Leftist anon thinks the right controls america
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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You're assuming that their views are based in reality. They're not.
In this guy's world hate crimes have increased dramatically. But he doesn't realize that hate crimes are up because getting to work on time is now a hate crime or how ridiculously low the standard is now; he's seen 'the evidence', but only curated agenda-evidence from lefty news. It's the summer of the shark, but on every topic all the time.
The worst of these delusional people get their news from dozens of different outlets and have no idea that those are all given them the same flock-of-birds message. Any evidence or rational argument you show them is a crackpot theory because they're absolutely convinced they're well and deeply informed.
I've never seen anything like it.
It's actually relatively easy to explain. They spend 4+ years in college (and increasingly time in high school, as well) in classes where they are fed unfalsifiable bullshit based on theories that can be traced back to the Frankfurt School.
At some point, when you're fed years of lies about things that don't exist and are easily disproven, it becomes a game of the Emperor's New Clothes. It has nothing to do with the reality -- it's a choice of "accept the bullshit and stay in the club" or "burn every bridge and live on the outside." In my experience there is no middle ground between those two positions, and students are implicitly made aware of this.
So you have true adherents (mostly women, because they don't need logic to feel correct) and reprehensible losers who are 'faking it' until at some point they stop faking it because they have too much social capital to lose. It's also relatively basic psychology that if you 'fake' being someone or something for too long, you will eventually become it.
Call it a social contagion, call it a cult -- whatever you want, you're pretty accurately describing how fucked up it is.
It's because people are weak willed and can't stand on their own. Having your own opinions is verboten among most of the population.
I'm not even talking exclusively about the young, but even middle-aged and up who previously were well-informed and grounded.
What happened is around 2015 news organizations were majority democrat (approx 2/3rds), Trump got nominated and elected, and because he broke their minds they fired / me too / forced out any conservative until they are now less than 5% even with closet conservatives.
Extreme example is Tom Ashbrook. Everybody lauded On Point for nearly twenty years, but a year after Trump he got me too'd, an independent investigation totally exonerated him, but WBUR/NPR fired him anyway because they didn't want to work with even a conservative-leaning person like him. Now NPR has zero people you could even suspect are closet conservatives.
There's no dissenting voices in their newsrooms and their audience hasn't figured that out.
My father, for example. He still gets all of his news from mainstream sources, with their obvious spins and propaganda. Believes that it's objective journalism. And every time I contradict something, try to explain to him situations neutrally and objectively, he claims that I'm a conspiracy theorist, because it's not what he heard on the news. Tells me that I'm reading and listening to propaganda, because I take time to research my opinions myself instead of just believing the talking heads on tv.
I have not the slightest clue about how to deprogram him and to get him to make at least a slight effort doing research. I even often researched information right in front of him and showed him my evidence when he claimed that one of my statements was false, but he then just forgets the discussions and goes right back to his previous position. Even asking him about which organizations he considered credible in order to use their own data to support my points didn't work, because he refused to name a single organization.
I feel like I'm surrounded by NPCs most of the time.
The horror of recognizing that your own family, the very people that you should be closest to in the world, are unthinking automatons is a uniquely agonizing experience. My mom and sister are unrepentant in their Leftism, and I would have more success training caterpillars than reasoning my way through a subject they've already had their minds made up for them by the TV/radio.
I don't know what else to do except abandon them entirely and set out for people who I can talk to, strangers or not. I feel like they're entirely lost.
Make fun of them whenever you can. I suppose that ends up the same as abandoning them, but at least they will be clear on the reason and your politics. They may even reflect a little. (you would know better than me)
Same boat. I always send them the primary source when I can. I send them the peer-reviewed science paper not even the science-news summary of it so at least in their mind they have to think "oh he means well he's just reading the wrong study, the science is conflicted". They're smart enough to read the abstract and understand what the paper's main findings are.
I think the only prayer is for them to realize that all their sources are the same source.
Do you have a conservative source for that? Does your source have even a single conservative reporter/journalist working there that you can name? Then reject that source because you need to get the full picture or you only listen to balanced news.
It's not that they're dumb, they just can't conceive of a 150 million person echo chamber or that they're in it - that's a conspiracy theory, an impossibility.