A Feast for Your Eyes, a Poison for Your Mind
I read an incredible article by the The Washington Post this week: How lies become truth in online America. I've always known that fake stuff spreads like wildfire online on sites like Facebook, but I never seize to be amazed by the power of those echo chambers. Even when people are confronted about believing in clear falsehoods, they don't change their behavior at all. People only care to see what they want to believe. Like Adam Savage famously said: "I reject your reality and substitute my own." This is the alternative reality that millions of people live in.
I'm going to start sounding a bit more conspiratorial at this point. Over the past decades there has been a consorted effort by right wing groups to convert the american populace to be more right wing. In the early days of political talk radio, most of the channels were right wing. Early pioneers of conservative talk radio, like Rush Limbaugh, were pretty much the only voices on air. Millions of Americans, mostly men, listened to these channels and slowly began to be more aligned to the views portrayed. This was the in the 80s, just after the liberal, free-thinking years of the 70s. There is a film that talks about this phenomenon called The Brainwashing of My Dad.
This messaging is often very compelling to conservative leaning men. There is talk about the "good old days", when men held more power over women in terms of economic and social equality. The message of ethnic superiority is also very seductive to some. The idea of innate superiority in the face of personal hardships is a convenient excuse to blame one's problems on the "others". This "others" has taken many forms throughout history. In Nazi Germany it was the Jews. In modern days it is often immigrants. "They are not like us, they don't share our culture" are the kinds of arguments this poisonous nationalistic thinking breeds. All of this drives people to irrational action. It no longer matters what is objectively true, only who is right in your mind. The goal here is to sow discord among people, to drive political divides and to tribalize demographics.
I was thinking that I'm going too far with this thinking of nationalism, authoritarianism and outright fascism taking a hold in the west, but then I saw that even Last Week Tonight with John Oliver had a segment on authoritarianism. I think the reason for this increasingly far-right political atmosphere is because the right is slowly losing the demographics. Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven US Presidential Elections. Democrats have over eleven million more registered voters than the republicans. The Southern Strategy employed by Republican candidates for decades is slowly losing it's effectiveness. There are only so many racist voters left for them to win over.
See No Evil
Unfortunately, I believe that Trump has been a subjected to the brainwashing I discussed in the above paragraphs. Trump doesn't really believe in justice, as he seems more concerned with economic interests. This was proven when he let Saudi Arabian leaders off the hook for the brutal killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The considerable arms deals between the US and Saudi Arabia and his own financial ties to the kingdom seem to be a bigger priority. The beneficiaries of this whole ordeal are, of course, his military contractor donors, making billions with all of these arms contracts.
On Trumps authoritarian tendencies that the Last Week Tonight segment touched on, Trump apparently is in favor of locking up his political opponents. This is fascism, step one. Luckily, the checks and balances of the US political system has denied his worst dictatorial attempts so far. Trumps statement on the Saudi Arabia matter begins with the sentence: "The world is a very dangerous place!" The message to his authoritarian leaning supporters being that only Trump can protect you.
Conclusion
I feel my blog is slowly devolving in to a dark and depressing place. I don't know what people sitting on the bus usually think about, but I'm pretty sure it's not "fascism is slowly taking over the west." Being as interested in world politics as I am surely skews things to being more pessimistic. There is no news where everything is fine. There are plenty of things to optimistic about too in the world, like how poverty is going down drastically. I'm just afraid that we'll throw away all this progress by foolishly letting authoritarians in to positions of power and forgetting the value of democracy.
Thanks for reading!
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