Thread by @thomasafine

Depressing thought for the day:

Impeaching Trump to solve our problems is like boarding up your windows to stop global warming.

Sure, Trump is a dangerous storm, and our windows are being smashed by him, and we need the boards. But he's just a symptom of a changing world.

And I mean this even if we are successful in removing Trump.

We'll still have Fox and Breitbart and worse.

We'll still have a large population of Americans that believe in their hearts that liberals are the cause of all of their problems.

We'll still have a growing trend of nationalism throughout the world.

And we'll still live in a world where information has weaponized.

The real challenge before the United States — one that no one is even talking about — is how to unite our nation again.

To accomplish that we need two things:
1. to deprogram Trump's cult, and
2. to restore our national media to a responsible mode of operation.

On the second point, we need to restore rules we used to have that required local (rather than corporate) ownership of news outlets.

I know some want to bring back the fairness doctrine, but I don't actually think that will help, since most of our current media suffers from false equivalence syndrome. In which lending too much credence to bad arguments under the guise of "fair" coverage increases profits.

Of course no one, not even @ewarren, is talking about fixing the corporate ownership problem of Big Media. So I don't know how we get there.

I also think we need a legal stick with which to beat up the most egregious media outlets. Existing defamation laws don't stop them because they get press protection which limits them to a standard where you have to show malice on their part.

But of course, they really don't have malice, or even if they do they have the perfect cover: a desire for profit. Lying for profit still gives the press protection from libel suits.

My theory there has been to bring criminal charges of corporate fraud.

Corporate fraud is all about lying for profit. Even at that it's not an easy case to make, even without untested (in this context) press protections. You have to show they knew they were lying and you have to show that people were harmed.

But again, no one in the mainstream is talking or thinking about legal ways to stop extreme outlets from selling falsehoods. If we don't do that I can't see this situation ever changing.

But even if we fix the media problems that no one will even discuss, then we're still left with my first point, this cultist population.

Trump and Bannon and Putin leveraged existing biases to create this massive divide in this country.

Yes, you my readers know that Trump supporters have been duped. That while they blame the left for loss of jobs and a gradual slide towards poverty, we know Trump and his billionaire pals are the real cause of their plight.

We know and understand that they are cult worshipping the very symbol of their own undoing and loss of economic and political power.

But I really have no idea how to even begin to convince these people they've been duped. Especially while Fox et. al continue poisoning them.

And as I'm sure some are thinking, I haven't even mentioned the portion of Trump's supporters who love him simply because he's a racist mofo.

In the past when I've raised issues about this even my own supporters are loathe to talk about this group of people as being in any way recoverable. "Fuck those people" is a good summary of what I hear.

But if they are in fact a sizable percentage of Trump supporters, how can we ever be a whole nation if we can't find a way to reach them?

The answer is that we can't.

I had my eye on issues like this a couple of years ago. But I can see that I've become slowly immersed in this impeach Trump battle, I've lost sight of the bigger picture.

Where do we go after we get rid of Trump?

I don't see one single leader in the field who's talking about these issues; issues which I consider the most critical issues to our future as a nation, and ultimately to the future of the world.

So that I don't end completely negative, legal action under existing laws can have an impact on Trumpist propagandists, and here's an example. Read the included images.

https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/1205220930684964869