About the right and their anti-trans strategy—that is happening right now.
Rightwingers must drive a wedge between gay people and trans people to effectively demonize trans people. If we all stick together, they lose.
(Same with health—as w/ John Fetterman.)
Rightwing troll:
That “Gay Not Queer” account is 100% a rightwing social media manipulation effort. I’d bet on it.
Funded by the same people that fund Rufo and Knowles and Crowder: rightwing billionaires like Koch.
They’re paying for this trolling.
They seek to split us apart.
/2
While CPAC is getting attention today, the real action is in Florida.
At the Koch-network billionaire donor retreat. Where Republican candidates are heading down to kiss Koch’s ring. For money. Because donors control the GOP.
These billionaires also pay for social media manipulation. If they can throw tens of millions at a slouchy mediocrity like Stephen Crowder they can fund a much cheaper social media campaign to divide gay people and trans people.
A few weeks ago, a joint investigation across many news outlets including @haaretzcom@guardian and the Marker exposed a small Israeli company selling bot farms. Cheaply. This stuff is everywhere on Twitter, esp now, and Koch is funding it too.
@haaretzcom@guardian More on how easily people can buy social media manipulation and bots and trolls.
Dozens of PR firms do social media manipulation today. Big and small. This was just one small firm.
This is Tom Nichols’ principal blind spot about politics and media.
No. Many people DO NOT KNOW that Fox is lying to them. Many people are busy and don’t follow politics and live in areas where almost everyone thinks Fox is real.
Tom’s lived in MA and urban New England.@joshtpm
Tom hasn’t spent enough time living like average people in rural or exurban areas do.
It’s caused him for years to wildly discount the influence of Fox, and now to misattribute how it works.
David French is wrong about many things,
But French is right when he says many people don’t know Fox is lying to them. French has lived in red areas.
(French’s problem is he thinks Fox-addled people should be catered to and coddled. No. They are misled but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell them that.)
Media is so important and Gigi Sohn is a leader and pioneer thinker in how to improve our public debate and democracy.
Let’s use this as a time to renew our efforts to get focus on the FCC and media policy.
A setback for democracy.
But let’s make this a temporary setback. Let’s together join to fight big cable and media companies.
Big media execs lean conservative and that has harmed all of us.
For now, politicians are holding the line. But the NYT will chip away at their support and may change the game.
Quinta notes this.
But the point is there is an audience- it’s the people who read and enjoy Pamela Paul. UWS moms, Westchester and Potomac and Palo Alto parents. And that audience hasn’t really spoken up. But the NYT is pushing them.
What is striking and deeply misguided here is how Yglesias completely omits any prospect for persuasion.
Does taking a public stand for statehood persuade some voters to support it?
Yglesias implicitly says no: he says voters’ views are absolutely fixed. @brianbeutler
Popularism says there is no such thing as persuasion. It says voters’ views are fixed and candidates’ views are fixed. It says: get poll data, which is valid forever (because you assume views don’t change!) and pick and choose issues to get 50.1% of the vote.
How impoverished.
“Fundamentally, politics is about improving the status quo, which definitionally requires changing minds – political preferences do not appear in vacuums, and voters don’t assume them out of thin air.”
Where’s the discussion of Scalia and Thomas and Fed Soc judges, and how they increased crime in DC and made DC police and DC residents less safe??
Seriously.
@davidhogg111@WHCOS@anatosaurus@cdkang76 This kid was killed with a gun that Scalia and Thomas and the conservative court put into DC. (Purchased with a permit after SCOTUS rolled back a DC law that banned these guns.)
This is good because Stewart stomps this guy verbally.
Stewart speaks directly, and demonstrates strength and power— he makes that guy look like a weak fool.
THAT is what changes R voters’ minds.
Not calm centrists chiding the GOP for hypocrisy—
Making the GOP look foolish.