In the old days, movies were mostly entertainment with a bit of social mind control sprinkled in. But our skills at movie-making kept improving along with our mind control skills. In 2020, a movie like Joker can rewire an entire nation into seeing things in its frame.
If you don't think a GREAT movie can rewire minds, consider how many Matrix references you have heard in the past year. And that movie is old.
Your brain is a pattern-recognition machine, which probably helps to keep you alive, but it also makes you programmable. If I feed you the same pattern often enough, it becomes a "fact" to you. CNN and FOX News feed their audiences different patterns.
I'm willing to bet 90% of the protestors have seen Joker. It is so powerful and well-made that it bounces around in your brain and burrows in, forming a dominant go-to pattern for your thinking.
Can one movie nudge a young person into violence and anarchy? A bad movie can't. Even a good movie can't do that. But Joker can. That movie is next level, persuasion-wise.
I don't blame movies for how people act because we can't have a social system that absolves people of responsibility. That's my legal and philosophical opinion. The trained persuader in me assumed reality would imitate the movie as soon as I saw it.
As I often say, humans probably don't have brains that evolved (or were designed?) to understand reality, but you can choose a filter on reality that does the best job of predicting. The persuasion filter saw this coming from miles away. I'll bet @Cernovich saw it coming too.
