The grandson could have been one of them. When he arrived to live with us, he spouted all kinds of nonsense that he “heard online”, snuck out of his room at 4am to game and talk to people in inappropriate places on my computer. Silly boy had forgotten I was a computer tech because he had been conditioned by step-family and forums that older women were unimportant, so we had The Talk, and after about a year, he was back to being a decent human being.
Teenagers with mental health issues are really vulnerable to conditioning, especially since Common Core has replaced teaching kids how to learn with teaching kids how to take tests. If the kids are lucky, their post-grad education will get them back on board with critical thinking skills.
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Mass media has taken to the Internet, and just like magazines and newspapers are online, junk mail is online. And even cheaper!
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I get the idea that this kind of programming comes in stages. Like parboiling potatoes before pan frying them.
There’s a certain amount of programming involved just to function in society without feeling chronic nausea. Further programming is needed to be truly productive under these circumstances. By the time something like qanon can take hold, there’s already been a whole lot of prep-work done.
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Hard-Right types have a grooming process. The Daily Stormer even had a style and rhetoric guide for how to ease tweens and teens into racism and fascism a little bit at a time.
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Frontline, free to watch at the moment.
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Thanks for sharing.
They’ve effectively reduced political engagement to watching wrestling.
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EXACTLY! I am thrilled the parallels are apparent to people. This is an article from 2015:
I really believe Alex Jones considered his whole business endeavor to be professional wrestling tuned to a different medium. Professional wrestling never had a problem with people actually believing their storylines were true, it just made the fans more rabid. They resisted admitting it was fiction all the way up to the point of government hearings.
And think about who the target audience is for professional wrestling.
The most chilling moment to me was election night. Alex Jones gets somber and starts crying, and says “I won” and walks off. People have to understand how constructed conspiracy theory has been for the last 30 years, with full intent of political results, not just a lot of people refining fantasies randomly into a myth.
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Not specific to Qanon, but illuminates the modern Republican Party as a massive grifting machine
As Chris Hayes said, “much of movement conservatism is a con and the base are the marks”
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