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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Just because Republicans choose unreality doesn’t mean the media should ignore the facts of January 6.
On January 6, 2021, I watched CNN as thousands of Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. As someone well-versed in watching tragedy on television, I was struck by just how indisputable the facts were at the time: violent, red-hat-clad MAGA rioters, followed by Republicans in Congress, tried to stop democracy in its tracks. Trump had told his followers that the protest in Washington, DC, “will be wild,” and in the assault that followed his speech, some rioters smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol. Hundreds of them have since been convicted on charges ranging from assault on federal officers to seditious conspiracy. These are stubborn facts, the kind that do not care about your feelings. These facts include the inalienable truth that Trump is the first president in American history to reject the peaceful transfer of power.
It never occurred to me that these facts could somehow be perverted by partisanship. But three years later, we are seeing just that, as Republicans cling to the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” by Joe Biden and are poised to make Trump their 2024 nominee. And perhaps even more dangerous than the GOP ditching reality is the news media’s inability to cover Trumpism as the threat to democracy that it very much is.
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But the problem is, when all you have is conventional political framing, everything looks like politics as usual. One candidate makes a claim; the other disputes it. Two sides are divided, etc. This framing only works if both parties operate within the frameworks of a shared reality. But Trumpism doesn’t allow for the reality the rest of us inhabit. Trump’s supporters believe their leader’s reality and not, say, the reality the rest of us see with our eyes. As Trump once told a crowd: “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news. What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
Journalists may be well-intentioned in trying to be “objective,” or they’re simply afraid of being labeled partisan. Either way, coverage of January 6 that gives equal weight to both sides—one based in reality, one not—is helping pave the road for authoritarianism.
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Why sober, thoughtful conversation like this is not happening is beyond insane to me. Like I just do not know how to deal with a reality that treats this as normal.
Well said, I agree with every word.
It’s not a both sides thing. In my opinion, everyone needs to stop thinking this is a knowledge or coverage problem. It’s not a media influence problem.
It’s a fuck you problem. And the worse they are, the more appalling their actions, the bigger the fuck you. You can’t argue your way out of this.
People need to deal with the fact that roughly half of all voters in this country don’t give a fuck about you, and every time you get upset about a new rule broken, a new law violated, or a new constitutional principle ignored, the fun is in the fact that you get upset about it.
That’s the fun. You’re mad. They like to make you mad. Because this isn’t about political discourse.
They’re way more mad, they’re way more organized, they’re way more revolutionary, and they are way more armed. You can be as smart and knowledgeable as you want. They will put you up against a very smart and knowledgeable wall and put a very smart and knowledgeable bullet into your very smart and knowledgeable head.
You ever wonder how, during revolutions of the past, the people that were overthrown always seemed to have been surprised? This is how. Arrogance and a belief in a system that the others aren’t playing by or within. Revolution exceeds the system. Leftists think they have a monopoly on revolution, but they don’t.
You don’t have to agree with it. Your agreement or disagreement Does. Not. Matter. It’s watching worms on a hook trying to explain how soil works. Who cares?
People need to deal with the fact that roughly half of all voters in this country don’t give a fuck about you
There’s so much gerrymandering, vote caging, and deliberate disenfranchisement in the US that “roughly half” is heavily overstating it. Elections are decided by closer to 15% of eligible voters, as everyone else is packed or cracked or screened out of the process so as to be functionally irrelevant to the declared victor.
And this sentiment does go both ways. I can’t count how many times I’ve been told that I deserve whatever dogshit policy Ken Paxton and Greg Abbot are heaping on me today because I’ve committed the crime of living in a Red State.
This sentiment isn’t just confined to hotheads on social media either. When you’ve got guys like DeSantis and Paxton and Jay Ashcroft and Christie Noam flagrantly breaking state and national laws with zero response from the Biden DOJ, wtf do people expect some simple civvy like myself to do?
Leftists think they have a monopoly on revolution, but they don’t.
Leftists think they need a revolution to succeed, because reforms don’t work when the Right has the police on their side. And when you consider how many scalps J. Edgar Hoover had on his wall by the time he left office, you begin to see why.
The country is already deeply fascist. We have people living in relative (abet deteriorating) comfort who think we can just politely ask the next crop of politicos to fix problems for us. We have people living in far more dire circumstances who are scrambling to take direct action before they suffer irreparable harm. And then we have a large, heavily armed contingent of mercenaries who were taking selfies with the Jan 6th rioters not that long ago because they thought the Q-Shaman was making a lot of good points.
The Right doesn’t need to do a Revolution because they’re already the ones in control. The only real question is whether they decide Biden gets to keep his seat or Trump needs to be put back in charge come this November.
Boy I wish we could give Lemmy Gold to posts like this
Hunter S. Thompson reflected on the problems with Objective Journalism throughout his career: summarized well in a section of his obituary for Nixon.
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.
Damn right! It’s about time a publication in (the outskirts of) the main stream points this out!
The establishment media and the Dem politicians insisting on pretending that the GOP is a legitimate party of regular conservatives rather than a fascist movement is how it was allowed to get this far in the first place!
It’s useful to consider both sides of a political controversy when both sides actually fall within the realm of respecting and sustaining the democracy and social contract keeping people bought into it.
When the choices are between ‘you get some human rights’ and ‘you get no bodily autonomy’, one of these doesn’t fall within the bounds of reasonable discourse, where ‘reasonable discourse’ isn’t lighting the basis for democracy and individual rights on fire.
The exercise of gamely considering ‘both sides’ like it’s genuinely for the good of democracy when one side is actively hostile to democracy is… gaslighting, hostile to said democracy and to the social contract.
But facism gets such great short turn proffits before we blow ourselves and the rest of nature to shit. /s
But there are two sides… There’s the citizens, who believe in the process and support the peaceful transfer of power, and there’s treasonous scum.
See? Two sides.
One should be voting later this year, the other should be found, prosecuted, and thrown in jail… Or at least have their rights to participate in a democratic election taken away. I’d prefer the former, but I’d settle for the latter.
There’s zero reason that anyone should continue to believe the election was stolen. The 2020 election was one of the most scrutinized and examined elections in recent history. I don’t know of another election with this much scrutiny. The fact is, “both sides” examined ballots and found the results were accurate; or at least didn’t have enough inaccuracies to change the outcome. Fact is, the current president was elected. He is president. To deny that, is to deny not only the election, but the multitude of recounts after the fact, both by Trump supporters and by the systems in place to perform such counts and recounts.
Biden can be “not your president” if you disagree with the decision. You didn’t vote for him, I get that you’re unhappy with the outcome. You’re free to say whatever you want about the president, short of threats of violence or physical harm (in which case, secret service may want a word with you). The fact remains he is the president of the United States of America, voted into office by the people of the USA. Saying he “stole” the election by defrauding the election system, at this point, is just delusional.
Try telling this to the “gEnOciDE jOe” clowns, because they are the ones that need to understand this- not the trumpers. Trumpers are too far gone. They won’t listen to reason.
But these ‘single issue’ kids that are grassrooting the ideology that not voting is better than a vote for “genocide” are going to fuck around and find out the hard way when they get Trump installed as a permanent fixture in the White House.
Ok, let me preface this by OF COURSE Biden is by far the lesser evil compared to Trump, OF COURSE single issue voting is some Republican style bullshit and OF COURSE Trump would be even more supportive of a fascist government committing genocide, being a fascist war crime fanboy himself.
That being said, people who are outraged by Biden’s continued support of and thus enabling of genocide DO have a point. He’s supposed to represent the interests of every American who’s not a fascist, not those of a fascist apartheid regime currently committing the worst genocide since the Balkan wars in the 90s.
Just because the other guy is a much greater evil doesn’t mean that you can’t hold your own guy accountable for supporting evil. With Trump the only alternative, voting for him is a given, but giving him a free pass shouldn’t be.
All well and good, but these idiot kids are actually refusing to vote for him over this single issue. I agree that It’s fine to be bothered how he’s handling things- even if they’re a bit misunderstood on how things actually work- I mean, sure…it’s bothering.
But this is the biggest “I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face” America will EVER see.
I strongly suspect that these one issue kids have no idea of what is going on in the Mideast
Israel was attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah. The over the top response by Netanyahu is much like you would get from the orange wanna-be dictator. Israel is under threat by Iran too. The arms sent were a show of force least any other hostile countries decide to pile on. Biden has been forceful with Israel behind the scenes, placing conditions on the use of the arms and pushing Israel to back off. He can’t do so publicly because it would let the hostile countries sense a weakness. Kids are triggered by emotions and fail to dig for news contrary to their biases because it doesn’t reinforce their need for an anger dopamine rush - much like MAGAs.
It is so much easier to sit on ones ass rather than to do the hard work of being intelligently informed and to create change“I look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief they have known something of what has been passing in the world around them” - Harry Truman
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Exactly. Their “genocide” is a knee-jerk sensationalist reaction to the typical extremist news they’re used to reading. It’s almost always a lot more nuanced than it appears.
As I like to say, life exists within the grey area that lies between the boundaries of black-and-white ideologies.
You liberals call it genocide when China teaches a Tibetan Mandarin, but when Isreal mass slaughters tens of thousands as part of an ongoing campaign to expel Palestinians and take their land, suddenly things are “more nuanced then they appear”
Actually, its part if a Palestinian campaign to destroy Israel. Israel did offer a two state solution multiple times. Its the Palestinians that reject the right of Israel to exist, not the other way around.
Sacrificing their own population to gain support doesn’t make them right.
Isreal has never offered a two state solution. At best they have proposed a bantustan.
This misses the point completely, claiming they believe their own reality is ignoring just how deliberately dysfunctional all our reality is, and has been for centuries. Them being manipulated in to blaming minorities for it is the exact same distraction as liberals being manipulated in to blaming republican voters for it (Do they suck? Yes. Do they help uphold the system? Absolutely. Are they responsible for it? No, they are crabs in a bucket, just like the rest of us, they’re just happy to step on more people). To be clear - I am not comparing minorities to republican voters, I’m comparing the level and effectiveness of these distractions from those who are actually responsible for the shit we’re in, and who will do anything and everything to make sure we don’t turn on them, but only ever on each other - the people they’ve made sure are constantly stressed trying to survive, who are poorly educated (and this isn’t about the quality of the school or the years spent in it, it’s about the whitewashed version of history and lack of critical thinking skills we’re all taught among other things), exposed to constant propaganda and systemic division. The fact that so many people fall for the hateful bigotry this promotes against their own best interests just goes to show how well the system works for those it actually serves.
And that isn’t even Trump, he isn’t even in the same league as those actually pulling the strings, and who will stop at nothing to safeguard their power and money (including letting a destructive mask-off clown run amuck for a few years, you now, as a treat, and to manufacture consent for the much worse shit that’s yet to come).
If you really want to stop fascism you have to understand what it is (capitalism in decay) and that the both sides they let you choose from serve the same master and only ever represent their side. The actual sides in “both sides” are working class vs owning class, oppressed vs oppressors, the system vs those it exploits to exist.
Don’t play along with their game, free yourself from the binary they’ve made you believe is free choice, and fight the system, the sham they call “democracy” included.
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Thanks, it’s more about just having to say it, than wanting to debate it with anyone - those who would debate it have already made their minds up, it’s more for the undecided lurkers who come across it and it might make sense to…
I go back and forth on this. When I was younger the Palme Dutt essay you cited would have sounded like nonsense to me. Now I see his work as a brilliant analysis of the conditions that give rise to fascism. Going back and tracing the circumstances that led to my change in perspective is not easy. What was the relative impact of comments like yours or my life circumstances that led to a change in my perspective? I can’t say I know for sure.
Completely agree, america always has been rather right-wing, compared to Europe (counting after WWII, of course), and it has been shifting badly to the right and right wing extremists and even terrorists are the real problem right now, but…
There are a lot of “not really THAT important yet really fringy left” issues being pushed by many on the left side of the isle that really don’t get as much bang for the buck, whilst being very divisive. This divisiveness has then been very successfully used by the right wing to demonize the left side and sow division.
As an example, I can’t count the number of people I know that back in the day voted for trump because they were angry about the identity politics, the pronouns, the bathroom issues. Some of these issues are important, like the bathroom issue, but not nearly as important as, say, saving the supreme court, universal healthcare, police reform, etc. you know, bigger fish. Pronouns are much, much lower on that ladder even, it should be a non subject for politicians.
Meanwhile, all I heard was Democrats talking about these divisive none or low priority issues, and the right, very successfully, took advantage of that, and keeps taking advantage to this day.
Stop talking about these fringe issues. Like half a year ago or so I recall reading about some Democrat talking about the rights of trans prisoners, that they should have the right on government funded sex changes. Really? That’s the hill we’ll die on? I know it’s something that at some point should be talked about, but in this climate it’s stupid to even bring that up. We got bigger fish to fry.
Let’s for now start ONLY talking about the big issues, leave the rest for later, please?
