If Dems are relying on legislation and campaigns of fact-checking and truth-telling (“telling” being the operative word) to protect them… they’re crisped toast.
Imagery is too powerful, speaking biologically: neurologically, cognitively, psychologically, unconsciously. The science is in – and has been for quite some time. Corporations know it, marketers know it, dictators knows it, right wing think tanks know it… while Democratic politicos are in complete pitiful ignorance or denial about it.
Even when subjects behold imagery they know is not real – like boarded up financial centers – it affects them (us), it changes perceptions, it changes behaviors, it spreads. AI manipulation, rogue social media, right wing corporate “news” – think “Morning in America” on a fusion battery. Biden and Democrats will be vaporized by this, and fully from content sources that legislation can’t touch.
Democrats know how to talk. They know how to impart, to canvas – to “educate”. They don’t know how to communicate!
This bears repeating: Democrats do not know how to communicate.
That’s why Dems have been interminably on the razor’s edge (up until now – the ultimate historical trend towards loss will be crystal clear in hindsight).
As gross as it is to contemplate, fighting this firestorm with fire (and getting ahead of it) is the only way. If there is any way at all. When it comes to the way minds work, Democrats better dispense with the myth – soundly refuted over and over again by decades of rigorous research – of Rational Enlightenment, and start to believe in science. Learn how to communicate, to take control of language, to understand cultural story-making. (Democrats, not republicans, are the partisan deniers of science.) Democrats poo-poo the truth of human cognition gleefully on the path to their inevitable functional extinction.
This. Stuff. Is Real.