Goebbels, in essence: “If you want to make it in propaganda, you have to repeat the same trite phrases over and over again, no matter whether intellectuals contradict you and refute you. You convince scholars with clever arguments, and the masses with simple ones.”

They’re also terrible at spotting what’s fake or untrue.

It’s not a small feat when it does feel like every fucking person on TV is lying to you constantly.

From NPR to the Houston Chronicle to BBC News One to the Joe Rogan Podcast, it’s just mountains of bullshit and lies and jingoism and native advertising.

It was fine when during their evening tv watch they got commercial promos for the top evening news stories each ad break, but those days are gone.

Go back 30 years, and you still had this shit. It was just pitched to the Median Voter rather than some rarified hot house of partisans.

You still had John Stossel with his crypto-libertarian bullshit and Tucker Carlson screaming at James Carville on Crossfire, but always over something totally incidental. People like Rush Limbaugh and Rachael Maddow hadn’t quite gone mainstream yet. Jon Stewart was confined to the back corners of a cable news comedy channel. FOX (the whole damned network, not just the news channel) was just getting off the ground. Everyone agreed gay people shouldn’t get married, but women should be allowed to hold a credit card.

Everyone agreed Iraq had WMDs and Cuba is being run into the ground by Nazi Communist Fidel Castro and China is a backwards hellhole where Tianamen Square happens twice a day.

Now you’ve got Controversy as the focus of news rather than Consensus. So if CNN says the sun rises in the East, Newsmax will bring on Laura Loomer to tell people the CNN anchor rapes puppies, so don’t believe them. And if the WSJ says the economy is booming, sixteen podcasters will release episodes about how we’re a decade into the New Great Depression You Just Don’t Know About.

People believe crazy shit because there is no consensus reality anymore.

That, and just say what you’re going to do, rather than labelling yourself.

This vaccines giving autism shit all because of facebook.

Also to not use ANY of the conservative buzzwords they have conditioned them to hear and associate with certain things. Also don’t say anything related to all their Thought Terminating Cliches.

Don’t say: Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Immigrants, anything LGBTQ, anything economy, anything equality, anything related to DEI, anything they fixate on.

Instead, use actual basic terms and explanations without using the shortcut words that they have been conditioned/brainwashed with. It’s a minefield, but can be done. Don’t say the economy is bad, say the cost of food is very high and I wish we had better pay or cheaper prices. Don’t say you want democratic socialism, say it would be great if medical costs were fair and we had more help with everyday things we all want and need.

I think Lewis Black said it best: “We have a party of bad ideas and a party of no ideas.”

It’s the economy, stupid.

It’s because of them immigrants taking our jobs, right? Like those idiots voted for Trump because he talked about lowering prices. He did the opposite, but of course they are gonna vote for him again. Can’t vote for those dang socialists!
I fear people are just too dumb to ever not fall for it.

Don’t take this badly, but in my experience, formal Education doesn’t teach people Skepticism (the real deal, not the Denialism that morons have whilst thinking they’re being “skeptics”). It also doesn’t at all train people to be self-aware and spot when it’s an emotion (fear, wanting to belong, even hope) making them want to believe something rather than cold hard logic.

My formal Education is in Science and Engineering, and whilst education in those areas does push you more towards a more analytical kind of thinking and an as objective as possible measuring of things, most higher education out there is in soft “sciences” at best, or even just the kind of domains were the main required expertise is in convincing people, so the very opposite of being as Objective and Logical as possible.

From my observations even some people with higher education in a Sciences or Engineering domain are gullible cattle when it comes to politics, mainly because they don’t engage it with logic and the way of thinking they use in their professional life, but rather with tribalism (which is emotional) or just straight raw emotion (like anger or fear) and thus are stupidly simple to control and pretty much self-convince that whatever the propagandists want them to believe is true even when the most basic analysis of it immediatelly shows inconsistencies.

TL;DR Whilst better and more Education somewhat improves people’s resilience to propaganda, even the highest levels of Education in highly objective and analytical domains won’t make people immune to this shit, since people are controlled via emotional subconscious cognitive pathways, not logic, and even highly intellectual people who WANT to believe something will find some kind of seemingly “logic” explanation to conclude that which they want to believe is indeed so.

It’s crazy how the emoji made me read that with an Italian accent.

Mamda Nia!

These are people of the land

So far west they’ve ended up on the East Coast again.

…wh…what? What are the inner workings of that person’s brain…

I think there was a movie called Red Zone Cuba where the moral was everyone had to give their money and businesses to the US Government in order to stop communism.

Don’t forget " oh he’s Italian, so he is white" was probably a decent amount of their piggish thinking

It’s insane that it works because these people are so dumb

“People don’t know what Socialism means” is the worst case of intentional ignorance about things that are completely understandable by people who refuse to look something up since “People in the middle east have been fighting for centuries and nobody understands why.”

Jargon and labels are part of the way people are controlled - simplify complex concepts down to repeatable simple words and now you can both control the meaning of such soft definintion terms (notice how the meaning of “terrorist” has been moved over time to become “against those in power”) plus constant repetition breeds familiarity, thus the very same cognitive paths that transform brand-familiarity into “comfort with brand” and hence favoring it over less familiar brand, are exercised to get people to accept provided political “explanations” & “solutions” using those slogans.

That said, in my experience if you try and explain complex things to people with enough complexity and completeness for them to understand the subtleties of the subject, they switch off half way (like, I bet, plenty of people reading this post that didn’t pass the first half of the first paragraph), so you have to somehow find at least simple metaphors, so not quite down reducing it to slogans but not all that far.

This movie was actually how I was introduced to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

This is why you gotta show your work.

The political ouroboros.