Steve Almond tells the story of what happened to a young man who'd impressed him with his political engagement but changed the same way I saw others change.
Same brainwashing as the right-wing but different content and target. Goal is to make voters disgusted with Democrats in an emotionally unhinged way. Policy forgotten, all about hating an enemy to vote against.
"In the months after Clinton formally accepted the nomination, the nature of Jon's rhetoric changed. He began to respond to social media posts by friends and relatives with links to anti-Clinton pieces from strange websites. ... The Russians made a calculated bet that a guy like Jon, if sufficiently goaded, would shift from an agenda driven by progressive goals to one driven by animus to Clinton. Jon professed disgust with Trump. But his Facebook page was filled with links to articles vilifying Clinton. ... Taken together, Jon's posts composed a kind of ideologically incoherent gumbo in which the main ingredients were disinformation, distrust of authority in general, and Clinton in particular -- the same stew Trump dished out daily at his rallies.
"His logic was tough to follow. 'This country can't survive another Clinton presidency,' he wrote to his chat group, who all just happened to be female Clinton supporters. 'Clinton will lead us into war. She'll create a corporatist controlled police state.' When another member of his group asked him about the dangers of electing Trump, he replied, 'Why are you stuck on fear mongering?' I recognized Jon's rhetorical posture from my own years as a Ralf Nader crusader. ... But his logic was that of a fatalist: the system was broken beyond repair, policies were empty promises ... . The conservative movement fosters this false equivalence, which breeds apathy and depresses turnout. 'A vote for Hillary is a vote for Trump,' Jon wrote a few weeks before the election, which is how you know he isn't a person of color, a Muslim, or an immigrant."
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