Some Schmo wrote: ↑Wed Oct 02, 2024 6:04 am
It's pretty simple. Only ignorant, stupid, belligerent and insane people will vote for Trump.
Most people on this board should know, far better than I do, that it's hard to break out of cult conditioning.
To repeat something I said three years ago, in response to Moksha:
Moksha wrote: ↑Thu Oct 28, 2021 4:21 pm
Fox News knows that it needs to step up both its denial of reality and its lying if it hopes to compete with Trump's new social media and other Trump-friendly media outlets.
This is true. Early in 2021, Fox News shied away somewhat from endorsing the "stolen election" lie, and some of its viewers threatened to turn to Newsmax or OAN instead. If Fox News reports the truth, it will lose money and influence. Can't have that.
But the problem isn't Trump
per se. Take COVID. Trump set the tone early on: he didn't want COVID to be a big deal for fear it would hurt his reelection chances, so he downplayed it as long as he could. Therefore, COVID denialism took root among his supporters. But he also wanted a vaccine to be developed, because he simply wanted the disease to go away. By the time it had been developed, the denialism had gone far beyond anything Trump intended to create and metamorphosed into anti-vaccination paranoia. When Trump told his own rallygoers to get vaccinated a couple of months back, he was booed.
But the conservative base aren't the sole culprits either! White rural America has always been conservative, and even in the 1950s, nonsensical conspiracy theories circulated there, exemplified by the John Birch Society. But the John Birch Society never dominated rural America the way Bircher-style paranoia dominates it today.
I think the best metaphor for today's American right is a feedback loop. The conservative media echo chamber and the people who watch and listen to it amplify each other, gradually growing more extreme and more detached from reality. Republican politicians are mostly playing catch-up with their increasingly fanatical base. The best example is Eric Cantor, who virtually commandeered the 2013 government shutdown negotiations away from John Boehner because Boehner wasn't conservative enough — and then was ejected from his House seat because he wasn't conservative enough for the voters in his own district. Trump got way out ahead for a while, but his attitude is now mainstream within the party.