... those sources of hate and extreme over-generalizations!

by the right wing noise manufacturers.

I've seen other opinions like this----that old people are too damned stupid to think for themselves.

I don't know the breakdown of voters for Trump but I'm sure they were NOT all old,drooling,Fox News watchers.

Last edited Mon Jun 26, 2017, 01:20 PM - Edit history (1)

You haven't got that many years on me and I wasn't offended.

The truth is that people who haven't kept themselves educated through their adulthood (and note the presence of a 4 year college degree is irrelevant to this) are the ones who are going to be unsophisticated enough to be played for fools by slick outfits like Pox News.

Age is irrelevant to this. Don't know where you got that one. Intellectual laziness is a more solid predictor of being sucked in by right wing idiocy.

My sister has been watching only Fox for more than one year now, and I'm thinking she's brainwashed. It's very disturbing to know that she still supports Trump and his agenda.

Put the vid on my watch list. I saw his happen to my mother who became a Rush Limbaugh devotee. Angry and bitter, all the time.

because Fox is on all the time in so many places and because hate radio has cornered the market for radio talk shows. These media probably attract people who are already leaning conservative, and it's been demonstrated that people who identify as conservative tend to be more fearful and apprehensive in general than people who identify as liberal; they tend to be uncomfortable with change, new experiences, and people who are "different." The right wing media feed on and amplify the fear, discontent, alienation and anger of people who are already apprehensive about how their world seems to be changing. It's insidious, but it's been going on for at least 30 years and has produced millions of closed, angry minds.

You're absolutely right about fear and uncertainty and the conservative mindset that rejects change. It's just hard to imagine how long this 'brainwashing' can be sustainable when harsh working class reality hits more and more of the washed.

Sad all around

it is presented as being the fault of the powerless rather than the rich and powerful.

It is a weak and lazy way of thinking.

That right there

It is just that some of us have been brainwashed into believing that people should be cared for, and treated with respect.

Look at how many people detested Hillary Clinton without being able to have any rational discusion on why. Even among people who voted for her. This stuff is everywhere, but being immersed in it to the exclusion of other media sources and opinions causes the effect to be more extreme.

Edit: though I don't know that "brainwashed" is the right term. There's a defenite willful element involved in it. Just requires some introspection.

Can we stop making excuses for Trump supporters and just go forward trying to circumvent them?

Perhaps some will come around at some point when something catastrophic affects them personally, but until then, I don't think we have the time to psychoanalyze and treat them.

Last edited Mon Aug 7, 2017, 01:30 PM - Edit history (1)

The high-minded person who makes the "brainwashing" diagnosis can, in one stroke, declare their superiority over those poor souls who've succumbed to this alleged brainwashing (e.g., "I can see that they were brainwashed, but I can resist it''), while self-righteously scolding Progressives who dismiss the diagnosis as post hoc bullshit (e.g., "If you don't accept my diagnosis, then shame on you for dehumanizing these poor victims'').

You can see similar examples of this throughout the thread.

is better, but with Comcast as their owner not a lot is to be expected. There are extremely wealthy democrats, wealth is not something only held by republicans. I've been surprised there is not a really strong middle/left leaning media on mainstream media. I guess what happens is hatred and shock sells, but because of human nature not a lot of people are interested in things are going well feel-good media. I think many people spin the channel and land on Fox News.

total immersion has a cumulative effect.

MSNBC was getting there, and now they are moving in the opposite direction.

LEAN BACKWARD must be their new motto/

nothing from CNN or MSNBC! Imagine, a patient, and the only news you could get was Fox News.

So, your example would be hell for me.

only have Fox News as a news source in patient's rooms. And their cable supplier was a major company in that area. They had purposely blocked other news sources.

you were no doubt in a corporate-owned hospital and therefore at the mercy of said corporation. At least if you were in a public hospital, you would have some say in the channels available to you.

CNN or MSNBC was too much for sick RW patients to handle.

Not L O'D

Tiring of the campaign here to discredit Maddow and those others.

and that depresses me.

I've been watching from day one. I expect that's thier version of presenting "balance".

The liberal/progressive Evening shows have been their Crown Jewels since forever.

Hope that helps a little.

P.S it is very exciting to me how well Rachel and Lawrence are doing in the ratings these days.

Something most people here would be outraged with.

If we were labeling them due to some inherent or inborn quality in which they had no choice or control, then your objection might be reasonable.

But these are functional adults who have made the deliberate choice to endorse a pathological liar steeped in racism and bigotry and who might very well be a literal rapist. They weren't born as idiot racist fuckheads; they made the conscious decision in favor of idiotic racist fuckheadness.

In the same way that faux-Christians like to claim persecution when public schools aren't allowed to endorse the ten commandments, the claims that I am "dehumanizing" these idiot racist fuckheads are pure bullshit. That claim, in fact, is a gross offense against people who are *actually* dehumanized, such as the Muslims barred from entering the country and the women barred from access to healthcare.


You should advocate on behalf of a different group of victims, because your pet victims are working hard to destroy the country.

the man in that film was transformed

Tell us which ones were brainwashed and how you can determine this. Tell us how, exactly, you can presume to know them better than they know themselves.


For starters, you can abandon any wishful thinking that their alleged vote for Obama is evidence of current brainwashing, because it could just as easily be evidence that they were brainwashed in 2008 and 2012.



Other than through wishful thinking, how have you determined that these idiot racist fuckheads were brainwashed?

Have scientists found that gene?

Racism is by definition evidence of brainwashing.

Please be specific.

What behaviors outside of raw instinct are *not* brainwashing, in your view?

Your objection is not to brainwashing, then, but to brainwashing that you find aesthetically objectionable.


I wish that you'd mentioned that in your original reply, so that I would have known that your posts can be ignored.

You are saying that mass brainwashing is impossible. Look at North Korea. Obviously some are probably just pretending, but I've watched documentries on N K where people cry they are so overwhelmed with love and respect for their Dear Leader after a lifetime of only getting one message. Look at Nazi Germany.

I think we are afraid to admit that many of us, even if we call ourselves liberal, while we'd never deny rights or privileges to someone else based on their race or gender or sexual orientation, are more comfortable with others that grew up in the same culture, the same neighbourhood. Obviously because you have more to relate with them. It takes effort to reach outside your comfort zone and make connections with those outside of it. But for those of us that do, we know that the effort is worth it, and that we end up finding more in common than naught and things like skin colour or sexual orientation fades into superficiality.

That uncomfortableness though, especially in areas dominated by only one culture usually made up of one racial history as well, can be molded and altered into full blown xenophobia and then further into full blown racism and bigotry and irrational hatred with consistent and unrelenting drips of propaganda produced for that very purpose. It appeals to the part in a human that is socially lazy, that is eager to blame someone else for their own failures, that is susceptible to this kind of unrelenting brainwashing that is legitimized by professional production, graphics, and all the trappings of traditional news shows of the past.

And all brainwashing is not created equal.

The claim is that a statistically significant number of these 62 million idiot racist fuckheads is brainwashed. It is incumbent upon the claimants to demonstrate that this is so. It is not sufficient to say "See how they voted? They're obviously brainwashed."

or not we are dealing with a phenomenon that we have to understand if we want to undo, rather than throwing these people into the category of "deplorable."

Point is, they are simply humans, being human.

we are dealing with a phenomenon that we have to understand if we want to undo, rather than throwing these people into the category of "deplorable."

********************************************************

Sorry. Unless you posit that they have lost all capacity for free will and rational judgment, then they threw themselves into the "deplorable" category when they voted for Trump.



Frankly I am disgusted by this ridiculous push to empathize with our abusers WHILE THEY ARE IN THE FUCKING PROCESS OF ABUSING US! Why the fuck should I tolerate any of that crap? Fuck that. Fuck them. And fuck the idea that we need to reach out to them.


I reject the claim that they are brainwashed because, ultimately, it is circular, regressive, and self-serving. If that fantasy--that they are brainwashed--doesn't bring them into the light of reason in large numbers (and there is ZERO evidence that it does), then it is a masturbatory exercise solely to maintain the fantasy that all are fundamentally good people who mean well.

Fuck that. Some people are assholes by virtue of their own actions.

It reeks of armchair pop psychology and won't, ultimately, do anything to solve the problem.

I like your disease analogy, though; let us identify the carriers of this idiot racist fuckhead sickness and quarantine them.

Ah yes, the well-worn "You're not a real Liberal" strategy, which is every bit as silly and overwrought as the old "you're a bigot for not tolerating my intolerance" slogan.

* * * * * *
"If you just assume they are bad people, born that way, well shit, I've heard that kind of thing before, usually not out of liberals lips, but okay."
* * * * * *

That is, in fact, directly opposed to my argument, that these people are idiot racist fuckheads by deliberate choice. Since you misstate my argument, I have no obligation to defend your misstatement.

You and the OP are weirdly invested in the weird idea that these idiot racist fuckheads are the real victims, that they are good people who've been brainwashed into being idiot racist fuckheads. I am not interested in coddling my abusers, thanks. They are functional adults who must bear the consequences of their deliberate actions, and one of those consequences is to be revealed as idiot racist fuckheads.

Let those idiot racist fuckheads demonstrate that they are idiot racist fuckheads no longer. Until then, they can go fuck themselves.

reality, and their skewed version of it does them no harm. Of course, without serious cognitive dissonance, there is no reason to question your own facts, so that is the kind of ignorance that while only harming others(save for global warming and the impact it will have on us all), is also pretty hard to strip away without using tactics that work.

I see. So your argument is that people knowingly choose to be unknowing. You have somehow managed to find a way to blame people for being stupid by saying that they have actually intelligently, consciously, chosen to be stupid. That's ridiculous, and I hope you would concede that if nothing else, those "choices" are at a far more subconscious level, and that they are responses to very human needs as directed by both biology and domestic/cultural norms and expectations.

Have you yourself ever held an untrue thought that you didn't examine for months, maybe years? Or have you always simply made the choice to know fact from fiction? Did you for instance, always know that the FDA's 4 food groups was a bunch of fucking hokum? Or did you assume, like a lot of school children, and bring that baggage into young adulthood, that there was something to that nonsense?

I myself, having no other frame of reference growing up, because it was the consensus of family, news, culture, understood Reagan to be a good President...hell, one of the best Presidents, so I had no reason to doubt that to be the case. Trickle down economics? I was told it had worked. Everything I heard suggested it had worked. I don't have to tell you I wasn't exactly a political scholar. If somebody came out of the woodwork and started telling me that not only was Reagan a horrible asshole, but my family and loved ones were horrible assholes for voting for him, I might have been less receptive to the first part. Sure, I had no investment in whether or not Reagan was a good President, even though I would have been skeptical about the characterization given my previous indoctrination, but this fucker doesn't know my family. I do. And that shit would have sounded way off the mark and made everything he was saying far easier to disregard.

You aren't just not getting through to these people...you are losing the next generation as well. It isn't about tying to cater to racist, homophobic, mean interests. Its just about not forgetting that these are people also trying to be good people, according to whatever fucked up sense of reality they are interpreting good through. That is where we should focus. Showing them reality. Yes, I know that is herculean, but do you actually think that calling somebody a bigoted asshole fucktard is going to make him go "hmmmm....yeah, that resembles me. He nailed it. What else does this person have to say that I should probably be hearing?"

At least admit that there is nothing at all to be won by going to war at the bottom with other people at the bottom. That's a fucking joke. It is paying no attention to the people behind the curtain, who sure, aren't doing all of the brainwashing work...they're just exploiting the ignorance and the divide...and they are conquering.

"Frankly I am disgusted by this ridiculous push to empathize with our abusers WHILE THEY ARE IN THE FUCKING PROCESS OF ABUSING US! Why the fuck should I tolerate any of that crap? Fuck that. Fuck them. And fuck the idea that we need to reach out to them."

there are about 10 million millionaires in the US. I'm guessing most of them voted GOP. there's a chunk of the nearly 63 million.. then there's those who worship money and people with money.. then there's the racist fuckheads, the vast majority, of course.

that said, I have watched the "brainwashing of my dad" and it's quite revealing. Most of his brainwashing came from radio. Right wingers are rich and that cash goes a long way in getting their message out. They often operate radio stations at a loss, whatever it takes. They will buy successful stationsn that feature liberal talkers and change the message. This is the corporate takeover of America and got serious in 1972. Schools started changing curriculums and talk radio became radical right wing. A perfect storm. Then Reagan. The rest, as they say, is history.

And they will remain idiot racist fuckheads until they demonstrate that they are no longer idiot racist fuckheads.

I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe that 62,979,879 good, thoughtful adults succumbed to devious brainwashing techniques contrary to their fundamental nature. I don't doubt that some people were swayed in that manner, but the huge majority were already on board with the idiotic racist fuckheadedness that Trump was selling.

Indeed!

This is 2017 not 1017

If you can reach a state of semi-maturity WITHOUT ever once finding an example that hatred, racism, misogyny, bigotry, homophobia are WRONG - there's little hope for you. You are embracing it because you like it

can also change the direction of this country.

We do not need them. We have the numbers.

What we need is an end to voter suppression, gerrymandering and GOP-driven election fraud.

We do not need the idiot racist fuckheads who looked at Trump and said "He's the best choice."



Your whole desperate narrative--that these are good people who were brainwashed into acting against themselves--is a lovely fantasy but is an excellent way to ensure Democratic defeat for the next ten decades or so.

They need to actually win BEFORE they have the power to make the changes that you suggest.

While we're busy "reaching out to" these idiot racist fuckheads, they'll be busy securing state legislatures and locking up their election-proof gerrymandering for the next decade.

They voted for a bigot who never even tried to hide his bigotry. That makes them bigots.

These people have been brainwashed to the point of mind control.

My mother, now an elderly woman, has been brainwashed. Here's the thing, each of us have both good and bad in them, each of us are afraid of things. The brain washing they endure preys on the worst parts of people and exploits their fears. I think most people don;t realize how vulnerable we all are to group think and bran washing like this. This is a sophisticated process we are talking about, one that took decades to accomplish.

And the Left is not immune to this either, millions of Bernie supporters bought the same lies that Trump supporters did when it comes to Hillary Clinton. I had college educated liberal activists I know posting absolute lie filled stories about Hillary on Facebook all through the primaries. And despite all of those stories being publicly exposed as lies, many of them still believe them. These are not dumb people, some are scientists, some are lawyers, they still believe obvious lies that have been publicly exposed. This is extremely powerful stuff that we simply don't know how to de-progam en masse yet.

Nonsense.

my mother was a JFK democrat, hated Reagen with a passion, but started on cable news with CNN then moved to Fox late in the 90s/early 2000s.

By 2004 she was was disgusted by liberals like Howard Dean, who she would have loved prior.

Very few come back from it.

My mother was the typical great stay at home mom, just an amazing person who valued honesty and compassion above all else. And she'd never turn away anyone when it came time to feed kids.

When we all got older she took a job at a pharmacy. The owner played Rush Limbaugh from 12-3 everyday. That was the start for her, she had no idea what she was hearing, but that guy had to be smart because he was on the radio. The FOX News is all she would watch.

I feel like those decades were all leading up to the last few years though. The internet and social media were just too much for people like my mom to wrap their heads around. She is simply incapable of spotting lies now, and that's one part because of the brain washing and one part that her generation simply aren't savvy enough to process mass information from social media and make sense of it.

I see it getting much worse before it gets better. This group in power knows full well they have brain washed minions following them and they fully intend to get the most out of that.

I have been in all kinds of municipal offices in our state and I can't even count the number of times I walked a municpal facility and they had Rush blaring.

The girls who grooms our dog, sweet, her girls goes to school with ours, just a nice person. Went to pick up the dog and she had Laura Ingram going.

I agree completely, and have a hard time seeing how this does not get worse, probably much worse, before/if it bounces back.

Hell, we were 2 years removed from the W cluster fuck and this country saw fit to give them the biggest mid term win in our lives, 6 years later we have THIS ...

Conservative in her stay at home days, or a liberal?
When did you first notice she had switched over to the dark side?

Voted for Carter. My dad still votes Dem, mainly because he spent his career in the UAW.

Mostly though, my mom was apolitical, just wasn't that big of a deal to her. Rush just got her outraged at everything and then it was like all the sudden one day she was a different person.

What I think the biggest takeaway from all of this should be is that this wasn't just something that happened by chance. This wasn't individuals who just happened to shape the way people think to make them brainwashed. This was an organized and concerted effort to brain wash millions of Americans. They knew what they wanted to do during the Nixon Administration. This took organization and planning over decades. This was literally a group of Republicans getting together and literally saying, "let's brain wash people." And then continually meeting over the course of decades to make sure their plan was working. This was a major project with clear goals.

I wonder if Russia was involved back then?

You and/or your father for that matter.

Do you remind her of her liberal days when she goes off on these far rightwing hateful rants or what?

It's off limits now. She's just a confused like lady now, but she supports a white supremacist dictator.

Does she currently still hate Reagan, or she's a fan like every other Republican/self-proclaimed conservative?

Definitely still hated Reagen to the end ...

Fear is a powerful weapon.

If these idiot racist fuckheads are so damaged that they would actively vote against their own best interests and their own true natures, then they are suffering from a self-destructive mental defect and should be confined for their own protection.

Would you rather be a victim of the side effects of right wing manipulation of the population?

Probably easier and faster to appeal to them

Decades of 'unbrainwashing' people who might be predisposed to hatred....not interested

OK.

How LONG would it take to deprogram these noble zombies you support?

Appealing to nonvoters would be FASTER, ergo...winning elections

This applies to voters and non-voters alike.

It actually doesn't take long to de-program.....the problem is to get your message to any of them undiluted.

Clinton won the popular vote by a large majority--how many more millions do we have to capture?

The issue is not numbers; the issues are gerrymandering, fraud and voter suppression.

We do not need to "reach out to" or "understand" these idiot racist fuckheads, because they do not want our outreach or our understanding. They want our silence and they want our subjugation, and they can go fuck themselves.

... percentage of those non-voters are also infected with this idiocy. We saw this last Nov. New voter registration was up sharply in highly conservative counties here in Alabama. Those were NOT Clinton voters. Trump pulled his own minions of racist fuckheads (to borrow Orrex's moniker) out of the swamps.

I refuse to excuse their idiotic racist fuckheadness for the sake of a fairy tale that all 69 million of them are innocent victims of brainwashing. They are fully grown, nominally functional adults, and they are responsible for their own actions and the consequences of those actions.

If one consequence is that they are revealed as idiot racist fuckheads, then so be it.


My "rightness" has little to do with it. I have seen first hand that these idiot racist fuckheads do not, in the main, change their minds because of rational persuasion nor due to personal hardship. I am personally acquainted with dozens of these idiot racist fuckheads, nearly all of whom will suffer greatly under Trump's policies, yet they support him all the more fervently.

The reject fact. They reject reason. They dismiss personal hardship. It is not my job to persuade them, and I am not impressed by your preachy scolding in the meantime.

How ambitious of me!

Yes, they reject fact and reason in the context of normal Democratic framing, which is based on empathy. So you need to frame arguments differently in order to reach them.

And tell us how you know this. Tell us how, in your wisdom, you can presume to know them better than they know themselves.

Or better yet, fuck that. Scamper off on whatever quest flatters your worldview, but I find it naive and frankly insulting.


We do not need them.

ignorance. It's just lazy and look where it's gotten us. If I thought there was any hope of changing their minds, I'd be all for it, but all they do is put their fingers in their ears, going, "LALALALALALALA, FAKENEWSFAKENEWSFAKENEWS" then turn the channel to Hannity. This is merely anecdotal, of course, but it's my experience.

Logic won't work on the right wing manipulated mind.

but, not every brainwashed person will have somebody that is patient enough to take them through this process step by step. Or, if it's somebody's mom and dad that were brainwashed and the kids live out of state or out of the region - hard to do just on the holidays.

Their overall desire for themselves & others to believe that Liberals are the problem. Also, it's ok to be racist, islamaphobic.... Finally, blame everthing that's wrong on Obama and Hillary. It makes for a simple view...a nice little hate filled package.

it is clickbait, email, and the fact that MSM was often dragged in the direction of Fox, sometimes echoing their message.

Their beliefs are deplorable and hopefully they realise that one day like this man did. I. Minds can be "restored to balance" but it depends on the Mind and whether that person is prepared to appreciate an alternate viewpoint. The only lesson I am interested in if I were to watch this were the methods used to reach out to him - that's where my empathy begins and ends, how to persuade more people to get on board with ideas that will make my life better ( And theirs in the process) which, btw, is the total opposite of how they vote - voting in ways to make others suffer only to suffer themselves as well.

And I won't group them all into the same category - there are variations of Trump supporters. You have your preservationists, your anti-government types, your anti-traders and your free traders, your run of the mill conservative, but ultimately their actions resulted in a horror show of a Presidency and bigotry wasn't a deal breaker for them at the ballot box.

I am a young black woman and I am all out of fucks to give. My pointing out the deplorable-ness of their views is not the damn problem.

The problem with labeling them all as "deplorables" is that you cease to think about them as someone to persuade.

Think of it as deactivating land mines.

Have you ever read any books by George Lakoff?

George Lakoff utilizes empathy through understanding *how* to communicate with people - he wouldn't know how to do it if he didn't apply empathy. There's this assumption that empathy means you sign off on what someone does - when that's not what it means at all. A lioness has to empathize with her prey - what does it feel and what does it hear? How will it react in certain circumstances? what route will it take to escape? Is it sick and frail?

To understand the terrain you have to pinpoint precisely attitudes that exist and combat those attitudes. Don't sweep them under the rug or ignore them. You have to factor them into your strategy without coddling the people you wish to target.

Empathy does not mean you agree , or you ignore wretched views, but being better at empathy than your opponent is key to success.

And here's a riddle for you - we're making a choice here to reach out to them by deriding the word "deplorable" - the flip side of that is you ignore the righteous anger those on the receiving end of deplorable attitudes face everyday. "Deplorable" was politically problematic but it doesn't mean it wasn't a fair observation - it was more than fair, it was accurate. Many people I knew were waiting for someone to call out what Trump lifted up and what his supporters co-signed which is why I said - deplorable isn't the problem. Pointing out deplorable-ness is not the problem - developing better memes and strategies to counter the rise of deplorable attitudes should be the focus instead.

that is the problem.

I have just been seeing a lot of posts that indicate an unwillingness to even consider "developing better memes and strategies".

And in some cases their anger is justified.

I think there's too much focus on personalities and not enough on countering trends, attitudes and challenging the way liberal ideas are disseminated and framed. You actually have liberals endorsing republican narratives about democratic leaders and some social movements. If we focus on causes and outcomes we'll be on surer footing and better able to connect to other different constituencies that ordinarily lean to the right. What we can't do is dismiss the ugliness because we also have to nurture and care about our base, and articulate their concerns as well. It won't be easy because the democratic coalition is huge - republicans have it a bit easier because they know all they have to do is suppress the vote and try to cause divisions.

and I don't believe that there is any requirement to dismiss or minimize the negative behaviors and attitudes of the "deplorables", in order to influence their thoughts and feelings.

Do you feel that it is possible to nurture the base without focusing the ire upon the Trump voter, focusing instead on the puppet masters in the Republican party?

Maybe the only way things will change is with demographic shifts but it's possible to lay out an economic vision that targets rural areas. Why race attitudes play a part is because divisions are used to prop up US vs THEM narratives, and those attitudes need to be exposed. Which is why the whole identity politics spiel in the immediate aftermath of the election was harmful- we have to push the idea that cosmopolitanism and diversity are strengths, not weaknesses, and pinpoint the ways the puppet masters on the right breed divisive rhetoric not ignore the rhetoric or complain about people who expose it... And Make our issues personal- make it relevant to people's day to day lives.

Take the treatment of BLM - since it was trending in General Discussion yesterday. What BLM advocates is something every American could get behind. Poor whites should be supporting the movement and why? because they are too often the victims of civil forfeiture abuse by authorities. They too are victims of police brutality and scared by mass incarceration. It's democratic policy that aims to treat with opoid abuse in a robust way and deal with systemic injustices. And for a walled off conservative voter, appealing to their selfishness may be required - if poor people have access to affordable healthcare, good public schools, and feel optimistic about the future, that's less class resentment to worry about.

If we factor in on the health of the whole, and how it benefits the individual - health and security - then we may have a chance to break through to them. But we can't ignore the reality of harmful attitudes.