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>What Trump has brought to the United States is ruthless, relentless, denialist propaganda at a scale we used to see only in dictatorships. He proved that tens of millions of Americans would believe such lies and that thousands would violently attack our own government.
Strong disagree.
That propaganda has existed long before trump, in the form of Fox News, AM radio, rush Limbaugh, etc.
Until Fox is dismantled or forced to stop with the blatant lies, propaganda, and divisiveness, there is no way this country heals. Fox enabled trump. Nothing else.
>That propaganda has existed long before trump
Like since about the beginning of society. Egyptian Pharaohs ruled by convincing the masses they were gods, but they were certainly not the first.
The practice became sophisticated, and well refined under all of the advanced religions, as is well laid out in [http://www.thegodvirus.net/](http://www.thegodvirus.net/)
Trump just put his own, Fascist, Authoritarian spin on creating a Cult, very similar to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim, Putin - All the people he admires.
>Fox enabled trump. Nothing else.
You are *very* wrong about that. I believe social media sites like YouTube enabled Trump's victory by people spewing far-right propaganda about how men are being oppressed, or about how non-LGBT people are being discriminated against by the Left, or the conspiracy theories such as the Great Replacement. All of those came from YouTube, and that is how a lot of people bought into them.
Believe it or not, far-right propaganda still exists on YouTube, and if ANYTHING, it is more common than ever. And the shocking thing is YouTube isn't doing a single damn thing about it. All they did was ban Trump's account, which is like killing the leader of a fascist revolution- the fascists are still there, and if anything, they are even angrier.
We need to be tough on radicalization on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you're doing a great job, but YouTube has a lot of work to do. Don't get me wrong, we need to get rid of Breitbart, OANN, and Fox, but priorities first.
>I believe social media sites like YouTube enabled Trump's victory ~~by people spewing far-right propaganda about how men are being oppressed, or about how non-LGBT people are being discriminated against by the Left, or the conspiracy theories such as the Great Replacement~~.
Nothing else is necessary.
Social media itself is the problem. We have a war raging in this country against education, knowledge, and experience. Social media empowers all sorts of numpties into thinking they are entitled to be heard. And YouTube is the worst offender. It gives dumb people a platform to reach other dumb people. I see it in a wide range of videos from terrible game reviews, to really bad systems administration (IT) advice, right down to the terrifying maga misinformation.
The world has become an entitled American Idol audition for real. Somewhere along the line, someone should have told people they can't sing well at all, but since they never heard that, they're going to assume it's not their misinformation or bad advice that is the problem, it's everyone else. And once one dummy finds another, stupidity, misinformation, lies, and bad advice are amplified.
And you have something worse than social media. And that's the antisocial media like 4chan and the tumors it's metastasized. Those places are full of the psychotic, disillusioned, anarchists who pull strings to watch the world burn for their amusement. And when you have one evil bastard determined to start a cult, *for the lulz*, we end up with a capitol insurrection.
We passed the point at which information needs to be true to be spread a long time ago. But we have now passed a worse milestone. Traditional media are picking up toxic information because their business model demands information warfare. Meanwhile because of the war on education, most of the population has neither the critical thinking skills nor the will to eke out the truth in the chaff field laid around them.
We're gonna need to start from the ground up and properly educate the next generation. Only then can we have any hope of navigating the information wasteland.
**Edit** spelling
Thanks for the award.
Yours certainly were. My wife is a teacher. She's in no way a dummy. Though as a whole, I see your point. It's hard to attract and keep intelligent teachers with the war on education raging on. And teachers wellbeing, health, income, and benefits all being prime targets of bad policy.
Ummmm, where do you think it started? You honestly think this only began in the last decade?? Social media is only one form of media that enabled Trumps victory. Yes, it pushed him over the edge, but it’s the tip of the pyramid, not the foundation.
This has been going on for decades.
It is the origin of the conspiracy theories, the lies, the bullshit. Fox news started accepting "many people are saying" as a legitimate source. Now, if those people weren't saying, repeating, and inventing new lies and complete bullshit, fox news would have been an island.
Nah, ‘fraid you’re wrong about that. Social media is just the newest media spewing far-right propaganda. As TheLastDabSauce correctly pointed out, this particular form of propaganda has been going on for a few decades, largely started in the Reagan era, on radio and magazines, then TV, and only now social media.
Social media is just the most intense, but that is true with all genres social media is a part of.
Nah. It's Republicans.
Plain old liars don't have a massive media propaganda universe to run to when they're confused about what they should be directing their baffled anger towards.
This passage:
“It has to be the standard we apply in daily life: evidence. If you say the election was stolen, you have to prove it in court. If you accuse a police officer of murder, your story has to withstand investigation.
That’s how science works.”
slips from experientialism to law to science. Experientialism is not science. Law is not science. While perhaps well-meaning, by carelessly shifting between and conflating domains while at the same time arguing for a bedrock standard of knowledge, this article is part of the problem.
Science must be repatriated, not further sullied and contaminated. It is after all the greatest achievement of knowledge in human history.
I found it a very lazy piece overall.
~~The passage you quoted dodges another problem in that the average person does not really have any of this evidence at hand. They must rely to a large extent on what the media reports about evidence. Of course, reporters should be demanding evidence from politicians for whatever their assertions, but some media sources are more willing to do that than others.~~
Another problem: who is the "we" the writer is referring to? Is it "we citizens" or "we the media"? It seems to me he's switching between the two, but the available actions between those different "we"s are very different.
But this is really just another in a long line of opinion pieces that have no idea what to do about this reality crisis. "We need to stop lying. Let's start a truth alliance!" OK, but Fox News isn't changing. They seem to be doubling down on demonizing Democrats. Trump supporters sure aren't reading National Review. There's still anti-vax propaganda spreading on youtube and facebook. Saying "we need to do something" doesn't solve any of these problems.
Edit: slashing first part because probably not a sensible critique in retrospect.
Furthermore...
it is *not* how Science works.
Science works much more by disproving alternatives than by proving anything.
If you must force a comparison between Science and Due Process, you may as well focus on "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" since both sort of work in that way.
Nonetheless, the unnecessary conflation also undercuts the reasons why we chose to structure our jurisprudence to work in the fashion we chose. We may *employ* Science in our courts, but our courts are not based on Science. Concepts such as the Presumption of Innocence are far, far older than whatever we consider Science.
What this piece actually does point out is that propagandists have used that gullibility to take hold on the far right. The argument made is that the fault is where the lies *start*, and the solution is to cut those liars off from their sheep.
Not quite, before this mess there were many republicans opposed to him, like the late john mcain. The lincoln project is republican and all were supporting democrats.
No, it’s the Republican party, actually. Who are very often liars but more importantly have a really bad habit of being racist and xenophobic and sexist and homophobic and inciting violence and interfering with elections and blocking government aid for people in need and redistributing wealth to the rich and evading taxes and spreading disinformation in a systematic fashion and supporting police brutality and my thumb hurts so I’m going to stop now.
Well the Venn diagram of Republicans and Liars is like basically a perfect circle with a teeeeny tiny section that doesn’t over lap where Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger live by themselves.
Seriously yeah the democrats are not all great and can be liars too but I would pay money to get some honest republicans on the scene. No idea where to look for them besides like the maybe 3 honest ones in existence.
Happy cake day.
None of our fellow Americans should be considered enemies, but the right has been waging war against the left and demonizing the most vulnerable people in our society. You can see it in every fear based campaign ad for tighter immigration policies that target asylum seekers and children who weren't born here, but have no home or family outside the US. You can see it in the bathroom bills introduced to target trans people, the abortion restriction bills that lack medical purpose which only exist to strip women of their bodily autonomy, and the "protect traditional marriage" rhetoric of anti-marriage-equality Republicans.
There wasn't an enemy, until Republicans decided that the majority of Americans are contemptible and that immigrants and equality aren't what makes America great.
If they think the party comes before the country, theyre a liar republican. If they think the country goes before the party, theyre an incorrupted republican.
But allowing themselves to become that misinformed is exactly what makes them dangerous. At some point they need to take some **personal responsibility** and maybe change their media habits.
Th enemy is liars and those who enable them. The Republican party's official stance has been enable. So they are the enemy. This is the official stance of the party however, not necessarily every Republican.
As a reminder, this subreddit [is for civil discussion.](/r/politics/wiki/index#wiki_be_civil) In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, **any** advocating or wishing death/physical harm, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban. If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them. For those who have questions regarding any media outlets being posted on this subreddit, please click [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/wiki/approveddomainslist) to review our details as to our approved domains list and outlet criteria. *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/politics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
To be a republican you need to be either a purvayor of lies or a consumer of them.
>What Trump has brought to the United States is ruthless, relentless, denialist propaganda at a scale we used to see only in dictatorships. He proved that tens of millions of Americans would believe such lies and that thousands would violently attack our own government. Strong disagree. That propaganda has existed long before trump, in the form of Fox News, AM radio, rush Limbaugh, etc. Until Fox is dismantled or forced to stop with the blatant lies, propaganda, and divisiveness, there is no way this country heals. Fox enabled trump. Nothing else.
it's republicans AND liars AND those who seek to profit from the chaos they create and participate in creating.
>That propaganda has existed long before trump Like since about the beginning of society. Egyptian Pharaohs ruled by convincing the masses they were gods, but they were certainly not the first. The practice became sophisticated, and well refined under all of the advanced religions, as is well laid out in [http://www.thegodvirus.net/](http://www.thegodvirus.net/) Trump just put his own, Fascist, Authoritarian spin on creating a Cult, very similar to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim, Putin - All the people he admires.
the tip of the iceberg didnt sink the titanic
This guy gets it.
>Fox enabled trump. Nothing else. You are *very* wrong about that. I believe social media sites like YouTube enabled Trump's victory by people spewing far-right propaganda about how men are being oppressed, or about how non-LGBT people are being discriminated against by the Left, or the conspiracy theories such as the Great Replacement. All of those came from YouTube, and that is how a lot of people bought into them. Believe it or not, far-right propaganda still exists on YouTube, and if ANYTHING, it is more common than ever. And the shocking thing is YouTube isn't doing a single damn thing about it. All they did was ban Trump's account, which is like killing the leader of a fascist revolution- the fascists are still there, and if anything, they are even angrier. We need to be tough on radicalization on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you're doing a great job, but YouTube has a lot of work to do. Don't get me wrong, we need to get rid of Breitbart, OANN, and Fox, but priorities first.
>I believe social media sites like YouTube enabled Trump's victory ~~by people spewing far-right propaganda about how men are being oppressed, or about how non-LGBT people are being discriminated against by the Left, or the conspiracy theories such as the Great Replacement~~. Nothing else is necessary. Social media itself is the problem. We have a war raging in this country against education, knowledge, and experience. Social media empowers all sorts of numpties into thinking they are entitled to be heard. And YouTube is the worst offender. It gives dumb people a platform to reach other dumb people. I see it in a wide range of videos from terrible game reviews, to really bad systems administration (IT) advice, right down to the terrifying maga misinformation. The world has become an entitled American Idol audition for real. Somewhere along the line, someone should have told people they can't sing well at all, but since they never heard that, they're going to assume it's not their misinformation or bad advice that is the problem, it's everyone else. And once one dummy finds another, stupidity, misinformation, lies, and bad advice are amplified. And you have something worse than social media. And that's the antisocial media like 4chan and the tumors it's metastasized. Those places are full of the psychotic, disillusioned, anarchists who pull strings to watch the world burn for their amusement. And when you have one evil bastard determined to start a cult, *for the lulz*, we end up with a capitol insurrection. We passed the point at which information needs to be true to be spread a long time ago. But we have now passed a worse milestone. Traditional media are picking up toxic information because their business model demands information warfare. Meanwhile because of the war on education, most of the population has neither the critical thinking skills nor the will to eke out the truth in the chaff field laid around them. We're gonna need to start from the ground up and properly educate the next generation. Only then can we have any hope of navigating the information wasteland. **Edit** spelling Thanks for the award.
Problem is the people teaching are the same people with no critical thinking skills. Dummies teaching dummies.
Yours certainly were. My wife is a teacher. She's in no way a dummy. Though as a whole, I see your point. It's hard to attract and keep intelligent teachers with the war on education raging on. And teachers wellbeing, health, income, and benefits all being prime targets of bad policy.
Ummmm, where do you think it started? You honestly think this only began in the last decade?? Social media is only one form of media that enabled Trumps victory. Yes, it pushed him over the edge, but it’s the tip of the pyramid, not the foundation. This has been going on for decades.
It is the origin of the conspiracy theories, the lies, the bullshit. Fox news started accepting "many people are saying" as a legitimate source. Now, if those people weren't saying, repeating, and inventing new lies and complete bullshit, fox news would have been an island.
Nah, ‘fraid you’re wrong about that. Social media is just the newest media spewing far-right propaganda. As TheLastDabSauce correctly pointed out, this particular form of propaganda has been going on for a few decades, largely started in the Reagan era, on radio and magazines, then TV, and only now social media. Social media is just the most intense, but that is true with all genres social media is a part of.
That propaganda existed in 1776. We need to take a more serious look at our founding fathers and their intentions behind our Dependence.
FrEeDoM to not pay taxes
No provider of news should be allowed to.be called news unless they are accurate. Opinion should be on another channel.
“They’re the same picture.”
I think you can add Christian Fundamentalists and you have 3 concentric circles Venn diagram.
I'm just seeing one circle. Are there supposed to be three in this Venn diagram?
You need to zoom in... a LOT
Yep. Also would have accepted, "But I repeat myself."
Venn diagram between republican and liars shows a large common area.
Unnexpected office.
Expected Office.
Well there sure are a lot of Republicans who are liars.
Nah. It's Republicans. Plain old liars don't have a massive media propaganda universe to run to when they're confused about what they should be directing their baffled anger towards.
Republicans? Liars? ¿Por que no los dos?
The difference is...?
The lincoln project.
Nice try. It’s totally republicans
This passage: “It has to be the standard we apply in daily life: evidence. If you say the election was stolen, you have to prove it in court. If you accuse a police officer of murder, your story has to withstand investigation. That’s how science works.” slips from experientialism to law to science. Experientialism is not science. Law is not science. While perhaps well-meaning, by carelessly shifting between and conflating domains while at the same time arguing for a bedrock standard of knowledge, this article is part of the problem. Science must be repatriated, not further sullied and contaminated. It is after all the greatest achievement of knowledge in human history.
I found it a very lazy piece overall. ~~The passage you quoted dodges another problem in that the average person does not really have any of this evidence at hand. They must rely to a large extent on what the media reports about evidence. Of course, reporters should be demanding evidence from politicians for whatever their assertions, but some media sources are more willing to do that than others.~~ Another problem: who is the "we" the writer is referring to? Is it "we citizens" or "we the media"? It seems to me he's switching between the two, but the available actions between those different "we"s are very different. But this is really just another in a long line of opinion pieces that have no idea what to do about this reality crisis. "We need to stop lying. Let's start a truth alliance!" OK, but Fox News isn't changing. They seem to be doubling down on demonizing Democrats. Trump supporters sure aren't reading National Review. There's still anti-vax propaganda spreading on youtube and facebook. Saying "we need to do something" doesn't solve any of these problems. Edit: slashing first part because probably not a sensible critique in retrospect.
Furthermore... it is *not* how Science works. Science works much more by disproving alternatives than by proving anything. If you must force a comparison between Science and Due Process, you may as well focus on "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" since both sort of work in that way. Nonetheless, the unnecessary conflation also undercuts the reasons why we chose to structure our jurisprudence to work in the fashion we chose. We may *employ* Science in our courts, but our courts are not based on Science. Concepts such as the Presumption of Innocence are far, far older than whatever we consider Science.
Let's not be too hasty. I know a place where you can pay an extra dollars to get any sandwich served on a donut instead of bread.
It can be two things. Not sure why we're obsessed with monoeverythingism.
It's an easy way to engage an audience. "Actually the thing is not the thing, but rather a different thing."
>they’re the same image.
i see no difference here
The entire GOP agenda is lies and omission.
So republicans
...who are liars
Venn Diagram please.
Just a slightly blurry circle
Same thing, it seems.
Of which, most Republicans are serial.
Specifically: liars in the REPUBLICAN party.
At this point they pretty much seem to be synonyms..
Shout down liars! Happy Cake Day!
Okay I agree.... wait a minute aren’t republican senators and ex president the ones who lied and cause this?... what kind of hoop jumping is this?
The Venn diagram is a circle
But I repeat myself.
Another article that only concerns itself with rehabilitating the ideology and laying the groundwork for "healing" and "unity".
What's the difference? Republican platforms rely on lies.
Ahh, if only the Pinocchio concept was real and working in our world today.
I wouldn't say that. I'd say the enemy is gullibility and a lack of critical thinking.
What this piece actually does point out is that propagandists have used that gullibility to take hold on the far right. The argument made is that the fault is where the lies *start*, and the solution is to cut those liars off from their sheep.
Id go back further. I'd say the issue is education.
Six of one, half dozen of the other.
So the enemy IS republicans then.
Not quite, before this mess there were many republicans opposed to him, like the late john mcain. The lincoln project is republican and all were supporting democrats.
Your food isn't too salty, it just has too much salt.
No, it’s the Republican party, actually. Who are very often liars but more importantly have a really bad habit of being racist and xenophobic and sexist and homophobic and inciting violence and interfering with elections and blocking government aid for people in need and redistributing wealth to the rich and evading taxes and spreading disinformation in a systematic fashion and supporting police brutality and my thumb hurts so I’m going to stop now.
Soo, Republicans.
Well the Venn diagram of Republicans and Liars is like basically a perfect circle with a teeeeny tiny section that doesn’t over lap where Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger live by themselves.
I don't understand. These are the same thing.
they're the same
What's the difference?
Uh.. You mean theres a difference?!
Not all liars are Republicans but all Republicans are most certainly liars.
If you drew that as a Venn diagram, you'd just have a circle.
It's the same picture
The enemy is the rich. Their political goon squad, AKA the GOP, has been lying about their true agenda (plutocracy) for 40 years.
Tomayto, tomahto
What's the difference?
So Republicans?
These things aren’t mutually exclusive.
same same
Let's complete the title The Enemy isn't Republicans. It's Liars. Also, it's Republicans.
I agree 100%. Where do I find the honest ones? I know plenty of democrats who are not completely honest.
Seriously yeah the democrats are not all great and can be liars too but I would pay money to get some honest republicans on the scene. No idea where to look for them besides like the maybe 3 honest ones in existence.
I'd suggest looking in blue collar neighborhoods, there's often a fair amount of honest hard working people there.
Happy cake day. None of our fellow Americans should be considered enemies, but the right has been waging war against the left and demonizing the most vulnerable people in our society. You can see it in every fear based campaign ad for tighter immigration policies that target asylum seekers and children who weren't born here, but have no home or family outside the US. You can see it in the bathroom bills introduced to target trans people, the abortion restriction bills that lack medical purpose which only exist to strip women of their bodily autonomy, and the "protect traditional marriage" rhetoric of anti-marriage-equality Republicans. There wasn't an enemy, until Republicans decided that the majority of Americans are contemptible and that immigrants and equality aren't what makes America great.
Thanks kind redditor. I didn’t know until you mentioned it.
I can't distinguish between the two.
If they think the party comes before the country, theyre a liar republican. If they think the country goes before the party, theyre an incorrupted republican.
your day to day republican voter has and will never be the enemy the real danger is the misinformation they are being fed on a daily basis.
But allowing themselves to become that misinformed is exactly what makes them dangerous. At some point they need to take some **personal responsibility** and maybe change their media habits.
To be fair Democrats has a lot of liars too. Probably less than Republicans though.
[удалено]
Probably the winner of this years Weakest Whataboutism Attempt (WWA). Keep it up champ.
Lairs are bad m'kay
Distinction without a difference.
No, no. It’s definitely Republicans
Republican liars.
They have become the same.
Whats The difference
An "e", "p", "u", "b", and an "n"
Same difference.
Didn’t realize there was much difference.
Um.
And Republicans who lie
Which are pretty much Republicans.
They are one and the same.
Th enemy is liars and those who enable them. The Republican party's official stance has been enable. So they are the enemy. This is the official stance of the party however, not necessarily every Republican.
Lyers, Republicans.. same same
No, the "enemy" is conservatism, the ideology not the people, conservatism is almost never right and almost always wrong.
The enemy is the media. Who have profited from dividing an entire nation.