Touches some themes I’ve explored, like how there is good and bad in everyone and that polarizing doesn’t improve our situations.
“People don’t vote based off moral codes. I also don’t think they vote off facts,” said Lim.
As we face four years of a country molded in Trump’s image, perhaps the bigger moral question is not the decision we made at the ballot box in November, but how we confront the crisis already taking shape.
Well we sure won’t do it ignoring our part in how we got into this mess.
How many seriously believe the GOP billionaires are going to play fair in our next elections?
I almost think it is willful ignorance of history.
I’ve seen willful ignorance. I had an anti-vaxxer, former friend, who I showed the numbers of people who died of the old diseases before vaccines. I said, look at the graveyards, look at all the childhood deaths back then. He said, “I’ve never seen that” and went right on with his bad arguments. More often, I see people who are obviously emotionally attached their belief, like someone who voted for Trump and doesn’t want to think about how they might have made a mistake. Today, I saw two people who know each other but I don’t know well, talking about Panama. The facts are clear, China is not in charge, and the USA is not paying more for passage, as one of them pointed out. The other said things like “can’t you see how bad this is?” and spoke from emotion rather than objective facts.
But when people who can think critically, who can examine facts, consider their assumptions and change their point of view, when they point to tens of millions of people and say they are “willfully ignorant”, that also appears to me to be ignoring facts. What facts lead someone to believe that 49% of an entire electorate can suffer from the same delusion?
What about the facts of how many of them are ACTUALLY ignorant? The history of underfunding our school system, of allowing for bad homeschooling, the fact that they don’t read books, literally zero books, that they watch one News station, a station I’ve listened to and it drills propaganda into your head, the way we are all encouraged to shut them out of our lives and not “talk politics”, the fact that we have allowed so much money into politics and we can track its effect, especially in the primaries Trump says it openly now, “we’re going to primary that person”.
Please note, everything above is not an excuse for behavior, it’s a plan for how to fight for democracy. Fight for better education. Fight for public forums that openly discuss ideas. Fight for a fair press with transparent reporting. Fight for getting money out of politics. Fight for trustworthy elections. And don’t fight with your neighbors, listen to them.
Intensely directed propaganda against an imaginary enemy (from within) .
That is the very theme of 1984, and has a long record in history. And history itself has been erased because it had recorded bad behavior by a country or its population. Note current efforts with “book-burning” of racist history.
Copilot:
The quote “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past” is attributed to George Orwell in his novel “1984.” It emphasizes the power of those who shape historical narratives to influence the course of events and societal perceptions1. The phrase also suggests that the interpretation of history can be manipulated by those in control2.
Which is not willful ignorance. I included it in my list.
Well, propaganda has been intense for more than 50 years now.
People are afraid and fear for the future, they suffer from the new capitalism and from globalization.
"If you say a big enough lie and continue to repeat it, people will end up believing it. The lie can only be maintained while the state can protect the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes of vital importance for the State to use all its powers to suppress dissent, because the truth is the deadly enemy of lie, and therefore by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state . », Attributed to Goebbels
Ultra right gives a simple explanation they can understand, and it is almost impossible to fight emotion with facts.
For instance, i am on a French forum trying to fight ultra right. One of the main themes of it is the theory of great replacement. The idea is that there is an universal complot to replace European populations in Europe by people from the third world.
I have given them figures, i have shown that great remplacement cannot happen because the mixing of people. It is impossible to isolate a people of replaced and a people of replacements.
The only answer i got was " Go and see to Brussels. "
Reich has told that fascism is the character expression of the petite bourgeoisie
The best way to fight is to promote ideas of liberty and to give hope.
But, first, we need to understand what is happening and why.
Well unless of course, people can recognize the phony arguments & lies and go along with it. Then we get right back to much of the public being willfully ignorant because they didn’t want to know what the accurate truth was, they loved the Too Much Is Never Enough and Hate All Taxes and government, storyline.
Propaganda doesn’t work on everyone, but it works. You are faced with somehow proving who is a victim of propaganda and who are the perpetrators. A few, you can trace, like Ted Cruz who ran against Trump for the nomination, then publicly caved during the 2016 convention. Or Mitch McConnell, compare his wealth to how he has voted over the years. But you can’t do that for 100 million people. You don’t have the data.
Either that or you agree propaganda is real and there are enough victims that addressing the propaganda is the better strategy. Your choice is to blame the victims of it or try to figure out who is a “real” victim of it. I put that in quotes because I think it’s the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.
The Third Way, not the middle way, not a compromise, something you would do with those who are the actual victims of propaganda, is to figure how to reach them. What’s the message? Shame and blame? Ask them what’s wrong with them? Tell them to read a history book?
One indicator of a propaganda influencer is the news media.
Copilot:
FOX, Newsmax, One American News Network (OANN), The Blaze, and Daily Wire, to mention just a few. Viewership numbers for networks like CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and others don’t represent unique viewers. Instead, they reflect the number of people tuning in at any given time for specific programming.
Fox is not an independent news organization. It is a propaganda machine for the Republican Right. One of their advantages is that they broadcast more live and recoreded sports than other more news oriented organizations like CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and therefore has a large audience watching at any given time of the day.
Here’s a long list of propaganda from HCR. Similar to what McCarthy did when he added up a Justice’s salary over his lifetime and said he “took” that money from taxpayers, Trump added up subscription costs paid by government employees and said Politico is “funded” by taxes.
February 6, 2025 (Thursday)
The U.S. has seen high-profile immigration raids since Trump took office, but Dara Kerr of The Guardian today reported that the Trump administration “is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations.” On January 24, 2025, old online press releases from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from as much as a decade ago were updated to make Google prioritize them as new releases, thus creating the illusion that raids are taking place all over the country. When The Guardian asked ICE and Google about the changed dates, some of the new dates disappeared, dropping those stories out of the top of search results.
Since President Ronald Reagan, Republicans have won elections by convincing their voters that their opponents are not trying to use the federal government to help Americans like them but are instead trying to hand tax dollars and power to undeserving Black and Brown Americans, women, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Over the past 45 years, that rhetoric has created a population that believes the federal government is controlled by their enemies, now sometimes called the “Deep State,” whom they blame for destroying the country. Those Republican voters now appear to hate the federal government and to be willing, even eager, to dismantle it.
But the Republicans’ vision of the nation never reflected reality and now, under President Donald Trump, it is entirely made-up. Today, Brian Stelter of Reliable Sources recorded some of the disinformation in which MAGA voters are currently marinating. Trump lied that Elon Musk found that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spent “$100 million on condoms to Hamas” and that last week’s fatal midair collision that took 67 lives was due to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Trump today claimed CBS “defrauded the public” in “the greatest broadcasting scandal in history” when it exercised normal editing procedures on a 60 Minutes interview with then–vice president Kamala Harris that he insisted—falsely—involved replacing her actual answers with others. Today, Trump called for CBS News and 60 Minutes to be “immediately terminated,” despite the fact that the U.S. Constitution protects the freedom of the press.
MAGA is amplifying right-wing lies. Today, influencers—including Musk—claimed that USAID secretly bankrolled Politico, claiming that the media site had taken $8 million from USAID. In fact, that sum was not an annual grant, but rather years of subscriptions from across the government to Politico Pro, a pricey subscription service for data and legislative analyses for lobbyists and government officials. “Politico…has never taken a cent of government subsidies or state funding,” said the chief executive officer of its parent company. “[P]eople are paying for… [Politico Pro] because they need the service,” he said. “It’s not subsidies, it’s capitalism.” When Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) joined the chorus parroting the lie, fact-checkers noted that her office is a subscriber: it paid $7,150 for a yearlong subscription starting last January.
Nonetheless, Trump posted in all-caps that it “LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN [sic] AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS.”
Another story spreading disinformation appeared today after the State Department claimed that Panama had agreed to let U.S. government vessels transit the Panama Canal for free. Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino told reporters that the story was “lies and falsehoods” and noted that he had told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that he doesn’t have the legal authority to waive transit fees for anyone.
This morning, at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump boasted that he had delivered water to California, saying: “The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, but the Pacific Northwest. And it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day and uh, I opened it up. It wasn’t that easy to do. But I opened it up and it’s pouring down.” Camille von Kaenel and Annie Snider of Politico talked to Trump supporters among California’s farmers. They reported today that the 2 billion gallons of water Trump dumped onto the ground last week was water for irrigation that could never make it to the Los Angeles fires, which were under control by the time he dumped the water, in any case. For now, the farmers are sticking with Trump despite the loss of the water intended for their fields in the dry summer, but called for “close coordination” over the “incredibly complex” California water system.
Brian Stelter posted a December 9, 2017, quote from the New York Times: “Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.” Stelter wrote: “I think about this quote a lot.”
Performative victories over “the Libs” make MAGA voters happy, but to what end do political leaders distort reality in order to stay in power?
The current administration’s actions strengthen the hand of foreign nations, especially China, against the U.S. Yesterday, Pam Bondi, Trump’s second choice for attorney general—the first had to withdraw after the House Ethics Committee drew attention to his drug use and sexual behavior—took the oath of office.
Today, Bondi disbanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and cut back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Then-director of the FBI Christopher Wray established FITF in 2017 to stop countries like Russia and China from interfering with American politics, as Russia had done in 2016 to help elect Trump. FARA required anyone accepting money from a foreign government to declare that connection, and was key in helping law enforcement agencies to dismantle foreign influence operations. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort, for example, pleaded guilty to violating FARA when he didn’t disclose that he was being paid by those linked to the Russian government. (In December 2020, before he left office, Trump pardoned Manafort.)
Prioritizing human smuggling and drug cartels, the Justice Department under Bondi is scaling back white-collar crimes like bribery of foreign officials, kleptocracy, and money laundering. In the past few years, the Justice Department has recovered yachts, planes, and real estate from Russians sanctioned because of the attack on Ukraine. “Taken together these changes are an invitation to foreign actors to interfere in American affairs,” Aaron Zelinsky, a former national security prosecutor for the Justice Department, told Ben Penn of Bloomberg Law. “Even worse, it’s an invitation to Americans to help them do it.”
The assault against the United States Agency for International Development is tangled in foreign power struggles, too. Andrew Duehren, Alan Rappeport and Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times reported today that while Trump administration officials claimed they were conducting a general review of the Treasury Department’s payments system when they sought access to it, emails show that the plan all along was to freeze payments to USAID.
Daniel Wu of the Washington Post noted today that the destruction of USAID will take billions of dollars from American farmers, as well as other businesses, and Paul Sonne of the New York Times reported today that authoritarian leaders, including those of Russia, Hungary, and El Salvador are cheering on Musk’s boast that he was “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” USAID funding was less than 1% of the U.S. budget and focused on humanitarian assistance and healthcare for underserved populations. But it also promoted democracy. It has monitored elections in Russia, documenting extensive voting irregularities there. With the U.S. abandoning foreign aid, China can step in to fill the void.
China will also be able to step in at the G20 summit of the world’s largest economies to be held in November in Johannesburg, South Africa, if Secretary of State Marco Rubio keeps his vow not to attend. Rubio says he is walking away from the international table because Trump says he is unhappy that South Africa is “confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY.” Trump ally Elon Musk hails from South Africa and has agreed that “white South Africans are being persecuted for their race in their home country.” South Africa has also refused official approval of Musk’s Starlink satellite system because of a state requirement that 30% of a company must be owned locally, a requirement SpaceX has criticized.
Yesterday, a White House order signed by Trump required the Central Intelligence Agency to send over an unclassified email listing all the employees hired in the past two years. David Sanger and Julian Barnes of the New York Times reported that the list included the first names and first initial of the last name of those hires, including “a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking to identify them.”
The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, called the sharing of the information over unsecured channels “a disastrous national security development,” adding: “Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China.”
If there are advantages for foreign adversaries in the policies of the administration currently in power, there are also advantages to favored corporations. Musk’s team, along with Trump’s officials, is dismantling the government with the claim that it is inefficient and corrupt, but it appears their plan is to put Musk and his ilk in charge of the services Americans need.
In what sounds like an attempt to hand over air traffic control systems to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system and his AI company, Trump today said—and here are his words, as Aaron Rupar transcribed them—“We’re all gonna sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new. Not pieced together, obsolete, like it is, land-based. Trying to hook up a land based system to a satellite system. The first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can’t hook up land to satellites and you can’t hook up satellites to land. It doesn’t work. We spend billions of billions of dollars trying to renovate an old, broken system, instead of just saying cut it loose, and let’s spend less money and build a great system one by two or three companies, very good companies, specialists, that’s all it is. They used 39 companies. That means that 39 different hookups have to happen. And I don’t know how many people of you are good in terms of all the kinds of things necessary for that. And it’s very complex stuff. But when you have 39 different companies working on hooking up different cities at different people. You need one company. With one set of equipment. And there are some countries that have unbelievable air controller systems. And they would’ve, bells would’ve gone off when that helicopter literally even hit the same height. Because it traveled a long distance before it hit. It was just like, just wouldn’t stop. Follow the line. But bells and whistles would’ve gone off. They have ‘em where it actually could virtually turn the thing around. It would’ve just never happened if we had the right equipment . And one of things that’s gonna be, I’m gonna speaking to John and to Mike and to Chuck and everybody, we have to get together and just as a single bill just pass where we get the best control system. When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me, I’m landing in New York and I’m using a sys— I won’t tell you what country, but I use a system from another country because the captain says ‘This thing is so bad, it’s so obsolete.’ And we can’t have that.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted today that “the DOGE team” is “going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system,” saying that “‘experienced’ Washington bureaucrats are the reason our nation’s infrastructure is crumbling.”
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton pointed out that “US airlines had gone 16 years without fatal crashes. Then MAGA fired the FAA chief, gutted the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and threatened air traffic controllers with layoffs. Now there have been two fatal crashes. Hope your unvetted 22-year-olds fix things fast.”
Critics of the idea of Musk taking over the nation’s air traffic control systems note that his Tesla electric vehicles have the highest fatal accident rate among all car brands in America. The average fatal crash rate is 2.8 per billion vehicle miles driven; Tesla has a rate of 5.6 per billion miles driven. On social media, “God” posted: “Thou shalt not let the foreign billionaire whose rockets blow up all the time anywhere near the air traffic control system,” an apparent reference to the January 16 explosion of a SpaceX rocket over the Caribbean that scattered debris over the region led the Federal Aviation Administration to lock down airspace over Turks and Caicos.
There is apparently yet another reason that people will lie to gain power. Today, Katherine Long of the Wall Street Journal reported that one of Musk’s young team of engineers, Marko Elez, 25, abruptly resigned after Long linked him to a social-media account that championed racism and eugenics, the idea that human populations can be improved by selective breeding, an idea embraced in Nazi Germany.
Last night, Senate Democrats filibustered for 30 hours in an attempt to convince Republicans to join them in rejecting Trump’s right-wing religious extremist nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025. In the House, Democrats introduced the Taxpayer Data Protection Act to stop Musk and DOGE from accessing personal financial data.
U.S. District Judge John Coughenour indefinitely blocked Trump’s executive order altering birthright citizenship, calling it “clearly unconstitutional.” “It has become ever more apparent that, to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain,” Coughenour said.
The Department of Justice under Attorney General Bondi immediately said it would appeal the ruling. And tonight, Senate Republicans confirmed Christian nationalist Vought to head the Office of Management and Budget.
Stephen Groves of the Associated Press noted that Vought once described the budget director’s job as “a President’s air-traffic control system.” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) described his confirmation as a “triple-header of a disaster for hardworking Americans.”
This man and the people behind him are mad and dangerous.
Their plan is frightening, but it is coherent.
If they win a very different america will emerge, and a different world.
And they have philosophy, against democracy, against human rights, against free concurrence, promoting authoritarianism and religious conservatism.
Yes, I agree that fighting propaganda based on demonstrable lies is important.
My choice is for us to exercise personal responsibility.
Because that is the only way to build a solid future.
We chose to party and not think - now we are shocked simply shocked that our country has been handed over to a bunch of totalitarians who spelled out their plan for all literate people to read. Remember Project 2025.
So the blame game is silly, it’s the outcomes that matter.
Another good example of propaganda. This came to me from a conservative friend in Braver Angels. I’m not sure, but I think he deleted my facebook post. Luckily I saved it. He links to the Spectator article (a very right wing media). I acknowledge that I was not aware of the executive renaming of USDS, a digital services dept, to DOGE. But I give a different opinion about that.
After a few years of attempting to understand “them”, I’ve come to the point where there are very few things that are misunderstood about the desire for the policies and attitudes of political leaders. The disagreement comes down to different views on what “science” is. I had the same arguments with my far Left friends, who were the first to tell me about rigged elections and linking vaccines to autism.
I’m all for finding government waste. So I guess I’m in the 61% reported in the Reuters poll. Also thank you for the information about the USDS. I didn’t know that.
The Spectator ignores “how” that is happening and uses some data points in ways that I think are misleading. The main premise that Musk is “uncovering” waste is flawed. Anyone could review the publicly available information and make a speech about, call out whoever created the program, and pass bills or write orders to end them. You and I agree on some of the “what” but the media, Trump, and NYT want us to focus on “how” and argue about it. A few examples:
Renaming an agency and repurposing it is only legal if it goes unchallenged from our system of checks of balances. The spectator calls this “perversely responded”. USAID is not hiding anything, by law they can’t, but Elon Musk might be. See WIRED magazine
The Spectator misrepresents the polls. “doing what he promised” does not mean they like what he is doing. Yes, he is keeping his promises, that’s why I voted against him.
In the YouGov poll, the text frequently states “among Republicans” or similar statements, but the graphs don’t break down the responses by party. In other words, look at the methodology, not the headline. There is a PDF at the bottom for that, and one graphic showing the large Democrat/Republican divide about DOGE.
You have said, “use science”. I think that’s what I’m doing here.
Question is ; Is Trump using science?
My opinion. Very few people are. It’s why CFI exists. Most because they don’t understand how it works. Some know but want to confuse. Hard to tell the difference.
I’m turning this into the example of propaganda page. This article gives the full correct quote first then shows how it was twisted
That is the sillier choice, IMO, of the two I presented.
If we could take care of own space and have that also help others, that would be great. You can’t force others to be responsible, it has to be taught and modeled. I understand that sticking my nose in other people’s business is not something everyone supports, and it’s not something everyone should do or can do. For me, keeping my responsibility circle small seems somehow irresponsible.
What ever that means.
We need to keep in mind the distinction between, dissecting and understanding reasons for something happening - as opposed to (and distinct from) - finding excuses and self-justifications.
Good on you. It’s a great idea, I hope it spreads.
Poyner.org seems like it is also a good idea and excellent resource to keep handy.
Poynter.org
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is a non-profit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. The school is the owner of the Tampa Bay Times newspaper and the International Fact-Checking Network.[2][3] It also operates PolitiFact.[4]
Foundation
The school began on May 29, 1975,[5] when Nelson Poynter, the owner and chairman of the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) and Times Publishing Company, announced that he planned to start a small journalism school called the Modern Media Institute.[6]
In 1977, Nelson Poynter willed ownership of the Times Publishing Company to the Institute so that after his death the school would become the owner of the St. Petersburg Times.[6]
The name of the school was changed to the “Poynter Institute” in 1984.[5]
It means I agree with you. I stated it as you (as in the general “you” meaning all people) could do X or Y and from context you might have seen my preference for Y. You said X is silly.