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In my experience no one is 100% free of the influence of such propaganda, though every person believes they are. As soon as you get comfortable, it’s easy to lighten your guard and start letting some ideas through.
For example, all of my friends are exclusively left leaning and will join me in rants about eating the rich. They’ll agree with me about the corporate hellscape we live in and how privacy is being violated more than ever.
Half of my friends own an Alexa. Many of them have Ring cameras. Some of them don’t vote. One guy I know had the police illegally take his phone and force him to unlock it, then they went through it looking for evidence of any crime to arrest him for. We were talking later about how you can’t be forced to undo a code but you can be compelled for face scan unlocks, and he told me that story as well as the fact that he still uses a face unlock. Like ???
No one can be on guard all of the time, sometimes bad takes are going to get through. And those bad takes will often be influenced by billionaires. I think step one is recognizing that and not believing you have already reached complete enlightenment.
Exactly, we were supposed to think “the billionaires aren’t making any sense” snd then when the Epstein stuff came out “ohhh that makes sense they were raling children that’s why they were saying all this racist sexist stuff to distract us.”. Instead most americans are like "no they cant be pedophiles because we trusted them already "
My friend grew up in the sticks with a community whose opinions came directly from Fox and InfoWars. He didn’t know a single person who’d be considered remotely progressive until he went to college. He’s told me some terrible things he used to believe.
People are absolutely capable of seeing through the bullshit but when everyone you trust says 2+2=5, it’s no surprise that people don’t think to question it. Especially when you’re poor. The billionaires know this and exploit it. Keep em tired and poor and you can convince most of them of anything.
I’m not defending bigotry at all but I do think most of them have been victimized and it’s fair to say billionaire pedophiles shaped their belief system. A lot of them just do not have the brain space for reflection given their circumstances. Being poor is fuckin hard.
Just found out my friend is one of those, he emigrated to Russia…he is fucking dead soon.
Okay but, like, they literally did though? They bought up all the media companies and funded a bunch of chat room campaigns to normalize a lot of bat shit opinions.
They shaped “our” belief system.
They didn’t shape “my” belief system. (At least, I’m pretty sure a “burn it all down and eat the rich” anarchist wasn’t the belief system they were trying to shape me into.)
Kind of reverse shaped it maybe? Same, anyway. Now I distrust all hierarchy.
Well, when I hear a lot of people and media outlets saying something that I know is hateful and wrong, I still think it’s hateful and wrong.
I don’t suddenly start thinking it’s cool and normal
I’ve definitely swallowed some copaganda or bootstraps myths without questioning them. Probably lots of other things too
I’d be shocked if someone didn’t have any weak spots.
If people were immune to propaganda, the advertising industry wouldn’t spend trillions of dollars suffusing our lives with it.
You are being influenced by media and the people around you. You pretending you aren’t just means you aren’t consciously processing how you’re being manipulated.
I think they got the people who were predisposed, and those on the borderline
The reality is 'Murica is a hateful country, ruled by fear, and it always has been
People will do shitty things if they can personally benefit, but’ Murica celebrates it
Murica is a hateful country, ruled by fear, and it always has been
But it could not be so maybe? This feels like more billionaire friendly doomerism
Honestly, I really don’t think it can be. When you scrape away all the paint and polish and just look at the actions of our nation it’s actual values are very evident and consistent. Property and money have rights, people only get them by having the two. Success is measured by the amount of defeat you deal. As things that benefit everyone are considered losses.
After 180 years of fighting for equality, women still have less control over their bodies than I do over what’s allowed on my property. When public works are sold as a universal good, they almost always work in an exclusionary way. The poor side of town where a bus route is most needed will have half as many stops as the business districts that no one takes the bus to. Almost all crimes can be paid for, allowing you to commit them so long as you afford them.
These aren’t new things, this has been happening since day one and we’ve spent twice as much learning how to make it look pretty than we’d have needed to fix it. It’s the makeup and masks that hide the disease as we tell everyone else they’re lesser for marching gawdy attire. Every black man dragged behind a truck, ever child raped by their parent, every homeless person beat by the police has been in service to the true ideals we hold.
The makeup can’t replace the person, it needs it to exist. If we want an america that isn’t a wretched, soulless walking corpse we have to kill it, bury it, and salt the ground around it so it might never feed new growth and replace it with the values we actually want. We’ll never be able to cut enough of the rot away to save the body that exists, it will always be a disgusting game of racist, Nazi Wack a mole.
Where to start?
Getting got by a Taco Bell ad when your hungry is not the same as being influenced to hate trans people or any other minority. Pretending it is is as dangerous as making the propaganda yourself, which you just did.
It’s concerning that you refuse to take a moment to entertain what kind of propaganda would actively target you. We already know about the well documented disinformation campaign efforts by the Russians to interfere in foreign elections and destabilize the US:
Russian disinformation operations in 2016 targeted the political right and left, including Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Black Lives Matters activists, and secessionist movements in Texas and California. Bottom line: Russia’s goal was to exacerbate the divisions that already exist in the country to destabilize its democracy.
Propaganda campaigns often work by simply targeting and amplifying existing beliefs, so if you think all white people are transphobic, for example, they feed you more examples of transphobic white people to further entrench you in that belief, eroding your empathy and trust for fellow Americans.
To me, reading about PR campaigns against celebrities was a good way of realizing I have also fallen for propaganda many times in the past, particularly when the “internet” suddenly decides a celebrity is universally loved or hated. Now, you can simply call me stupid for falling for it and move on in your moral superiority, or you could take a second to wonder about all the little, seemingly meaningless, things you’ve read on the internet that confirmed your beliefs, or fed you negative emotions like outrage and dejection, and you didn’t bother to dig into them more deeply to understand why is this being shown to me now? Who benefits from my gut reaction to this and who suffers from it?
I appreciate the effort you put into this post, but I don’t think you read what I wrote.
At no point did I refuse that.
There are an insane amount of assumptions here. I have dug into it. It’s rich people owning propaganda machines to make us tear each other a part.
Same side. Don’t let them win.
This is a gamergate reference as Epstein accomplice maxwell was a reddit mod at the time and apparently had some part in amplifying the movement into the red pill ideology that we know today.
The strong prey on the weak is a good argument for pedophilia and wealth hoarding.
What a username.
