There’s still the “where the rubber meets the highway” maxim that applies. When they promise to make America great again but can’t even make eggs affordable again, things will slip. And the autocracy only works against them: top-down, big pie chart wedges results-only systems are notoriously bad at this: Chernobyl, Wuhan, etc. I really don’t see Donald Trump wonking out on the nitty gritty of avian viral pathology. And unlike what he hoped could be brushed aside as just a few seasonal deaths mainly in nursing homes and homeless shelters during Covid, every refrigerator has eggs.
Right-wing media will no longer worry about inflation at all, just like they don’t worry about deficits when there’s a Republican in the WH. So, for anyone consuming that media, inflation will just have gone away – must be all better now!
Normal media will run a few stories about how inflation remains low (which it is right now, of course), assuming it does so in the face of larger deficits and tariffs.
Fox et. al will certainly perform such omissions, or go on the offensive to somehow blame it on drag shows. But somehow I recall hamburger going from fifty five cents a pound to over ninety in 1973, a very hungry year for my family, and Nixon’s approval dropping below 30 percent. Everyone in our bubble thought Watergate was just some WA DC musical chairs.
Maybe you should sit down for this, but the media have changed a lot since the Nixon era.
This, of course. Trump’s voters will never question it, even as they’re paying more for the same bag of groceries. Must be Demoncrats running those food companies!
If the price of eggs gets high enough so that FoxNews happy-talk isn’t enough to drive it out of people’s minds, the Trump Admin will simply threaten those running the corporations that sell us groceries. Drop the price of eggs NOW or be audited! They will drop the price of eggs (and raise the price of something less meme-worthy, to make up the difference).
Yeah. There wasn’t really a way for Nixon to escape being blamed for the rising prices; everyone watched/read/listened to the same news sources, for the most part.
Today, so long as FoxNews and Sinclair decide to hold the line against reporting bad things happening post-January 20, millions of Americans won’t know that the bad things are happening.
They have to play the game better. The Republicans saw the way to people’s hearts was through social media and the new sort of social media influencer. Musk, Rogan and Kennedy got voters to the polls. Taylor Swift didn’t.
Where is america going ?
I am reading this now about Walmart 
“No more HRC surveys, Pride funding under review, DEI term discontinued, and LatinX banned from communications”
I will not read news for a few months…too much for me to take
Bob doesn’t want higher wages for “all of us”. He already told you how he feels about “those people”. The wealth that he most wants to preserve is the social capital that comes from being superior to “those people”. This is something he can hold onto through good times and bad.
This is why, although I think poor information and poor persuasion are factors, these will never land effectively without addressing why people deliberately seek out misinformation: because they want confirmation of what they already believe.
People will of course prioritize their immediate material interests if that’s on the ballot, but more than that, they will prioritize the validation of their prior belief systems if that seems to promise a more beneficial order over the long term. Getting them to replace that belief system with another one is hard, especially if that change pulls them away from others in their social circle.
To be fair, “LatinX” has always been incredibly stupid.
Here on the local NPR station, after the election I heard one of the programs talking to a Latino from Lawrence MA about how much they’d shifted towards Trump. The host kept saying “LatinX” but the interviewee, a Latino, kept calling them “Latino.” I found that telling.
I think if the majority of Latin Americans find the word LatinX offensive/condescending or stupid… it’s better if the democrats/liberal media stop using the word LatinX and start using Latino all the time.
I remember Trump screeching at a rally that “fact checking is censorship!” because I guess pointing out when he spreads untruths infringes on his free speech rights to lie his ass off.
Maybe Latin or Hispanic is better? What do you call someone whose gender isn’t known to you or who doesn’t have a distinct or consistent gender?
OK, how would you label the >50% of Republican voters who think the 2020 election was stolen? They were sold an obvious pack of lies, and believed it. What are we supposed to call them?
What about the non-negligible % of Republicans who think the Covid vaccine was more dangerous than the Covid virus, and decided not to take the shots, costing about 300K lives?
There are dozens more examples of obvious nonsense on the right.
So, we won’t call them “brainwashed”. What should we call them?
Yes, part of the right-wing playbook is to attack fact-checkers themselves, and turn them into some sort of bolshevik conspiracy. The enemy of authoritarians is truth itself, so it must be stamped out along with the people who try to speak the truth.
First, that assumes it’s a problem that needs solving. I’m not saying it isn’t, but, well, is it?
Second, if we really needed that, just plain Latin would work. It’s not like there would be any confusion that you meant Pedro was from ancient Rome.
Third, I thought we were supposed to let people decide what they should be called, so if they don’t like it, we shouldn’t use it (I recall, however, a big debate right here because some people don’t like being called cis gender; I guess not everyone is afforded that luxury)
Yes, I suggested that, or Hispanic.
The problem that needs solving for me is, what’s the right term for someone whose gender is unknown by me? Or, whose gender varies or someone who is enby? What term do Hispanic non-binary people prefer?
As a theoretical test case … do you have any evidence that shows that websites like Snopes, PolitiFact, or any of the fact-checking resources listed here have a poor track record for accuracy and fairness?
That is almost verbatim what a FOAF MAGA has told me several times when presented with facts and figures that proved him wrong.
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