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   Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 05:53:34 JST Nowhere Girl

   The fascists and their reactionary centrist friends in the media went out of their way to portray marginalized people criticizing them for being bigots ("the woke left are attacking free speech!") or trying to undo systemic, institutionalized bigotry (e.g., DEI, affirmative action) as objectively worse than them being bigots and in some cases literal Nazis, which is how they got a large portion of the white American electorate to support them.

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     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 05:53:32 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     Every book ban, every attack on DEI and "wokeness" and "cancel culture," every anti-trans screed in a "liberal" newspaper, every attack on science and common sense public health measures, every right-wing asshole who buys up a media or social media outlet is trying to shadowban reality and deny people the knowledge, the platforms, and the resources to speak out against them -- or even just to survive.

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     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 05:53:33 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     Except for activists at the local level, pretty much nobody got in their way.

     In fact, the Democratic Party, still cowering in the shadow of Reagan and butt hurt over being rejected by white voters, went out of their way to help Republicans and their wealthy patrons consolidate media under their control. Deregulation, baby.

     Not to mention turning cops into a militarized occupation force at home, armed with special powers via the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Terror."

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     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 05:53:33 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     Liberals once freaked out that Karl Rove (supposedly) said: "We're an empire now. We create our own reality."

     But you read about how Biden's admin suppressed dissenting views on Israel-Gaza and repeatedly lied about its involvement, or the fact that Biden was surrounded by yes men who never gave him bad news, including his own abysmal poll numbers -- and you realize "truthiness" infected them all.

     "It's the voters who are wrong."

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 05:53:33 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     People blame the Internet and social media but this started well before then on AM radio and 24 hour news channels desperate for something to talk about.

     There's so much money in unreality and propaganda now and so little political will to challenge the narrative orthodoxies they create.

     The whole goal of the fascist project was not only to seize power but to make opposing them -- that is, to be moral -- inconvenient, if not illegal.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 05:53:34 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     Watergate, Vietnam, and the Civil Rights Movement convinced the fascists that control of media and the narratives it creates were essential to rolling back progress in this country.

     They created the biggest Alternate Reality Game (ARG) of them all for Republican voters and politicians to inhabit, a Fox News Cinematic Universe where it was the "political correctness" and civil rights that were the truly abhorrent, unnatural thing, an attack on the cis white majority's "inherent superiority."

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     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 06:11:23 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     • timberwraith

     @timberwraith Yeah, exactly. Hell, you can go back to Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM as being a source of reactionary ideas and conspiracy theories dressed up as paranormal shit.

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     timberwraith (timberwraith@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 06:11:23 JST timberwraith

     in reply to

     @gwynnion Oh that guy. My right wing sister used to listen to him religiously. Yep. That scans.

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 06:11:23 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • timberwraith

     @timberwraith @gwynnion It's a general pattern that, when a medium becomes obsolete due to a new alternative that doesn't have all the negative aspects it had, the owners of the old medium channels will lean hard into getting worse and exploiting the people stupid enough to stay behind. We saw this with AM & FM radio, TV news (first Fox, then *all* of them), Facebook, Twitter, ...

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     timberwraith (timberwraith@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 06:11:24 JST timberwraith

     in reply to

     @gwynnion AM radio! Yes. I remember listening to AM talk radio in the latter half of the 1980s when Rush Limbaugh was still a lesser known talking head. That side of the dial was rapidly transforming into some of the most bigoted shit on the airwaves. It started there, as the influx of right wing crap in news/opinion spaces is concerned.

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     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 06:11:24 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     • timberwraith

     @timberwraith As Kal reminded me recently, AM radio is where the modern cult of celebrity started amongst conservatives. Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan -- guys who are fucking stupid as shit but will say anything and intentionally court bigotry and controversy to grow their audience. They became the power base of modern Republicans, which is why so many younger Republican politicians see their job primarily as saying and doing shit to get on TV.

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     timberwraith (timberwraith@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Feb-2025 06:11:24 JST timberwraith

     in reply to

     @gwynnion In some ways, I'm guessing it might even have started with the seemingly "apolitical" shock jocks who preceded them on the radios waves. Those radio personalities promoted their own variant of reactionary thinking via commuter drive-time humor, largely appealing to a white male, cishet audience. It wet people's appetites for what came next and Limbaugh & Co were next.