YOU are speaking!
Have you made any poignant commentary on the recent election in the U.S.? Do you have a good response to liberals who are upset with the results or process of the election? Have you written or seen something as a comment reply/post that you think has standalone value? Did you see a new take or analysis you hadn’t previously considered?
Whether it’s a long idea with lots of context, or a short and sweet one liner, we want those thoughts aggregated here. This post is intended to be a resource for comrades to draw from when having actual discussions outside of Hexbear both online or IRL regarding the election.
Consider this a mini-effortpost aggregator. This is not for shitposts, but humor is completely acceptable if it helps make the point.
I've been trying to figure out how to innoculate/poison the rhetoric in use that gets people to go along with whatever liberal/conservative talking heads set as an agenda for discourse.
Deconstructing rhetoric, analysis of media narratives - "media literacy" - more generally. I need a really fast way to read people into that frame such that they are immediately deonstructing narratives as soon as they feel empowered to do so.
I basically want to utterly snuff out the average person's credulity towards people who are seeking power or modelling behavior from a highly visible place.
In order for things to get better, people have to have the tools they need to distrust power. That needs to be paramount, over anything else. Once you have people going "oh wow that's kinda bullshit" rather than uncritically entering a receptive state and parroting what the guy on their screen told them to say and think, a lot of the work will just get done on its own
We really need to be poisoning the rhetorical space as much as possible. I need something that devalues propaganda the same way capital is trying to use AI to devalue art. I need something that poisons the dataset.
I try to go "diagonally." Don't go full on, strike true and at weak points without wasting any additional effort. Analyze each opening. There isn't an easy one-stop formula, sometimes you have to focus on peripheral aspects, as long as you shatter the liberal worldview bit by bit.
Noam Chomsky: The five filters of the mass media machine | The Listening Post
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
One of the biggest problems I face when trying to do this same thing is that it’s so easy to go too deep too fast and really turn off somebody’s willingness to listen or start using that frame of reference on their own. You can’t just jump into the conversation, because to them we sound like conspiracy theorists when we do.
So what do we do? We make them pry. The way I’ve been combatting this is by using familiar sayings or adages to get the ball rolling. When you’re talking in such a way that a liberal or conservative feels like they SHOULD understand what you’re saying, more often than not they will agree and engage rather than risk looking foolish. One of my favorite phrases that I’ve seen work over and over again is to just throw in a casual, almost dismissive “follow the money” to somebody bringing up an applicable current event. It’s too true to even be argued with. It’s too familiar and universally understood to not be a reasonable assessment to anybody. The phrase is too familiar. This person has likely already had to investigate something for the same reason before. You’re priming them to go from talking about an ad during the Super Bowl to talking about access to resources.
The problem is that there's no shortcut.
People have to be motivated to seek the truth, with the discipline to not fall for convenient scapegoats or going off on wild tangents in conspiracy-minded thinking, and that's especially hard if the truth does not align with the material interests of the seeker. You can introduce a frame of thinking that's distrustful of power, but if the person you introduce it to is not armed with the critical thinking necessary they will just fall into their own biases and come to the wrong conclusions.
You need to give actual material reasons for why a person should think for themselves on issues like "the economy" or "politics" and not just outsource all that to "the experts", be that Jake Tapper or Jordan Peterson, and then after that you might have to do the long hard work of teaching people how to follow the money (as CoolerOpposide put it)- which might require teaching the basics of Marxist theory.
That's the bad news. The good news is that once you overcome that (admittedly difficult) hurdle, media literacy is a skill that anyone can learn.