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While you're kinda right , you're also kinda wrong. Today we sure have the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, even for free (mostly). Back then everythink required way more effort. But we also had way more time to do so. People didn't need to have two incomes or two jobs. When they were home, they were home. No 24/7 availability due to a phone.

But what did we do with the time? Reading tabloids and watching silly tv. Like people today scroll through social media. I'd argue it's still the same, just the ways of ditching information changed. Gen z and younger aren't per se dumber than boomers and older. The ways to get dumber or smarter just shifted.

Gen X myself, with always way too much spare time at hands to make observations and conclusions and gather information/knowledge. Which is also more easily done today than ever.

Ouch.

LOL neither the media nor Russia created tribalism or echo chambers. They're just the digital equivalent of immigrants creating ethnic neighborhoods. People are more comfortable around others who speak their language and share their background. Give them all the variety in the world and most of them will flock to their own kind.

But I totally agree America is the United States of Ignorance and won't recover from it. Not just ignorance but incapability - in spite of a flourishing DIY culture, Americans in general can't DIY their way out of a WalMart. They don't even think up to them to solve anything, because every problem is either somebody else's direct fault or was inevitable because of conditions somebody else created. It's a nation of spectators whining that all the shows suck.

This is sort of my train of thought, however, historically, when that sort of thing happens, very rarely is the resulting government a unfucked democratic nation.

I hope there are enough people with actual core American values that rise to the top if/when it happens.

My hopes aren’t high, but they’re not high with the status quo either.

Let's go aliens!!!

Because.......

Grandpa Joe worked with the mob rum-running, in order to amass the family fortune, and fhey in turn delivered several major cities in the election, but then JFK let RFK Bobby loose on an aggressive anti-racketeering rampage

Among other reasons ofc

No I voted and still blame them. People were vocal about their concerns and intentions to not vote months before the election and the campaign ignored them and somehow that isn’t their fault.

Also the 10 million, like you said, were ignorant. It wasn’t the ultra-impassioned grandstanders that affected an election. It was people that saw the last 4 years relatively boring politics as a license to tune out and figured this election wasn’t something they needed to worry about. Those people exist in far FAR higher numbers than anybody actually paying attention

Don't worry. Plenty of blame to go around. The fuckwad voters who enabled fascism by staying home, and the fuckwad party elite who couldn't find their own asses with both hands and a map and lost a lay-up election to fascism through their own venality and incompetence.

Well, ooooobviously that's because the democrats cheated in 2020 and then inexplicably, while in power, decided not to cheat in 2024. Obviously.

Massive /s.

Tbf. 152 million votes counted so far in 2024 and just shy of 160 million voted in 2020. Every swing state had record turn out except Pennsylvania which was close. There was bound to be less votes with people working and mail in ballots not valid to do because covid in some states. Most the votes lost were in states that outcomes were the same in 2020. She lost by 250k people in 4 states. These people flipped or some sat home while more showed up for Trump she lost because of not getting better turn out in those states she even beat Bidens numbers in some of these states.

Liberty consists of the capacity to make meaningful choices; those ignorant of their choices cannot possibly make them. Ignorance itself is a kind of tyranny which chains people.

Harder to be taken advantage of if you know the means by which one takes advantage of another.

Knowing the wealthy need you more than you need them lets you make stronger demands and form unions.

Being knowledgeable gives you job security and independence, you have intrinsic value as a capable resource - and if spurned can become a troublesome enemy because you understand your opponent and can take advantage accordingly

Knowledge is absolutely power, and power gives you opportunity for freedom to choose how to live your life.

because uneducated people are easy to lie to.

one way is, that if you do not know the impact of policies, you cant make informed decisions about them and thereby lose control over your life and environment.

Not strictly: he says only an educated people can be a free one, meaning that all free peoples are educated ones, but the inversion of that is "No uneducated people can be free". By that, I assume he means that uneducated people are far more susceptible to deception and manipulation compared to the educated that will be better able to detect lies, point them out and understand explanations of why that's bullshit.

As an example: If I tell you that the "vaccines cause autism" study was a) just a pilot study, not an actual one at scale, b) heavily fudged to the point that one scientist was kicked off the project for refusing to falsify results, c) only examined a specific vaccine, the MMR combination vaccine usually given to infants and d) led by a guy that had financial stakes in a company trying to sell individual vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, you can probably smell the bullshit.

If I tried to explain that to someone who's not educated enough, they'll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of "Well, you never know what to believe these days" and change absolutely nothing about their stance.

Things get far worse when someone tells their base that some group is capturing and eating their pets and ends up inciting violence by people who take him at face value.

Edit: I don't know why I said "harmless" there. Anti-Vaxxers aren't harmless, even when compared to incitement of hate crimes.

In the defense of the left, going into right-wing online spaces to try to change someone's mind is probably one of the worst uses of one's time possible. At least at a protest you can't get banned by an assmad mod.

If you're trying to reason someone out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into, you're not gonna do anything but act as a straw man for people to make into whatever they want to attack

Yes, it's absolutely vital to reach across the isle and offer understanding and share knowledge, but you're also up against a national propaganda system that is universally accessible.

The only two real avenues of change are

people getting negatively affected enough that the wealthy may potentially lose their status quo so they're willing to capitulate to the middle class in a small way that keeps their illusion intact

Or, you are able to humanize yourself and your views in a way that successfully removes the difference between left/right culture war and reframe it as a top/bottom class war.

Usually best accomplished by demonstrating that most people want the same things and aren't as different as Media tries to make us. This realization will also be worn down over time in the face of (now) every media source available inventing realities to explain how everything is correct, going to plan, and paradise is just over one more horizon of tax cuts, austerity, and diminished rights.