I don’t care if people don’t vote for fascists because fascists are racist, if they don’t vote for fascists because of fascists’ horrible policies designed to secure their own power, or if they don’t vote for fascists because the Great Gazoo told them not to.
It didn’t help that Letterman would do things like lean out of his office window with a bullhorn while the humorless Bryant Gumbel was recording a Today Show special in Rockefeller Plaza below and yell, “I’m Larry Grossman, President of NBC News, and I’m not wearing pants!” You can find a split-screen video on YouTube that synchronizes the Today Show taping with the video from Letterman’s program of him yelling out the window.
I was invited to a home-cooked meal by someone who made okra stewed with tomatoes. Because I was taught that I should try everything someone had cooked for me, I served myself a small amount and took a tiny bite… and could not swallow. My throat literally closed up and rejected this slimy, stringy, plant matter. So, I took a bite of my roll, chewed it up (while keeping the okra tucked in my cheek), and then tried to swallow them both. The roll went down, but the okra stubbornly stayed in my mouth. I finally had to excuse myself to go spit it out.
Be careful about thoughtlessly repeating that the press is useless, biased, and incompetent. A lot of that criticism originates in the same ideological drive that produced Trump and Koch/ALEC/Heritage Foundation-supported neofascism. Now that they have successfully in the minds of many proven that news media can’t be trusted, then when that media reports that someone fomented insurrection or worse, it’s simply “fake news” because all news is fake. Remember, propaganda doesn’t just tell you untrue things; it fundamentally defines “truth” so that you no longer can think about what is true, but only about what you’re told.
Technology changes us by promoting messages that make us crazy: messages that promoted valorization of things over people, consumption as fulfillment, and the “rightness” of hierarchy. Also a problem for Haidt (though often not the part he says out loud) is that social media also sends messages from outside those corporatist and authoritarian assumptions, messages about equity, diversity, respect, and the dangers of climate change and toxic cultures. He wants to control the medium because he wants to suppress one set of messages and promote the other. He’s a perfect example of what happens when you marry capitalism, right-wing “conservatism,” and the worst sort of intellectual chicanery made possible by academic training.
Jonathan Haidt’s book pretty much just presents “moral panic” with an “academic” sheen, which he uses to promote a social and political agenda. Look at what else Haidt has been involved with, which includes claiming that there is a “crisis of free speech” on college campuses that needs to be countered by promoting conservative viewpoints (and demonizing what it calls “liberal” ones) with weak or no evidential support.
I don’t care if people don’t vote for fascists because fascists are racist, if they don’t vote for fascists because of fascists’ horrible policies designed to secure their own power, or if they don’t vote for fascists because the Great Gazoo told them not to.