FOX “News” has effectively divided, conditioned and massaged Republicans for decades to regurgitate the message disseminated by Rupert Murdoch through their favorite flavor talking heads (Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and more recently Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters).

They went from ‘Russia bad’ in the 1980’s to ‘Russia good’ and ‘America had it wrong’. The viewers lack critical thought under scrutiny and regurgitate the talking points of their favorite broadcasters.

It’s not conservativism, conservativism has been captured by think tanks funded by oil and banking billionaires. They’re framed conservativism, gutted it, and replaced its insides with Libertarianism (and sometimes technocratic fascism), as that’s what gives them the lowest taxes, the most corporate welfare, union busting capabilities, and defends their wealth accumulation most efficiently.

They’re not good members of society, this is demonstrated in Trump’s fascism (which is based on Roy Cohn’s fascism). It seeks to destroy society, the nation, and government.

even the idea of altruism is a lie.

Wow. You’re right. Helping others is as politicized as abortion. One of the tribes can’t even fathom uplifting their neighbors because that could be equated to socialism and it would get them kicked out of their in-group.

There’s some truth to this, but if you take the effort to break out of your media bubble, to find original sources, to read documentary evidence, indictments, transcripts.

To go the other direction and track down evidence for Trump’s accusations against others,

the guy comes off even worse.

I’m actually curious.

Are there countries (ones that have a voting system) where it isn’t all one big popularity contest?

Have you considered that you actually found a tankie in the wild?

他會說中文嗎？

Conservatives who are capable of good quality research, and honest self-reflection barely exist because those two qualities often destroy their affiliations to modern conservativism as it stands today.

So some become neocon-neoliberal hybrids, others become economic Libertarians or Fascists in sheeps clothing, but most, are just as they seem - people who feel betrayed and shut out by the prevailing liberalisms of the day (often personified in the form of an ex-wife, ex-boss, or minority on the street), and it’s something they don’t want to investigate or research honestly.

In fact, most conservatives of this “follower” ilk, are deeply and psychologically invested in their sickness, in maintaining their “honest dogma” as it explains past traumas and the state of their lives in easy and convenient ways.

Get them together in groups and it becomes a self-reenforcing system. Self-propagating. It’s a self-sustaining set of problems and problem mindsets.

Some for conspiracy theorists, gets to be a real problem when they get a platform too.

Despair is also a key party platform. The more hopeless someone is, the more likely they are to invite catastrophic change like Trump promises.

I would say that all Americans were. Republicans/conservatives overachieved however.

There’s this bizarre assumption that debates shape public opinion rather than sharpen prior biases.

Liberals watched the debate and concluded Harris was normal and therefore won.

Conservatives watched and concluded only Trump is willing to speak The Truth to a hostile media and therefore won.

Undecideds don’t like either one of them for a variety of reasons. But nothing these two said on Tuesday really turned heads. It was classic Trump and classic Kamala.

It’s 100% this. Politics is treated like a sport in the USA; the only thing that matters is your side winning, and which side you root for is largely dictated by location and family history. This is encouraged by the private news media, who intentionally report on election campaigns in this manner in order to increase ratings and ad revenue. Social media only made it worse because it made a lot of abstract identity dimensions, such as political affiliation, feel stronger to people than their everyday lives.

Moron is no longer enough. Republican voters at this point are malicious, not stupid, not poor gullible fools, they are malicious people who actively seek to harm others, no matter how ‘nice’ they may seem.

I am not interested in hearing about how someone knows a Republican who is such a nice pleasant person, willing to help just about anyone, kind, caring, etc. It is a mask, like that of…I forget the precise medical term, either psychopath or sociopath. But the irony is they are worse because they do have the capacity for empathy, but they choose not to.

And this is, and always has been, who they are. This is not new. This is exactly who they have always been, people who, if they lived in a different time, would happily own slaves, or watch someone tortured for the evening’s entertainment at the coliseum, or any number of such things.

That’s the people we’re dealing with, and they are a significant portion of the population as they always have been.

Society has to acknowledge that half of its members are of below average intelligence. And we need a way to handle the lowest tenth, since they are a danger to themselves and others.

I am tired of people saying trumptards are “misguided” or some bullshit like that. If you voted for him in 2016, sure, you could have been misled

I’ve watched my in-laws change since they first voted red in 2016. Their reasoning at the time was that Obama didn’t reach across the isle enough so they voted trump. The other option was Hillary Clinton, and Trump said some weirdly populist stuff that made him further left than her on some matters, so can ya really blame them?

But since then their critical thinking skills have declined so much, their comfort with risk has increased significantly, and their ability to empathize has dropped like lead. They’ve also shown their true colors in having zero willingness to make even the smallest changes to plans to account for severe allergies or their special needs grandkids (and refuse to see the obvious mental illness and distress in some of their family too)

Quite frankly, Trump’s base is a cult of personality. These poor souls need to be deprogrammed and taught once again how to think critically, and probably temporarily disconnected from social media and cable news

Obama won before and he was part black. Why would that be a problem now?

It’s propaganda. But, it’s not just propaganda, it’s effective propaganda.

The fact that it’s so effective is somewhat new and very concerning. We have to understand why it’s effective if there’s any hope of eventually stopping it. And, it’s effective not just because the propaganda is well crafted, it’s effective because there’s a whole system that immerses the audience in it and never lets them see an alternative point of view.

In North Korea the only information you get is information specifically selected by the state. The US free market and first amendment was supposed to be a shield against that sort of propaganda. Unfortunately, while people have the right to find other forms of media, a lot of people want the comfort of living inside their own media bubble. Then the propaganda channel tells them that every other source of media is full of lies, and controlled by the jews, and who knows what else, and those people get even more locked in to their propaganda source. Then they’re told that scientists are getting rich (ha!) by selling out, so you can’t trust scientific papers. So, you can’t trust the government, the media, scientists, doctors, schools… you can only trust them.

Then they’re told that if they ever do try to do their own research, they’re not going to get results because of censorship. Some censorship exists. Sometimes it’s formal, sometimes it’s informal, like YouTube taking down videos that hurt their bottom line, or cause them headaches. But, the convenient thing about claiming that information is being censored is that it’s unprovable or “unfalsifiable”. You can’t prove that something that doesn’t exist was censored because you can’t prove it ever existed in the first place. And, of course, when an idiot is told that information on “turbo cancer” is being censored, they search for it and get no results, that just reinforces their belief that the news is being censored.

Add to that that the same group that wants to lock people into a pipeline of disinformation also wants to defund schools and universities. You can’t hope that someone can learn the truth from a teacher or a professor if the school no longer exists. You can’t hope that the next generation learns critical thinking in high school if the high school is defunded and shut down.

Big tech companies making their platforms extremely engaging is yet another element in this shitty soup. Most of these companies actually employ mostly liberal people, and the culture is at least somewhat left of center. But, they get their money by keeping people engaged, which means feeding them things that are shocking, angering, etc. That keeps people in their bubbles, and keeps them from engaging their critical thinking abilities.

The end result is you get people living in bubbles, listening to, watching and reading news that makes them feel good because it reinforces their existing biases. They cut off people in their lives who have dissenting views because either they’re angry about that person’s views, or it’s just too much of a headache to constantly fight with them. Social media keeps them in a bubble that keeps them engaged, and keeps them seeing the same point of view over and over. And so-on.

Because the whole situation is so complicated, it’s not going to be easy to reverse. It’s not just a matter of shutting down Fox News, or Newsmax or MSNBC or any other propaganda fountain. It’s also going to have to involve breaking up tech monopolies, or at least removing their Section 230 protection for their editorial decisions. It’s also going to require major educational system reforms, ensuring that all kids go to schools that teach critical thinking skills, and because this is the US that will involve major fights over property taxes and religious freedom. I honestly don’t know if it’s going to be possible.

they’ll say “well you did it too so it’s not bad.”

And they’ll be right apart from it being not bad.