Tens of millions believe the truth is a lie or a lie is the truth.

[boston bean]

Trump is winning the propaganda war.

How do we stop this.

Humans are susceptible to this. Even on the left people fall for conspiracies that do not exist. Thankfully those persons don"t lead our party......... yet.

I fret a leftist tea party. If anything this election has taught me is for our nation we need to be responsible with facts. We cannot allow ourselves to also be propagandized.

Thoughts?? What can we do to help stop this?

I am really concerned about this because at this point a conversation cannot even be had with persons because they believe it is "you" who have been brain washed and are telling a lie.

[Cosmocat]

1. This shit didn't start November 8th.

Republicans have been gaslighting half the country for a quarter century now.

The rise of am radio, the relentless churn fromy Limbaugh and 1,000s like him turned their brains to mush LONG before 45.

At the same time, Democrats simply have not given the people another alternative.

90 percent of elected Rs in DC are foaming at the mouth, crazed radicals.

We can count on one hand the number of Democrats with 2 balls - Bernie, Warren, Franken...

All the energy of our roots now is great, but their zombies have that, too. Meanwhile, our elected officials crawl in the corner while theirs are running around in an anarchist steroid rage.

[Takket]

14. Exactly. Trump isn't the beginning of the gaslighting, he is the apex of it.

[doc03]

2. . When you bring up the latest outrage from Trump,

it's fake. They ask where you heard it, you say CNN, that's the Communist or Clinton News Network. All the broadcast networks are libruls.
The only thing they believe is what Faux or some crazy web site says. Shep Smith on Faux told the truth a couple days ago and they are
swamped with calls and threats to fire him. What do you do it is like this country is infected with mass insanity?

[boston bean]

3. There is no basis of fact. It is like a cult member who believes everyone who

Knows different is the one in a cult.

I do not know how to counter that.

[Trust Buster]

4. I agree. I cringe when I hear people referring to the RESIST. movement as the new Tea Party.

The Tea Party was funded by the Koch's and preyed on the ignorant. We should do everything necessary to avoid duplicating that.

[BumRushDaShow]

5. He is only "winning it" among his base

the rest of America (hundreds of millions) is not so gullible.

[boston bean]

6. No sarcasm here. So I am fretting for nothng?

I am not sure but history shows these types of regimes gain momentum and support over time. Just because they have the power. People may believe differently but fear quells their voice.

[BumRushDaShow]

8. There are variables that relate to this country

that distinguish it from the oft-cited European countries that implemented fascism - most notably Germany. And the one related to the OP is that our country was actually founded with a principle that recognized a "free press" and encoded that concept into the founding document.

So you have many generations that have been indoctrinated with the idea and pronouncements of the "First Amendment" (including all the other interesting things lumped in it), and that didn't happen in Europe (or other countries around the world).

The thing to be worried about is whether the people are ready to dissolve this form of government altogether (per what I have posted in other threads before) as this whole system of government literally operates on a "honor system".

[boston bean]

10. I agree on your last point. But think maybe we can't get there without if we have a free press.

Right now, we have a free press, that tens of millions of people don't believe. Might as well not have one for those people.

[BumRushDaShow]

11. But this has always been the case for the entire history of this country

although obviously the total numbers of people involved were different as the country gained population over the centuries.

This country is vast, with enormous amounts of empty land where no one lives. The advent of broadcast communication (radio, television, and internet) has not only amplified voices across certain sectors of the country that had not been "heard" or "seen" before, but has falsely attributed more weight to them, and that skew is helping to cause unnecessary angst. And this even extends to foreign lands where routine crime reports in other countries somehow manage to trickle into our own reporting.

You might recall the era of the so-called "Moral Majority", where that "movement" was highly touted and of course eventually promoted by Raygun. This is no different except now we have the internet and 24/7 cable networks helping to feed the hysteria, so it begs a different way of operating in a hyper-sensationalized environment.

What is happening at this point is the purposeful generation of "noise" within the broadcast system in order to mask the "signal" of reality and it is up to us to focus on the "signal" and respond accordingly in order to move forward on our agenda of getting more Democrats elected at all levels of government.

In the "old days", because of the lack of a "sympathetic press", many had to resort to handing out flyers to announce protests and publish "underground" newspapers to inform those who agreed with their sentiments. The internet actually provides a vehicle for that.

As a note, the "average person" is not posting on political forums like this one nor are they entrenched in political introspection, although they are now finding themselves dragged into it if they participate in social media. However there is a rumbling going on and you have seen posts here that have been reporting on it. It's something that I think has far surpassed the rumble of 2006. So we need to focus focus focus on elections.

[Warren DeMontague]

7. It's a good question, a pertinent question, and a deeper and more profound one than it may initially

appear, I think.

On one level I have seen the blame for this phenomenon laid at the feet of everything from the internet to post-modernism, or the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth;

the fact of the matter is, I think the human animal, particularly due to its rapid immersion in an exponentially more information (or, at least, flashing and buzzing shiny things) rich environment, is getting a crash course in some of the "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" behind-the-scenes functioning in our own brains, particularly in the way we discern patterns and assemble narratives out of the data points which come in to our heads, and then filter subsequent data according to those patterns and narratives.

It's always been this way, it's just way more obvious now. Like everything else, technology has thrown it into high gear.

I don't have a good and obvious answer, but without going on a boring rant about the scientific method and general semantics and some dubious hope of prodding consciousness up to a level of higher meta-awareness, I think the answer has to lie with teaching (or, I don't know, gently illuminating) critical thinking skills along with an ethos of continual questioning of authority- particularly, especially, one's own and the authorities one subscribes to the most- challenging of self-assumptions and dogmas, and certainly trying not to always take our own selves and our own Belief Systems, too seriously.

Valuing evidence over opinion, as well. Because while there are a myriad number of ways to interpret reality, I'm pretty sure actual facts do exist.

But this is more for the future, our kids maybe. And I do think it is good to try and embody things like "gee I might not always be right" or "I better double check this" in our own lives and communities, to be sure. But how you crack through the wall right now of someone who is in denial to the point of being an unrepentant Trump booster or evolution denier or moon landing hoaxer? I don't know. It might be a waste of time.

You aint gonna learn what you don't want to know.

I do think Trump, specifically, is losing people at the edges, rapidly, though. The True believers are still in there but I think a lot of otherwise right-wingers are starting to go The disingenuous ones will wait for enough of their friends to bail on him, before they do. At some point though it will be like rats leaving a sinking ship.

[boston bean]

9. I agree, a lot of it is persons not willing to determine if they may be wrong, and then admit it

if they were able to find they were.

Everyone has been wrong about something. I've been wrong enough in my life to know not to dismiss the possibility.

But seems they so believe that anything coming from a mainstream source is fake that you cannot have a conversation and they just won't bother. The cultist thinking everyone else is in a cult... It is the strangest, fucking weirdest and sort of scary thing. And I say this because people in my family in Massachusetts have fallen for this.

They believe nothing can be believed unless it comes from Trump or a news source he says is correct.

These people are a danger to us all. My family members included.

[Warren DeMontague]

17. honestly- I was just thinking about this last night - I know no one, literally, who supports Trump.

At least, not openly.

Like on my FB feed, at this point.. the one or two people who were sort of marginally Trumpish (but still outnumbered) before the election, have gone silent.

And yes, I know I live in a self-selecting Pauline Kael-esque (even though she maybe never actually said it) liberal bubble. But actual debates with Trump people- it really doesn't even come up. On my FB it's a massive echo chamber at this point.

[Mr. Ected]

12. A free press, in concert with governmental checks and balances, has always been our saving grace

Unfortunately, the 2 party system was a ticking time bomb, waiting for the perfect set of circumstances to go off.

BOOM. It's gone off. The lunatics run the asylum: the executive and legislative branches are in the hands of the crazies. The crimes will not be prosecuted by the perpetrators. Republicans always place party above country.

Without checks and balances or constitutional measures in place to address the lunacy that currently reigns in Washington, we'll be stymied in taking our country back.

It's our duty to be certain that we base our opinions on sourced and documented news. This whole real news, fake news conundrum is a fake construct. There is news, and there are lies. Too many people are too lazy or ignorant to discern the difference...and they comprise an inordinate percentage of our population. We can't simply deprogram them overnight. They're fanatics, and we're screwed.

[mitch96]

13. The propaganda war. How do we stop this.

I looked at the sickest propaganda guy around, Joseph Goebbels..
Hitlers propaganda minister

"A lie told once remains a lie. A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.
The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State.
If you tell the same lie enough times, people will believe it; and the bigger the lie, the better.

So if the lie is the enemy of the truth and the truth is the greatest enemy of the state...
Find and tell the truth over and over and over again ad nauseum till you can't tell it any more. Then tell it again... Even Goebbels said the truth will eventually win out..

"There will come a day, when all the lies will collapse under their own weight, and truth will again triumph."

m

[TrekLuver]

16. +1000

[TrekLuver]

15. I think this election has awoken many people who were not involved or not even paying to

politics before....and they are mostly on our side. I don't think they would migrate to the far left of the party. But I too am concerned with what you're saying because the far left I feel wants to fracture us. Not sure how that advances their agenda....?? Oh right it doesn't.