Abandon the people who feel compelled to vote for MAGAs at our peril.
Other them at our peril.
… The problem is that for some people, the mirror world speaks to these anxieties better than anything else. Not by seriously addressing the climate crisis but by playing on these feelings for its own ends – an authoritarian political project which is highly nationalist and has elements that are “explicitly fascist” (although not everyone is in the mirror world for this reason).
Take Bannon. “While most of us who oppose his political project choose not to see him, he is watching us closely. The issues we are abandoning, the debates we aren’t having, the people we are insulting and discarding.” And this focus on popular issues could be his ticket to the next wave of electoral victories, Klein warns.
People like Bannon co-opt truths – such as how elites take advantage of emergencies for their own ends, one of the arguments of Klein’s The Shock Doctrine – and mix them with dangerous lies, such as the “great reset” conspiracy. They hijack and obscure the left’s arguments – tapping into people’s worries, they turn themselves into the vanguard of resistance, without offering any real alternatives to the “corporate predation” they rail against.
Using conspiracy culture, they become the only source people trust, regardless of what they hear, read or even see themselves. One recent example, Klein says, is that a directed energy weapon caused the Maui wildfires. “Everything has to have an alternative story, it’s a great way to have an obedient base.”
The mirror world is not to be brushed off lightly. But what is important is to understand how we ended up here. It’s too easy to say people in the mirror world are the ones who “have no regard for material reality”, Klein says, and that “we are the people who are guided by truth and science when we all know we are in various stages of denial”. The “grotesque mockery and language and words that go on in the mirror world are only possible because of a generalised cheapening of words that is happening at the centre”. Politicians say they care about the climate crisis but continue subsidising fossil fuels and opening coalmines – she points to the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who joined the 2019 climate strikers that were protesting against the policies of his very government. …
Klein’s words are factual but they taste like bitter medicine to me.
It’s all I can manage to remain civil, polite, composed in conversations with MAGAs, whom I do try to talk with (still!). Mostly, I just want to turn my back on them. And walk away. I don’t always feel up to it, some days. It takes a lot of energy out of me, for some reason.
I don’t even know if I’d want to watch Bannon, in any context.
He’s such an awful human. Or, to put it charitably, he chooses to do awful things. And to keep doing them.
I wonder too about us lefties who jet around and drive around and buy shit like there’s no tomorrow. I mean, there sort of is no tomorrow. Yet we do somehow carry on acting like the future isn’t very, very likely to get very, very bad. And very, very soon. She’s right, maybe we’re not as delusional, but nonetheless. . .
@anon73430903 might have some critical insights into this video… It seems to me that he’s engaging in a good dose of “whataboutism”? And does he seem to be far too accepting of “tankies” on the left?
I haven’t been able to watch the video yet, so I can’t give an answer on that, but
At some point JT Chapman (Second Thought) has become a tankie. Maybe he always has been, but Second Thought (the channel) used to keep away from the worst of that until recently, when I started to notice the dogwhistles.
Some of the older stuff is probably still good, but anything after February 2022 is suspect. Maybe everything as early as October 2021, because that was when he started doing The Deprogram podcast which is more obviously tankie.
Yeah, I get that sense, too, so I’m glad you confirmed it… I think I really noticed it when the Ukraine war started, and he (and yugopnik, too) really started leaning into support for Russia.
I’ve only heard one episode of that, when they had FD Signifier on. I keep meaning to listen to the episode with Lady Izdihar, but have not done so yet…
Thanks for confirming my suspicions though. I always know I can count on you for navigating the fraught waters to the lefty-landscape!
So much of the ugly foundation for today’s GOP and MAGA was laid during his time in office that I’ll never hear the term “Reagan Revolution” again without feeling disgusted. Now they have more tools making it easier for them to spread copaganda, fear-mongering, and misinformation to undermine trust in education, science, or government.
The report below is about paying attention and avoiding distractions. It made me wish there was an easier way to counter what has been done to manipulate the public to the point reached before Biden took office. Maybe the faster pace of societal change means it won’t take another 40 years to fix what certain groups have been working so long to destroy:
Now they have more tools making it easier for them to spread copaganda, fear-mongering, and misinformation to undermine trust in education, science, or government.
