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I can't find it again in a cursory search of my browser history, but I know I saw a piece in a "legacy media" outlet asking how they deal with our situation wherein so much of the American public have turned against facts and truth and willfully chosen to be ignorant. To support this description of our current landscape, the author cited the well-surveyed decline of trust in the establishment media and increasing turn to alternate outlets; then immediately wondered how you fix people who have stopped trusting in Truth and have willfully turned to listening to liars instead.
It was pure Principal Skinner "Am I so out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong" attitude. There's quite a lot of that these days. There's nothing wrong with the legacy media and its trustworthiness, it's the people who've stopped listening that need to change. There's nothing wrong with Democrat policies (except maybe compromising too much with the right), it's just that so many voters are driven by racial grievances and hate, and are beyond reasoning with. The Party and the Media did not fail the people, the people have failed the Party and Media. "[T]here aren’t people worth “winning over,” there’s just a country overwhelmingly clogged with trash to eliminate."
To add to this, I can confirm that this is not just an opinion they're projecting outwards, I've heard high ranking industry professionals despair to a room of colleagues as to what they should do about the "misinformation" problem. They truly believe that the public is turning away from their trustworthy news because they're not as comforting as misinformation.
And those in that industry I've personally interacted with, yes, probably do take their ethics and integrity seriously. The reason they don't get a pass is something I've touched a couple of times here.
Even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, my observation is that as a group they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession. And I don't mean "the evil and bad right wing journalists that write misinformation", I mean their own in-group. When outsiders push against them the wagons circle and end up pointing in a predictable direction, leading me to believe there is a tacit endorsement of the bad aspects. Journalists cannot afford in-group loyalty with their peers. As Scott wrote, yes, genuinely criticizing the in-group is excruciatingly painful, but that is precisely what the public expects journalism school to train journalists to be able to do.
As long as the profession as those serious journalists don't start publically cleaning up their profession, the public has no reason to trust them.
I'd agree with this, but I'd also extend slightly more charity, in noting that part of journalism is taking a large amount of information and reducing it down to the most important parts, trimming out more irrelevant bits. And human beings being what we are, it's not unexpected to have some bias creep in — even if unconsciously, and even if one is trying to be even-handed — toward omitting "unflattering" elements for your side. Now, consider what happens when this is repeated as a story passes through multiple layers (see also the usual complaints about science journalism and what the nuanced conclusions of journal papers end up reduced to at the end of the journalistic "game of telephone"). You get something like the top portion of this infographic from our own @mitigatedchaos.
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One pundit I saw was asking why the left did not have its own counterpart to Joe Rogan. I wanted to shout at the screen, "You did, and his name was Joe Rogan! You ostracized him because he was friendly with some people on the right."
I've been thinking about this as well, Joe Rogan has had a number of left-wing guests over the years and he's sympathetic to many left-wing ideas but he's "part of the right-wing misinformation machine" because he'll listen to right-wingers too. So a "liberal Joe Rogan" would have to: (1) never speak with a known right-winger, (2) immediately push back on any guest that happened to express a right-wing idea, (3) never utter or express sympathy for any right-wing idea himself, and (4) pay close attention to the ever-evolving liberal orthodoxy so he never accidentally violates rules 1-3.
There are guys with podcasts right now who follow all of these rules, but I seriously doubt anyone of that ilk could build a mass following among apolitical men the way Rogan has.
If Joe Rogan followed all those rules his listenership would probably be a tenth of what it is now.
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Which indeed is the crux of the problem with the left in America these days: they refuse to acknowledge that yes, you have to actually engage with people that you want to convince. You can't just preach at people and demand they convert. You need to do the hard work of talking to people, understanding where they're coming from, and trying to appeal to them in terms that they can appreciate.
A lot of times the left can get away with this, for example in Hollywood and stuff where they have a stranglehold on the culture. But when it comes to elections, you can't berate people into voting for you. And unless they learn that lesson, they're going to have more Trump-style "how could America vote for these awful people" losses.
Why not? Consider parts of the spread of Christianity into "Pagan" Medieval Europe, or much of the early expansion of Islam. All you need is a sufficiently persuasive "or else"
But you can make electoral outcomes less relevant. If the people are going to vote wrong, then their votes don't get to matter anymore.
Or they can take a page from Bogleech about how …there aren’t people worth “winning over,” there’s just a country overwhelmingly clogged with trash to eliminate… They chose to be fash like the supporters of every other fash machine in history. Name a single time that problem was solved by kindly talking them out of it please. At minimum they have to be driven to leave."
Or from one "pizzmoe" on Twitter:
Or jbrillig on Threads:
Or, for someone more notable, The View's Sunny Hostin:
If "the majority has spoken and they said they don’t care that much about democracy," as Stephen Colbert has claimed, then democracy has to be defended from the majority.
If the voters are going to make "the wholesale decision to go full in with electing as their leader a convicted felon, a rapist, a child molester and a treasonous insurrectionist," then it's incumbent on the "kind hearted, generous and moral people who love democracy and their liberty" to stop them from using Our Democracy against itself. If the Constitution is not a suicide pact, then neither are election outcomes.
Why compromise your possession of truth, facts, and high morals, on the Right Side of History, by playing Chamberlain and trying to appease a bunch of fascists? Why should the party change, when it is not them, but the voters who are wrong? Is not the better course to make the electorate change for the better, whatever it takes?
Simply put, because you can't. All you can do, and all they have done, is cause people to not speak their true thoughts under threat. But that doesn't change them, that simply makes them quietly resent you and bide their time. And since we live in a democratic society, you really do need to change them.
I'm aware of all the various rhetoric you quoted saying "we shouldn't waste time trying to appeal to them". But that rhetoric is exactly why they lost this election, and why they will continue to lose elections (not every election to be sure, but enough) until they realize that politics is not a game of who is the most self righteous and preachy.
That's fixable.
Or until they stop holding elections. If letting the American people vote means Orange Hitler, then you obviously can't let them vote anymore.
Sure, you don't have to appeal to people if you remove the democratic nature of our government. But that is so far outside the realm of probability that it isn't worth discussing.
See, I don't think it is. Particularly since I think people overestimate the ability of elected officials to control the permanent bureaucracy, and that many of the powers for doing so set in the Constitution — and civics textbooks — don't actually exist anymore, and that enforcement mechanisms against the various agencies are weak — particularly against the agencies used to do the enforcing. If the FBI stops following presidential orders, to whom does the president turn to compel their obedience? If Congress orders something "defunded," but the Treasury Department keeps issuing them funds anyway, what can they do about it?
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This is a good example of how the cultural left is led by its fringe. It's the extemists who set the course and steer the ship, and everyone else is eventually brought along for the ride, even perhaps unwittingly. At first it's a small cadre of extremely online culture warriors who start excommunicating Rogan for heresy, but it sort of trickles down until everyone understands, almost by cultural osmosis, that he has become untouchable and nobody should go on his show. Eventually, mainstream political pundits just take it for granted, because it's just common knowledge, that Rogan is some kind of far-right grifter and wonder why he doesn't have a left-wing counterpart.
While this dynamic can occur on the right, it's far less pronounced or successful, in my experience. It also seems most restricted to cultural issues on the left, because they've had far less success steering the economic ship.
We know that "just be nice" with the treasury doesn't work in the long run. Our economists are less susceptible to flim flam than our social scientists and culture warriors.
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