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"The median age of a Fox News viewer is 68, and liberals have joked about the network 'brainwashing' their conservative parents. But rightwing social media content has effectively targeted and radicalized younger people, who — unlike the typical Hannity-obsessed grandpa — can vote for the next several decades.

#Trump #fascism #disinformation #YoungVoters #SocialMedia #YoungMen #gender #MaleEntitlement
/2

"A cultural and political chasm has opened up between Americans who still care about the integrity of their democracy and those who do not. We have entered an age of political nihilism in which our traditional conceptions of ideological and identitarian conflict must be abandoned. This election was about the identity of the United States as a whole, and it didn’t tell an inspiring story."

~ Matt Johnson

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #authoritarianism #disinformation #education
/3

"The old narratives about the Democrats’ contempt for the working class and their racially divisive politics don’t apply to this election. The argument that Americans are in so much economic pain that they had to vote for Trump doesn’t hold up: Unemployment is just over 4 percent, the stock market was hitting all-time highs before Trump won, and inflation has plummeted from a peak of over 9 percent to 2.4 percent."

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #authoritarianism #disinformation #education
/4

"This election was about identity after all—an American identity which has become more tolerant of authoritarianism and less committed to democracy over the past decade. As Trump’s opponents try to figure out why they were defeated and how they can resist him over the next four years, they need to confront the dark reality about who we have become as a nation."

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #authoritarianism #disinformation #education #IdentityPolitics
/6

"The decline in voter participation is what allows the Republicans to cosplay a mandate. If the elite political media plays along, that play-pretend becomes reality. Any story you read that uses the word mandate in any way except ironically is playing you for a fool…."

~ Charles Pierce

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #disinformation #VoterApathy #media
/7

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a62896778/presidential-election-2024-turnout/

"What we can say, though, is that this was not an electoral landslide, but a narrowly contested race in which Trump is likely to have benefited as much from who didn’t turn out to vote for his candidacy as who did turn out to vote for him."

~ Philip Bump

#Trump #fascism #cruelty #disinformation #VoterApathy #media
/8

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/12/what-numbers-actually-say-about-2024-election/

"Trump’s chaos calibrates itself … inside a unified and powerful ecosystem of rightwing news, online content and viral disinformation that has grown more powerful throughout this era, spewing the same falsehoods in unison day after day, on repeat, for years. It is the 'political technology' by which swathes of the population have voted in effect to anoint a king in the belief it will amount to more freedom."

~ Oliver Laughland

#Trump #fascism #disinformation
/9

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/14/ive-been-to-more-than-100-trump-rallies-since-2016-this-is-why-i-think-he-won

As Josh Koblin reports, since the election in the US, MSNBC's ratings have plummeted while "the opposite has happened at Fox News."

#Trump #fascism #disinformation #FoxNews #MSNBC
/10

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/business/media/msnbc-fox-news-ratings-election.html

" Politics is an entirely new game now that has little to do with right and wrong – or at least far less so than it did before.

It’s all about making the public believe what you’re saying, and this time, the majority of Americans chose to believe MAGA. MAGA is better at making itself believable to more people, as hard as it is to digest and believe."

~ Keith Owens

#Trump #fascism #disinformation
/11

https://wearespeaking.substack.com/p/we-are-losing-a-war-of-words

Jason Linkins responds to the truly astonishing — the very definition of blind hubris — belief of Washington Post's editorial team that they can lecture Democratic voters about "elitism" following this election. About Bezos, he says,

"The only successful way for a plutocrat to own a newspaper is for the Richie Rich in question to follow my two-step plan: Shut your mouth, and write those checks."

#Trump #fascism #disinformation #media
/12

https://newsletter.tnr.com/index.php?action=social&chash=2c89109d42178de8a367c0228f169bf8.1087&s=cdd6377d8462caad2b4695418c877aea

It's elitist, you see, in the eyes of the lofty people occupying bully pulpits at Washington Post to think there's something shockingly inhumane about a plan to round of untold numbers of people, put them in camps, and ship them out of the country — just because. Because we want to pretend they're the problem.

Elitist to care about the human lives of those people and the barbarism of any nation cooking up such a scheme….

#Trump #fascism #disinformation #media
/13

And while I'm talking about my contempt for Bezos, let me say a word about Los Angeles Times' Patrick Soon-Shiong, who has shown himself to be beyond contemptible. He thinks he can simultaneously virtue-signal about his refusal to endorse Kamala Harris by saying this was about her Gaza stance, and at the same time say his paper needs more right-wing journalists to "balance" its "liberal" views.

#Trump #fascism #disinformation #media
/14

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/13/media/la-times-harris-endorsement-gaza-war-editorial-board/index.html

Does he think we're too stupid to see that the second assertion cancels out the first one, and that the obviously sincere assertion of the two is that he intends to "balance" his paper? Does he think we don't know he's a friend of Elon Musk?

Does Soon-Shiong have no shame at all?

#Trump #fascism #disinformation #media
/15

"In many ways, what Trump has done is expose the rot that has always plagued this country beneath the veneer of liberal democracy. When one looks at our plight in these terms, it becomes clearer what the Harris campaign was up against—and why the struggle for the future is all the more essential.

This is generational, not just of-the-moment."

~ Elliot Kirschner

#Trump #fascism #disinformation #democracy
/16

https://elliotkirschner.substack.com/p/are-we-pointing-fingers

@Savvyhomestead Yes, absolutely.

@Godfrey642 @Savvyhomestead @wdlindsy Putin wins this round of chess.
We’re so screwed.
We need a Plan B to derail this train

@Godfrey642 @Savvyhomestead @wdlindsy yup, except for a few safe states on the coasts

@Godfrey642 @Savvyhomestead @wdlindsy it can’t happen peacefully. But then we only have one example and it didn’t work out. But the potential states seceding here have much of the liberal, more educated population although still contain Trump supporters. Very messy. More likely that governors of states will try to rule but the feds still could come in and crush a rebellion.
Kinda dystopian. Going to be messy if we don’t have elections in 4 years.

@bouriquet I agree.

@clane22 I, too, have never listened to Fox News, and I obtain news from sites other than MSM media sites. I doubt Josh Koblin is saying that everyone has flocked to Fox News.

@jik Yes, good commentary. I agree.

@the_blackwell_ninja Same here — same frustration.

@frankcat Well-stated. That sounds very right to me.

@steter I think that's rather the point of John Koblin's article — that Fox and MSNBC have nothing to do with each other.

@wdlindsy I don't subscribe to the paper on the other side of the continent that chased the POTUS I voted for out of office, the man who defeated Trump, to increase the likelihood that Trump would win again, and thus pad their corrupt wallets.

Not going to subscribe to read an article from a fountain of yellow journalism.

Nice to know I discerned what they wrote about. They can go to hell for what they've done.

@steter I'm sorry, I seem to have lost the thread. Not sure what paper you're talking about. The only paper I've supported financially myself in lo these many years is The Guardian. I don't get my news from sites like MSNBC or from corporate media, and have no illusions about what those venues are like. I reported Josh Koblin's commentary not to promote any media outlet, but simply to note what he was saying about people now flocking from MSNBC to Fox.

@wdlindsy Cool. If it was on the Guardian, I'd read it. The link was to the New York Times. I am not a subscriber. It has a paywall. I cannot read that article from that source. You seemed to think I missed the point or were unhappy I hadn't read it. That's all. Two ships passing in the night. Sorry to bother you.

@steter Sorry I did not understand. I, too, do not subscribe to the New York Times. When I want to read an article there that someone else has promoted, I normally go to the Webpage Archive site. This article has been uploaded there and can be read without a subscription, bypassing the paywall:

https://archive.ph/czUiB

@bronakins Yes, you're right. And before the final (though the vote-counting isn't complete even now) numbers began to come in, I myself swallowed that landslide meme.

@wdlindsy

I cannot figure out what happened (I know trump happened).
Enthusiasm for Harris was off the charts. The last few weeks Trump was “anti-campaigning.” I think I have too much faith in my fellow Americans.

@bronakins I think the long and short of it is that misinformation and disinformation are prevailing. People who told pollsters they know they themselves are doing better economically then went on to say that the economy is bad. How do you put those two things together? They make no sense unless you factor in the disinformation and misinformation that have made people — increasingly — believe what's not true. The pandemic gave us a case study in folks' willingness to believe nonsense.

@wdlindsy

That’s kinda what I mean, I have too much faith that most people can recognize bs when they hear it.

@bronakins I agree.

@wood5y Well-noted. Thank you. And if my Greek, which has long since grown entirely rusty, isn't all gone from my head, at the root of the word is a word for being self-centered.

@wdlindsy the actual root comes from being personal, private, not public.

I wish I had time to learn more Greek, but it's competing with Welsh for my attention.