Post by The Horny GoatPost by m***@gmail.comIt's a waste of time talking to Trump supporter.
They have no ability to comprehend the truth.
They drank the Kool-aid four years ago and take part in a cult of personality.
They don't have the ability to think critically.
If you REALLY believe that then you have a permanent intellectual
divide in the United States since once Trump is off the scene you've
given up the opportunity to win them over.
Once Trump is gone do you really intend to do nothing at all to win
them over before the next demagogue comes along?
That's not a good solution to help your preferred candidates win
election nor is it a good idea for re-developing a healthy body
politic.
It's not merely a matter of talking to individual Trumpists. Like the
old tag line says, "They're soaking in it." The parents of a late
high-school buddy of mine, very sweet people, told me with a straight
face that George Soros was paying Central Americans to walk to the U.S.
border and ask for asylum. They definitely did not come up with that
idea on their own. I doubt before four years ago they had ever even
heard of George Soros. These people both like and respect me, but
nothing I said could dissuade them from this harebrained idea. They're
getting this stuff from Fox News, reactionary talk radio, and from memes
emailed by other elderly viewers of Fox News (they're not on Facebook or
Twitter, not that that would be better), and you can't convince them
that it's hogwash.
It's one thing to have normative disagreements over the size of
government or the budget ceiling or even how restrictive immigration
policy should be, but the number and size of the deliberately false
"factoids" out there dwarf even what Fox News, Limbaugh, Breitbart, et
al. were spewing before Trump came along. No one individual can keep up
with it all. It is a completely different and self-reinforcing
psychological reality from the verifiable one. It's as if about 20% of
the U.S. has joined a cult, with another 20% knowing or at least
suspecting the truth, but believing their bread to be buttered on the
side of fantasy, so they play along.
The ones who have realized that they made a practical miscalculation,
like my schoolmate who thought that Trump was going to propel him from
the 10% into the 1%, are the ones who are going to make the difference
in this election. It's the same reason why those tankie commies at
Goldman Sachs have said on the record that the U.S. is more likely to
prosper under Biden than under a second Trump term.
Because of the unprecedented scope of digital media, we're in the middle
of the most powerful disinformation campaign in human history, amplified
by bots and trolls, some foreign, some domestic. The greatest weapon
they have is that almost everyone is convinced that they're immune to
propaganda, the same way everyone is convinced that advertising may work
on other people but not on themselves. Countering it is going to take a
lot more than just sitting down at the kitchen table and talking to your
neighbor, who may literally live in another mental landscape than you
do.
We're in a situation where we need deprogramming, like de-Nazification
in the aftermath of World War II in Germany. We're unlikely to get
anything like that, though. The practical things that I see as helping
are federal intervention in foreign election interference and
disinformation campaigns (won't stop the domestic disinfo campaigns,
though), aggressive law enforcement against domestic terrorism,
reducing community spread of the novel coronavirus, the introduction of
the Public Option to reach 100% health coverage in red states that had
rejected Medicaid expansion, millions of overdue infrastructure and
renewable energy jobs, the browning of American ethnic demographics
(though this is looked on with abject fear by the Trumpists), and the
gradual replacement of people born before 1950 with people born after
2000, who take climate threat, LGBTQIA rights, and extrajudicial police
violence more seriously. The youth vote seems to be up this year.
"Democrats reported awareness [of QAnon] at a higher rate than
Republicans, 55 to 39 percent, and overwhelmingly said it is a
'very bad' thing for the country.
"On the other hand, 41 percent of Republicans who had heard or
read about the theory said it is a good thing for the U.S.
"Followers of QAnon believe, without evidence, that a secret
cabal of Democrats and Hollywood elites are engaged in large
scale child trafficking and pedophilia.
"They also also believe that President Trump is working with the
military to expose and execute that shadowy network."
<https://thehill.com/policy/technology/516791-awareness-of-qanon-jumps-in-new-poll>
-Micky