It should also be pointed out that, yes, while not all conservative thought is conspiracy theories, racism and stupid, it’s also clear that almost everything new in conservative thought over the last 10-20 years or so, those things that distinguish them from the GOP of the 80s and 90s, is conspiracy theories, racism and stupid. John McCain made of point of shutting down Birtherism crap; Trump and the modern GOP embrace Birtherism, and more. There were always racists in the party, but they tried to keep it on the down-low. Now, we have the President telling immigrant citizens to “go back where they came from”. And Stupid? Well, fuck, where to even start?
As I mentioned, there is a reason why conservative media has found an audience.
‘Everything in conservative thought for the last twenty years is conspiracy theories, racist, and stupid’ does not really lead to informed debate, and does not IMO inform the public.
This is true in a sense, but also reveals the problem with people who make up the market for conservative media. You state that the mainstream media slants to the left. The reason for that is that reality slants to the left. Global warming and evolution are two of the big issues where reality and what conservatives believe are contradictory. If people want to hear that they can keep their coal mining jobs and keep burning hydrocarbons to prosperity while not damaging the environment, they’re burying their heads in the sand, not looking for real news.
Fox News and Limbaugh came into existence because Reagan guillotined the Fairness Doctrine.
Talking with Flat Earthers doesn’t really lead to informed debate and doesn’t inform the public, either. If the vast majority of what conservatives blather on about is racist, stupid and just as wrong as the notion that the Earth is not a sphere… not my bummer.
With unbiased and non-partisan articles like this in the media, one can scarcely imagine from where conservatives get the idea of media bias. I mean, who wouldn’t trust a source like David Atkins to fairly and honestly outline conservative beliefs, right?
And this is another good example of what I’m on about. You completely blow past the part where I was a conservative voter for most of my life, until the stupidity took over the entire movement.
But you just ignore that, and try to score some “more reasonable than thou points”. How about you actually take a minute to consider the possibility that you really are embracing the Party of Stupid, rather than just dismissing this as some kind of leftist bias?
The statistics I’ve seen about the US point to the Left becoming more radical and the Right, comparatively, only moving a little further to the right. Cite 1 and Cite 2.
The first graph in the second citation is interesting because it shows that the gap between Left and Right in 2008 is much smaller than the gap between Left and Left between 2008 and 2016.
Yes, there’s a reason that conservative news found an audience. Conservatives couldn’t handle unbiased news, so they had to create their own biased news.
If conservatives created less biased news, then you’d have a point that maybe the regular news was biased. But they didn’t. They created conservative news.
They simply wanted reported to tell them what they wanted to hear.
One will always wonder how a report that shows that the Democrats are still much closer to the center (First graph in the second cite) compared to the radicalization of the Republicans of today, and then the sources you rely on conclude that it is the opposite.
And the other research the first cite points at shows the Democrats becoming more active regarding the needy, race relations and immigration.
Can’t read the second cite, but that first one is telling:
Recognizing the reality of economic inequality and racial inequality is considered “far left extremism” by the right wing.
And if you think that’s not just their bias showing, consider this gem:
Yep, when the GOP starts agreeing that prejudice and inequality is bad, they’re lauded as becoming “more moderate”.
And this doesn’t even touch the issues I talked about: What the party’s various actual policies are. A poll about people’s opinions on various social issues tells you very little about what kind of policies they’d accept to try to alleviate the problems they see.
If you don’t “believe that most people who want to get ahead can do so if they work hard”, how do you solve that problem? Well, you could take all the bourgeoisie out back and shoot them, or you could establish training programs in disadvantaged areas, and enact tax policies that encourage businesses to hire the people who graduate from these training programs.
If you think “corporations make too much profit”, you could nationalize them all, and drive that profit into government coffers. Or, you could increase the corporate tax rate, eliminate obsolete tax deductions, re-direct government contracts to less-profitable businesses, or adjust corporate laws to encourage the growth of mom-and-pop type businesses.
What you identify as problems aren’t what make you an “extremist”, it’s the solutions you propose for those problems that make you an extremist.