Truth and the Trumpers

Very interesting. “Republicans' trust in national news outlets drops by half in just five years” This piece details how liberals still have “some” or “a lot” of trust in the media, but for Republicans, that trust went down very quickly from 70% to 35% from 2016 to 2021.

Why might that be? The Netflix series “How to Become a Tyrant” provides an answer. In episode 4, the series points out that an effective tyrant must “Control the Truth.” He (They’re always a “he”) must control the past (The George Orwell novel 1984 showed us in great detail how that’s done) and he must, like a domestic abuser, “Plays mind games, such as when he denies requests he has made previously or when he undercuts her sense of reality.”

A dictator must have people believe that he is the only source of truth. That only he can be believed. That no other source is worthy of any trust.

Now, does this mean I or liberal friends of mine trust the media implicitly? No, we apply critical tests to distinguish truth from falsehood. There are certainly faults and problems with the media. CNN seems to believe that Afghanistan, the Texas “snitch” law on abortion and the economy are all “crises” for President Biden right now. They are, of course, nothing of the kind. But CNN has to get “clicks” on its websites and eyeballs on its TV show, so they’re desperate to make the news more dramatic than it actually is. .

Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan says “It was not rigged. It was not stolen," Ryan told WISN 12 in a rare interview on Monday. "Donald Trump lost the election. Joe Biden won..." But here we are, 10 months after the 2020 election that Joe Biden won by about 7 million votes and “Two-thirds of Republicans still think the 2020 election was rigged.”

What is their proof? The “Kraken” lawyers, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and others, are on the verge of losing their licenses to practice law, their lies were so clearly and egregiously false. The brainwashing appears to have worked.