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Republican voters: "Does he still piss off the many, many, many groups of people we openly hate and wish harm upon more than any other candidate could?"
Well yes, but what does that have to do with effective governance?
Republican voters: "what the fuck is governance?"
This is almost word-for-word an interaction I had with a coworker yesterday. Said she voted Orange this primary because "he's the only one to fix this damn gender issue", so I asked her what she thought of his policies on foreign affairs and the domestic wage gap.
I got a double-chinned shrug and an "idunno". Lmfao our country is going to burn because a vast swath of people would rather see hundreds of thousands prosecuted for socially-engineered offenses instead of nurturing the human condition.
On a solemn note, our country's governance has become a joke. A circus of clowns too busy honking horns and throwing pies at each other to notice the tent around them is ablaze. To everyone, please, do not take our country's governance as a joke. Serious, irreversible consequences oft come from impotent or non-existent legislative power.
We stand at a precipice, so please vote. Vote. VOTE. VOTE.
I mean, you really have to hand it to Fox and the right-wing propaganda machine for so successfully turning such a stupid non-issue into the top priority for a bunch of people.
I mean it's wrenchingly sick, but they've pulled it off so well.
From the outside, I think Fox News was only able to do that because in US culture, TV and movies are more revered than anywhere else, and therefore people's opinions, when voiced on TV, are taken way more seriously than they should be.
It's hard to explain what I mean but it's a feeling of "if it's on TV, there must be something to it" which is very strong in US culture, and this enables the worst and most evil people to influence public opinion, even if they spew nothing but lies or phantasies.
As for movies, I am always totally in awe of how many movies a person in the US watches - going to the movies once or even twice a week is widespread, which is odd because most movies aren't worth watching. The rest of the days they watch even more movies and TV shows at home. I always wonder what they get from that.
Listening to Knowledge Fight (the Alex Jones analysis podcast), I learned that Jones frequently uses the plot of Hollywood movies as a source for his insane conspiracy theories about "the globalists". So it seems like he knows that many dumb Americans aren't able to differentiate between movies and reality, because they watch more movies than interact with people and matters IRL.
Don't get me wrong, I love movies and TV shows too, but nobody can tell me there's enough good ones out there to fill every damn evening of the week. I go to the cinema maybe once a year, and watch the odd TV shows maybe every 3-4 years (because I don't want to spend my time watching crap).
You got this crap all over the world, the US is just a bit further along the way. People love to get absolved of all responsibilities and the political right gives them exactly that. They are also better at information exchange, just copying propaganda techniques, that worked somewhere else.
It started before Fox, with Hate Radio. And a few other things.
But I really don't think it's a "TV is God in the US" thing at all. It's extremely normal for people to have trusted information sources. And purported news organizations have been a standard source across the world for 150+ years.
In the US (and several other places) news has become increasingly propagandized, particularly towards the far-right. People increasingly also don't care about actual truth, but what they want to be true (often based on the propaganda)
There's probably several cultural things that make Americans more succeptable to some of this manipulation, but a lot of that culture is the product of DECADES of very hard, specific work (which also led very directly to Fox News). Starting almost immediately after the Watergate scandal.
But it's also not like propaganda, and falling for propaganda, is unique to the US or throughout history. At all. Or because of TV and movies or whatever.
It's just impressive that with the US's relatively strong, free press (and freedom laws) and low government propaganda (again - relatively) that a right wing propaganda machine has been able to so massively corrupt things. And fucking scary.
It's so strange but also so obvious that Americans who love Trump have the exact same worries about the world that Putin's voters, the Russian country bumpkins, had when they still were able to vote in non-sham elections: Gender and gender roles, homosexuality, the end of toxic masculinity, etc. It's all they care about, and I think it speaks volumes about their innermost fears about their own lives.
If only they just realized as long as trans people and democrats have rights, so will they. They want so badly to be oppressed
They want both victimhood and domination, at the same time, and being able to hold that wild dissonance in their heads without alarm bells going off is what makes them Republicans. Republican media has trained them into believing that being both victim and oppressor is a perfectly valid position to hold, and because it feels good to believe that, that they deserve to be powerful enough hurt others and also bear no responsibility for that power as they are the victims of the people they want to hurt, many do.
They aren't special or anything, critical thinking and reasoning must be taught. Without that, most people rely on their feelings. The Nazis convinced massive swaths of Germans that because Jews and other groups they hated were "victimizing the German people," scapegoating them of course, the German people should allow the Nazis to murder them in their name, guilt free because clearly the german people were the victims of these scapegoats.
Herd mentality is a hell of a drug. So is Schadenfreude. American Republicans are addicted to both. Not entirely their fault either, Fox "News" and other right wing propaganda made them into what they've become over decades. Free speech weaponized into a a cancerous means of indoctrination through appealing to fear and hatred.
Nance was a shitty governor anyways.