Since this is where I was talking about a lot of conservative propaganda, I figure this'll fit this thread even though it's a slightly different topic. And I didn't wanna start a whole new one just because I'm in the mood to make fun of something...
If it's boring, skip it - yer not gonna miss anything all that profound, I'm just in a rambling mood.
https://news.yahoo.com/conservatives-laser-focus-owning-libs-191115709.html
Here's some excerpts, with mockery:
When President Donald Trump ran for office four years ago, a conservative writer with a growing following vented the kind of doubt and cynicism that was common among people like her who worried about the damage he could do to their cause. She called him “a demagogue with no real solutions for anything at all.” She accused him of betraying the anti-abortion movement. And she wrote that his constant complaining about being treated unfairly was “ineffectual and impotent.”
Today, that writer, Mollie Hemingway, is one of Trump’s favorites. Her pieces for The Federalist, where she is a senior editor, have earned presidential retweets and affirmation for their scathing criticism of Democrats and the media, whom she accuses of lying about just about everything when it comes to the president.
In other words, their integrity is more of a convenience thing. Fight the guy until he wins... the fall right in line with everything he does and become the same person you were criticizing before. Basically, do the good ol' conservative thing and become a hypocrite.
How many of us have seen people who "don't like Trump and think he's a clown" who'll yet defend everything he does, and attack anybody who criticizes him? All of us.
Recently she claimed that journalists had fabricated reports about tear gas and the excessive use of force against protesters outside the White House (law enforcement, in fact, has acknowledged shooting a pepper-based irritant into the crowd) and said “a large group of Democrats” was defending the destruction of federal property (there is no such group).
I'm a huge fan of the new conservative trick of "you didn't see that stuff you saw on video, it never happened!" No matter how many spent gas rounds you show 'em, they keep denying it. They're used to their base, who will gladly disbelieve anything they see in favor of what they're told to think... and they've started thinking the rest of the world is that gullible, too. Sorry, kids, doesn't work like that.
Instead, they offer an outlet for outrage against those the president has declared his enemies, often by reducing them to a culture war caricature of liberalism.
I know a lot of liberals, many of whom annoy the hell out of me, but I don't know
any who resemble the strawmen that the right keep attacking.
The capacity that many Trump supporters have developed to focus so intensely on the perceived wrongdoing of his opponents is a powerful asset for the president as he runs for reelection amid growing economic and social turmoil and a public health crisis that a majority of voters say they don’t trust him to handle.
"The capacity" being a nice-fella way of saying "brainwashing." That's a fundamental of cults: seeing yourself as persecuted by some opposition, which seldom resembles the people who are actually against you or what they're actually doing. Most of the time Trump's cultists like to hold their opponents responsible for
things they think that they MIGHT do, as if they've already done them.
Think back to when Obama was in office, and all the things the conservatives hated about him. How many were actual things that he did, and how many were things they were sure he was
gonna do... but didn't? It's heavily stacked toward that fear of the "gonna" rather than actual grievance against the "did."
This almost entirely white cohort of conservative commentators can spend ample time mocking the mainstream and liberal media for focusing on Trump’s racist and divisive messaging without giving nearly as much consideration to the harm caused, for instance, when he promotes a video of someone shouting “white power.”
Note how if reporters just show video of Trump saying things, conservatives will still claim it's "bias." If anyone accurately repeats what Trump has said, then they're "biased," even though there's not any other way to report on that stuff honestly. Sometimes it's not "bias." Sometimes your side just really is that bad.
Through this lens, Trump’s transgressions seem irrelevant compared with the manifold misdeeds of everyone from the Clintons to CNN.
Good ol' what-about-ism. Where would conservatives be without it?
Their portrayal of what the country would look like if the Democrats win big in November is indeed a frightening one to Trump supporters: a White House with Sen. Bernie Sanders as the shadow socialist president; a Democratic House of Representatives where Rep. Ilhan Omar calls the shots; a society in which mask mandates are the first step in a government experiment with social control; a political arena where conservatives are badgered into silence.
See? Fear of a fantasy in their own heads.
The mask thing is especially odd. Somehow they think wearing a mask during a pandemic is a "road to tyranny." When battling a virus caused by droplet spread, it's obviously the best, easiest protection against it. It's common sense and far from unreasonable. And yet, because Trump has told them to, they pitch a big ol' six-titty airedale bitch about it, and scream about all kinds of nonsensical conspiracies.
Whether you enjoy wearing a mask (who does?) or not, it does make absolute sense in the situation we're in, and there is absolutely nothing about it that leads to tyranny. The arguments against it are nonsense, and based entirely on doing Trump's bidding in the face of all common sense.
And then they get mad if you call 'em a cult.
To many conservatives these scenarios seem perfectly plausible, especially as some prominent figures on the right contend that their voices are unwelcome in mainstream media — and even some liberals face a backlash for arguing that shaming and ostracism of opposing points of view has grown too common.
It's not that their voices would be unwelcome... it's that nobody has a desire to listen to people tell hysterical lies. If conservatives would make logical, fact-based arguments, then they'd be heard. Refuted, perhaps, but heard. But when they're just spreading absolute horseshit, they can't really get mad when their horseshit isn't regarded on the same level as actual facts. I'm sorry, but people spewing "QAnon" crap don't deserve respect. It's not "ostracism of opposing points of view" to point out when something's not only a lie, but a silly one.
“There are a lot of conservatives reading ‘1984’ right now,” said Allie Beth Stuckey,
I don't believe there are ever a lot of conservatives
reading ANYTHING. I live in a state thick with these fucks, and readers they are NOT. At
best they'll listen to books on tape, but if you want to discuss literature with them, you're gonna have a lousy time because the wide percentage of 'em haven't read a book in high school, and they most likely lied about that.
who hosts a podcast, “Relatable,” and is the author of a forthcoming book on self-esteem, “You’re Not Enough (And That’s OK).”
The follow up to that inspirational best-seller,
You're A Piece of Crap, Get Used To It. Stuckey has a growing fan base and a large platform through her affiliations with right-leaning outfits like Turning Point USA and PragerU that are aimed at reaching millennials.
See? Total liar propaganda outfits. Those places simultaneously (A) brag that they're the biggest things on YouTube and (B) are "oppressed" and "being censored." And all the time they lie and lie and lie and make absolutely ridiculous, dishonest arguments.
While she does not go out of her way to defend the president, she said she got the sense from her audience that there are a lot of young women like her: socially conservative and religious, who sometimes cringe at Trump’s behavior but don’t let it bother them overall.
So, essentially, hypocrites.
“There’s fear. It’s real fear. And I understand if you’re not a conservative it’s hard to be empathetic, and it seems like an exaggeration,”Stuckey said. “But like the same kind of fear on the left that Trump is a unique threat to the country, there’s a real fear on the right, especially I would say from Christians, of what the country would look like under a Democratic president.”
Christians just spent 8 years under a Democratic president and they did just fine. Honestly, any Christian who claims to be "oppressed" in America is laughably full of shit. They run roughshod over the country and then cry if any secular law prevents them from overreach. That's not "oppression," it's just not allowing you a theocracy and preserving rights for non-Christians... which a lot of Christians don't think should be a thing that exists.
The thread of commentary that isn’t explicitly pro-Trump as much as it is witheringly anti-left has blossomed into a big business,
See? The right is both "oppressed and silenced," and is
big business. Nice trick if you can pull that off.
Honestly, that's what's wrong with the country, and why everyone's so divided. It has become immensely profitable to fill the heads of stupid people with alarmist, untrue bullshit. Creating division is a major money-making business now.
If you get down to basics, conservatives and liberals pretty much want the same things for the country. We have different ideas about how to implement them, and if you can draw people away from their propaganda for a bit, not let Hannity tell them what they're supposed to think, conservatives will even agree with a lot of "liberal" ideas... if they don't know they're "liberal."
Like, right now my right-wing co-worker is alll excited about maybe getting a second "stimulus check."
Of course, that "stimulus check" is frickin'
socialism. Ain't no way around that, at all. That's more socialist than anything Bernie Sanders has done in his entire life. Even I'm not completely comfortable with it, although I'm not gonna sneer at free money. But she freakin' LOOOOVVVES the idea. AND constantly expresses fear of "socialism," which is a thing she understands about as well as a dog understands an internal combustion engine. She frets over her social security... not realizing that's socialism. She loves the fire department (socialism) and bitches about toll roads (not socialism, although the free roads are), likes the USPS better than the (capitalist) UPS and Fed-EX, etc. If she really
understood what she was trained to hate and fear, she wouldn't hate and fear it. But, good churchgoer that she is, she does what the authority figures tell her. And there are always people willing to make a big profit from being one of those authority figures. YouTube, especially, is full of them.
Ben Shapiro, host of one of the most successful podcasts in the country and the author of best-selling books. His most recent is “How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps,” in which he offers a stark take on how for many Americans, the president’s “serious character flaws simply become secondary concerns” when they see the threat from the “rising tide of radicalism from the left.”.
I am not entirely sure that Ben Shapiro isn't a muppet. I'm going to require an X-ray before I can drop that idea.
In this line of attack, Shapiro echoes other conservatives who deflect: Trump wasn’t helping anyone, for instance, by asking top public health officials to study whether disinfectant could be injected into the human body as a coronavirus treatment. But, Shapiro explained he didn’t actually tell people to put bleach in their bodies. “That doesn’t mean he was recommending actually injecting Clorox, people.”
Nah. Just the
equivalent of injecting Clorox.
Seeing people defend Trump's absurd shit is hilarious to me, 'cuz they gotta sit down and put on some clown shoes before they can even start. Some things you have no real choice but to go ahead and say, "The president's a fuckin' idiot." At least, if you want to be taken seriously.
Some media scholars see the desire to pick apart Trump’s critics as a form of entertainment disinformation. “They try to get you not to believe other kinds of information that you might hear in the larger media sphere, and it’s just fun,” said Khadijah White, a professor at Rutgers University who studies race, gender and the media. “It’s really fun to see the other side lose. And that just buttresses the idea that maybe Trump is corrupt, but they’re corrupt, too.”
Try to get you not to believe
completely crazy lies, you mean. See, that's the thing: the two arguments aren't equal at this point. If they were, that'd be one thing, but right now we have "Facts about Trump" against "insane conspiracy theories like QAnon, propaganda from Epoch Times and FOX News, and flat-out lies." The two things are not, by any means, equal. Conservatives like to pretend that they are, though, because if they were forced to rely on actual
facts about Trump, they have no ammo at all.
Honestly, there is
nothing this guy's done that's been successful. Even when the economy was kickin', it all was lower and slower than that of his predecessor. When you implement a tax cut and massive deregulation and everything goes DOWN instead of UP, albeit slightly, then you really have no case that tax cuts and deregulation help the economy, now do ya? And those are really the only tools in the conservative tool box.
The results
prove them ineffective. So, what else ya got? Nothing. That's why they bring out the lies and the horseshit. If they
had actual data, they'd be using it. But they don't, because data that supports them... doesn't exist.
“The conservative ideology that had been cohesive during the Cold War is falling apart,” said Nicole Hemmer, a research scholar at Columbia University. “It seems to me that ‘owning the libs’ is kind of the way you hold everyone together when your policy preferences are coming apart.”
That's really all they've got now. There's no track record of success to run on, so the only thing fueling them is "liberals are annoying." And that's often true enough -- a lot of 'em irritate the hell out of me -- but I vote like I vote not out of love of "the left," but because I've seen, very clearly and with overwhelming evidence, that the right is a huge failure. It's hard to live in Mississippi and think conservatism works in any way, shape, or form for a normal working person.
Republicans who are no fans of Trump or the turn that their party has taken under him say that its fuming commentariat is a symptom of a deeper problem: its inability to govern. Though the GOP controls half of Washington, its leading voices still often sound like the aggrieved opposition party.
That's the fun thing: when they're in power, they still make excuses for not doing good jobs. It's like "if we were running things they'd be great"... even when they ARE running things. They don't let success stop 'em from acting like losers.
“Ask them what they are building, and they can’t answer,” said Evan McMullin, who ran against Trump in 2016 as a third-party candidate. “They aren’t trying to build anything. They’re just tearing things down.”
Bring a cow into a cathedral, it's still gonna be a cow.
During the 2018 midterm elections, Republican candidates ran ads that portrayed Democrats as socialists who would let drug gangs roam free on suburban streets. These messages largely failed because people didn’t believe them.
They act like Dems have never been in power before. They try to scare their dumbass base with all these scary things that would happen under a Dem... and those things didn't happen when there
was a Dem, so... why believe 'em now?
Tim Miller, a former adviser to Republican candidates, said one of the problems with the right today is its attempt to make isolated incidents and marginal political figures seem representative of the entire Democratic Party. “What the president says isn’t important,”Miller said, “but what this city alderman running in Chicago says is.”
They DEFINITELY overplay this. Think about how much they rail against AOC. She's a representative of a small district, has views that 90% of Democrats do not really share (you can argue that's a good or bad thing, but it's true nonetheless), and really doesn't have much power at all, yet to hear Republicans going on about her you'd think she was the leader of the entire party. Mostly they do it because she's easy for their base to hate because she's (A) a woman and (B) Latinx. They don't like seeing females or brown folks wielding any power at all.
Honestly, you get propagandists like Candace Owens claiming the GOP is better for people of color, but let's get to the nitty-gritty on this: which party elects the most people of color and thus gives them more of a say in regards to how they're governed? I'll give you a hint: it's the party that's NOT the Republicans. And it's not even
close. Republicans and the Trump campaign are pushing those themes again today, focusing on images of unrest from protests in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle. But there are signs that this messaging is out of step with the majority of Americans who support the overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations nationwide against racism that followed the killing of George Floyd.
This is the other fun thing: they like to take issues that most Americans really aren't that divided on (I've seen plenty of conservatives agreeing that George Floyd was flat-out murdered) but then trying to portray them as somehow "bad." The vast majority of these protests have been peaceful. Most of the violence has been due to (A) right-wingers posing as "Antifa," as I exhibited earlier in this thread (and should have updated because a lot more cases of that have come up since), and (B) cops -- under Trump's "Operation Legend" orders -- attacking people and causing the situations to become more violent.
Anyway, the GOP has become a party that is on a life-support system of propaganda. It's literally running on bullshit and very little else at this point. And it's been that way for quite some time. They like to say that Trump caused it, but mostly what Trump has done is
reveal it. Trump's a crazy idiot and doesn't know that he's supposed to keep what they're doing on the down-low. He thinks their base is stupid so doing legerdemain with 'em is a waste of effort. Sadly, a lot of them are proving him right... they'll do whatever they're told, no matter how lousy Trump is. But, the sane ones are freaking out and doubling-down on the propaganda, trying to keep the rest of the base controlled. And it's getting harder for them every day...
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