I guess I should’ve noticed the extent of this before.
I played golf with a couple friends yesterday. One of them is a consumer of right-wing media. In the bar afterwards, over a couple beers, he started telling me how I feel about politics and about society and culture and liberals and conservatives. Every single thing that he said, both about how I feel and in general, was straight out of the fox playbook.
I hadn’t understood just what a huge part of right-wing propaganda is disinformation about the viewpoints of those who aren’t brainwashed like they are. It’s harder to argue with well-reasoned positions, so fox sets up some straw men instead. A tactic as old as the hills, I know. And I was aware that fox has been doing this for decades. I just didn’t notice how much until now.
I had noticed that right-wingers used the same insults: snowflake, SJW, cuck, etc. And I knew they generally considered those not on their side to be weak, unpatriotic, etc. And I knew they got those insults and ideas from their echo chamber. But I didn’t realize that they have assigned viewpoints (made-up viewpoints, of course) to the left on quite a few specific issues. We only discussed maybe half a dozen issues. But on each one, he told me what I thought and how I felt. I am extrapolating, but I would imagine that, given his perfect score of “knowing” what I felt on those issues, he’s pretty sure how I feel about a pretty high percentage of the issues.
This friend is very intelligent, and very funny. And usually quite reasonable. But there was just no way that he was ever going to believe that fox is propaganda and that WaPo and the NYT are real news. He was quite adamant – even a little emotional – about that.
I came away from the conversation even more dispirited than ever about our prospects of bringing reason back to the discussion. If a reasonable, intelligent guy like this can be so irreversibly brainwashed, so completely immune to facts, reason, evidence and logic, I don’t see how we can turn around this bamboozling of a huge swath of the country.
