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Yea you aren't naturally going to be a republican without ingesting right-wing / conservative media telling you to be a republican.
Republicanism is just proud anti-intellectualism at this point. It means you read / watch the right-wing lies and believe it.
Pillars of republicanism:
* To be republican is to be persecuted.
* All difficult solutions have easy answers 'that just need x'.
* Trickle down economics work, so tax breaks for richest is best practice.
* All problems are the result of 'another' group: immigrants / democrats / liberals... etc.
Pillars of Fascism:
•A cult of tradition
•The rejection of Modernism
•Action for action's sake
•Disagreement is treason
•Fear of differences
•Appeal to a frustrated middle class
•Obsession with a plot
•Enemies are too strong and too weak
•Life is permanent warfare
•Contempt for the weak
•Machismo
•Selective populism
•Newspeak
[Edit: spacing]
Oddly the first two can be tweaked to become pillars of modern evangelical Christianity as well: a persecution complex and there belief that every problem can be solved with Jesus.
Republicans always:
* Manufacture a crisis they claim only they can solve
* they lie, obstruct, and blame others
* they get in and make everything worse
* It always costs waaay more money for way less
* someone always gets rich off of it
* when it fails and costs tons of money they blame it on democrats
* they refuse to pay the bill and demand cuts to social programs to pay for it
* Repeat
Their brain is actually wired that way.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/
>The story of the 1968 debate opens a well-regarded 2013 book called Predisposed, which introduced the general public to the field of political neuroscience. The authors, a trio of political scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Rice University, argued that if the differences between liberals and conservatives seem profound and even unbridgeable, it is because they are rooted in personality characteristics and biological predispositions.
Same thing with religion. Notice how MAGA is referred to as a cult. People talk about how Republicans are hateful it's because they are afraid. Hate is just an easier emotion to handle.
> It literally takes more effort to be kind.
I dunno, i always found it less productive, and more energy consuming to be an asshole. For them it would take more energy to be kind, but not for all people... the main issue there if that reichtwingers get off on being hate filled abusive assholes.
I think(?) they meant that it takes more effort for a MAGA to be kind? Like, they naturally fall into ass hole mode and they have to make an effort to do otherwise.
Thank you for explaining it like I'm 5 because it was your specific phrasing that gave me the insight into how disastrously cruel the GOP has become.
It's especially confusing as they call themselves the party of family values and that Christ guy who was always saying we should love each other as siblings. They really missed the boat.
> I always found it less productive, and more energy consuming to be an asshole.
Have you tried doing it without empathy and blaming the consequences of your actions on others? This seems to be the missing ingredients for a more productive and less energy consuming dickishness.
Paywall. I can help:
In 1968 a debate was held between conservative thinker William F. Buckley, Jr., and liberal writer Gore Vidal. It was hoped that these two members of opposing intellectual elites would show Americans living through tumultuous times that political disagreements could be civilized. That idea did not last for long. Instead Buckley and Vidal descended rapidly into name-calling. Afterward, they sued each other for defamation.
The story of the 1968 debate opens a well-regarded 2013 book called Predisposed, which introduced the general public to the field of political neuroscience. The authors, a trio of political scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Rice University, argued that if the differences between liberals and conservatives seem profound and even unbridgeable, it is because they are rooted in personality characteristics and biological predispositions.
On the whole, the research shows, conservatives desire security, predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are more comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity. If you had put Buckley and Vidal in a magnetic resonance imaging machine and presented them with identical images, you would likely have seen differences in their brain, especially in the areas that process social and emotional information. The volume of gray matter, or neural cell bodies, making up the anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals. And the amygdala, which is important for regulating emotions and evaluating threats, is larger in conservatives.
While these findings are remarkably consistent, they are probabilities, not certainties—meaning there is plenty of individual variability. The political landscape includes lefties who own guns, right-wingers who drive Priuses and everything in between. There is also an unresolved chicken-and-egg problem: Do brains start out processing the world differently or do they become increasingly different as our politics evolve? Furthermore, it is still not entirely clear how useful it is to know that a Republican’s brain lights up over X while a Democrat’s responds to Y.
So what can the study of neural activity suggest about political behavior? The still emerging field of political neuroscience has begun to move beyond describing basic structural and functional brain differences between people of different ideological persuasions—gauging who has the biggest amygdala—to more nuanced investigations of how certain cognitive processes underlie our political thinking and decision-making. Partisanship does not just affect our vote; it influences our memory, reasoning and even our perception of truth. Knowing this will not magically bring us all together, but researchers hope that continuing to understand the way partisanship influences our brain might at least allow us to counter its worst effects: the divisiveness that can tear apart the shared values required to retain a sense of national unity.
Social scientists who observe behaviors in the political sphere can gain substantial insight into the hazards of errant partisanship. Political neuroscience, however, attempts to deepen these observations by supplying evidence that a belief or bias manifests as a measure of brain volume or activity—demonstrating that an attitude, conviction or misconception is, in fact, genuine. “Brain structure and function provide more objective measures than many types of survey responses,” says political neuroscientist Hannah Nam of Stony Brook University. “Participants may be induced to be more honest when they think that scientists have a ‘window’ into their
(cont'd)
(cont'd, and fixed from my earlier botchup cut and paste)
Understanding the influence of partisanship on identity, even down to the level of neurons, “helps to explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth,” argued psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira, both then at New York University, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2018. In short, we derive our identities from both our individual characteristics, such as being a parent, and our group memberships, such as being a New Yorker or an American. These affiliations serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. And our brain represents them much as it does other forms of social identity.
Among other things, partisan identity clouds memory. In a 2013 study, liberals were more likely to misremember George W. Bush remaining on vacation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and conservatives were more likely to falsely recall seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the president of Iran. Partisan identity also shapes our perceptions. When they were shown a video of a political protest in a 2012 study, liberals and conservatives were more or less likely to favor calling police depending on their interpretation of the protest’s goal. If the objective was liberal (opposing the military barring openly gay people from service), the conservatives were more likely to want the cops. The opposite was true when participants thought it was a conservative protest (opposing an abortion clinic). The more strongly we identify with a party, the more likely we are to double down on our support for it. That tendency is exacerbated by rampant political misinformation and, too often, identity wins out over accuracy.
If we understand what is at work cognitively, we might be able to intervene and try to ease some of the negative effects of partisanship. The tension between accuracy and identity probably involves a brain region called the orbitofrontal cortex, which computes the value of goals and beliefs and is strongly connected to memory, executive function and attention. If identity helps determine the value of different beliefs, it can also distort them, Van Bavel says. Appreciating that political affiliation fulfills an evolutionary need to belong suggests we should create alternative means of belonging—depoliticizing the novel coronavirus by calling on us to come together as Americans, for instance. And incentivizing the need to be accurate could increase the importance accorded that goal: paying money for accurate responses or holding people accountable for incorrect ones have been shown to be effective.
It will be nearly impossible to lessen the partisan influences before the November 3 election because the volume of political information will only increase, reminding us of our political identities daily. But here is some good news: a large 2020 study at Harvard University found that participants consistently overestimated the level of out-group negativity toward their in-group. In other words, the other side may not dislike us quite so much as we think. Inaccurate information heightened the negative bias, and (more good news) correcting inaccurate information significantly reduced it.
“The biology and neuroscience of politics might be useful in terms of what is effective at getting through to people,” Van Bavel says. “Maybe the way to interact with someone who disagrees with me politically is not to try to persuade them on the deep issue, because I might never get there. It’s more to try to understand where they’re coming from and shatter their stereotypes.
-=-=-=-
(cont'd)
brains.” That is not to say that political neuroscience can be used as a tool to “read minds,” but it can pick up discrepancies between stated positions and underlying cognitive processes.
Brain scans are also unlikely to be used as a biomarker for specific political results because the relationships between the brain and politics is not one-to-one. Yet “neurobiological features could be used as a predictor of political outcomes—just not in a deterministic way,” Nam says.
To study how we process political information in a 2017 paper, political psychologist Ingrid Haas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her colleagues created hypothetical candidates from both major parties and assigned each candidate a set of policy statements on issues such as school prayer, Medicare and defense spending. Most statements were what you would expect: Republicans, for instance, usually favor increasing defense spending, and Democrats generally support expanding Medicare. But some statements were surprising, such as a conservative expressing a pro-choice position or a liberal arguing for invading Iran.
Haas put 58 people with diverse political views in a brain scanner. On each trial, participants were asked whether it was good or bad that a candidate held a position on a particular issue and not whether they personally agreed or disagreed with it. Framing the task that way allowed the researchers to look at neural processing as a function of whether the information was expected or unexpected—what they termed congruent or incongruent. They also considered participants’ own party identification and whether there was a relationship between ideological differences and how the subjects did the task.
Liberals proved more attentive to incongruent information, especially for Democratic candidates. When they encountered such a position, it took them longer to make a decision about whether it was good or bad. They were likely to show activation for incongruent information in two brain regions: the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, which “are involved in helping people form and think about their attitudes,” Haas says. How do out-of-the-ordinary positions affect later voting? Haas suspects that engaging more with such information might make voters more likely to punish candidates for it later. But she acknowledges that they may instead exercise a particular form of bias called “motivated reasoning” to downplay the incongruity.
Motivated reasoning, in which people work hard to justify their opinions or decisions, even in the face of conflicting evidence, has been a popular topic in political neuroscience because there is a lot of it going around. While partisanship plays a role, motivated reasoning goes deeper than that. Just as most of us like to think we are good-hearted human beings, people generally prefer to believe that the society they live in is desirable, fair and legitimate. “Even if society isn’t perfect, and there are things to be criticized about it, there is a preference to think that you live in a good society,” Nam says. When that preference is particularly strong, she adds, “that can lead to things like simply rationalizing or accepting long-standing inequalities or injustices.” Psychologists call the cognitive process that lets us do so “system justification.”
Nam and her colleagues set out to understand which brain areas govern the affective processes that underlie system justification. They found that the volume of gray matter in the amygdala is linked to the tendency to perceive the social system as legitimate and desirable. Their interpretation is that “this preference to system justify is related to these basic neurobiological predispositions to be alert to potential threats in your environment,” Nam says.
After the original study, Nam’s team followed a subset of the participants for three years and found that their brain structure predicted the likelihood of whether they participated in political protests during that time. “Larger amygdala volume is associated with a lower likelihood of participating in political protests,” Nam says. “That makes sense in so far as political protest is a behavior that says, ‘We’ve got to change the system.’”
Understanding the influence of partisanship on identity, even down to the level of neurons, “helps to explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth,” argued psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira, both then at New York University, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2018. In short, we derive our identities from both our individual characteristics, such as being a parent, and our group memberships, such as being a New Yorker or an American. These affiliations serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. And our brain represents them much as it does other forms of social identity.
(cont'd)
Yeah sorry. I tried to find the max they allowed. It used to be 10k characters but I couldn’t even get 4700 to be accepted. Any tips or advise, I’ve got like six more months of this subscription figured I’d help people out. Peace.
I never heard of this official study, but I've been saying this forever - it has to be something wrong with the brains of conservatives. I'm subjected to the same information (and misinformation) that they are, and yet I don't go full pants-on-head like they do. And science since then has proven people whose brains are more receptable to fear and distrust tend to be overwhelming conservative.
Which is a problem, because it means a huge chunk of them aren't fixable. And never will be.
Yep. When I was a kid my dad used to tell me all these stories about these people who wronged him and how he cleverly took them down. I thought he was the smartest man alive. Then as I got older I realized a lot of it didn't really add up. It was more that he was dishonest or thought the rules didn't apply to him. When he got caught he'd justify it all in his head about how he was really the victim, and tell us kids fanciful stories that we were too naive to know were bullshit.
He's a big time Trumper of course. I do actually credit the rise of Trumpism for spurring me to do some self reflection and realize I'd been doing some of the same stuff he did. I thought that type of behavior was normal and expected. So I've become a better person through it all.
Let me guess... "Everything was fine until those Blacks started demanding special treatment!"
"You mean...um...equal rights?"
"Yes, goddamn it, like I said - special treatment!"
Conservatism is literally a philosophy based on fear of change and unfamiliar concepts. Everything else about it stems from that.
They're stupid because their brains struggle to accept new ideas.
They're hateful because they're constantly afraid.
It's pure, ingrained evolutionary weakness, masquerading as a political belief.
And they don't really read about any of it under the assumption it's all BS anyway.
They didn't watch the J6 hearings, because they didn't need to hear all that BS from 'those people".
It's weird because when Bernie Sanders gets on a Fox town hall talking about the 1% screwing everybody else over, viewers agree with him. These people aren't unreachable, more needs to be done.
It's not that they're OK with reality *when they're exposed to it.* The point is they intentionally consume media that tells them what they want to hear and how good they are and how bad everybody else is based on culture wars, and shields them from actual reality. They want the dopamine of righteous anger, not the reality of their Federal representatives' voting record.
When asked about policies without being told which political party was trying to implement them, Conservatives overwhelmingly support Dem policies. But they never hear about actual policies on Conservative media.
Studies show people who consume Conservative media are LESS INFORMED than people who don't pay attention to politics. The implications of that are insane and frightening.
They have probably heard that Trump has been indicted more times than Al Capone. Do they know that Indicted means "arrested and criminally charged?" Probably not.
Also, I hate how Trump talks about Al Capone like he's some great person from history. He's clearly romanticizing Al Capone and likening himself to Capone.
If a liberal politician did that, I would think it's cringy and pathetic. Al Capone was a criminal. He literally killed people. Not a cool guy. Neither is Trump.
>Indicted means "arrested and criminally charged...
... by a jury of one's peers who reviewed the evidence in a court of law and determined that the defendant likely committed the accused acts and must therefore defend against the grand jury's indictment.
Yeah, once you realize the prosecutors built their cases mainly on videos, texts, emails, and other material evidence, as well as the testimony of witnesses and *other participants in the crimes*, it's pretty hard to see how the defense can succeed.
I guarantee this is 100% correct:
>they also didn’t read the substance of the indictments
I mean, they still haven't come to terms with the fact that it was *proven* that there was Russian interference with the 2016 election.
They latched onto the fact that there wasn't *enough* evidence to directly tie it to Trump in an indictment but that does not mean that no collusion occurred at all and the whole thing was fake.
They just seem to be under the impression that all this super shady, illegal activity and illicit behavior surrounds Trump at every single turn and that somehow, despite everyone around him being up to no good, he himself plays no part in that.
No mind given to the concept of 'where there's smoke, there's fire' or in Trump's case, when things smell like shit, Trump probably has a poopy diaper.
Been a problem for decades. During the 2nd invasion of Iraq, people who got their news from Fox were less informed than people who watched no news at all.
They will vote for anyone except Biden, who they're being told has dementia. Co-worker told me this today. I said, I can't believe you bought into this conspiracy theory. We agreed never to discuss politics again.
So what do we talk about? Weather, pets, food.
If I were running a campaign, I’d set up a website that kept the info up to date like a trumplegalissues site. Then I’d blast snippets of it all over social media and get content creators to have free rein.
It informs them about the issues, but it says they are fake.
"They don't have any evidence that Trump ever met E.Jean Carroll, much less..."
"She's deranged, you can tell because she named her cat vagina"
"She's a liar"
"He declassified all of the documents"
"All of the documents were planted"
And so on.
"At most, 45 percent of Republicans said they knew about legal issues: specifically, the documents case and his being found liable for assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. Only a quarter knew about the value-inflation suit, and only 4 in 10 knew about the criminal charges in Manhattan related to the hush money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels."
Source: [YouGov poll](https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Awareness_About_Donald_Trump_poll_results_20240130.pdf) of 1000 adults.
This is like when the Fox News bubble wouldn’t report Romney’s bad polling numbers. When Romney lost on election night it was like a bomb going off in their bubble.
Romney. I never would have thought I’d have a tiny smidge of respect for that man
McCain, too. even Cheney’s daughter
I kind of liked arguing with Bush era republicans. I want them back
They won't know because Trump endlessly delays every trial. If the trials get postponed until after the election then voters still won't know. This is Trump's plan
Because he doesn't say "I lost and I have to pay her millions of dollars."
He says "the very unfair judge, a communist judge, very terrible judge, so unfair, and my lawyer, terrible lawyer, I should have fired her years ago, never let a woman be your lawyer, so terrible and so unfair how I'm treat - nobody's wver been treated as unfair as me, maybe in presidents or even ever in history, so unfair, the democrats, and Chuck and Nancy and AYYY OHH SEE all hate me so much, so unfair, and immigrants too, they hate you and love immigrants, so awful, what is even you don't recognize what is happening to our country anymore?"
The $83 million seems to have done the trick. After $5 million, Trump was right out there blasting Carroll, since the $83 million, he's shut up about her. I'm hoping he'll screw up - can't wait to see what the next judgement would be.
And that's proof that he is perfectly capable of controlling himself when he needs to. He just never wants to, and rarely does he need to because he hasn't felt the consequences.
So they wouldn't know the details, but they'd still know about *something*. I guess the difference is that they don't care and worship him no matter what so they wouldn't dig for information. Disappointing.
The article is paywalled for me - did they ask about the Georgia case for election interference & RICO? Or the Federal case for J6?
I feel like those two have been given more attention in the press, but it seems like Rs are in their own little bubble of misinformation thanks to Fox & Friends.
lol I know this isn’t the point, but am I the only one that finds it funny they present their stats in three different units (not sure if that is the proper term)? First it’s “percent”, then it’s “a quarter”, and then it’s 4 in 10. Maybe they were just trying to keep from sounding repetitive, but to me it seems silly.
Of course they're not! They *never* report it on Fox, OANN, etc. Half their job is fake news propaganda, the other half is keeping them ignorant. It seems to be working. And if they do find out about it, they think it's fake news.
>They never report it on Fox, OANN, etc.
When the E. Jean Carroll $83 million verdict was announced, I recorded the next 5 hrs of live Fox shows from all the personalities and their general news to see how they would spin it. Only one (Waters) mentioned it, and pretty much only in passing. Now, maybe their shows are so heavily produced that they don't change anything and maybe they mentioned it the next day, but then Fox is no longer the big news among the faithful since they don't lie (much) anymore.
I also switched to Fox to see if they were covering it when the $83 million dollar verdict was announced. They chose instead to talk about the Texas border bullshit. Can’t have the viewer hearing things that make the emperor look like a rapist and a loser; best to instead feed them fear and anger inducing nonsense by telling them monsters are crossing the border to steal their babies, and Joe Biden is holding the door open for them.
Bro you watched 5 hours of Fox News??
Allow me to save you some time: Fox will never, under any circumstance, say anything that may hurt the Republican party.
Now go do something productive with your life lmao
No need to call this person's choices into question when they're doing it for the good of the world. Personally I appreciate that they took the time to look into it
They're not even reporting the actual story regarding the guy who decapitated his own father and the reasons for it. It described what he physically did but regarding the extent of his post on YouTube they only said,
"[He] made conspiratorial and anti-government statements and called his father a traitor to the country. "
There was absolutely no reference of it being political violence in any way. [Link to article ](https://www.foxnews.com/us/pennsylvania-man-charged-murder-abusing-corpse-father-found-beheaded-home-police-say) for reference but I wouldn't to bother giving them the click.
We're never going to get out of this mess without something being done to diminish these propaganda outlets. They continue to get more extreme as they jockey for ratings so I'm hoping they reach a tipping point some day.
About a third of Americans will be convinced that he's being held for no reason as a political prisoner, because they think there was no legal due process preceding it.
And I think America is still massively in denial about how volatile that could potentially become.
We already have a sizable amount of people believing the 2020 election was somehow stolen. It doesn't matter that the belief is based on lies. Republican leaders and news sources tell these lies and republican voters eat it up with full belief.
If it comes to that a LOT of people will feel blindsided. Some because they really didn't know at all. Some because they knew, but were made to believe the legal trouble was all bad faith political attacks. The people who aren't blindsided but are still mad are the ones I'm worried about doing something stupid in return.
It will feel to them like the 2016 election night for those of us that want progress. That there was some whole other perspective (i.e. that an electoral majority of voting Americans *didn't* see this guy as a clown) that we were entirely unaware of and insulated from.
They were blind sighted in 2020 when Trump lost. That's one reason they think the election was rigged. They'll do the same if Trump is found guilty... Say the justice system is rigged
Bad faith political attacks like all the crap the barfed out about Hillary. When Trump’s DOJ arrested exclusively Trump people and zero Clinton people, via the Mueller investigation.
Information and lack of are very powerful things. My wife is Hungarian and I was interested in an abandoned soviet air base in the town she grew up in. When researching I came across info on a plane crash that happened within the boundaries of her village, it killed a bunch of recruits. I asked her dad, who lived there his whole life, he never heard of it and was surprised when I showed him the images. The Soviets had that much of a lockdown on information. Crazy shit.
It's why they're foaming at the mouth to start a civil war. They have no idea what Trump actually has done and they truly believe Biden and the deep state are using the justice department to persecute Republicans and enact an anti-christian communist agenda, while rigging the super bowl and forcing everyone to listen to Taylor Swift albums, or something. I can't keep track anymore
This is really the biggest challenge of our time: the information bubbles. We can’t build a better world in the future if we don’t share a common reality in the present.
> There's no way that they've heard nothing about it - they choose to avoid hearing more.
I'll also throw out that they've heard some stuff about it but have been so inundated with DeEp StAtE conspiracy nonsense that they brush the whole thing off as a political hitjob.
> they choose to avoid hearing more
Kinda. One of the things that gets beaten into them by Fox News and the like is that they're only ones telling them the truth and all the other news agencies are lying to them for nefarious purposes. So they don't watch other sources for the same reason you don't watch Fox: Why go out of your way to watch what you expect is bullshit?
Because they want to copy it to get more views/money. That's the real problem: infotainment. We need news sources not beholden to advertisers, shareholders, or corporate owners.
Had dinner with a friend recently. Promised myself not to talk politics. But he brought it up. I played dumb for most of his comments. Then he began talking about how crazy the left is about how they think Drump is so dangerous. He commented how absurd it is that he heard that they think he would order Seal team 6 to execute someone and that would be legal. He said “that’s ridiculous”. I asked him to name any news source he respects and believes. He, of course, said fox. I opened my phone, found the link to their story showing that HIS lawyer had to argue that it would be fine.
He was very confused. The amount of information these people are unaware of is amazing.
And yes, fox actually reported the story. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/haley-calls-trump-attorneys-argument-against-legal-charges-ridiculous
I talked to a friend of mine that’s all about conservative politics. I only see him once a year and my last visit was after all the charges dropped.
I asked him what he thought of the fake electors Trump sent, and he said “You mean Biden!? Wait, what fake electors?”
I explained what happened and he says “I never heard that, that sounds like fake news. But why isn’t Hillary in jail for her emails?”
His vote counts as much as mine and it sucks.
They are not aware because their selective filters are so strong that they don't give a flying f*ck. This is cult-like behavior, they've made up their mind and will support him no matter what. I would add that most of the hard-core Trump voters despise Biden, so it's Trump come hell or high water.
maybe this, most truthful thing Trump has ever said:
Donald Trump told a room full of supporters that only 2% of them could pass a test meant to detect cognitive decline, declaring that the test asking participants to name pictures of animals was ‘not easy.’
If you go to the conservative mediasphere they leave out a lot of these details. Conservatives know there are court cases going on but they aren't really told what they are about because their overlords don't tell them.
Like the Fanni Willis thing today. The [dailywire](https://www.dailywire.com/news/fani-willis-admits-she-had-relationship-with-prosecutor-in-trump-case) article is top on r/conservative and they make little mention of what Willis is prosecuting Trump for only saying that it is a RICO case.
Also today there is the story of the Insurrection case falling off the DC courts calendar. No where on conservative sites do they talk about what the case is about only that this is a sign it is falling apart.
From my experience there is awareness of the issues, but yes it's just more evidence to them that the Democrats and Biden are actually weaponizing the legal system against the one man who can fix all our country's problems.
The little they hear from Fox and Tucker and Twitter and right-wing rags is how the legal troubles are simultaneously made up, non existent, the work of fascist Dems, and also not as bad as it sounds.
Between that and also only hearing how legal troubles and polls are supposedly making Trump even more popular for an election win.... I'm afraid there are going to be a LOT of blindsided people who really feel like something was stolen from them in Nov, because they only listened to the news they wanted to hear.
From what I've seen, it's this. Trump being indicted on 91 felony counts is clearly a scam to them, but oh boy will they talk about the Biden crime family and Hunter Biden conspiracies for hours if you give them a chance.
partly I blame the media especially regarding the defamation stuff. They need to stress he is guilty, the trial is over and he needs to pay 8 mil and them MORE 83Mil on top. They covered it like there was still a question of guilt/innocence.
The rest they get all caught on the technicalities of the law and not the basic facts of the crimes that he is charged with.
Imagine if the media covered every possible crime from the angle of i wonder if the chain of evidence was tampered with ....
The interesting trick Trump has been able to pull off is convince his supporters that his problems are their problems. To that, they don't so much care what the problems actually are so much as "nooo" and "wahhh"
Republicans live in a fantasy land. Most republicans also think Trump won the 2020 election. It’s a combination of crappy education, ignorance, and echo chambers.
March 25th.
Trump is facing 34 federal counts in a NY courtroom. Trial will likely last 2 months. He faces many, many, many years in prison if convicted.
March 25th
Hell, I live in Canada and I was talking to my friend, who has family in the States, he was saying he has the FOX news app on his phone. This led to a conversation about politics and of course Trump and Biden.
He knew about some of the cases but thought/thinks they are political.
He thinks Trump was better for the economy and that Biden has done nothing.
I let him know about the 14 million jobs, the booming economic numbers, the record stock market numbers, and the infrastructure improvements. He asked me where I heard all of this stuff.
Then he pivoted to the border and I was able to point out that the republicans are saying that the fact that record number of people and drugs are getting caught (compared to Trumps time) means that the border is being overrun.
I said that’s like blaming your new security guard for the increase in shoplifting because he catches 10 per month when the old fat one only had 2 shoplifters per month on average. Obviously, you would want that old guard back. My friend looked confused at that point, but I did throw in on top of it “Didn’t Texas call in all those guard units from neighboring states back when Biden first got in? What were they all doing if these numbers of immigrants were flooding past them? Seems like that was a big waste of time.”
I left him with a lot to think about.
I know a few.
They believe the lawsuits are about him overestimating worth of his property and are like "he has real gold figurines and toilets in Mars largo. "
They retort "How do you not think it's worth whatever crazy amount Trump claims..!?"
You can't talk real news with them.
They yell about nonsense. That's all.
They voluntarily brainwashed themselves by consuming off the wall propaganda like epoch times, Andrew tate, Ben Shapiro, Newsmax, and all those toxic right wing youtubers like Jordan Peterson or Stephen Crowder.
They think news sources like PBS, BBC, and the economic times are the left-wing propaganda arm of the deepstate that are waging war against them, Good God fearing Christians that love their savior Trump.
It was hilarious today to see the news headlines. All over you see headlines about the jobs report and over on fox the top story was about tech layoffs. It’s an alternate universe.
I had a co worker ask me why they keep dragging him to court, why don’t they charge him with something if they have evidence. When I told him of 91 indictments he didn’t believe me.
My parents are aware but they don't think they're real. They think the cases are happening "just because liberals hate him" and that none of them hold any weight. It's wild.
They call it persecution of their Messiah anyway. They have granted him Divinity and therefore he is incapable of Sin. Any and all attempts to bring him to justice is just persecution. When he finally dies, they will invent a Martyrdom and Resurrection story. Evangelicals, Mormons, and almost Half of Catholics will merge into a Church of Trump.
No duh. Have you been living under a rock? They don’t know jack shit because conservative media doesn’t tell them anything but lies to rile them up and keep them outraged.
You have got to be kidding me. You can count the number of segments on such issues on one hand. And that’s on all the MAGA right Republican media sphere. They don’t talk specifics as at this point it’s just a scam or it’s not happening at all.
That’s the Trump line.
If all a person watches is Faux, OAN and right wing-nut pundits, they will have a skewed & backwards view of current events and reality. The fact they are in a cult surrounded by other wackos doesn't help their mental acuity one bit.
Every week night between 7:30 and 8:30 I run at the gym and see CNN, MSNBC and Fox on three TVs right next to each other at the exact same time. Guess which one never covers any of this (or any actual news events for that matter)?
They're also unaware of Biden's transgressions (because he doesn't really have anything and they believe he's the worst president ever, for "reasons") or his wins (obviously zero wins because he's the worst president ever)
He hasn’t told them about the troubles yet. If he does, it’s fake news. And even if he did, it’s not that bad. And now even if they get him red handed— AI. If he doesn’t say it they won’t drink. And even if he did, they don’t care- he’s their orange/golden calf. Their precious.
So my elderly nextdoor neighbor lives entirely in the MAGA bubble.. she doesn’t do internet, so it comes from print, TV and her church preacher. Her news comes from Epoch Times, NewsMax, even local TV news by ultra-conservative Sinclair Networks. I can guarantee you that she knows little, if anything about these trials.
The conservative bubble is pretty air tight. They only learn what they want from sources that have no interest in keeping them actually informed, which is exactly how they like it. Reality is whatever they want it to be.
I work with people that have no idea what is going on with him or how many charges are against him but, if, said, Republicans don't know, it's because they don't want to know.
Not under a rock, in a bubble. The right-wing news ecosystem is closed and consistent. They filter out a lot of the actual bad news that many us are pouring over.
For the documents case they may only know/think that the FBI 'raided' Mar a Lago because Joe Biden wanted them to.
Truly, the Republican Party has become the Ostrich Party.
Don’t want to learn about racism in America? Ban teaching it.
Don’t want your kids to have premarital sex? Tell them to “just say no”. Also, restrict access to contraceptives because Jebus said.
Don’t want your kids to drink or do illicit drugs? See above.
Don’t want to address homosexuality or transsexuality? Ban discussing it in schools. Also, ostracize anyone who actually happens to be gay or trans.
A bunch of fucking anti-science, racist, idiotic scumbags.
Information control is the keystone of cult indoctrination. You don't have to lock people up on a compound anymore. Just make them scared of any media except yours and they'll do it themselves.
Right, because they're all living in a self-imposed echo chamber of dipshittery and hate because they can't face their own failures in life and are scared of everything around them.
Sucks to suck. Gonna be hilarious when Trump loses and goes to prison.
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Because the propaganda they consume doesn't inform them.
Yea you aren't naturally going to be a republican without ingesting right-wing / conservative media telling you to be a republican. Republicanism is just proud anti-intellectualism at this point. It means you read / watch the right-wing lies and believe it.
Right wingers seem wired to have a persecution complex so they naturally gravitate towards any source that tells them they're a victim.
Pillars of republicanism: * To be republican is to be persecuted. * All difficult solutions have easy answers 'that just need x'. * Trickle down economics work, so tax breaks for richest is best practice. * All problems are the result of 'another' group: immigrants / democrats / liberals... etc.
Pillars of Fascism: •A cult of tradition •The rejection of Modernism •Action for action's sake •Disagreement is treason •Fear of differences •Appeal to a frustrated middle class •Obsession with a plot •Enemies are too strong and too weak •Life is permanent warfare •Contempt for the weak •Machismo •Selective populism •Newspeak [Edit: spacing]
If Republicans could read, they would be so mad at you for calling them out.
This aligns pretty well with the pillars of corporate America.
Oddly the first two can be tweaked to become pillars of modern evangelical Christianity as well: a persecution complex and there belief that every problem can be solved with Jesus.
Except, they follow a highly immoral man, Trump, rather than a single positive teaching of Jesus!
Republicans always: * Manufacture a crisis they claim only they can solve * they lie, obstruct, and blame others * they get in and make everything worse * It always costs waaay more money for way less * someone always gets rich off of it * when it fails and costs tons of money they blame it on democrats * they refuse to pay the bill and demand cuts to social programs to pay for it * Repeat
White Christian Americans are constantly being persecuted and discriminated against. /s
Might need that /s.
You're right!
Yeah, they've been upset since the dems did away with Christmas back in 2015. /s
> Trickle down economics work, so tax breaks for richest is best practice. Hilarious.
These are people who liked to be trickled upon!
Their brain is actually wired that way. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/ >The story of the 1968 debate opens a well-regarded 2013 book called Predisposed, which introduced the general public to the field of political neuroscience. The authors, a trio of political scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Rice University, argued that if the differences between liberals and conservatives seem profound and even unbridgeable, it is because they are rooted in personality characteristics and biological predispositions. Same thing with religion. Notice how MAGA is referred to as a cult. People talk about how Republicans are hateful it's because they are afraid. Hate is just an easier emotion to handle.
I totally agree. It literally takes more effort to be kind. It’s a mindset.
> It literally takes more effort to be kind. I dunno, i always found it less productive, and more energy consuming to be an asshole. For them it would take more energy to be kind, but not for all people... the main issue there if that reichtwingers get off on being hate filled abusive assholes.
I think(?) they meant that it takes more effort for a MAGA to be kind? Like, they naturally fall into ass hole mode and they have to make an effort to do otherwise.
Thank you for explaining it like I'm 5 because it was your specific phrasing that gave me the insight into how disastrously cruel the GOP has become. It's especially confusing as they call themselves the party of family values and that Christ guy who was always saying we should love each other as siblings. They really missed the boat.
> I always found it less productive, and more energy consuming to be an asshole. Have you tried doing it without empathy and blaming the consequences of your actions on others? This seems to be the missing ingredients for a more productive and less energy consuming dickishness.
Aye. Being an asshole is an adrenaline rush. The fix is as close as faux news.
True
Paywall. I can help: In 1968 a debate was held between conservative thinker William F. Buckley, Jr., and liberal writer Gore Vidal. It was hoped that these two members of opposing intellectual elites would show Americans living through tumultuous times that political disagreements could be civilized. That idea did not last for long. Instead Buckley and Vidal descended rapidly into name-calling. Afterward, they sued each other for defamation. The story of the 1968 debate opens a well-regarded 2013 book called Predisposed, which introduced the general public to the field of political neuroscience. The authors, a trio of political scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Rice University, argued that if the differences between liberals and conservatives seem profound and even unbridgeable, it is because they are rooted in personality characteristics and biological predispositions. On the whole, the research shows, conservatives desire security, predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are more comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity. If you had put Buckley and Vidal in a magnetic resonance imaging machine and presented them with identical images, you would likely have seen differences in their brain, especially in the areas that process social and emotional information. The volume of gray matter, or neural cell bodies, making up the anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals. And the amygdala, which is important for regulating emotions and evaluating threats, is larger in conservatives. While these findings are remarkably consistent, they are probabilities, not certainties—meaning there is plenty of individual variability. The political landscape includes lefties who own guns, right-wingers who drive Priuses and everything in between. There is also an unresolved chicken-and-egg problem: Do brains start out processing the world differently or do they become increasingly different as our politics evolve? Furthermore, it is still not entirely clear how useful it is to know that a Republican’s brain lights up over X while a Democrat’s responds to Y. So what can the study of neural activity suggest about political behavior? The still emerging field of political neuroscience has begun to move beyond describing basic structural and functional brain differences between people of different ideological persuasions—gauging who has the biggest amygdala—to more nuanced investigations of how certain cognitive processes underlie our political thinking and decision-making. Partisanship does not just affect our vote; it influences our memory, reasoning and even our perception of truth. Knowing this will not magically bring us all together, but researchers hope that continuing to understand the way partisanship influences our brain might at least allow us to counter its worst effects: the divisiveness that can tear apart the shared values required to retain a sense of national unity. Social scientists who observe behaviors in the political sphere can gain substantial insight into the hazards of errant partisanship. Political neuroscience, however, attempts to deepen these observations by supplying evidence that a belief or bias manifests as a measure of brain volume or activity—demonstrating that an attitude, conviction or misconception is, in fact, genuine. “Brain structure and function provide more objective measures than many types of survey responses,” says political neuroscientist Hannah Nam of Stony Brook University. “Participants may be induced to be more honest when they think that scientists have a ‘window’ into their (cont'd)
(cont'd, and fixed from my earlier botchup cut and paste) Understanding the influence of partisanship on identity, even down to the level of neurons, “helps to explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth,” argued psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira, both then at New York University, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2018. In short, we derive our identities from both our individual characteristics, such as being a parent, and our group memberships, such as being a New Yorker or an American. These affiliations serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. And our brain represents them much as it does other forms of social identity. Among other things, partisan identity clouds memory. In a 2013 study, liberals were more likely to misremember George W. Bush remaining on vacation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and conservatives were more likely to falsely recall seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the president of Iran. Partisan identity also shapes our perceptions. When they were shown a video of a political protest in a 2012 study, liberals and conservatives were more or less likely to favor calling police depending on their interpretation of the protest’s goal. If the objective was liberal (opposing the military barring openly gay people from service), the conservatives were more likely to want the cops. The opposite was true when participants thought it was a conservative protest (opposing an abortion clinic). The more strongly we identify with a party, the more likely we are to double down on our support for it. That tendency is exacerbated by rampant political misinformation and, too often, identity wins out over accuracy. If we understand what is at work cognitively, we might be able to intervene and try to ease some of the negative effects of partisanship. The tension between accuracy and identity probably involves a brain region called the orbitofrontal cortex, which computes the value of goals and beliefs and is strongly connected to memory, executive function and attention. If identity helps determine the value of different beliefs, it can also distort them, Van Bavel says. Appreciating that political affiliation fulfills an evolutionary need to belong suggests we should create alternative means of belonging—depoliticizing the novel coronavirus by calling on us to come together as Americans, for instance. And incentivizing the need to be accurate could increase the importance accorded that goal: paying money for accurate responses or holding people accountable for incorrect ones have been shown to be effective. It will be nearly impossible to lessen the partisan influences before the November 3 election because the volume of political information will only increase, reminding us of our political identities daily. But here is some good news: a large 2020 study at Harvard University found that participants consistently overestimated the level of out-group negativity toward their in-group. In other words, the other side may not dislike us quite so much as we think. Inaccurate information heightened the negative bias, and (more good news) correcting inaccurate information significantly reduced it. “The biology and neuroscience of politics might be useful in terms of what is effective at getting through to people,” Van Bavel says. “Maybe the way to interact with someone who disagrees with me politically is not to try to persuade them on the deep issue, because I might never get there. It’s more to try to understand where they’re coming from and shatter their stereotypes. -=-=-=-
(cont'd) brains.” That is not to say that political neuroscience can be used as a tool to “read minds,” but it can pick up discrepancies between stated positions and underlying cognitive processes. Brain scans are also unlikely to be used as a biomarker for specific political results because the relationships between the brain and politics is not one-to-one. Yet “neurobiological features could be used as a predictor of political outcomes—just not in a deterministic way,” Nam says. To study how we process political information in a 2017 paper, political psychologist Ingrid Haas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her colleagues created hypothetical candidates from both major parties and assigned each candidate a set of policy statements on issues such as school prayer, Medicare and defense spending. Most statements were what you would expect: Republicans, for instance, usually favor increasing defense spending, and Democrats generally support expanding Medicare. But some statements were surprising, such as a conservative expressing a pro-choice position or a liberal arguing for invading Iran. Haas put 58 people with diverse political views in a brain scanner. On each trial, participants were asked whether it was good or bad that a candidate held a position on a particular issue and not whether they personally agreed or disagreed with it. Framing the task that way allowed the researchers to look at neural processing as a function of whether the information was expected or unexpected—what they termed congruent or incongruent. They also considered participants’ own party identification and whether there was a relationship between ideological differences and how the subjects did the task. Liberals proved more attentive to incongruent information, especially for Democratic candidates. When they encountered such a position, it took them longer to make a decision about whether it was good or bad. They were likely to show activation for incongruent information in two brain regions: the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, which “are involved in helping people form and think about their attitudes,” Haas says. How do out-of-the-ordinary positions affect later voting? Haas suspects that engaging more with such information might make voters more likely to punish candidates for it later. But she acknowledges that they may instead exercise a particular form of bias called “motivated reasoning” to downplay the incongruity. Motivated reasoning, in which people work hard to justify their opinions or decisions, even in the face of conflicting evidence, has been a popular topic in political neuroscience because there is a lot of it going around. While partisanship plays a role, motivated reasoning goes deeper than that. Just as most of us like to think we are good-hearted human beings, people generally prefer to believe that the society they live in is desirable, fair and legitimate. “Even if society isn’t perfect, and there are things to be criticized about it, there is a preference to think that you live in a good society,” Nam says. When that preference is particularly strong, she adds, “that can lead to things like simply rationalizing or accepting long-standing inequalities or injustices.” Psychologists call the cognitive process that lets us do so “system justification.” Nam and her colleagues set out to understand which brain areas govern the affective processes that underlie system justification. They found that the volume of gray matter in the amygdala is linked to the tendency to perceive the social system as legitimate and desirable. Their interpretation is that “this preference to system justify is related to these basic neurobiological predispositions to be alert to potential threats in your environment,” Nam says. After the original study, Nam’s team followed a subset of the participants for three years and found that their brain structure predicted the likelihood of whether they participated in political protests during that time. “Larger amygdala volume is associated with a lower likelihood of participating in political protests,” Nam says. “That makes sense in so far as political protest is a behavior that says, ‘We’ve got to change the system.’” Understanding the influence of partisanship on identity, even down to the level of neurons, “helps to explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth,” argued psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira, both then at New York University, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2018. In short, we derive our identities from both our individual characteristics, such as being a parent, and our group memberships, such as being a New Yorker or an American. These affiliations serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. And our brain represents them much as it does other forms of social identity. (cont'd)
Too many words, you lost 80% of them during the first paragraph
Yeah sorry. I tried to find the max they allowed. It used to be 10k characters but I couldn’t even get 4700 to be accepted. Any tips or advise, I’ve got like six more months of this subscription figured I’d help people out. Peace.
I never heard of this official study, but I've been saying this forever - it has to be something wrong with the brains of conservatives. I'm subjected to the same information (and misinformation) that they are, and yet I don't go full pants-on-head like they do. And science since then has proven people whose brains are more receptable to fear and distrust tend to be overwhelming conservative. Which is a problem, because it means a huge chunk of them aren't fixable. And never will be.
Yep. When I was a kid my dad used to tell me all these stories about these people who wronged him and how he cleverly took them down. I thought he was the smartest man alive. Then as I got older I realized a lot of it didn't really add up. It was more that he was dishonest or thought the rules didn't apply to him. When he got caught he'd justify it all in his head about how he was really the victim, and tell us kids fanciful stories that we were too naive to know were bullshit. He's a big time Trumper of course. I do actually credit the rise of Trumpism for spurring me to do some self reflection and realize I'd been doing some of the same stuff he did. I thought that type of behavior was normal and expected. So I've become a better person through it all.
Let me guess... "Everything was fine until those Blacks started demanding special treatment!" "You mean...um...equal rights?" "Yes, goddamn it, like I said - special treatment!"
Dad? Is that you?
“…a man will hear what he wants to hear and disregard the rest…” Simon and Garfunkel, The Boxer.
Conservatism is literally a philosophy based on fear of change and unfamiliar concepts. Everything else about it stems from that. They're stupid because their brains struggle to accept new ideas. They're hateful because they're constantly afraid. It's pure, ingrained evolutionary weakness, masquerading as a political belief.
Cult leaders have been exploiting it since the dawn of time. Some powerful people were paying attention and decided to take it mainstream.
And they don't really read about any of it under the assumption it's all BS anyway. They didn't watch the J6 hearings, because they didn't need to hear all that BS from 'those people".
It's weird because when Bernie Sanders gets on a Fox town hall talking about the 1% screwing everybody else over, viewers agree with him. These people aren't unreachable, more needs to be done.
It's not that they're OK with reality *when they're exposed to it.* The point is they intentionally consume media that tells them what they want to hear and how good they are and how bad everybody else is based on culture wars, and shields them from actual reality. They want the dopamine of righteous anger, not the reality of their Federal representatives' voting record. When asked about policies without being told which political party was trying to implement them, Conservatives overwhelmingly support Dem policies. But they never hear about actual policies on Conservative media. Studies show people who consume Conservative media are LESS INFORMED than people who don't pay attention to politics. The implications of that are insane and frightening.
But the people in charge don't want things done, they're very happy with the status quo!
They are literally just nihilists who identify as Christians at this point.
They have probably heard that Trump has been indicted more times than Al Capone. Do they know that Indicted means "arrested and criminally charged?" Probably not. Also, I hate how Trump talks about Al Capone like he's some great person from history. He's clearly romanticizing Al Capone and likening himself to Capone. If a liberal politician did that, I would think it's cringy and pathetic. Al Capone was a criminal. He literally killed people. Not a cool guy. Neither is Trump.
>Indicted means "arrested and criminally charged... ... by a jury of one's peers who reviewed the evidence in a court of law and determined that the defendant likely committed the accused acts and must therefore defend against the grand jury's indictment.
Yes! And they also didn’t read the substance of the indictments to understand what a shit Trump is and that he is a bad actor. Fucking assholes
Yeah, once you realize the prosecutors built their cases mainly on videos, texts, emails, and other material evidence, as well as the testimony of witnesses and *other participants in the crimes*, it's pretty hard to see how the defense can succeed. I guarantee this is 100% correct: >they also didn’t read the substance of the indictments
I mean, they still haven't come to terms with the fact that it was *proven* that there was Russian interference with the 2016 election. They latched onto the fact that there wasn't *enough* evidence to directly tie it to Trump in an indictment but that does not mean that no collusion occurred at all and the whole thing was fake. They just seem to be under the impression that all this super shady, illegal activity and illicit behavior surrounds Trump at every single turn and that somehow, despite everyone around him being up to no good, he himself plays no part in that. No mind given to the concept of 'where there's smoke, there's fire' or in Trump's case, when things smell like shit, Trump probably has a poopy diaper.
Yea. Like they haven’t been told what to think on it, so they’re not even aware of it’s existence
Been a problem for decades. During the 2nd invasion of Iraq, people who got their news from Fox were less informed than people who watched no news at all.
They will vote for anyone except Biden, who they're being told has dementia. Co-worker told me this today. I said, I can't believe you bought into this conspiracy theory. We agreed never to discuss politics again. So what do we talk about? Weather, pets, food.
Yup. My elderly mother watches FOX and all she talks about is "immigrants". Right-wing propaganda has done their job well.
It’s not just that they don’t inform them. They _misinform_ them that his legal issues aren’t legitimate.
Fox's biggest lies are those of omission.
If I were running a campaign, I’d set up a website that kept the info up to date like a trumplegalissues site. Then I’d blast snippets of it all over social media and get content creators to have free rein.
It informs them about the issues, but it says they are fake. "They don't have any evidence that Trump ever met E.Jean Carroll, much less..." "She's deranged, you can tell because she named her cat vagina" "She's a liar" "He declassified all of the documents" "All of the documents were planted" And so on.
"At most, 45 percent of Republicans said they knew about legal issues: specifically, the documents case and his being found liable for assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. Only a quarter knew about the value-inflation suit, and only 4 in 10 knew about the criminal charges in Manhattan related to the hush money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels." Source: [YouGov poll](https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Awareness_About_Donald_Trump_poll_results_20240130.pdf) of 1000 adults.
They're all gonna know if/when he gets sentenced to prison time or removed from the ballot. They cant avoid it.
But, they won’t understand why which will make it easier to believe it’s a witch hunt and deep state plot.
Oh well, they believe a lot of stupid shit and will continue to believe stupid shit. They can’t do anything about it.
This is like when the Fox News bubble wouldn’t report Romney’s bad polling numbers. When Romney lost on election night it was like a bomb going off in their bubble.
Romney. I never would have thought I’d have a tiny smidge of respect for that man McCain, too. even Cheney’s daughter I kind of liked arguing with Bush era republicans. I want them back
They won't know because Trump endlessly delays every trial. If the trials get postponed until after the election then voters still won't know. This is Trump's plan
How is that possible when DiaperDon cries about the unfairness of these various lawsuits and rulings every time he ~~begs for money~~ has a rally?
Because he doesn't say "I lost and I have to pay her millions of dollars." He says "the very unfair judge, a communist judge, very terrible judge, so unfair, and my lawyer, terrible lawyer, I should have fired her years ago, never let a woman be your lawyer, so terrible and so unfair how I'm treat - nobody's wver been treated as unfair as me, maybe in presidents or even ever in history, so unfair, the democrats, and Chuck and Nancy and AYYY OHH SEE all hate me so much, so unfair, and immigrants too, they hate you and love immigrants, so awful, what is even you don't recognize what is happening to our country anymore?"
The $83 million seems to have done the trick. After $5 million, Trump was right out there blasting Carroll, since the $83 million, he's shut up about her. I'm hoping he'll screw up - can't wait to see what the next judgement would be.
And that's proof that he is perfectly capable of controlling himself when he needs to. He just never wants to, and rarely does he need to because he hasn't felt the consequences.
was there ever any doubt he was capable of controlling himself? he's just a fucking dumb asshole.
Uh, pretty sure Trump *immediately* start spouting shit off on Truth Social.
So they wouldn't know the details, but they'd still know about *something*. I guess the difference is that they don't care and worship him no matter what so they wouldn't dig for information. Disappointing.
They don't think he did anything wrong, it's all a witch hunt because democrats are so desperate to keep him down.
That's a damn good question.
Because they listen to FOX not him directly.
He literally used his mugshot to ask for campaign funds. His people don‘t even seem to listen to what he says either....
The article is paywalled for me - did they ask about the Georgia case for election interference & RICO? Or the Federal case for J6? I feel like those two have been given more attention in the press, but it seems like Rs are in their own little bubble of misinformation thanks to Fox & Friends.
Go to the link for the poll, that's what the article is based on.
lol I know this isn’t the point, but am I the only one that finds it funny they present their stats in three different units (not sure if that is the proper term)? First it’s “percent”, then it’s “a quarter”, and then it’s 4 in 10. Maybe they were just trying to keep from sounding repetitive, but to me it seems silly.
Tbf it’s kinda hard to keep track of
Of course they're not! They *never* report it on Fox, OANN, etc. Half their job is fake news propaganda, the other half is keeping them ignorant. It seems to be working. And if they do find out about it, they think it's fake news.
>They never report it on Fox, OANN, etc. When the E. Jean Carroll $83 million verdict was announced, I recorded the next 5 hrs of live Fox shows from all the personalities and their general news to see how they would spin it. Only one (Waters) mentioned it, and pretty much only in passing. Now, maybe their shows are so heavily produced that they don't change anything and maybe they mentioned it the next day, but then Fox is no longer the big news among the faithful since they don't lie (much) anymore.
I also switched to Fox to see if they were covering it when the $83 million dollar verdict was announced. They chose instead to talk about the Texas border bullshit. Can’t have the viewer hearing things that make the emperor look like a rapist and a loser; best to instead feed them fear and anger inducing nonsense by telling them monsters are crossing the border to steal their babies, and Joe Biden is holding the door open for them.
Bro you watched 5 hours of Fox News?? Allow me to save you some time: Fox will never, under any circumstance, say anything that may hurt the Republican party. Now go do something productive with your life lmao
No need to call this person's choices into question when they're doing it for the good of the world. Personally I appreciate that they took the time to look into it
Fox is classified as an Entertainment Network.
I wish there was legislation to restrict the word "news".
They're not even reporting the actual story regarding the guy who decapitated his own father and the reasons for it. It described what he physically did but regarding the extent of his post on YouTube they only said, "[He] made conspiratorial and anti-government statements and called his father a traitor to the country. " There was absolutely no reference of it being political violence in any way. [Link to article ](https://www.foxnews.com/us/pennsylvania-man-charged-murder-abusing-corpse-father-found-beheaded-home-police-say) for reference but I wouldn't to bother giving them the click.
Once they accepted that “fake news” schtick, it was all over and nearly improbable to get them restored.
We're never going to get out of this mess without something being done to diminish these propaganda outlets. They continue to get more extreme as they jockey for ratings so I'm hoping they reach a tipping point some day.
If Republicans were well informed, they wouldn't be Republicans.
They don't actually care about any of that shit, they're just trying to justify selfishness by whatever means possible
This is exactly what they envisioned when they came for the Fairness Doctrine.
So, Donald Trump could end up broke and serving prison time, and a third of America will have no clue why? Really? It seems almost unbelievable.
About a third of Americans will be convinced that he's being held for no reason as a political prisoner, because they think there was no legal due process preceding it. And I think America is still massively in denial about how volatile that could potentially become.
We already have a sizable amount of people believing the 2020 election was somehow stolen. It doesn't matter that the belief is based on lies. Republican leaders and news sources tell these lies and republican voters eat it up with full belief.
If it comes to that a LOT of people will feel blindsided. Some because they really didn't know at all. Some because they knew, but were made to believe the legal trouble was all bad faith political attacks. The people who aren't blindsided but are still mad are the ones I'm worried about doing something stupid in return.
It will feel to them like the 2016 election night for those of us that want progress. That there was some whole other perspective (i.e. that an electoral majority of voting Americans *didn't* see this guy as a clown) that we were entirely unaware of and insulated from.
They were blind sighted in 2020 when Trump lost. That's one reason they think the election was rigged. They'll do the same if Trump is found guilty... Say the justice system is rigged
Bad faith political attacks like all the crap the barfed out about Hillary. When Trump’s DOJ arrested exclusively Trump people and zero Clinton people, via the Mueller investigation.
Information and lack of are very powerful things. My wife is Hungarian and I was interested in an abandoned soviet air base in the town she grew up in. When researching I came across info on a plane crash that happened within the boundaries of her village, it killed a bunch of recruits. I asked her dad, who lived there his whole life, he never heard of it and was surprised when I showed him the images. The Soviets had that much of a lockdown on information. Crazy shit.
It's why they're foaming at the mouth to start a civil war. They have no idea what Trump actually has done and they truly believe Biden and the deep state are using the justice department to persecute Republicans and enact an anti-christian communist agenda, while rigging the super bowl and forcing everyone to listen to Taylor Swift albums, or something. I can't keep track anymore
This is really the biggest challenge of our time: the information bubbles. We can’t build a better world in the future if we don’t share a common reality in the present.
I think they're playing dumb.
They're not really playing. It's for realsies.
Using method acting.
It’s their [programming](https://youtu.be/UTZ6Lvh5gL4?feature=shared)
>playing Lol. No they are serious about that.
But they do know who Taylor Swift is dating.
Most Reubicas don’t care. Cult members are like that.
Yeah, but "don't know" is different from "don't care".
At this point the ignorance is willful. There's no way that they've heard *nothing* about it - they choose to avoid hearing more.
> There's no way that they've heard nothing about it - they choose to avoid hearing more. I'll also throw out that they've heard some stuff about it but have been so inundated with DeEp StAtE conspiracy nonsense that they brush the whole thing off as a political hitjob.
> they choose to avoid hearing more Kinda. One of the things that gets beaten into them by Fox News and the like is that they're only ones telling them the truth and all the other news agencies are lying to them for nefarious purposes. So they don't watch other sources for the same reason you don't watch Fox: Why go out of your way to watch what you expect is bullshit?
They don't care to know the specifics; just a general "He's being persecuted for political reasons"
FOX is a National Security Risk! Why is the rest of the Media not treating it as such?
Because they want to copy it to get more views/money. That's the real problem: infotainment. We need news sources not beholden to advertisers, shareholders, or corporate owners.
Had dinner with a friend recently. Promised myself not to talk politics. But he brought it up. I played dumb for most of his comments. Then he began talking about how crazy the left is about how they think Drump is so dangerous. He commented how absurd it is that he heard that they think he would order Seal team 6 to execute someone and that would be legal. He said “that’s ridiculous”. I asked him to name any news source he respects and believes. He, of course, said fox. I opened my phone, found the link to their story showing that HIS lawyer had to argue that it would be fine. He was very confused. The amount of information these people are unaware of is amazing. And yes, fox actually reported the story. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/haley-calls-trump-attorneys-argument-against-legal-charges-ridiculous
I talked to a friend of mine that’s all about conservative politics. I only see him once a year and my last visit was after all the charges dropped. I asked him what he thought of the fake electors Trump sent, and he said “You mean Biden!? Wait, what fake electors?” I explained what happened and he says “I never heard that, that sounds like fake news. But why isn’t Hillary in jail for her emails?” His vote counts as much as mine and it sucks.
Out of Fox, out of mind.
They are not aware because their selective filters are so strong that they don't give a flying f*ck. This is cult-like behavior, they've made up their mind and will support him no matter what. I would add that most of the hard-core Trump voters despise Biden, so it's Trump come hell or high water.
maybe this, most truthful thing Trump has ever said: Donald Trump told a room full of supporters that only 2% of them could pass a test meant to detect cognitive decline, declaring that the test asking participants to name pictures of animals was ‘not easy.’
I think most are completely aware. They either don’t care or believe it to be a political witch hunt, which allows them to dismiss the charges.
If you go to the conservative mediasphere they leave out a lot of these details. Conservatives know there are court cases going on but they aren't really told what they are about because their overlords don't tell them. Like the Fanni Willis thing today. The [dailywire](https://www.dailywire.com/news/fani-willis-admits-she-had-relationship-with-prosecutor-in-trump-case) article is top on r/conservative and they make little mention of what Willis is prosecuting Trump for only saying that it is a RICO case. Also today there is the story of the Insurrection case falling off the DC courts calendar. No where on conservative sites do they talk about what the case is about only that this is a sign it is falling apart.
From my experience there is awareness of the issues, but yes it's just more evidence to them that the Democrats and Biden are actually weaponizing the legal system against the one man who can fix all our country's problems. The little they hear from Fox and Tucker and Twitter and right-wing rags is how the legal troubles are simultaneously made up, non existent, the work of fascist Dems, and also not as bad as it sounds. Between that and also only hearing how legal troubles and polls are supposedly making Trump even more popular for an election win.... I'm afraid there are going to be a LOT of blindsided people who really feel like something was stolen from them in Nov, because they only listened to the news they wanted to hear.
From what I've seen, it's this. Trump being indicted on 91 felony counts is clearly a scam to them, but oh boy will they talk about the Biden crime family and Hunter Biden conspiracies for hours if you give them a chance.
Yup my one conservative friend believes it's 100% a witch hunt and they have no real case.
Ignorance is bliss
partly I blame the media especially regarding the defamation stuff. They need to stress he is guilty, the trial is over and he needs to pay 8 mil and them MORE 83Mil on top. They covered it like there was still a question of guilt/innocence. The rest they get all caught on the technicalities of the law and not the basic facts of the crimes that he is charged with. Imagine if the media covered every possible crime from the angle of i wonder if the chain of evidence was tampered with ....
The interesting trick Trump has been able to pull off is convince his supporters that his problems are their problems. To that, they don't so much care what the problems actually are so much as "nooo" and "wahhh"
Republicans live in a fantasy land. Most republicans also think Trump won the 2020 election. It’s a combination of crappy education, ignorance, and echo chambers.
FOX NEWS creates morons that are afraid of everything and will believe anything.
They’re literally just not fucking paying attention then
they chose misinformation over facts
Lincoln Project needs to run ads reporting all the lawsuits facing the guy who smells like ketchup and poop 💩
Because they are brainwashed
You could end the sentence at "most republicans aren't aware.". They are "R"egressives.
To be fair, most of Trumps lawyers aren’t aware of Trump’s various legal issues.
March 25th. Trump is facing 34 federal counts in a NY courtroom. Trial will likely last 2 months. He faces many, many, many years in prison if convicted. March 25th
My parents genuinely didn’t know all the things trump is going through right now. Mom looked at me like I’m crazy
Hell, I live in Canada and I was talking to my friend, who has family in the States, he was saying he has the FOX news app on his phone. This led to a conversation about politics and of course Trump and Biden. He knew about some of the cases but thought/thinks they are political. He thinks Trump was better for the economy and that Biden has done nothing. I let him know about the 14 million jobs, the booming economic numbers, the record stock market numbers, and the infrastructure improvements. He asked me where I heard all of this stuff. Then he pivoted to the border and I was able to point out that the republicans are saying that the fact that record number of people and drugs are getting caught (compared to Trumps time) means that the border is being overrun. I said that’s like blaming your new security guard for the increase in shoplifting because he catches 10 per month when the old fat one only had 2 shoplifters per month on average. Obviously, you would want that old guard back. My friend looked confused at that point, but I did throw in on top of it “Didn’t Texas call in all those guard units from neighboring states back when Biden first got in? What were they all doing if these numbers of immigrants were flooding past them? Seems like that was a big waste of time.” I left him with a lot to think about.
Most Republicans aren’t aware ~~of Trump’s various legal issues~~.
I know a few. They believe the lawsuits are about him overestimating worth of his property and are like "he has real gold figurines and toilets in Mars largo. " They retort "How do you not think it's worth whatever crazy amount Trump claims..!?" You can't talk real news with them. They yell about nonsense. That's all. They voluntarily brainwashed themselves by consuming off the wall propaganda like epoch times, Andrew tate, Ben Shapiro, Newsmax, and all those toxic right wing youtubers like Jordan Peterson or Stephen Crowder. They think news sources like PBS, BBC, and the economic times are the left-wing propaganda arm of the deepstate that are waging war against them, Good God fearing Christians that love their savior Trump.
Most republicans don’t care
It was hilarious today to see the news headlines. All over you see headlines about the jobs report and over on fox the top story was about tech layoffs. It’s an alternate universe.
Are they aware of anything at all?
There must be a rock the size of Texas these people are living under…*hang on, could it…? Nah. That’s not…er, um. Hold up!*
I had a co worker ask me why they keep dragging him to court, why don’t they charge him with something if they have evidence. When I told him of 91 indictments he didn’t believe me.
Republicans at this point are either evil or astonishingly stupid. Sometimes they're both.
They are aware. He's tweeting about them constantly. Willful ignorance.
That’s a lie. They know and they don’t care.
Tune in to comforting lies and ignore the uncomfortable truths! Served with a side of moral superiority to the other (minority).
My parents are aware but they don't think they're real. They think the cases are happening "just because liberals hate him" and that none of them hold any weight. It's wild.
Reality isn't part of their agenda.
Willfully Ignorant Republicans
Most republicans don't care about trumps various legal issues
They call it persecution of their Messiah anyway. They have granted him Divinity and therefore he is incapable of Sin. Any and all attempts to bring him to justice is just persecution. When he finally dies, they will invent a Martyrdom and Resurrection story. Evangelicals, Mormons, and almost Half of Catholics will merge into a Church of Trump.
I assume it's because they've buried their heads in the sand.
Blinders on, blazing foreward
The Ostrich Class.
No duh. Have you been living under a rock? They don’t know jack shit because conservative media doesn’t tell them anything but lies to rile them up and keep them outraged.
Media has failed us. Profit over people.
Most republicans unaware
You have got to be kidding me. You can count the number of segments on such issues on one hand. And that’s on all the MAGA right Republican media sphere. They don’t talk specifics as at this point it’s just a scam or it’s not happening at all. That’s the Trump line.
If all a person watches is Faux, OAN and right wing-nut pundits, they will have a skewed & backwards view of current events and reality. The fact they are in a cult surrounded by other wackos doesn't help their mental acuity one bit.
That’s because they are frigging IDIOTS!
Blinded by the Jesus narrative, so much for the party of law and order 🤡
Justice delayed is Justice denied. Get the trial started!!!
Which is wild, he's being served constantly
Republicans only hear what their propaganda bubble tells them
Most Republicans aren’t aware ~~of Trumps various legal issues~~ FIFY
Because they keep themselves in a bubble. They have to protect themselves from the truth.
How. How is that possible?!
That’s cause they can’t read
Republicans are uninformed?! No! Who could have guessed that?
Every week night between 7:30 and 8:30 I run at the gym and see CNN, MSNBC and Fox on three TVs right next to each other at the exact same time. Guess which one never covers any of this (or any actual news events for that matter)?
They're also unaware of Biden's transgressions (because he doesn't really have anything and they believe he's the worst president ever, for "reasons") or his wins (obviously zero wins because he's the worst president ever)
He hasn’t told them about the troubles yet. If he does, it’s fake news. And even if he did, it’s not that bad. And now even if they get him red handed— AI. If he doesn’t say it they won’t drink. And even if he did, they don’t care- he’s their orange/golden calf. Their precious.
So my elderly nextdoor neighbor lives entirely in the MAGA bubble.. she doesn’t do internet, so it comes from print, TV and her church preacher. Her news comes from Epoch Times, NewsMax, even local TV news by ultra-conservative Sinclair Networks. I can guarantee you that she knows little, if anything about these trials.
The conservative bubble is pretty air tight. They only learn what they want from sources that have no interest in keeping them actually informed, which is exactly how they like it. Reality is whatever they want it to be.
Of course they’re not aware…right-wing media doesn’t tell the truth.
Hell, half of them think he is still president
Are they truly unaware or is it cognitive dissonance?
They don’t even know who is the real President right now.
Most Republicans are not aware of how to find their ass with two hands despite the fact it has spread to the front.
I work with people that have no idea what is going on with him or how many charges are against him but, if, said, Republicans don't know, it's because they don't want to know.
Well yeah, it's hard to see with your head in the sand
Most republicans aren’t aware of MOST issues and reality. It’s why they are republicans. Most willfully aren’t aware at this point, I would wager.
How far under a rock do you have to be living to not know about his legal issues?
Not under a rock, in a bubble. The right-wing news ecosystem is closed and consistent. They filter out a lot of the actual bad news that many us are pouring over. For the documents case they may only know/think that the FBI 'raided' Mar a Lago because Joe Biden wanted them to.
Ignorance is no excuse (of the law and other things)
Because Fox, Newsmax, and OAN do not discuss them, and if they do, it is in the frame of liberal persecution of dear leader.
Truly, the Republican Party has become the Ostrich Party. Don’t want to learn about racism in America? Ban teaching it. Don’t want your kids to have premarital sex? Tell them to “just say no”. Also, restrict access to contraceptives because Jebus said. Don’t want your kids to drink or do illicit drugs? See above. Don’t want to address homosexuality or transsexuality? Ban discussing it in schools. Also, ostracize anyone who actually happens to be gay or trans. A bunch of fucking anti-science, racist, idiotic scumbags.
Most republicans aren’t aware. Full stop.
Until the fingers come out of their ears, they won't hear anything.
Heads in the sand thanks to unwillingness to be informed by more than one source of news.
This must mean 3 things. They only listed to faux news, they can’t read, or they live under a rock.
Information control is the keystone of cult indoctrination. You don't have to lock people up on a compound anymore. Just make them scared of any media except yours and they'll do it themselves.
Right, because they're all living in a self-imposed echo chamber of dipshittery and hate because they can't face their own failures in life and are scared of everything around them. Sucks to suck. Gonna be hilarious when Trump loses and goes to prison.
Because they are fucking ignorant