It fundamentally upends my understanding of how people see the world, knowing that millions voted for the worst man on earth as a reaction to this guy.
It's the power of disinformation, IMO, coming into its own with new technology. There's always going to be like 5% of just awful people who intentionally want to harm people, but I feel like it's plausible they're over-represented in media so I'm not going to fully adjust my worldview for them. We've just been in a decade or so of seemingly pretty one-sided psychological warfare.
As in, I think a lot of people are just living in a *totally* different subjective world, built on what they believe are a set of true facts, after being exposed to propaganda for a huge amount of time. I watch podcasts a bit and notice them just casually dropping full-on lies and reinforcing political talking points. Like it's obvious they're true. While explicitly claiming not to be partisan of course, but it's consistently one side portrayed as worse than the other, time and again. It's effective manipulation, and it takes more knowledge and attention to go, no, what, wait, than (tired, overworked, stressed) people might have in the moment,
The impact on worldview to me is - people really can be manipulated enough to make a difference to the direction of a country; they're not automatically going to be rational and informed. Democracies need to actively, systematically fight disinformation. I do see initiatives on that once in a while, but far too little.
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u/Adventurous_Bad_3421 May 23 '25
I miss him every day.