many of his most reckless efforts in his first administration were stymied only because of others in his administration who blocked, delayed or watered down his aims to ensure that he could not put himself above the law or the country.
I often wonder what would have happened if his first term was unleashed. Eg if McCain voted yes to dismantle ACA. If Trump got his way the first time, would he have gotten in the second?
It was fucking laid out in P2025 and from the mouths of the billionaires
Arrest him. The fuck
How was anyone supposed to know he was gonna do the things he said he wanted to do.
In 2024, everything was already laid out for everybody to see clear as day - Trump1.0, MAGA’s behavior since 2021, Project 2025…
BTW, in 2016, both Mary Trump and Tony Schwartz predicted Jan 6 21: “If he loses the next election, he won’t go willingly.”
Ever since Jan 6 21 it’s been crystal clear where this goes if he wins again.
Fuck that. It was predicted a full year before. This is bullshit. Stop reading the NYT. They lied about the attack on Oct 7 (claimed sex crimes that didn’t happen) and never made a retraction. I cancelled my subscription to them and to the Washington Post (cause Bezos killed an opinion piece endorsing Biden, who I voted for because fuck Trump, but Biden was a terrible candidate).
Listen to the audio-book, “Manufacturing Consent,” from Noam Chomsky. Unfortunately, he’s in the Epstein docs, so I can’t recommend him otherwise. Oh well. All these people are monsters.
Unfortunately, he’s in the Epstein docs, so I can’t recommend him otherwise.
Also read an introductory textbook on logic & pay attention to fallacies like ad hominem. Shit’s timeless & really pays off far better than whatever joke of an education people got.
Beyond being buddies with Epstein, Noam is just a piece of shit of a person. Just absolute scum with interesting and thoughtful insights…but just a horrible person.
The people who needed to be convinced think the New York Times is globalist propaganda. If they even noticed the existence of this article they would assume it was a made up smear campaign against Dear Leader.
Also, our media (even the “liberal media”) is part of the problem. For example, they did such a terrible job explaining Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election that to this day even many anti-Trump Americans don’t understand how fucked up it was.
The primary blame is on the sociopaths in charge and the troglodytes who voted them in, but there is plenty of guilt to go around.
I worked in news media in the Bush years and I got to see first hand how our national news promoted the lies coming from the Bush administration and helping spearhead support for an Iraq invasion.
The media has been a problem for a long time.
I’m still pretty pissed off about that. It’s when I learned that a huge number of my fellow citizens are really stupid. Covid was when I learned that they’re also hateful pieces of shit.
Freedom fries, you guys. Woohoo.
Iraq II - Shock and Awe was definitely a huge part of my political awakening. I’m still saddened (but no longer amazed) that more people didn’t figure it out at the time, and that so many still haven’t figured it out.
People still think the NYT is some left leaning (or even “far left” in some circles) source. It’s fucking absurd.
I don’t recall the media covering the fake electors of the Jan 6 coup hardly at all. The media loved to cover the big violent crowd becaus it was flashy. However, the fake elector scheme was the more significant crisis in my mind. That showed a planned and coordinated effort by people in power to subvert democracy.
Precisely.
The biggest lie of them all is the “Liberal” in liberal media
All American media is essentially fascist, they’ve proven this beyond a doubt
If there were even a HINT of an ALLEGATION that Biden or Obama were party to INFANTICIDE they would have burned DC to the ground. Now all the US media outlets are just participating in the damage control operation
No, the people who needed to be convinced were the on-the-fence independents who stupidly thought they’d get a better economy under “Trump the successful businessman” than Kamala “Joe Biden 2.0 Harris.” They’re the ones who dismissed Trump’s stated plans as bluster; the people you’re talking about knew he wasn’t joking and were counting on it.
Donald Trump was a lot of peoples’ fault. One article nailing him doesn’t cancel out all the articles that normalized or sane washed him, or ran with his narrative. Nor does it undercut all the well-justified mistrust of legacy American media. It’s not as if people started trusting pundits out of nowhere - they started looking for commentary and news from alternate sources because yeah, actually, a lot of legacy media does report like they serve their wealthy owners. Not that MAGA pundits don’t, but that’s beside the point.
Hell, even right now, they’re generally running with the narrative that Trump’s Israel-Gaza ceasefire has been effective by not reporting that Israel still murders many innocent Palestinians every day.
I don’t disagree with the content of this post but take this OPs hour-old account with a large grain of salt; this is likely another self deleting spam account.
Every single fucking thing Trump has done I predicted and warned people about and got shadowbanned across half the goddamn internet for it.
Okay great we were warned, let’s stop whinging about the idiots of the past and start working to convince today’s idiots.
I think the most important thing about this era is to understand how the fuck this happened. I have no answers and have never heard anything convincing. I think if humanity lasts long enough, hundreds of years of scholars will be trying to understand it. Most people on earth could’ve predicted most of this shit, yet no amount of spreading that knowledge made a fucking difference. If nothing else, this tells us how unbelievably irrational humans are.
I have a pretty good idea how it happened, I just have no idea how we can guardrail our human weaknesses against every single entity committed to exploiting those weaknesses in new and inventive ways so that they can gain power over others.
We had this entirely new thing come into our lives where we could get mental stimulation on-tap anytime we want, perpetually and it fucked everyone’s minds, we lost our attention spans and learned to fear each other as organized groups worked tirelessly to change our thinking and behavior, either for commercial purposes or for social/political agendas, and it worked spectacularly because we had no idea what “the internet” does to a human brain until someone makes the internet and does it all to us.
Social pressure holds communities together, as primitive as it is, it’s a system we’re designed to work within, and as we’ve given up community outside influences are replacing it with incel-forums, loot-boxes, 24-hour news feeds, same-day shopping and and endless stream of jokes, memes and voices each desperately trying to get your attention, and getting just enough that you don’t look away or question your own capacity to question.
And of course it doesn’t help that actual bad people are doing things like indirectly paying millions of people in developing nations to spread propaganda across the US for retweets and clicks because it’s just enough money to make a career for someone in India or Philippines.
You’re right about all of this. What I can’t fathom though – is that in the past, facts mattered. A lot. How did all of the propaganda literally erase that entirely? That’s what I cannot figure out. It’s not like the internet invented the concept of the lie. Before social media, at least most people would have some skepticism and if nothing else, ask their smart friend. How the hell did that go away?
How did all of the propaganda literally erase that entirely?
I struggled with this also around the pandemic watching people deny reality, and my result is that in my adult life I have been re-black-pilled by depressing new knowledge about the human species:
We are not a logic, rational creature. Our brains are not machines for working out problems, they’re machines for telling stories to create a coherent narrative. And that narrative doesn’t need to follow rules of reality, it just needs to tie ends together. This is why you ruminate and get depressed about things that aren’t real or have already happened, this is why people will cheer for their wrestlers while also knowing it’s scripted, this is why people can get into positions at the height of power by just saying “I’m the best at this.”
We are massively vulnerable to cognitive dissonance, and once again, the only thing that has kept this in check for the majority of human society has been social pressure to know the rules.
The rules have changed over the centuries, but they’ve at least required the members of the community to know how to distinguish things that are against the rules from things that are allowed, and with this comes critical thought (for self preservation) and pondering one’s choices (for self preservation) and the desire to conform and adapt to the will of the people around you (for self preservation.)
When you take away the community and the pressure for survival, people can just live with whatever stories run wild in their minds, without consequence. The rest of us just hit the “mute” button or walk away and go be alone in our own universe of our own choosing. We’re all guilty of doing this about something, at some point, and when you get millions of people doing this at all once, you no longer have “objective reality” you have millions of Main Characters not caring about consequences for choosing to believe in things that run against reality.
We are not a logic, rational creature. Our brains are not machines for working out problems, they’re machines for telling stories to create a coherent narrative.
I gotta push back against this. It’s much more complicated than this. Humans have a complex brain, with some parts matching this description perfectly, and others that do not at all. If we were not capable of both being rational and prioritizing facts, we’d probably still be roughly the same as chimpanzees. Instead, we developed incredibly complicated systems for accomplishing long term goals, and throughout human history, cooperation based on rational thought has played a huge role in the direction our species took. Hell, without that ability, there probably wouldn’t have ever been a coherent ruling class. They wouldn’t have been able to put all the pieces in place to hoard wealth indefinitely.
What I see now as a distinct change is that rational thought just literally gets turned off at will, at any moment. In the past, 98% of people would watch a video of a crime and agree at least roughly on what happened. Now people literally seem to deny what their visual cortex perceives in favor of something they heard already. That is new.
Intentional psyop
fuck the NYT they have repeatedly failed to do their jobs
I don’t think many people really blame journalists so much as they blame the news media corporations that employ them.
Yes, if you are well informed and are actively looking for this type of journalism it’s widely available. However, you also have to know how to sift through the mountains of articles that conflict with this article run and promoted by the same organization.
The problem is that these companies are essentially advertising platforms whose motivations are not based in journalistic integrity, but to maintain user engagement.
But instead, the american public prefered to trust influencers such as Joe Rogan, Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson.
I think this is an inherent reaction to be expected when people lack trust in mainstream institutions. You can’t expect people to not seek alternative knowledge when what you see around you does not reflect the story being sold over the television.
Trust in institutions can take decades to build, and all these inconsistencies with reality can eat away at that trust in a much shorter period of time. When the tickers on the bottoms of the screen constantly tell you the economy is doing better than ever and you’re having to work overtime to put food on the table. When every news outlet is agreeing with the president about invading a country because they have weapons of mass destruction. With decades of these conflicts with reality… of course people are going to seek alternative sources of information.
This is Lemmy. Ain’t no one here surprised by this. We’ve been shouting at each other that this would happen for 2 years.
Try 10+ years
On Lemmy?
deleted by creator
Hey now, some of them could have not read it because of a paywall at the time too.
Sorry, I combined two comments into one and your reply got orphaned
The only thing I’m aware of which was predicted by anyone which he hasn’t done or tried to do is launch nukes at North Korea. Which he has threatened that. I think he’s enough of a psychopath that he is not above launching nukes if he ever finds himself in the position Hitler did. I mean why wouldn’t he? He’s shown us thousands and thousands of times that he cares about a singular person and that is himself.
But yeah, every fucking concern we had has been validated and then some. And these fucking zombies don’t care because they somehow can pretend he does nothing wrong, literally no matter what.
Never has there been a more disappointing time to have a working brain. All of this would’ve made way more sense before everyone could instantly check facts any time they wanted. Yet somehow, that ability made people less informed. I get that propaganda works and all, but I still will never understand how people could remain so adamantly ignorant when it’s genuinely so easy to learn and to stop being ignorant. I could even understand a world where people hate Trump’s specific actions but support a lot of the things he does. Would still be disappointing but it would make sense. Instead we live in a world where he can do anything and be loved for it no matter how heinous.
