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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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The normies think what the journalists tell them to think.

Isnt the whole alleged "crisis of consensus", "political polarization", and "rampant anti-intellectualism" that typifies modern America indicative of the opposite?

There may have been a time many years ago where, if Walter Cronkite said it, people would assume it was true. But that time is long gone.

Epstien didn't kill himself.

There may have been a time many years ago where, if Walter Cronkite said it, people would assume it was true. But that time is long gone.

The pandemic proved otherwise.

Epstien didn't kill himself.

That just marks you as a non-normie. The normies have forgotten who Epstein was, and if you remind them, of course he killed himself, what are you, some sort of paranoid?

I think that you are woefully out of touch with what "normal people" believe.

If any thing media viewership and trust were already trending downward before 2020 and the pandemic coupled with the George Floyd "summer of love" killed what was left.

We live in a world where (if a quick Bing.com search is to be believed) Joe Rogan's podcast averages more listeners per week than all of CNN.

The George Floyd "summer of love" had middle-aged white people setting up Black Lives Matter rallies in suburban towns. While wearing masks, as they were told by CNN et al. The pandemic and Floyd should have caused a huge drop in media trust; what it did is demonstrated that the power of the media was far greater than most thought.

Again, I think that you are woefully out of touch with what "normal people" believe.

In person, I've heard a lot of opinions from regular people with normal politics that you would typically only hear from the far-right online. What is considered allowable opinion online, much less the opinions that are typical of young journalists, are not at all typical of most people in the real world.

They really don't. The journalists love to imagine that's the case, but it isn't.

If normies thought what the journalists told them to think, the Voice referendum would have passed with 80-90% of the vote.

Journalists have a huge influence on what people think, even if they don't follow journalists every single time. Elections are not won by every single voter doing what the journalist says; tilting the balance is enough to win the election.

No they don't. Normies think whatever their friends do. That is, frequently, highly skeptical of the media.

I think "frequently" is understating the situation: "skeptical of the media" is now a supermajority, at an all time high, with 29% of last fall's Gallup poll reporting "not very much" trust in the mass media and 39% reporting "none at all".

Generalized distrust of media is insufficient if it does not result in skepticism of a given story. It observably did not do so for most people for COVID and BLM, which are the last two serious stress-tests of the thesis. It's really not so different from people having a super-low opinion of congress, yet reliably voting for their incumbent congressperson.