When MAGA complains about mAiNSTreaM MEdiA, they’re right. Just not in the ways they think.
Yep I think that’s a big part of what made MAGA so successful. They said a lot of the right things. They clearly didn’t mean them, AT ALL, but naive MAGA people didn’t realize that (and to a large extent still don’t fully realize how deeply cynical the lies actually were).
That’s how he got farmers on his side, military people on his side, the rust belt working class on his side. And so many of them still are. Because they want somebody to look out for and support them, and in a world where neither party gives a fuck about any of them, the one who says they’ll give a fuck (but doesn’t) becomes the only obvious choice. I’m convinced the most truthful words that ever came out of Trump’s mouth was his infamous quote “I love the poorly educated”. They don’t have enough insight into what’s going on to realize how thoroughly betrayed they’ve been, but they feel betrayed already. That’s why they joined MAGA. It’s not a new or surprising experience for them.
I think Cory Doctorow does a good job of explaining this when he talks about Naomi Klein’s book. They both call it a “mirror world” of political beliefs.
Qanon’s obsession with “child trafficking” is a mirror-world version of the real crises of child poverty, child labor, border family separations and kids in cages. Anti-vax is the mirror-world version of the true story of the Sacklers and their fellow opioid barons making billions on Oxy and fent, with the collusion of corrupt FDA officials and a pliant bankruptcy court system. Xenophobic panic about “immigrants stealing jobs” is the mirror world version of the well-documented fact that big business shipped jobs to low-waged territories abroad, weakening US labor and smashing US unions. Cryptocurrency talk about “decentralization” is the mirror-world version of the decay of every industry (including tech) into a monopoly or a cartel.
It’s easy to be convinced by that type of logic. I used to be heavily into cryptocurrency because I saw the failure of capitalism to protect us from corporate consolidation and monopolies, so I assumed “this system that decries centralized authorities must be better.”
They were only half right though. It’s true corporate consolidation was a problem, and the centralization it brought causes issues, but the reason that consolidation happens is because of capital, which crypto is very much not against, and heavily supports, through tokens that give you ownership over a share of all the income a protocol generates, even if that protocol could run just fine indefinitely on-chain without paying you a fee.
People slowly accumulate more wealth, more voting power, and eventually control how these “decentralized” protocols operate.
In the same way, MAGA thinking has the same problem, where they’ll correctly identify an issue or motive, but entirely misjudge what the cause of it is, will fight the wrong enemies (or worse, support their true enemies), and only later will they realize things have just kept getting worse.
I think its more republicans point their fingers and say “these immigrants and woke people are responsible for your problems, so we need a giant fascist prison camp system to fix it” knowing full well it will make things worse.
Many democrat politicians do this thing where they try to make the answer as obtuse as possible to deflect their donors from blame so they mostly just sound like Nancy Pelosi when she said something like “the problems are very bad but their causes are very good”, the causes there being corporate donors that largely prefer republicans but also fund democrats to a lesser extent.
Republicans are willing to point their fingers at people and blame them for people’s woes which at least suggests a solution, even if its a full lie where they’re just blaming the victims or full absurdity like Elon Musk blaming George Soros for things (a guy who has like 2% of elon’s wealth and his political spending in politics is dwarfed by elon’s buyout of twitter alone)
Or when he said smart people don’t like me recently. No shit.
But it’s no secret why he’s popular with some of the working class, or shouldn’t be, if it’s a mystery to you it’s a sign you are being deliberately misled by people you trust. He looks like he’s fighting the status quo. That’s it.
He seems like he’s fighting the corrupt system. And he is, he is just fighting to make it more corrupt for him. But we all know the public doesn’t know that. So it’s no excuse for not running our own campaigns that can win.
The other truthful thing he said was he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose any support.
This seems to be a common pattern. Conservatives recognize a problem (eg: housing is expensive) and then come to some pants on head wrong conclusion (it’s the {outgroups})
Its because right wing media is own by fascist billionaires who feed them disinformation while defunding their school districts, leading to them being unable to think for themselves and buying the outright lies as fact.
And the conservatives in the blue uniforms throw their hands up and just pretend to be powerless in response.
It’s not that they figured out the problem independently but were too stupid to come to a rational solution. It’s that their propaganda sources know these are problems and are proactively introducing them and providing nutty solutions so when they’re raised naturally the issue will both validate the conservative end goals and be vaguely idiotic to the liberals.
“Every accusation is a confession” is real, even for things that seemed kind of outlandish like the elite pedophile cabal. I’m seriously concerned that the various baby blood and baby cannibalism conspiracy theories also aren’t just creative fiction by addled minds.
It’s also because these problems are multifaceted, layered and complex and generally don’t have simple solutions.
They often gravitate to a “solution” that they “understand” and right wing politics have been pretty good at promoting those “solutions”.
To play devils advocate: their solution isn’t wrong, it’s just to help rich folks not the poor.
Them recognizing a problem comes down to: poor people are complaining about X.
Their solution: well it would help me if we do this for X.
They are recognizing opportunities that could benefit them than actual problems.
I feel like my reading between the lines isn’t comprehending. Why the random capitalization?
Dude is based
And this is why network news isn’t doing so great. Bunch of rich-ass, traitorous boomers.
Ha ha, this guy is awesome. We need to organize enough to be able to put guys like him up for local office. City council for instance. It wouldn’t take that much oranization, and we could do it from the fediverse, we could make a new type of social media interoperable with lemmy and mastadon, and start it here on lemmy and mastadon in the interim.
Find and grooming candidates, coordinating getting them press, dealing with smears, etc would not take all that many people to start. We are better than they are too, if following politics has taught me anything it’s just how dumb, arrogant, and corrupt the ones leading us are. They aren’t better at all, their people aren’t better. We are.
Working families party. Go sign up
“yeah yeah much more snow, cooler winters, and again, private equity didn’t own so much”
Lmao this guy knew what she was trying to do
The cherry on top:
- Black Female reporter is the class traitor here
This was the twist of a great movie about corrupt cops
movie name
In Rebel Ridge, the protagonist, a black guy, is trying to get a bag of bail money back from a corrupt police department that enacted civil forfeiture. It often cuts away to the one black woman in the dept who has to drive a shittier car than the rest. Then, we learn there’s an informant to IA inside the dept trying to bring them down. The protagonist figures it’s the black woman. He’s wrong; she betrays him, trying to arrest him. Turns out, the informant was the white guy who first stole his money, as a way of trying to build trust with a department that had been doing a lot of the same.
I’m glad fiction helped you see the modern problems with class traitors.
Oh, I absolutely know it’s not new. Long ago, I thought that Uncle Ruckus in the Boondocks was an absurd fictionalized character. But people like that absolutely exist.
😭🫂
I don’t often get to talk about this because I’m a straight white guy from the south with a thick accent. I ain’t upset about it because I would assume the worst of me too.
I think it’s at least semi common knowledge that conservative/racist/sexist/homophobic white men often assume all other straight white men think the same as them and will say some wild shit on that assumption. Well it wasn’t common but I definitely remember a few black folks that may as well have been Stephen from Django Unchained
She’s not a class traitor because she’s black or because she’s a woman, she’s a class traitor because she works for a living and is cooperating in suppressing news about the problems caused by the Owner Class.
They’re aren’t implying that it’s because of those things. They are saying as an individual who has undoubtedly been subject to those systemic abuses is makes it all the more stomach turning that they’d be a cog in perpetuating it.
as an individual who has undoubtedly been subject to those systemic abuses
Bullshit!
Plenty of black women are part of the Owner Class, plenty of white men are part of the Working Class - what’s almost perfectly correlated with being subject the systemic abuses of class is “Wealth”. Race (even in the US, which is extra fucked up) is only somewhat positivelly correlated and gender is barelly so (the difference in average incomes between rich and poor is literally thousands of times greater than the difference in average incomes between men and women).
There is no reason to pull out “identitarian markers” when talking about class inequality unless one has been indoctrinated in a Neoliberal “divide and conquer” fake-Leftist political ideology designed to divide the fight for Equality For All into a hierarchy of “differently deserving of having Equality” based on things people wore born with rather than on Need, a view of others and how deserving they are that mirrors the way the Far-Right sees the world.
Not being filthy rich and having to slog in the mud like the rest of us to just keep one’s head above the surface is infinitelly more correlated to not being in the Owner Class than one’s count of X chromossomes in pair 23 or one’s gene for melanine production.
It really pisses me off how people from some political cultures with very right-shifted Overtoon Windows, even whilst they have the best of intentions, have been brainwashed into classifying their fellow human beings and having expectations on them (i.e. Prejudices) using the very same architecture of thinking as the Far-Right, to the point that even when they talk about “class inequality” their mind sees “identitarian markers” (just like the Fascists) rather than “Working Class” which is from where the actual expression “class inequality” originates from.
I understand that wealth is the primary decider of one’s rights in America.
However you can’t say that Reagan deliberately putting drugs in black neighborhoods didn’t have a systemic effect on the advantages of black people in America.
You can’t say that women earning 80% as much as men doesn’t have an effect on how high they could reach.
I don’t think that any one thing decides which class you’re going to be but it does stack the cards against you. Maybe this person never experienced it but she certainly had a higher chance of it.
Re-read what I wrote - being black is nowhere as correlated with suffering systemic abuses from wealth inequality as is being poor or working class, more so for gender as per your own numbers: women earning in average 80% of what men earn is far less unequal than the average worker earning less than 0.3% of what a CEO earns (and way less than that when compared to a billionaire).
There is no inherent poverty in being black or a woman, there’s only that which has been placed there by people who - like Reagan - when they look at other human beings don’t see people, they see ethnicity or gender, and by following a logic that expects afro-americans or women to all be “something” and “having an obligation to behave in certain way” purely because of their race or gender, you’re following THE EXACT SAME MENTAL ARCHITECTURE as the racists and sexists like Reagan of classifying people based on genetics and then having expectations on them and determining what they deserve based on that.
(Emphasys and big caps because that’s the part that really pisses me off)
Fighting inequality by using the very same proxies of worth and deserving as the Far-Right is validating and prolonging the very fundations of Far-Right thinking that say that people should be treated first and foremost based on race and gender. Those who do so, whether they think that they’re leftwing or not, are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
It’s thus not surprising that this kind of thinking is most widespread in Neoliberal countries whose Overtoon Window is way to the right of most countries - you don’t shift politics to the Left by limiting yourself to the perspective on other human being of the Fascists.
You fight the suffering of systemic abuses by punishing and stopping the abusers and helping the ACTUAL victims, not by accepting the reductive and prejudicial proxies of the abusers themselves and shaping your thinking on the subject and fighting around those - that’s just willfully playing by the rules of the Fascists.
PS: But don’t trust me, just look at the actual results - Identity Politics has been way worse than things like Social Democracy or even Unionism in reducing the systemic abuses its supporters claim to want to address. In fact in the countries and period were Identity Politics dominated left-of-center (relative to the local Overtoon Window) politics, the suffering due to systemic abuses has actually worsened when compared to periods and places were Social-Democracy or even just Unionism were more dominant.
She didn’t come in prepared to have a nuanced conversation about private equity firm or hedge fund acquisitions of residential living spaces, so I’m not surprised that she tried to nope out of the conversation. There are thousands of topics I can’t hold up a conversation about, but I think it would be awesome for reporters to do a 15 seconds of fame rule in these cases. Just state “i’ve got nothing to contribute, but you have the next 15 seconds,” and then let them cook.
Uhhhh, this is who she works for. There is a legitimate financial reason not to say “I’ve got nothing to contribute, but you have the next 15 seconds.”
This is why she is a class traitor.
I love this guy. Homo and all.
This comment confuses me. I guess good? I do think he stands up for a good humanitarian cause. I don’t really care about his sexuality.
I think this is a reverse callback to “no homo” which was big in the 90s-2000s. I don’t believe he thinks the gentleman is gay.
Am I that old? Surely it was a thing later on too.
I think he’s saying that he loves him on multiple levels, including the sexy kind.
Spineless bastards… Freedom of speech is a long forgotten dream over there.
They are spineless bastards, but the news does not have have an obligation to broadcast this dude’s opinions. No freedom of speech was violated in any sense of the words
Sure, no violation of freedom of speech by the letter of the law. Mission accomplished I suppose.
But instead we have structures and institutions funneling inconvenient opinions and lived experiences into the fringe - bit by bit - so that they may fizzle in silence.
And on an interview with the veneer of “regular people’s opinions”, why is this particular opinion being met with repulsion? Why would a journalist seek an opinion and determine this guy’s isn’t the “right opinion”? Why would an interviewer who is working as a professional chase a vapid discussion about nostalgia?
He was literally asked a question and they were trying to stop him from answering because it didn’t go along the corpo line.
I would say that freedom of speech as an ideal extends beyond just the law, and that if there is value in getting someone’s opinion “on the street” there is something to be said to them sharing views on predatory capitalism.
Yeah, it’s not like the FCC (a government agency) has been caught multiple times directly pressuring corporate media to toe the party line, or else. O wait…they actually have been
“Caught”
They did it out in the open, and definitely weren’t trying to hide it.
And yet when Trump claims to have signed an executive order doing something about it he gets a standing ovation.
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Yes. I want that. I want constant rants against capitalism.
Fuck. I want the local news to dedicate one segment a week to letting people come on and read their manifestos live on air. The crazier the better!
We [used to] have that: it’s called “public access TV” and hardly anybody watches it.
My city defunded it – redirecting the cable TV subscriber fee that paid for it into a slush fund – and it failed to become the major scandal it should’ve been because hardly anybody noticed.
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There’s a difference between derailing a fluff piece and derailing actual news.
I do like some actual depth to my news instead of it all being fluff but I might be the exception.
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Yes I do. People don’t talk enough about the core issues in society, even though we all feel the pressure
Paradoxically it might lead to people feeling more heard, and if it contributes towards fixing the issues, well,.there’s less pressure in all of our backs
News isn’t where I go to for relaxation and entertainment after all
What a stupid as fuck hill to choose to die on.
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You are not here for conversation, and you’re clearly not listening. Your mind is already made up.
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12 hours later, when are you deleting the comments?
You need help.
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Please refer to my previous comment.
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No.
I’m talking about do you want EVERY SINGLE STORY interrupted by the ONE MOST IMPORTANT THING WRONG IN THE WORLD.
… actually yeah. That would not be a bad thing.
