“And you’ll dig under it and see that while it may initially appear anti-Trump it has a subtler purpose, to discourage people from being engaged or to suggest that all politics are so corrupt that there’s an equivalence between the candidates.”
coughsusansarandoncough
“…You just can’t undo decades of brainwashing overnight, if ever…”
Nice post. My take is that these same tactics would work again tomorrow.
The people duped by these ads are too dumb to know they were scammed.
They have core beliefs outlined in this piece and those core beliefs aren’t going away. They provide warmth and comfort to the holders. I heard most of them decades – I mean decades – ago. Those beliefs, irrational as they may be, are baked into the culture of those who would support a Trump
They also got Nixon and Bush Jr elected – oh, and don’t forget Saint Ronnie. .
It worked so effectively to cement Putin in power in Russia they thought; “Why not in the USA too?”
They are just repeating the steps they took to put Putin in power over here, with their lackey Trump as the puppet.
The dumbing down of America and the strangling of the school system has reaped it’s reward of a general populace devoid of any critical thinking skills whatsoever.
Even Ivy league grads seem to make it through without ever having to “Think”
True. But don’t forget those fine Nader voters…
I am not even sure I blame the schools per se. Parents often put these sorts of ideas into the kids. For some evangelical Christians they are brainwashed into a conservative christianity from youth. Most do not come out of it. Other factors apply the same way.
The schools do not help, I agree, because they are teaching to tests as opposed to more proper critical thinking (some is on the test) but schools are also under assault for not respecting everybodies opinion in things like science class etc.
It does go back further even than FOX, but I blame Fox in general, and Rupert Murdoch in particular, for the decay and ultimate downfall of American democracy based on the long-term brainwashing of between 30 and 40 percent of the American population.
Rupert Murdoch. Is there NOTHING that can be done about him and what he’s created? Certainly St Ronnie’s abolition of the Fairness Doctrine went a long way to opening the door to nonstop blatant right-wing propaganda on the public airwaves. But telecommunications deregulation –– OK’d by no less than President Bill Clinton –– went a lot further. At this point, I really don’t see what can be done. Rupert Murdoch, for all the crimes or federal violations I suspect he’s committed, well never be investigated, much less prosecuted. And even that would no longer make any difference. The damage has been done, and appears irreparable. It reminds me forcibly of the decline and fall of the Greco-Roman civilization. America has been rotting at its core pretty much since Reagan, and the decay is now so deep and all-pervasive that limbs are beginning to fall off.
curious if the US could/has/will retaliate with the Russians in a similar way? why wouldn’t it work over there?
Although I agree that Fox and the rest of the right-wing media outlets have made the situation worse, I think it is a mistake to say that they are the cause of the problem, rather than a symptom of it.
Fox, Breitbart, Drudge, etc., didn’t spring up in a vacuum. Each of them was created in order to exploit a large segment of the American population that already existed. Strom Thurmond ran as the presidential candidate of the Dixiecrats (officially, the States Rights Democratic Party) in 1948 in response to President Truman’s order to integrate the US military, long before Fox, etc. existed. George Wallace ran as the segregationist candidate of the American Independent Party in 1968, also long before Fox was started in 1996.
What jep07 says is accurate as far as it goes but fails to discuss the real enablers of both the GOP and hackers and trolls around the globe.
The real enablers are the American mainstream media which under the guise of fair and balanced equates facts and “alternative” facts to a point that nobody not already well learned on a topic has any idea of what is the truth. I mean the only reason the election was close enough for the Russian meddling to matter was that for two years prior to the election the media was equating any hiccup of Hillary Clinton with the lying racist misogynist xenophobic gay bashing bible thumping bigotry and hypocrisy of Donald Trump and the GOP.
But in regard to jep07’s mention of "hate-speech, the media has been helping the GOP for decades. For example, for the last 40 years anytime anyone mentions that because of 200 years of legal discrimination there is a link between “Class” and “Race” in America and therefore whenever you talk about “Class” you are talking about “Race”, the media accuses the person of “playing the race card”. When in fact it is the media and others who are “playing the race card” by denying/ignoring that link because it without specifically acknowledging that link it allows for “hate-speech” by saying that the racial connection between “Class” and “Race” is the result of “those people” not being as good.
It wouldn’t work for a number of reasons. For example, the Russian political system is entirely different from that of the US. Also, ordinary Russian citizens don’t have the same unfettered access to social media sites such as Facebook as do ordinary American citizens. There also are major differences in culture.
The sad reality is that Fox News and other right-wing media outlets never will run stories letting their viewers/readers know how they were duped by Russia. The only way to get that information to them would be for Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc., to trace who received/viewed the Russian propaganda and then send the a message or tweet letting them know that what they saw/received during the campaign was Russian propaganda and not actual “news” or “facts.”
Unfortunately, I don’t think that is going to happen.
Sorry, it’s not all about Fox News. Or evil Republicans, though they understand and exploit these trends while Dems don’t by and large grok them at all.
Unless we deal with the untempered, swooning intellectual embrace of Information Technology (sigh!), little will change. Or maybe we should shun mass media itself, a delivery system for consumerism devoted to not antagonizing advertisers–or viewers, but mostly advertisers. Fox has an agenda that is more overtly guided by prejudice and avarice, but is built on that mass media template.
Now add the Web. The academic truth aspirants and fact dispersers–the original attraction (sigh! So useful, so smart!) of an open network–are now intermingled with commercial lust, poorly updated versions of hard copy and broadcast media, and unmediated argle-bargle. Alex Jones is a Star! The President’s frequent Twitter vomiting gets headlines across all platforms! Yay IT! Freedom!
It’s not because of Fox, folks. It’s us. We are conditioned to like what’s bad for us and good for advertisers, including in our political tastes. Trump was better theater than boring Clinton. His slogans were better. He wore a brand cap.
We are children of TV and now of the Web. Likely not you personally, because you’re on this thread, but Americans as a whole are deeply selfish. I’m not aware of any political proposals that would deeply impact our negative trend. Our cultural flaws are emotional, not logical. How does that get fixed? That’s what I look for on-line and in books. Meanwhile, I donate and I support those who try something else.
This is Us.
This list is lacking because sexism was absolutely part of that equation. The explosions of men’s rights groups, tech bros and red pill types that infiltrated online forums, social media and the news were all directed at pushing back against liberals and progressives and when Hillary became defacto nominee, it was amplified to divide the left.
You realize the “online explosion” of negativity was in part instigated by people who speak better Russian than English? And that you’ll never know if you’re another social media consumer who was emotionally tweaked by Trump tacticians.
I doubt we’ll ever know the full extent of the Russian meddling, but this was, in my opinion, the thing that had the greatest, most devastating impact. And it was two-fold.
One group targeted more moderate, sorta fence sitters by playing on the kinds of fears and anxieties outlined in the piece.The other group targeted Sanders voters and those who lean left.
On left leaning sites and FB groups, the second group was inundated with hand-wringing posts and literal concern trolling memes about Clinton stealing the primary, the DNC, DWS, Brazille, etc. Minorities were beaten over the head with claims that Clinton is secretly racist. I don’t know how many conversations i had with people in which I had to explain what all was actually in the 1994 Crime Bill, that Sanders voted for it and Clinton didn’t. I think those things, as well as many others, were expertly exploited by the Russians all across social media. Just think how easy it would be to friend a bunch of obviously liberal folks on FB and then push out a steady stream of anti-Clinton memes that they then share with all their friends and so on.
And the same thing was happening to the more moderate group. They weren’t getting the “she’s racist” memes in their feeds. No, they were hit over the head with, “Hillary kills people” and posts about her stealing from her family’s foundation. They received a steady drumbeat of posts that subtly fed into every bad thing anyone anywhere ever said about Clinton.
This campaign waged by the Russians was subconscious and targeted to either convince you to vote for PP, vote 3rd party, or not vote at all. And it worked. Yes, Clinton got many more votes, but the point wasn’t the number of votes. It was to swing the election in certain states just enough to effect the outcome.
This. My knowledge was entirely theoretical. I know it was the primary focus of what they were up to, but my knowledge of Facebook is mostly theoretical. But I strongly suspect that the persistent grievance nurturing based on the myth of the all-powerful DNC that stole the primaries for Hillary was, if not created, amplified and kept alive, by Russia on Facebook.
Personally, I NEVER considered FOX mainstream media, they were always outside that purview from what I could fathom.
Posing as mainstream, and then owning it simply with flashy sets and eye-candy female commentators, while the men were all blowhard buffoons with few exceptions, the realmainstream edia was salted and peppered with those characters before FOX, but they were not concentrated into such a clusterbunch. Once Murdoch got rolling and Ailles leaned into it, that meainstream media ownership became untouchable.
Until recently… curious how Trump,who was at time a beneficiary of that left-hating largess, has seen a metoeric rise while FOX took a big dump… it was simultaneous. And Ailles really left the hard way. When will Hannity join the other floaties flushing down that toilet? Seems like FOX fell as Trump rose, go figure.
I have a friend who bought the whole #neverHillary nonsense hook, line and sinker. He was even citing RT-produced videos trying to “prove” she stole the primary from Bernie. We’ve drifted apart over the last decade, so I don’t know if the derangement was self-inflicted or influenced by the circle of friends he’s joined. I tried to point out the inconsistencies in the stories (and the unreliability of his sources), but nothing got through to him. In part, he insisted that since he lived in CA, it didn’t matter if he voted for Stein in “protest.”
I haven’t spoken with him recently, so I don’t know what he thinks of everything that’s come out (and likely will continue to leak out) since the “election.” I would hope that maybe the blinders would come off to some degree, but self-delusion is the most pernicious.
