Journalism and opinion writing like this that causes the reader to stop and ponder the behavior and motivations of any political group, including us progressive types, is worthy and valuable.
What I still can't wrap my head around was the Rather-Bush document. When someone online showed that you could create an exact duplicate of the supposedly 1960's typed document using the latest MS word I thought to myself how wonderful the internet would be, it will make truth more obvious and help dissolve disinformation (a word not in use from what I remember). Ha!
I remember that. And of course, now Dan Rather's Twitter account is a non-stop torrent of Republican Boogeyman Derangement Syndrome and ranting about "misinformation".
The bigger problem is the much larger number of more plausible lies promulgated by mainstream newspapers and television news - and our own CIA & FBI. Not to mention government directed censorship of social media.
The reason people have turned to social media (and Substack) for news, is because of the lies, lack of journalistic integrity, and one sided coverage by traditional media. They have made themselves less relevant. I would like to say irrelevant, but they are still heavily influential.
I think it was a chicken-egg situation. Traditional media started losing ratings to social media, got a little wacky in order to compete, and the slope got slippery.
Traditional media were losing ground to Facebook, Twitter, etc. - true.
But owners and staff of traditional media were alarmed by Bernie drawing crowds in 2016 Democratic primary, and suppressed coverage.
They ignored Trump, because they were so out of touch they believed he had no chance.
Then, they were stunned by Trump’s victory over Hillary in 2016.
Their response was to censor, and not worry about the appearance of fairness or truth. Stop Trump at all costs. They saw this as more important than retaining market share. The wealthy owners and staff of WAPO, NYT, etc did not care about profits - only ideology and influence. They purged their staff of anyone not far left, or at least anyone not anti-Trump.
But eventually their total lack of journalistic integrity has cost them much of their influence as well - no one believes them any more.
It did not start with Trump. That's just false. He capitalized on it, exploited the pressure points, and they fell into the trap whole hog. And they definitely care about profits. At least in the case of NYT, it has shareholders, so they have a legal obligation to prioritize value.
Social media has certainly built hothouses for politicized crisis cults, along with dumping a lot of Concentrated Hyperbole & Speculative Fantasy fertilizer on them.
The WSJ took the time, did the legwork, and finally got the story.
The idea that the Russians attacked their own pipeline was self-evidently stupid from the get go, but got traction because so much of the Acela Corridor journo establishment is stupid, lazy, and hyper partisan to begin with. They simply live on, and for, Blue Wave Twitter.
The WSJ "finally got the story?" You're joking, right? A small collection of Ukrainians, on a small sailboat, pulled off a deep dive in some of the most heavily surveilled waters on the planet, to blow up large pipelines encased in concrete. Pull my other leg. Seymour Hersh was likely far, far closer to the truth than this ridiculous thesis put out by the WSJ.
Hersh is one of those guys who is sure he has the truth and is willing to tell a lie to get it rolling. Just make up an anonymous source, get the story out, and then people will come on the record to say it's true.
His "anonymous source" cited divers from a ship that wasn't in the area. Like any goofball, Hersh didn't say "oh, holy shit, let me check up on this" but just said "well that's part of the conspiracy because they turned off the transponders." Then the ship was confirmed in formation at other locations by satellite pictures. So then it became a false flag or some other bullshit.
Remember the guy who said that the post office was frauding up votes for Joe Biden? https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/pennsylvania-postal-worker-waffles-on-election-fraud-claim/ He didn't have any evidence it happened, he just *knew* it was happening, somewhere, since Tucker Carlson had told him so. And so he told a lie to help the truth along, sure that a bunch of other people with the actual truth would come out. He recorded his interrogation by the postal inspectors and by his own recording he backtracks on most things.
The scale of the operation necessary to blow up those pipelines, in those waters, make it far more likely that major state actors were involved. A half-dozen yokels on a friggin' sailboat? Sorry, no way.
It is impossible to believe that Democrats are opposed to misinformation when you closely examine the way they have wielded misinformation to prosecute and smear political opponents. The evidence of Democratic political plotting to control political speech is overwhelming, and far more norms-threatening than any silly 1980s era debate about indecency or vulgarity.
From what you say, it would seem this Blue MAGA group can't conceive that there are real world problems, caused, and sustained by the US government, that might turn people against Ms Harris. Poll or no, the truth is that neither candidate is any good for the majority of people, or muchly different from each other, except for a few differences within an allowable range.
They must think third parties are not worth bothering about. This election we have the chance to make them realize they are wrong.
The likelihood of the conspiracy theory having any basis in fact is irrelevant.
The sole point is to discredit the tribal enemy on any imaginable basis. If the only available narrative that will discredit the tribal enemy requires divine intervention, as well as space aliens assisting Jews and ninjas, who teamed up to corner the frozen orange juice futures market (which is critical for Our Nation;s Security!), then that is what they will profess. The absurdities will not bother them one bit.
I recall one russiagate conspiracy theorist insisting that the investment firm Blackrock was "entirely controlled by Russian oligarchs". As a publicly traded company, Blackrock's ownership is a matter of public record. Not a single Russian had filed an SEC ownership disclosure with regard to Blackrock. Various institutional investors and public employees' retirement boards did.
No matter. The inconvenient facts were ignored like water off a duck's back. The allegations that Blackrock was a Russian cutout were widely shared.
There was a study tying promotion of conspiracy theories to political nihilism (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/need-for-chaos-political-science-concept/677536/), and if I recall correctly, subjects would even share stories they knew were false for all the implied reasons. This doesn't seem like a rational strategy to me - if I want to discredit Trump, my first instinct is to highlight that *he* promotes conspiracy theories, not promote one myself. But I'm probably underestimating the degree to which consensus is swayed by a steady onslaught of negativity, whether true or not. I think liberals have made the determination that mutually assured destruction (see Khive) is better than unilateral disarmament (see 2016).
When it comes to in-group signalling, you get credit for sharing bad things that the out-group did. And you lose major points if you point out that something is nonsense.
But now it's not like in previous generations. With the decline of organized religion a number of alternative philosophies have stepped up as replacements with the result that political affiliation is now a major component of personal identity for some people.
A political party used to be a major social group. You'd attend a dance held by the Democrats the same way you'd attend one put on by the Shriners. But there wasn't much policy involved. People would have all sorts of feelings about guns, taxes, abortion, Russia.
One of the challenges of refuting conspiracy theories is that often conspiracists will support mutually contradictory storylines. It's unclear how a person who thinks the shooting was a traditional false flag reconciles their beliefs with someone who thinks Trump wasn't actually shot, similar to how a person who thinks the Bush administration orchestrated 9/11 is the ally of someone who thinks jet fuel can't melt steel beams. The glue keeping the coalition together is just shadowy forces operating in secret - it doesn't matter which forces or what their operations are. If you're interested in truth and persuasion, then conspiracists have cast an impossibly wide net so they can't be effectively discredited.
This also doubles as a reason why their theories shouldn't be believed in the first place, but that observation only makes sense if you treat conspiracism like other opinions. Conspiracy theories promise community, escapism, access to forbidden truth, opportunities to signal fervor towards a cause, etc. Converts *want* to believe, optimizing for emotional investment over accuracy, which is exactly what beliefs should avoid.
Yup - just like "Covid was a bioweapon intentionally released by the Chinese to destroy the West" is very different from "the Covid pandemic originated from a lab leak caused by poor adherence to security protocols at the Wuhan Institute of Virology".
Both were assailed as conspiracy theories. And in typical fashion, when Tom Cotton went public with his piece about the lab leak hypothesis, he was attacked by blue-no-matter-who Acela Corridor journos as promoting a conspiracy that C19 was a deliberately engineered bioweapon, even though his piece made no such claim whatsoever.
Now, of course, the lab leak hypothesis has emerged the overwhelmingly likely candidate, with the Fauci emails more or less pointing that way too. It's become so predictable, it's practically a self-parody.
Any time Tom Cotton wants to get some discussion point out into the wild, he should pay someone else to say it He's a huge enough asshole that many people automatically disregard or assume to be a bald faced political lie anything the wannabe Pinochet from Arkansas says.
10x as many people were aware of Tom Cotton's statement on the issue as were made aware of Robert Redfield's public statement that the virus showed signs of lab manipulation. That was a choice by media. In 2020, the Washington Post wrote an article to ridicule Tom Cotton and in that article cited Richard Ebright of Rutgers as "debunking" Cotton's claim, despite the fact that Ebright stated the exact opposite to the reporter, claiming it was the most likely explanation. That was also a choice. Which is to say that the media will always select the least reliable person as the spokesperson for a view they want to denigrate - and just manufacture the consensus that opposes that view.
Just imagine how bad things will get if Trump wins again. Any kind of questioning of any kind of Left approved orthodoxy will get one excommunicated again. People will really lose their mind.
Completely agree. One of the under-appreciated aspects of the Trump phenomenon is how it exposed so much neuroticism on the liberal and progressive left.
This is exactly how I feel about covid. I don't think covid was harmless, I think reasonable people can disagree (or forgive authorities for mistakes) in the initial response to covid, I have a nuanced view of who benefitted from the vaccine and who mostly did not. But its role in revealing exactly which people in your office are total psychopaths is just an undeniable public good.
On the other hand the Democratic leadership could easily decide that they need to court moderates and working class voters if they're ever going to win again, meaning that they'll attempt to marginalize the woke contingent.
Not necessarily. If she shifts towards the middle and then loses, the more extreme progressives will simply point out that going to the middle is a losing strategy.
I was under the 2nd tower on 9/11 when the second plane hit. I wrote a story about it. People commented online that there was no second plane, which literally hit above my head.
I have direct firsthand experience of online insanity, and that was back in the stone ages. I can’t even imagine how bad it is now, and don’t look bc I don’t want to be infected by lunacy, I want to solve problems and need a clear head to do so. I appreciate being kept abreast of the horrors so I can have a sense of things without having to do it myself.
The link to the original publication (at the top) leads to Off Guardian (where the weird speculative comments are), which probably lends itself to weird theories but I was glad they wanted to put it out there. There are typos etc so I prefer to share the version on my substack.
"There was no second plane" is pretty fucking crazy given that millions of people were staring right at the WTC with their own eyes because of the first plane.
"No first plane" is something that I can *conceive* being true, like someone faked just a little bit of video since almost no one recorded it. "No second plane" is someone trying to win the contest of most-ballsy conspiracy theory.
This was a bad one for sure. I got a lot of looks from a lot of people when I'd point out the obvious. Now everyone is yeah, it's obvious. That was a weird few years because as much as FdB's example highlights large crazy corners of the internet, the blindness to Biden's infirmity pretty much infected everyone I knew. I rarely, and I mean rarely, I think only one other person, agreed with that assessment. Most to this day still think that the debate was the real reveal. It wasn't.
Part of the problem with this thesis is that it ignores the progressive nature of Biden's condition. It's seldom linear, nor even strictly monotonic. What the public saw of Biden over the last 18 months is congruent with a moderate decline followed by steeper decline after about January 2024.
The debate removed the doubts of many, but by minimizing Biden's exposure beforehand, it also allows anyone with prior suspicion to assume that his present condition stretched back to the initial time of their suspicions, which is possible, but not likely.
In no way does the above absolve the people that hid Biden's condition at any stage. They are responsible for the public's blindness to his infirmity, because they traded upon their credibility, and exploited gullibility.
And the same applies to Trump's team regarding his slower, long-term decline.
It's because admitting the infirmity in public meant two things: 1) blowing up the election, and 2) you can't make a suggestion like "the president may be too old for the election" without simultaneously saying he's too old for the presidency. The fact that no one has initiated a 25th amendment process yet is absurd. If you are too old to campaign (because you are too old to be relied upon to speak publically), then you are too old to be President.
I largely agree. For whatever reason, the US has a big hangup on the health of their president, such that publicizing an ailment of almost any kind is detrimental to electoral prospects. But of course mental infirmity is politically fatal anywhere.
Perverse incentives. The Trump camp enjoys Biden occasionally venturing onto the public stage and talking about "beating Medicare" and the Harris camp can't suggest removing him from office without opening up a can of worms.
I know *why*. I'm merely pissed that they've confirmed my suspicions that the partisans in our country would happily misgovern, making very obvious, very bad choices for the country overall as long as they benefit from those choices. I'm even more pissed that they've confirmed it and very few people (who do not themselves have an axe to grind) even seem to care. I knew the officials were corrupt; I really did think better of the general public.
Keep in mind though that Biden will be gone soon no matter what. The public may feel that it's not worth it to kick off a national drama with the election so close.
Being too old to campaign absolutely means you are not capable of finishing out several months. If people really thought the problem was merely the next four years, I don't even know what to say. The president is the president 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. At any given point, he may be forced to work for very long hours and get little sleep. When that happens, he still needs to be clear-headed and decisive, and the world doesn't care that it's not a good time for him, or that he's having a "bad day." If he can't campaign due to mental infirmity (which IS the case), he can't be president.
It means you shouldn't be in a situation where you might need to stay alert for 24 or 36 hours straight to manage a rapidly unfolding crisis that involves one or the other secondary regional superpowers who are btw also nuclear powers.
I understand that concern, but we're evaluating a president, not a babysitter. I felt he wasn't up to being president, in charge of war decisions, probably 2-3 years ago. Mostly it was the behavior of his staff, not his own behavior that made it obvious to me. If he needed guidance to maneuver simple social situations he was in no way capable to run a war. So 2 years ago, not fit for presidency, 6 months ago, not fit to watch a child. And the comparisons to Trump's decline are not really analogous, one is the more typical decline of age, slower but still fit enough, the other is a disease. What is happening to Biden can happen to a 50 year old. It's sad that he's had to maneuver through this terrible disease in this way.
Can you account for the many instances where he simply performed and spoke as a President, competently, *2-3 years ago*? I suspect your hindsight is biased.
I agree on the logical progression, but not the timing.
I think the Biden of 2-3 years ago was at least as capable at prosecuting a war as most of the world's leaders I've dealt with. I haven't spoken with Biden in over 5 years, but the man was quite a bit sharper in private than he comes over in public.
The bahaviour of his staff since 2020 didn't make anything obvious, instead it obfuscated, making any forward analysis more difficult, not easier. The media over-focuses on small gaffs, to which he was prone for decades, and he's a stutterer, so their over-protection was entirely logical to me. The problem is one of progression. Somewhere along the line, Biden reached a compromising point, and none of us know exactly when that was.
Trump's decline is actually quite analogous. It's also more publicly evident, because his talking is integral to his schtick. Trump is experiencing a period of slow but gradual cognitive decline, as did Biden, when he was the same age. Trump has overall declined somewhat more than Biden at the same age. There's likely more that we're not being told - it could be a lot, or not. The risk that Americans took on Biden's mental acuity in 2020 is even greater for Trump in 2024.
I blame media bubbles and the "FOX News Fallacy". When mainly right-wing outlets are reporting on Biden's issues, left-of-center people will naturally be dismissive of that reporting. And even if you share some of those concerns, you'd hesitate to express them for fear of aligning with "MAGA talking points".
Obviously conservative media was going to edit things to put Biden in the worst possible light, but the bigger issue is that he was giving them so much material to work with. The debate was just the point at which it became impossible to deny because we all saw it live and unfiltered.
Yeah, these people are raving lunatics. They're also supremely idiotic.
As someone who is no longer on social media and believe Twitter is the worst thing to happen to American communication and information dissemination since its inception, I will only say that I've not talked to a single person in my life that has stated or even hinted at Trump's assassination being staged or fake. I do, however, have dozens of family members or friends that believe the 2020 election was stolen, and plan on voting for Trump again. I work in finance in a liberal college city, and folks I interact with run the gamut, politically.
Am I being overly dismissed over the Blue MAGA you refer to here? Perhaps. But I think it's more the case that I feel no affiliation with those people, despite the fact we're likely going to vote for the same person.
This isn't complicated: my statement is an anecdote, and it's in a response to other anecdotes, of course. Namely - Twitter accounts of people with absolutely no power within a party. Am I supposed to come up with data to combat the lack of data?
I don't even know what you mean by 'excuse.' My entire point is that I don't have any affiliation or feel the need to defend or go after stupid lunatics on Twitter.
I will say that interacting with you in Freddie's comments feels an awful lot like interacting with someone on Twitter or Facebook. I've literally never seen you concede any type of point or even say anything I couldn't predict you would say. You're BORING. Extremely boring.
"I don't even know what you mean by 'excuse.' My entire point is that I don't have any affiliation or feel the need to defend or go after stupid lunatics on Twitter."
What exactly was the point of even posting in that case?
"You're BORING. Extremely boring."
LOL. In that case why respond at all? I'll just get the last word in and you can enjoy my posts as capstones to whatever you write.
I've had people at political organizing events say that Trump wasn't actually shot in the ear. I'm unpopular when I say he was, like, why am I harshing the mood?
I liked how Freddie recently referred to primaries as the "immune system of the electoral process". Having some motive to turn harsh critical attention to your own members allows bad ideas to get weeded out. But if you systemically suppress that immune system, by making all criticism of the Party verboten, then bad ideas (like ludicrous conspiracy theories) run amok.
On top of everything else, if you're going to go to all this trouble, why not have a ton of faked evidence ready to go that the shooter was a left-wing antifa zealot instead of, as appears to be the case, a disturbed man with somewhat incoherent but mostly right-leaning beliefs?
Journalism and opinion writing like this that causes the reader to stop and ponder the behavior and motivations of any political group, including us progressive types, is worthy and valuable.
I suppose. Maybe. Until we are all drowning in it.
All of this lunatic behavior boils down to social media and its incentives, which are really really bad for all of us. On all sides.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
What I still can't wrap my head around was the Rather-Bush document. When someone online showed that you could create an exact duplicate of the supposedly 1960's typed document using the latest MS word I thought to myself how wonderful the internet would be, it will make truth more obvious and help dissolve disinformation (a word not in use from what I remember). Ha!
I remember that. And of course, now Dan Rather's Twitter account is a non-stop torrent of Republican Boogeyman Derangement Syndrome and ranting about "misinformation".
The bigger problem is the much larger number of more plausible lies promulgated by mainstream newspapers and television news - and our own CIA & FBI. Not to mention government directed censorship of social media.
The reason people have turned to social media (and Substack) for news, is because of the lies, lack of journalistic integrity, and one sided coverage by traditional media. They have made themselves less relevant. I would like to say irrelevant, but they are still heavily influential.
I think it was a chicken-egg situation. Traditional media started losing ratings to social media, got a little wacky in order to compete, and the slope got slippery.
I see it differently.
Traditional media were losing ground to Facebook, Twitter, etc. - true.
But owners and staff of traditional media were alarmed by Bernie drawing crowds in 2016 Democratic primary, and suppressed coverage.
They ignored Trump, because they were so out of touch they believed he had no chance.
Then, they were stunned by Trump’s victory over Hillary in 2016.
Their response was to censor, and not worry about the appearance of fairness or truth. Stop Trump at all costs. They saw this as more important than retaining market share. The wealthy owners and staff of WAPO, NYT, etc did not care about profits - only ideology and influence. They purged their staff of anyone not far left, or at least anyone not anti-Trump.
But eventually their total lack of journalistic integrity has cost them much of their influence as well - no one believes them any more.
It did not start with Trump. That's just false. He capitalized on it, exploited the pressure points, and they fell into the trap whole hog. And they definitely care about profits. At least in the case of NYT, it has shareholders, so they have a legal obligation to prioritize value.
No purging of "far left" journalists was necessary. They had zero and still do.
Social media has certainly built hothouses for politicized crisis cults, along with dumping a lot of Concentrated Hyperbole & Speculative Fantasy fertilizer on them.
The same people who believe that the assassination attempt was an op also believe that it was the Russians that blew up Nordstream.
But...but...we (NATO) would never do that. We're the good guys!!
The WSJ took the time, did the legwork, and finally got the story.
The idea that the Russians attacked their own pipeline was self-evidently stupid from the get go, but got traction because so much of the Acela Corridor journo establishment is stupid, lazy, and hyper partisan to begin with. They simply live on, and for, Blue Wave Twitter.
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explosion-real-story-da24839c?st=x0mjl27bs8m0kya&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Ya I was being sarcastic there.
The WSJ "finally got the story?" You're joking, right? A small collection of Ukrainians, on a small sailboat, pulled off a deep dive in some of the most heavily surveilled waters on the planet, to blow up large pipelines encased in concrete. Pull my other leg. Seymour Hersh was likely far, far closer to the truth than this ridiculous thesis put out by the WSJ.
Hersh is one of those guys who is sure he has the truth and is willing to tell a lie to get it rolling. Just make up an anonymous source, get the story out, and then people will come on the record to say it's true.
His "anonymous source" cited divers from a ship that wasn't in the area. Like any goofball, Hersh didn't say "oh, holy shit, let me check up on this" but just said "well that's part of the conspiracy because they turned off the transponders." Then the ship was confirmed in formation at other locations by satellite pictures. So then it became a false flag or some other bullshit.
Remember the guy who said that the post office was frauding up votes for Joe Biden? https://www.factcheck.org/2020/11/pennsylvania-postal-worker-waffles-on-election-fraud-claim/ He didn't have any evidence it happened, he just *knew* it was happening, somewhere, since Tucker Carlson had told him so. And so he told a lie to help the truth along, sure that a bunch of other people with the actual truth would come out. He recorded his interrogation by the postal inspectors and by his own recording he backtracks on most things.
The scale of the operation necessary to blow up those pipelines, in those waters, make it far more likely that major state actors were involved. A half-dozen yokels on a friggin' sailboat? Sorry, no way.
That brings up the recurring question: Were they stupid? Or lying?
Some may have been lying, or just reading their script, but never underestimate stupidity!
It is impossible to believe that Democrats are opposed to misinformation when you closely examine the way they have wielded misinformation to prosecute and smear political opponents. The evidence of Democratic political plotting to control political speech is overwhelming, and far more norms-threatening than any silly 1980s era debate about indecency or vulgarity.
It’s not BlueMAGA. It’s BlueAnon.
It's Qanon for liberals.
Beat me to it!
A co-worker was totally convinced that Q-Anon was a real threat, by watching Vice channel.
He parroted the "reimagine policing" line given out during the 2020 demonstrations / riots, with no idea what that would mean in the real world.
Had no idea about Antifa, and how actual local governments in the pacific northwest tacitly allowed their operations.
Interesting that Democrats know more about Q-Anon than Republicans, and Republicans know more about Antifa than Democrats, due to polarized media.
Of course the Blu-Anon conspiracy that Trump assassination attempt was staged is indeed only a fringe view - or in some cases tongue in cheek troll.
But there are a huge number of less absurd lies believed by a large percentage of our polarized public. And that, is indeed a huge problem.
Antifa isn't a one size fits all conspiracy theory pushed by actual former three star generals.
Correct
From what you say, it would seem this Blue MAGA group can't conceive that there are real world problems, caused, and sustained by the US government, that might turn people against Ms Harris. Poll or no, the truth is that neither candidate is any good for the majority of people, or muchly different from each other, except for a few differences within an allowable range.
They must think third parties are not worth bothering about. This election we have the chance to make them realize they are wrong.
The likelihood of the conspiracy theory having any basis in fact is irrelevant.
The sole point is to discredit the tribal enemy on any imaginable basis. If the only available narrative that will discredit the tribal enemy requires divine intervention, as well as space aliens assisting Jews and ninjas, who teamed up to corner the frozen orange juice futures market (which is critical for Our Nation;s Security!), then that is what they will profess. The absurdities will not bother them one bit.
I recall one russiagate conspiracy theorist insisting that the investment firm Blackrock was "entirely controlled by Russian oligarchs". As a publicly traded company, Blackrock's ownership is a matter of public record. Not a single Russian had filed an SEC ownership disclosure with regard to Blackrock. Various institutional investors and public employees' retirement boards did.
No matter. The inconvenient facts were ignored like water off a duck's back. The allegations that Blackrock was a Russian cutout were widely shared.
There was a study tying promotion of conspiracy theories to political nihilism (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/need-for-chaos-political-science-concept/677536/), and if I recall correctly, subjects would even share stories they knew were false for all the implied reasons. This doesn't seem like a rational strategy to me - if I want to discredit Trump, my first instinct is to highlight that *he* promotes conspiracy theories, not promote one myself. But I'm probably underestimating the degree to which consensus is swayed by a steady onslaught of negativity, whether true or not. I think liberals have made the determination that mutually assured destruction (see Khive) is better than unilateral disarmament (see 2016).
Fascinating, Captain.
When it comes to in-group signalling, you get credit for sharing bad things that the out-group did. And you lose major points if you point out that something is nonsense.
Popping in to point out the inherent absurdity of a “party opposed to tribalism”
But now it's not like in previous generations. With the decline of organized religion a number of alternative philosophies have stepped up as replacements with the result that political affiliation is now a major component of personal identity for some people.
A political party used to be a major social group. You'd attend a dance held by the Democrats the same way you'd attend one put on by the Shriners. But there wasn't much policy involved. People would have all sorts of feelings about guns, taxes, abortion, Russia.
What percentage of Democrats would be willing to date or marry a Republican now compared to in the past?
One of the challenges of refuting conspiracy theories is that often conspiracists will support mutually contradictory storylines. It's unclear how a person who thinks the shooting was a traditional false flag reconciles their beliefs with someone who thinks Trump wasn't actually shot, similar to how a person who thinks the Bush administration orchestrated 9/11 is the ally of someone who thinks jet fuel can't melt steel beams. The glue keeping the coalition together is just shadowy forces operating in secret - it doesn't matter which forces or what their operations are. If you're interested in truth and persuasion, then conspiracists have cast an impossibly wide net so they can't be effectively discredited.
This also doubles as a reason why their theories shouldn't be believed in the first place, but that observation only makes sense if you treat conspiracism like other opinions. Conspiracy theories promise community, escapism, access to forbidden truth, opportunities to signal fervor towards a cause, etc. Converts *want* to believe, optimizing for emotional investment over accuracy, which is exactly what beliefs should avoid.
Yup - just like "Covid was a bioweapon intentionally released by the Chinese to destroy the West" is very different from "the Covid pandemic originated from a lab leak caused by poor adherence to security protocols at the Wuhan Institute of Virology".
Both were assailed as conspiracy theories. And in typical fashion, when Tom Cotton went public with his piece about the lab leak hypothesis, he was attacked by blue-no-matter-who Acela Corridor journos as promoting a conspiracy that C19 was a deliberately engineered bioweapon, even though his piece made no such claim whatsoever.
Now, of course, the lab leak hypothesis has emerged the overwhelmingly likely candidate, with the Fauci emails more or less pointing that way too. It's become so predictable, it's practically a self-parody.
The lab leak hypothesis has also since proven politically useful.
Any time Tom Cotton wants to get some discussion point out into the wild, he should pay someone else to say it He's a huge enough asshole that many people automatically disregard or assume to be a bald faced political lie anything the wannabe Pinochet from Arkansas says.
10x as many people were aware of Tom Cotton's statement on the issue as were made aware of Robert Redfield's public statement that the virus showed signs of lab manipulation. That was a choice by media. In 2020, the Washington Post wrote an article to ridicule Tom Cotton and in that article cited Richard Ebright of Rutgers as "debunking" Cotton's claim, despite the fact that Ebright stated the exact opposite to the reporter, claiming it was the most likely explanation. That was also a choice. Which is to say that the media will always select the least reliable person as the spokesperson for a view they want to denigrate - and just manufacture the consensus that opposes that view.
COVID doesn't exist, the Chinese invented it in a lab, but Trump defeated it, using a vaccine that doesn't work.
The best was the MSM stance that the lab leak theory was racist, but the wet markets theory wasn't.
This is one of the many batshit crazy things of 2020 that I struggle to get over to this day.
How much jet fuel was needed to bring WTC 7 down at literally free fall speed?
Who ya gonna believe? Me or your own eyes?
Just imagine how bad things will get if Trump wins again. Any kind of questioning of any kind of Left approved orthodoxy will get one excommunicated again. People will really lose their mind.
Completely agree. One of the under-appreciated aspects of the Trump phenomenon is how it exposed so much neuroticism on the liberal and progressive left.
This is exactly how I feel about covid. I don't think covid was harmless, I think reasonable people can disagree (or forgive authorities for mistakes) in the initial response to covid, I have a nuanced view of who benefitted from the vaccine and who mostly did not. But its role in revealing exactly which people in your office are total psychopaths is just an undeniable public good.
On the other hand the Democratic leadership could easily decide that they need to court moderates and working class voters if they're ever going to win again, meaning that they'll attempt to marginalize the woke contingent.
Yup. Ruy Teixeira has been arguing this point for a while. But is the Harris campaign listening?
Harris losing is going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back, putting the centrists back in charge. It's a cycle as old as American politics.
Not necessarily. If she shifts towards the middle and then loses, the more extreme progressives will simply point out that going to the middle is a losing strategy.
At that point I don't think what they say will matter: the centrist, pro-business DLC contingent will purge them.
...and they'll be right.
Define "Left" the proper adjective (?).
I was under the 2nd tower on 9/11 when the second plane hit. I wrote a story about it. People commented online that there was no second plane, which literally hit above my head.
I have direct firsthand experience of online insanity, and that was back in the stone ages. I can’t even imagine how bad it is now, and don’t look bc I don’t want to be infected by lunacy, I want to solve problems and need a clear head to do so. I appreciate being kept abreast of the horrors so I can have a sense of things without having to do it myself.
The link to the original publication (at the top) leads to Off Guardian (where the weird speculative comments are), which probably lends itself to weird theories but I was glad they wanted to put it out there. There are typos etc so I prefer to share the version on my substack.
https://allisongustavson.substack.com/p/under-the-second-tower-ed826bcefaa
"There was no second plane" is pretty fucking crazy given that millions of people were staring right at the WTC with their own eyes because of the first plane.
"No first plane" is something that I can *conceive* being true, like someone faked just a little bit of video since almost no one recorded it. "No second plane" is someone trying to win the contest of most-ballsy conspiracy theory.
I think the years of denying reality about Biden's age and fitness for a second term primed them for this.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
This was a bad one for sure. I got a lot of looks from a lot of people when I'd point out the obvious. Now everyone is yeah, it's obvious. That was a weird few years because as much as FdB's example highlights large crazy corners of the internet, the blindness to Biden's infirmity pretty much infected everyone I knew. I rarely, and I mean rarely, I think only one other person, agreed with that assessment. Most to this day still think that the debate was the real reveal. It wasn't.
Part of the problem with this thesis is that it ignores the progressive nature of Biden's condition. It's seldom linear, nor even strictly monotonic. What the public saw of Biden over the last 18 months is congruent with a moderate decline followed by steeper decline after about January 2024.
The debate removed the doubts of many, but by minimizing Biden's exposure beforehand, it also allows anyone with prior suspicion to assume that his present condition stretched back to the initial time of their suspicions, which is possible, but not likely.
In no way does the above absolve the people that hid Biden's condition at any stage. They are responsible for the public's blindness to his infirmity, because they traded upon their credibility, and exploited gullibility.
And the same applies to Trump's team regarding his slower, long-term decline.
It's because admitting the infirmity in public meant two things: 1) blowing up the election, and 2) you can't make a suggestion like "the president may be too old for the election" without simultaneously saying he's too old for the presidency. The fact that no one has initiated a 25th amendment process yet is absurd. If you are too old to campaign (because you are too old to be relied upon to speak publically), then you are too old to be President.
I largely agree. For whatever reason, the US has a big hangup on the health of their president, such that publicizing an ailment of almost any kind is detrimental to electoral prospects. But of course mental infirmity is politically fatal anywhere.
Perverse incentives. The Trump camp enjoys Biden occasionally venturing onto the public stage and talking about "beating Medicare" and the Harris camp can't suggest removing him from office without opening up a can of worms.
I know *why*. I'm merely pissed that they've confirmed my suspicions that the partisans in our country would happily misgovern, making very obvious, very bad choices for the country overall as long as they benefit from those choices. I'm even more pissed that they've confirmed it and very few people (who do not themselves have an axe to grind) even seem to care. I knew the officials were corrupt; I really did think better of the general public.
Keep in mind though that Biden will be gone soon no matter what. The public may feel that it's not worth it to kick off a national drama with the election so close.
Being too old to campaign or too old over the next 4 years doesn’t mean you can’t finish out the last year of a term.
Being too old to campaign absolutely means you are not capable of finishing out several months. If people really thought the problem was merely the next four years, I don't even know what to say. The president is the president 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. At any given point, he may be forced to work for very long hours and get little sleep. When that happens, he still needs to be clear-headed and decisive, and the world doesn't care that it's not a good time for him, or that he's having a "bad day." If he can't campaign due to mental infirmity (which IS the case), he can't be president.
It means you shouldn't be in a situation where you might need to stay alert for 24 or 36 hours straight to manage a rapidly unfolding crisis that involves one or the other secondary regional superpowers who are btw also nuclear powers.
I understand that concern, but we're evaluating a president, not a babysitter. I felt he wasn't up to being president, in charge of war decisions, probably 2-3 years ago. Mostly it was the behavior of his staff, not his own behavior that made it obvious to me. If he needed guidance to maneuver simple social situations he was in no way capable to run a war. So 2 years ago, not fit for presidency, 6 months ago, not fit to watch a child. And the comparisons to Trump's decline are not really analogous, one is the more typical decline of age, slower but still fit enough, the other is a disease. What is happening to Biden can happen to a 50 year old. It's sad that he's had to maneuver through this terrible disease in this way.
Can you account for the many instances where he simply performed and spoke as a President, competently, *2-3 years ago*? I suspect your hindsight is biased.
I agree on the logical progression, but not the timing.
I think the Biden of 2-3 years ago was at least as capable at prosecuting a war as most of the world's leaders I've dealt with. I haven't spoken with Biden in over 5 years, but the man was quite a bit sharper in private than he comes over in public.
The bahaviour of his staff since 2020 didn't make anything obvious, instead it obfuscated, making any forward analysis more difficult, not easier. The media over-focuses on small gaffs, to which he was prone for decades, and he's a stutterer, so their over-protection was entirely logical to me. The problem is one of progression. Somewhere along the line, Biden reached a compromising point, and none of us know exactly when that was.
Trump's decline is actually quite analogous. It's also more publicly evident, because his talking is integral to his schtick. Trump is experiencing a period of slow but gradual cognitive decline, as did Biden, when he was the same age. Trump has overall declined somewhat more than Biden at the same age. There's likely more that we're not being told - it could be a lot, or not. The risk that Americans took on Biden's mental acuity in 2020 is even greater for Trump in 2024.
Reagan redux.
I blame media bubbles and the "FOX News Fallacy". When mainly right-wing outlets are reporting on Biden's issues, left-of-center people will naturally be dismissive of that reporting. And even if you share some of those concerns, you'd hesitate to express them for fear of aligning with "MAGA talking points".
Obviously conservative media was going to edit things to put Biden in the worst possible light, but the bigger issue is that he was giving them so much material to work with. The debate was just the point at which it became impossible to deny because we all saw it live and unfiltered.
"Most to this day still think that the debate was the real reveal. It wasn't."
Biden's senility has been obvious for years. Caity Johnstone was pointing it out before the 2020 election.
Yeah, these people are raving lunatics. They're also supremely idiotic.
As someone who is no longer on social media and believe Twitter is the worst thing to happen to American communication and information dissemination since its inception, I will only say that I've not talked to a single person in my life that has stated or even hinted at Trump's assassination being staged or fake. I do, however, have dozens of family members or friends that believe the 2020 election was stolen, and plan on voting for Trump again. I work in finance in a liberal college city, and folks I interact with run the gamut, politically.
Am I being overly dismissed over the Blue MAGA you refer to here? Perhaps. But I think it's more the case that I feel no affiliation with those people, despite the fact we're likely going to vote for the same person.
Anecdata.
Yeah, as opposed to all the amazing data shared in this post and your comment about the level of the problem. Good reply.
What comment? I'm just pointing out that your excuse amounts to nothing more than anecdote.
This isn't complicated: my statement is an anecdote, and it's in a response to other anecdotes, of course. Namely - Twitter accounts of people with absolutely no power within a party. Am I supposed to come up with data to combat the lack of data?
I don't even know what you mean by 'excuse.' My entire point is that I don't have any affiliation or feel the need to defend or go after stupid lunatics on Twitter.
I will say that interacting with you in Freddie's comments feels an awful lot like interacting with someone on Twitter or Facebook. I've literally never seen you concede any type of point or even say anything I couldn't predict you would say. You're BORING. Extremely boring.
"I don't even know what you mean by 'excuse.' My entire point is that I don't have any affiliation or feel the need to defend or go after stupid lunatics on Twitter."
What exactly was the point of even posting in that case?
"You're BORING. Extremely boring."
LOL. In that case why respond at all? I'll just get the last word in and you can enjoy my posts as capstones to whatever you write.
Get back on Facebook, Uncle Slaw. It's where your people are.
I've had people at political organizing events say that Trump wasn't actually shot in the ear. I'm unpopular when I say he was, like, why am I harshing the mood?
I liked how Freddie recently referred to primaries as the "immune system of the electoral process". Having some motive to turn harsh critical attention to your own members allows bad ideas to get weeded out. But if you systemically suppress that immune system, by making all criticism of the Party verboten, then bad ideas (like ludicrous conspiracy theories) run amok.
Or you promote a candidate verging on senility to the position of party nominee.
On top of everything else, if you're going to go to all this trouble, why not have a ton of faked evidence ready to go that the shooter was a left-wing antifa zealot instead of, as appears to be the case, a disturbed man with somewhat incoherent but mostly right-leaning beliefs?
Have they actually uncovered any political writings or evidence as to his beliefs?
Yes, and like many people's, they appear to be ..variable and inconsistent over time.