News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I really think that many moderates and liberals simply don't understand the grasp that he has over some people. This is how post WW1 Germany became Nazi Germany right before WW2.
We can make fun of it. We can complain about it. But what I rarely see is people studying it and trying to understand both the draw and the origins of this deadly attraction.
As much as we want to simply call these people "stupid" or "clueless" (which many people in this thread have already one) but it is much deeper than that. In fact taking that simplistic approach only makes it that much easier for him to recruit more people. The Left is so quick to minimize the hardships that many Trump supporters have faced in the past which might have pushed then to join his cult. If you constantly push groups away and this cult is openly embracing them and saying they understand their pain, then you can't be surprised when you hear headlines like the one for this story.
Rather than trying to understand their pain, my opinion is that the US right wing voter is under the control of one of the largest propaganda networks in history. The evangelical church, the billionaires that own local TV stations (Sinclair), Fox News, AM radio, and now social media echo chambers have led to a complete epistemic closure of the American right. Facts cannot penetrate that wall. Science cannot penetrate that wall. No amount of Democrat messaging can penetrate that wall. Seeing something with their own eyes cannot penetrate that wall.
History teaches us that this kind of propaganda leads to a very bad ending. Civil war, genocide, authoritarian dictatorship... pick your poison. America needs to find a way to dismantle the right wing propaganda apparatus, without that I see no hope. (I know, doom and gloom.) I sincerely hope I'm wrong.
Completely on the dot! A couple of years ago during Covid I landed into the far right echo chamber. The way it happened: I was looking for answers to all the craziness that was unfolding, and found my source for answers. Apparently, it was all just a big conspiracy, and there was a group of satanist elites that were trying to take over the world. Terrifying stuff, and even more terrifying, apparently they had so much power that they managed to gain control of all big news channels! Don't look at the news anymore, and beware of contradicting news sources, they might be controlled opposition! I was in it for about two years and learned about all kinds of weird stuff, Freemasons, MK Ultra, Adrenochrome, Archons, Reptilians, you name it. Recently, through discovering contradictions, I've been re-assessing my beliefs and have come to the conclusion that most of it is nonsense.
The grip is very strong once it's got you. Its whole schtick is in systematically closing off all your access to contradictory information and getting you hooked on sources from the inside, based on fear of the "powerful elites". It's a self-controlling system of more of the same, leading to more and more rigidness and nonsense as you get sucked deeper into the belief. At the same time it is actively trying to gather new members. This is why it can live on so many separate channels, even outside of the internet. No moderators are even needed to control the information from its members, as members themselves already do the job on their own. It's the perfect epistemic loop, and the thought that you're in one won't even cross your mind.
I'm afraid that TV stations, Fox News and the church are not the primary spreaders of this belief. It might not necessarily be spread top-down. The echo chamber can be compared more to a living organism, which self-corrects and evolves based on its environment, to grow and gain members. Scary stuff, the way it traps people looking for answers.
For me the solution has been a new belief system: one where I am aware of the way echo chambers work, and am actively looking for them in my own life so I can escape them, with daily practices and all to assist me in this. A lot of our problems are built on echo chambers that we build ourselves. I've been experimenting with this for about half a year now, with some really great success. I'm making posts about this here on Lemmy if you're interested:
The principles of all echo chambers: https://unilem.org/post/120862