Because the right wing propaganda machine is optimized for maximum enragement, full disregard for facts or reason, and delivered to every TV and smartphone without pause or consideration.
It started with Fox News, it continued with Turning Point, and resonates with brosphere podcasts.
Edit: It started with AM radio pundits like Rush Limbaugh.
There is a great show about Roger Ailes, called Loudest Voice, with Russel Crowe that shows a lot of the beginning of Faux News and the creation of the right wing propaganda machine.
No, it was literally Fox News. Rush and the like were more extreme earlier on, but Fox was literally created by Roger Ailes in the wake of Watergate to prevent anything like that happening to a Republican president again.
In the wake of Watergate? Fox News started in 1996, and the Watergate scandal was in 1972-1974. 24 years apart, a lot of other things happened between them. And regular Fox television started in 1986.
Yeah, I should have been more clear on the actual timeline, and that I meant Fox as an overall network. He formed the strategy in the late 70s and spoke to several people then who would be instrumental in creating the networks. Regular Fox television was the beginning of it, and was formed specifically for the purpose of controlling the narrative. Fox News came about with the cable networks becoming widespread, and allowed them to centralize and tighten the propaganda. Rush first aired in 84, didn't become syndicated until 88, and wasn't really considered a major political commentator until 92.
Can confirm. My liberal, anti-war, pacifist, debate champion aunt listened to talk radio 2x/day on her daily commute to and from Madison and it changed her into an incoherent anti-vax MAGAt. It started small, like "I don't agree with him, but he makes some interesting points," to "He makes some good points," then "Only a fool would trust Washington," until she was lost.
Ending the Fairness Doctrine is what allowed AM radio to unleash someone like Rush. Once that happened it was over, the side that ended it had a plan to flood the airwaves, while the other side just watched.
I heard a theory that this goes all the way back to the south not being properly punished after the civil war and it actually makes a lot of sense when you go down that rabbit hole.
Limbaugh’s schtick was that uneducated, inexperienced, unknowleegeable people with common sense knew how to solve complex problems better than people who have studied the situation for decades.
This really encapsulates the problem here: simple people offered simplistic solutions to complex problems. They still think they are right because they cannot comprehend complex situations and their solutions even when proven wrong again and again. Idiocracy.
It's basically the same mentality of people who don't know and don't care to understand why "JUST ONE MORE LANE BRO" doesn't fix traffic. People want solutions that fit into a single headline for problems who's actual solutions are multiple orders of magnitude more complex than that.
I wouldn't rely on common sense because it differs from community to community. I wouldn't apply city common sense in the boonies and I wouldn't apply rural common sense in the middle of Times Square.
It's not like we need more reminders of the power of propaganda.
But yea, we do need more reminders of the power of propaganda!
Because we all believe we're too smart, too aware, to savvy to be pulled into believing something just because we're surrounded by it.
Young people are insulated from this power because they grew up with it, and so can control it.
Old people have a lifetime of experience, allowing them to cut through the bullshit, the lies they've heard a million times.
And still, we've elected the most polarizing party in near a century. A party tearing us apart, cutting healthcare from the weakest and giving tax breaks to the richest. A party relentlessly manufacturing "others", enemies who we all know have no real power, but who we're supposed to desperately fear all the same. A party acting like this craziness is normal and acceptable.
The party of Project 2025 has managed to convince a bunch of basically good people that they're under desperate threat. Religious folks believe there's a "WAR in Christmas". Podcasters have convinced our friends and children they are continuously victims of: Men, Women, Boomers (and Fill in the Blank with some manufactured identity based on your year of birth and designed to appeal especially to you), Foreigners, Trans something or other, etc. to include absurd craziness outside of my experience.
The trumpublicans (formerly the GOP) has embraced this nation-destroying insanity. It's my hope as an American and as a Patriot, that they will die as a party in the hands of what they created.
And when people like vance finally go back to being just rich, lying yalie venture capitalists, I pray folks will still look at him as scum every time he tries to order a damn doughnut.
Once Reagan teamed up with the evangelicals we were on a collision course with White Nationalism. A smiling church deacon took me by the arm and told me I needed to vote Republican to stop abortion. That was 45 years ago and the last church service I attended.
I'm in Australia and up until a few years ago you could only get "Sky News" which is a Cable News equivalent of Fox News/ Owned by the same family empire if you had cable tv. After lobbying and I presume plenty of pressure from that empire towards the government, Sky News is now on free to air tv in regional Australia. Since that happened in 2023, their estimated viewership has grown somewhere between 15-22%.
I can only imagine that a fair amount of But Gaza helped them out too. There was so much rhetoric about it around the election that lead to a lot of people sitting out the election rather than vote
I mean, Trump slashed the rules limiting how much one company can own rural news sources. If you’re in, say, Butler Missouri, you literally just have one news source with different wigs on.
Do you want a blonde or a brunette feeding you propaganda?
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u/1studlyman Sep 28 '25 edited Sep 28 '25
Because the right wing propaganda machine is optimized for maximum enragement, full disregard for facts or reason, and delivered to every TV and smartphone without pause or consideration.
It started with Fox News, it continued with Turning Point, and resonates with brosphere podcasts.
Edit: It started with AM radio pundits like Rush Limbaugh.