General Discussion

Last edited Fri Oct 11, 2024, 06:40 PM - Edit history (1)

The question "how anyone in their right mind could support Trump" isn't that tough. It is the result of more than four decades of systematic brainwashing. The brainwashing predates the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the mid-80's, but that marks a turning point that was accelerated with the rise of FOX News in the early 90's.

We are contending with a vast, far-right extremist, multibillion-dollar decentralized network of talk radio, think tanks, podcasters, and other "influencers," with FOX News as the behemoth at the center of a firehose of falsehoods that is brainwashing an ever-growing proportion of the American population.

If we don't take this on as a nation and figure out how to reach and deprogram people, we will keep losing them to a cult that is on track to becoming a majority force.

I lost my mother-in-law to FOX News in the early 2000's when she moved to Florida and started watching what "everyone" watched: FOX News. A formerly active Democrat, highly-intelligent woman (passed the bar at a time when women were unicorns in the profession) started spouting the hateful propaganda. She never recovered.

People across this country have lost friends and family to the brainwashing. Formerly loving, kind people brainwashed into a set of beliefs that leave them alienated from any sense of connection to their own government and eager to utterly destroy hard-won programs and policies that have improved their lives and the lives of their fellow citizens; beliefs that leave them hating those of us who believe our government and public institutions are ours to shape and can be wielded for our collective benefit.

We need more documentaries like the one below; more attention on the stories of people indoctrinated into the far-right cult and the pain of those they leave behind; more stories from “recovering” extremists.

I think it would benefit us to shift away from the “us” vs. “them” mentality and get real about how this is affecting us personally. I’m not sure why, but I think that is a key to actually digging ourselves out of this. I think we need a greater emphasis on the pain we are suffering as individuals -- and as a nation -- as we lose people to the cult created by the extremist right propaganda machine. Rational debate of the facts isn’t getting us anywhere. This is a social phenomenon. We are social creatures. Either throwing up our hands, because we are unable to fathom “them” or returning “their” hateful rhetoric about "us" with our own hateful rhetoric about "them” is not going to get us out of this.