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You know what was always going to help TFG win?
Internal bickering

If Biden hadn’t quit when he did, the age thing wd have raged on as wouldve Gaza.
So he fell on his sword. If the party had tried to nom someone else-the chaos would’ve done the work & Gaza (that was always going to be a Russ tool against Ds). So Biden chose the next in line who was SO incredibly qualified- she had to fight misogynoir, Gaza & a very short election season.

But ultimately white supremacy/patriarchy won out /1

So nope, you’ll never convince me that Dems could have out maneuvered the GQP and I say that having close family who voted for TFG. They weren’t going to be convinced by a legacy media they didn’t trust. They weren’t going to read a headline at the WAPO and have their eyes opened. They had dumb ideas they got on the internet, Rogan and Faux News. /2

@Danetteb When I was younger, I used to love listening to Coast To Coast AM, a late night talk show about fringe and paranormal subjects. I have basically always been a skeptic and very scientifically minded, but I enjoyed hearing people talk about fringe ideas from a folkloric perspective. And because of that detachment, I didn't see the danger.

Fringe media sells the "You can't trust institutions; trust me." angle. And it leads to people accepting that parasocial relationship everywhere.

@roadriverrail there’s a whole lot of woo out there that has nothing to do with religion. My roommate listens to a lot of YouTube videos that are on aliens and a lot of that leads down an anti-government/ conspiracy rabbit hole. Did the government use alien technology to go to the moon? To develop the internet? It gets dark pretty quickly.

@Danetteb Just to be clear, I was definitely not talking about religion. I was talking about the various "experts" who peddle conspiracy theories and bizarre pseudoscience and the like. They still all have the same story-- "You can't trust deliberative institutions. Only I, the renegade, know what's going on. Trust me and my friends."

Like, that's also the Alex Jones move in a nutshell. And the drip drip drip of "don't trust consensus reality/institutions" has been corrosive.

@Danetteb ok, cool. I'm not fond of religion either but some parts of a subthread kinda took a bit of a turn I hadn't expected.