Just a reminder to not let Lemmy be your echo chamber. Most people either don’t know about the shit we care about, or don’t care.
Unfortunately, it will probably get worse.
Just a reminder to not let Lemmy be your echo chamber. Most people either don’t know about the shit we care about, or don’t care.
Unfortunately, it will probably get worse.
Alternative more accurate headline would be “Most Americans are really stupid and ignorant and actually believe the things Fox News (or worse) reports are even remotely truthful”.
Also, “mainstream” media is far (FAR) more critical and nitpicky about Democrats and blame everything on them. When they question Republicans the bar is usually “can you confirm that racism is bad?”.
“Well, you seeeee …”
Not just Fox News zombies.
But yes. Most Americans are really stupid and ignorant.
By design, too. They’ve been dismantling our education system for two generations, and it wasn’t that great to begin with.
The really sad thing is, I believe, even with the American education system being sabotaged by the right, we’re probably better educated now on average than at any point in the past.
The difference is that the right formed a new coalition in the 80s, and got new propaganda tools in the 90s (Fox and other right-wing misinformation outlets) and 2000s (online disinformation). Being slightly better educated isn’t enough to counter that.
And now it’s going to get fucked even harder.
In the Information Age, the poor and uneducated rapidly gained access to the rest of the world and its knowledge, yet couldn’t tell what was true.
Those in power regarded these new cohorts opportunistically, as fertile soil and pliable tools, but the most cynical considered them weapons and cultivated their fear.
In the chaos that ensued, we sought to curtail their influence by censure, but the cynical were happy to amplify their voice. We attempted remediation with facts, but the cynical knew they preferred lies. So the conflict was recast as a war over culture and values, a profitable diversion for many.
We always dismissed the most obvious solution, addressing their fears, because these mostly boiled down to simple economic insecurity, and solving that has little short-term profit potential for those who have the most.