in place.
I’m not talking about Nazis. When all this is over, they can deal with the consequences of their actions
I’m talking about the people who genuinely have no idea what’s going on. The Trump supporters you see in real life. The ones who were shocked when the tarrifs went through. The ones who think Trump is religious. The ones who thought Elon was actually intelligent and is reducing fraud
Most people you meet in real life aren’t the raving lunatics you see online, they’re people who watch the news. In American news, everything Trump says is sane washed.
They aren’t Nazis. They don’t believe Nazi things. They don’t know or understand what’s going on, they think it’s business as usual because that’s what they’re being told
There’s genuinely not very many Nazis, there’s plenty of casual bigots, but the ignorant vastly outnumber the true believers
You are correct, they aren’t Nazis, not even close. But they are full of hate. Enough hate that they would prefer to be thought of as stupid, or easily fooled rather than admit why they chose to vote for someone who who is an open fascist, “admirers” Nazi generals, and was best friends with a pedophile. Trump is not some unknown. He has was not only president before, but his presidency was was disastrous and he exited with the worst polls of any president ever. They knew exactly what they were getting. They weren’t fooled. They weren’t conned or hoodwinked. They didn’t even lack for choice. There were plenty of other little fascist wanna bees running around trying to get elected.
Stop infantilizing grown adults. If they “didn’t know what they were getting” it is because they chose not to know. They purposely chose someone that they knew would hurt them because they expect him to hurt the people that they hate more.
They’re not full of hate - they’re full of fear and anger. Warranted fear and anger. Just misdirected
In Trump’s last presidency, nothing fascist really happened. Bad things certainly, disastrous even, but honestly? Living through it, it was mostly business as usual. Things got worse, but the COVID response was really the worst, and there’s no living comparison… So it’s a mishandling of a unique crisis, so it was what it was
You don’t understand propoganda.
One of the times I felt most ignorant was when I was working in France, and talking politics I called them socialist and they laughed. Because all my life, France was labeled socialist, I learned it in elementary school through college. I was already a leftist. But I never thought to evaluate my understanding of socialism against my understanding of French politics. And when called out, I immediately realized it was a complete blind spot and felt ashamed. I learned to doubt what I’d been taught, to examine my geopolitical beliefs more deeply. I’d never have done that without a wakeup call
They don’t know what fascism is. They’ve never experienced it. The Nazis are unambigiously evil to them, but they don’t know the fascism checklist. The news they consume reframes everything as normal partisan politics… It downplays it all to a degree that can only be described as lies.
They don’t know that there’s any inconsistency. They are the highest form of ignorant - they don’t know to question yet
There’s no concept of “casual bigotry” as there’s no “ranked bigotry”. A bigot is a bigot the same way as a nazi is a nazi even if he only shares a meal with other known nazis.
No amount of sane washing can change their nature, only re-education and facing consequences for their choices will.
It’s time to stop being polite and understanding with people who have no sense of community or care for others around them, keeping this attitude will never solve the problem. If you show mercy to this people they will continue to resent you while feeling as victims of an unjust system (in their eyes) and will continue to spread their worldview to their spawn presenting it as a “counterculture” to the mainstream way of life keeping this circle of hate and victimisation alive.
We have to break the circuit by showing to their faces why they aren’t adapt to be living among us and we need to be clear in our messaging, otherwise any small window we will leave they will use it to maintain their positions and preach their gospel of hatred.
I understand how it happens and I agree that the people making and spreading the propaganda deserve more of the blame than those consuming it. However, I don’t think the consumers get a free pass. We (including myself because I understand that I am not immune to propaganda) all have the responsibility to view information critically and not let our biases and our environments distort our view of reality. In the cases where I fail to do so I am ultimately to blame for that. The same is true for all of us. Blaming manipulators lets people avoid taking responsibility for allowing themselves to be manipulated and that is not going to help us solve this problem.
I agree to a certain extent, but at the same time - what level of responsibility do we really have?
I’d say it’s virtuous to keep yourself educated, but it’s also virtuous to realize your limits and to recognize when you should trust others on things beyond you. No one can know everything, and being able to weigh conflicting accounts accurately is a rare skill
Humans naturally drift to a certain distance from their perceived community consensus. Like the Overton window, or the whole concept of “normalizing” things. Our beliefs are relative to our society
Propoganda hacks this. If you hear something uncontested frequently, you start to internalize it. It happens without actually processing the information. If people around you generally seem to hold an opinion, your opinion is relative to this - except with social media, algorithms purposefully distort what you are exposed to
It just doesn’t seem fair to blame people for not rising above their own nature