Robin Hood marketing itself as a business to "democratize investment" and then capitulating to the demands of the elite few is a great time to remember that businesses sell themselves on progressive sloganeering in order to profit off your political sensibilities.
These brands aren't on your side and they certainly don't hold these positions. Corporations know they have to pretend to care about diversity, inclusivity, and progressive ideas while using those buzzwords as illusions to hide their exploitation.
In modern times this is has been the result of the GOP and the wealthy and powerful understanding blatant white supremacist, misogynistic, exploitative behavior was increasingly unpopular and unsustainable.
They learned they had to hide behind polite, smiling veneers.
Remember this when a company like Nike, which exploits people around the world, markets progressive ideas or justice via slick ads and paid endorsements.
It's a game to hide the reality of the situation and we're increasingly lost in these illusions.
Just because a corporation produces a movie that pays lip service to inclusivity or progressive ideas, just because an ad happens to touch on your own ideology, does not meant that corporation actually conducts itself along those principles or that it means anything it's saying.
It's time to start recognizing how much of our current reality is cloaked in illusions and capitalism that preys on designed gestures while operating unethically.
It's time to get down to the real business of reality.
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This is the exact same New World Order conspiracy the Right and its media have pushing for four decades now, only it now involves specific mention of a new Civil War and the Right slaughtering fellow citizens.
Make no mistake, this is the conspiracy theory Fox News airs every single day, but FNC stops short of voicing the specifics and allows viewers to take the ideas to their illogical extent.
We’re entering a new phase of radicalization.
Disturbingly, so much of this moment resembles the lead up to the OKC Bombing in the 1990’s and the violence preceding the Civil War. The question, if this continues, is whether violence will be asymmetrical or widespread/directed.
Stop sharing Josh Hawley’s posts and videos. You’re only increasing his reach and allowing him to build a dangerous platform of perceived persecution and misinformation.
This started with Trump. They know how to use these sites to their advantage.
Hawley is daring you to share his message of perceived persecution and playing on your natural instinct to prove him wrong that he isn’t silenced.
Social media isn’t a conversation, it’s an economic and political platform. We have to learn that from our past.
The Right knows moderates and liberals can’t stand being called biased or unfair and so they create a “moderate” space that moves discourse to the right. This has worked in papers, on TV, and now social media. Don’t enable this. Recognize it and recalibrate.
News shows, networks, major publishing outlets, politicians, and pundits.
When you invite conspiracy theorists and fascists and white supremacists onto your shows or into a conversation you are saying they have a valid point of view and are a necessary part of discourse.
We have to stop treating these conspiracy theorists, cultists, and fascist movements like they are anything besides radicalized groups that continually spew propaganda that will further radicalize others and poison culture.
Analyze them, dismantle them, work AROUND them.
But any conversation about this would be incomplete if we did not mention that many outlets understand featuring conspiracy theorists and fascists and bad faith actors also drives their bottom line as it leads to outrage and widespread sharing of their content.
Normal was never normal, it was an illusion that allowed the wealthy and powerful to become wealthier and consolidate power. That illusion is flickering and has to be replaced. The question is whether the replacement will be mass violence or a realer, more human future.
There is no choice. To concede the future is to allow mass antidemocratic forces to kill and purge and plunge us into a dystopic future as long as the planet holds out.
The choice is to make a choice.
The more I study history the more I realize it’s just eras of illusions that hold sway and allow exploitation until the illusion gives out and a new reality takes its place.
The future belongs to people who recognize this and make a choice.
Here’s how we deal with blatant GOP hypocrisy. Don’t share the post, screenshot it and explain the purpose of deception.
“McConnell is now trying to change discourse around majority rule in the Senate to slow legislation after years of gleefully steamrolling the minority.”
Sharing the post gives the liar impressions, fries their reach, possibly even helps the lie trend.
Refuting the lie and providing context takes out the venom and might even help people who don’t know what’s happening understand the situation.
We have to start rethinking social media, messaging, and our relationship with this poison. Bad faith Right Wing messaging has an effect, as does sharing op-eds and articles by major outlets designed explicitly to outrage the Left and profit off their hate-sharing.
Been thinking a lot this morning about bad faith on the Right and how it’s already in full bloom from its media and politicians.
It’s time to change the way we handle this, the way we experience it, the way it makes us feel and how it effects us.
For those who spent the early aughts watching The Daily Show it became a study in those bad faith tactics, how the Right was engaged in malleable ideology, nihilistic power grabs, and outright gaslighting.
It’s an incredible weapon and it’s time to disarm it.
We all know the Right has become a principleless, antidemocratic, fascistic movement dedicated only to power and profit. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise and allowing these snipes and bad faith efforts to have any oxygen whatsoever. They’re not a surprise, at all.