I think this is a big part of it. I don’t think there will be many (if any) conservatives able to admit that they got completely fooled by one of the dumbest men on earth, while liberals were loudly and continually warning them that they were getting scammed.
That kind of admission would be very hard even for a person with decency and self-awareness, and those typically aren’t strong suits for Republicans.
The right wing has quite simply gone off the edge and isn’t coming back. They are unpersuadable; superior numbers are our only hope of defeating them.
And if they have a perception that it is wrong because they choose to consume media that reinforces that perception, then it becomes self perpetuating.
If people think that fire services are stupid because they ride unicorns to the fire instead of trucks, whose fault is it that they think that?
No one is disputing whose fault it is. The real question is, who suffers? The people in a town run by people stupid enough to buy unicorns instead of fire trucks. When there’s widespread misperception of what Common Core is all about, kids suffer. We can blame the perpetrators of the misperception all we want, but it doesn’t change the fact that the perception matters.
I mean, the real question is, how do we fix this misperception that people are tied to?
I even hear teachers talk shit about common core, and everything I hear them say about it based on misunderstandings as well.
Is there actually a root cause here? We keep trying to treat the symptoms that appear, but without identifying and treating the actual disease, we really can’t make any headway.
And you are absolutely correct that it is the kids who suffer, who grow up to make their communities suffer.
But people are just so dismissive and hateful towards education. In another thread, one of our esteemed fellow message boarders who is a teacher was “put down” by a right winger for being a teacher. If it’s not common core, it’ll be something else, the point is that the right hates public education, and will find anything it can to try to tear it down. They will spread whatever lies and disinformation necessary to achieve this goal.
I don’t know much about Common Core or, really, any of the issues facing public education today. (Even though my wife, child and I were 100% public schooled.) But my guess is that right-wing hostility toward public education comes down to some combination of:
Hatred of people telling them what they can and can’t do
Disgust that their taxes help pay for anything they dislike, distrust or don’t understand, for any reason whatsoever
Distrust of any subject being taught differently from how they learned it
Whole-hog buy-in to the idea that the private sector does anything better than the public sector
I came across it originally by accident. On chess.com you can join Clubs.
So a sub forum. I made the mistake of apologizing for Trump to someone from another country and was immediately noted by a mod. They where correct. chess.com is chess. Still, I was very embarrassed to be a US Citizen. The hearings are helping a little.
It’s my understanding, and this is a serious answer (but we’re in the pit, so I’m not bothering to find a cite), is Fox News. The citation I’m not bothering to dig up, said that despite the bad reputation of social media, the vast majority of right wing and reactionary bullshit is spread on and by Fox News.
The proof by anecdote I’ll give is the last time I spent 10 minutes watching Fox News. They were all pearl clutching about the “Crisis at the Border” with repeated aerial shots of groups of people running near a fence. If that was my primary source of news, I could be perfectly rational, and believe that there are hordes of criminals and (at best) people just looking for a handout rioting outside our southern border trying to get in.
Superior numbers in the right geographic distribution is the only way to defeat them. That is, unless we somehow manage to come up with a vastly different way of electing representatives, senators, vice-presidents, and presidents.
Not only that, but also extreme racism tied into the politics. I thoroughly enjoyed my first assignment in the Navy and was quite disappointed when I joined a FB group for those who had been assigned to that ship. I got moderated for simply asking people not to use well-known anti-Arab slurs and thus I removed myself from the group and reported it to FB. I’ve no idea what the upshot of that was.
I’m just throwing this out there but I think that, while “left, right, and center” can be defined in relationship to each other, “liberal and conservative” are words with actual meanings. Calling trump and his gang “conservatives” is an insult to American conservatism, even when they’re the ones doing it.
I don’t buy this at all. The only thing “conservatism” really wants to conserve is unearned privilege at the expense of the marginalized. For a brief shining moment in the 20th century, conservatism cloaked itself in the trappings of a mediocre intellectual movement, and could thus be reasoned with (to some extent). But conservatism doesn’t stand up to reasoned analysis, so they abandoned the intellectual trappings and got back on the path to their ultimate destiny, which is the embrace of Trump and the rejection of democracy.
And as far as liberals go, true liberals, the reason conservatives hate them so fiercely has always been the narcissism of small differences. They’re both competing for the crown of “defender of capitalism”. The word “liberal” now has no reliable meaning since conservatives have deliberately conflated it with the radical left, whose displacement now is beginning to create pockets of red-brown alliance in which the extreme left and extreme right are collaborating to annihilate their shared enemy of liberalism.
“Center” of course means “latent right-wing,” as evidenced by the fact that centrists are always warning people not to offend them, lest we push them into the arms of the right. They never warn that they’re getting pushed left, which tells you everything about where they’re coming from and where they end up.
They’re really not, though. They’re words that have been used for over two centuries by various people all over the world to mean a wide variety of different things. If “liberal” can mean both “advocate of unregulated free markets” and “advocate of strong regulations on markets” in different contexts, there’s no inherent reason why “fascist” can’t be one of the recognized definitions of “conservative”.
I don’t get this, at all. (Liz Cheney said much the same in her recent closing remarks for Phase I of the Jan. 6 hearings).
No one was “fooled.” Trump has been a consistent, open-book, This-Is-Who-I-Am guy for at least forty years. He’s never hid a thing about himself.
The very latest anyone could claim they still didn’t know exactly what this guy was about was 1989, when he ran that Central Park Five ad in the Times.
Don’t tell me it was just New Yorkers who knew what he was about in the thirty years that followed. As he became a national figure, nothing changed.
No one was fooled. Every 2016 Trump voter knew exactly what they were getting, and they got it. And loved it. And still love it. So, nearly all of them did it again, in 2020. (Indeed, more of, by raw numbers!).
This “hoodwinked” crap lets those millions off the hook WAY too easily. (The silver lining, if you’re looking to defend them, is that at least they aren’t gullible, necessarily, at least not based on this alone.)
You are assuming FAR too much. Why in the name of common sense would I, as a resident in the heartland, bother to learn about a random rich guy 2,000 miles away?
When Trump announced his presidential run, I knew this–
He was rich.
He lived in NYC.
He was the driving force behind “The Apprentice.”
That is ALL that I knew about him.
I am perplexed, baffled, and bewildered by your expectation that I would go out of my way to learn about somebody who, up to that point, could not possibly have had any affect on my life whatsoever.
I never once in my life went out of my way to learn anything about Trump. He went out of his way to make sure everyone in the world knew as much about him as possible. And none of it was good. He made himself clear to the world. He made it even clearer when he started campaigning for president.
I take the point here, but it’s part of the truth, not the whole truth.
There were many people who hoped Trump would reward rich white people, beat the shit out of brown people, and act like a completely lawless turd. If you believe in the archetype of the hateful racist uncle, Trump fits it.
But additionally, there are so many people who are drilled into their ideology… states’ rights, anti-big-gummint, free-market capitalism, Christian evangelism, what have you - who refuse to believe that he’s as bad as all this. And we can put a great deal of the responsibility for this on Fox News, who tells their viewers that racism is a solved problem of days gone past, that liberals are the “real racists” who lie about Trump to hide their own sins. That there’s no need to worry about injustice or democracy or climate change, that they can just keep cashing rent checks and making boat payments without looking outside their own interests.
So yeah, it wasn’t Trump who fooled those people. It was Fox News and the right-wing information machine. Now, make no mistake, the things we believe are in large part a function of what we want to believe. While many of these people were fooled because they’re easy to fool, many were fooled because they want to be fooled (and still do). So they are accountable for that.
Half of America lives in the constructed reality of Fox News. They have based their worldview on it, have publicly agreed with it and aligned with it, even based their identity upon it. There’s absolutely no way they can back down at this point. The potential embarrassment is too hideous to contemplate. So it’s endless doubling down until everything burns.
People who lived in/around New York in the 70’s-90’s have said they always knew who he was. People who were concerned about him winning the 2016 primary would have paid attention to him. To the rest of us he was a joke who merited no serious thought. I don’t mind admitting error about that… it was a reasonable assumption, and a black swan event that he got nominated. But it’s true that most of us had no real reason to form an opinion about him until he stopped looking like a loser in the Republican primaries.
I guess you were fortunate to have missed his years-long Twitter campaign to “prove” Obama was born in Kenya. I don’t even have a Twitter account yet somehow I was not only aware of it but disgusted by it.