I’ve been recovering from an injury and staying with family since I can’t walk right now, and I’ve caught a lot of Fox News is the last five days. Like I knew they were fucked by every segment is either about “Wokeism” (which seems a whole heck of a lot like Cultural Bolshevism) or “Biden’s Communist Agenda. The segment I just saw was them going to Little Mogadishu in Minneapolis and they walk up to three people and those people say they don’t speak English. They went in to say that this was destroying America with “separate cultures” and I was really expecting them to say something about the White Christian Blood and Soil but they must of cut to commercial before that. I guess this is a rant but Jesus fuck we are getting apartheid in 2022.
Tucker was outright spreading the Great Replacement theory the other week, they're not even attempting to hide it anymore.
If it's not Trump it's either going to be him or Desantis as the GOP nominee IMO, and I'd honestly rather have Trump again than either of those ghouls.
I mean, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were accused of sexual assault, or even outright rape, while running for President, or after taking office. Of course, I would also point out that the accusations were never corroborated.
At this point, I think you can have such an accusation and still win a competitive election, especially if there is no real proof or even something like what happened to Roy Moore (where it was not necessarily proven that he was a pedophile, but there was a lot of evidence, especially from the time the incidents supposedly occurred, that supported that characterization).
My bet is that the 2024 Republican Presidential nominee will be Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Ron DeSantis or Kristi Noem.
he doesn’t drop hard slurs
Oh he absolutely did just not on his show. Apparently there was a radio talk show he phoned into back in the (early 2000's? Slightly before 2000?).
From the guardian:
“I just have zero sympathy for them or their culture. A culture where people just don’t use toilet paper or forks,” he said of the nation in a 2006 appearance on the Bubba the Love Sponge radio show, in audio rediscovered by the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters. “They can just shut the fuck up and obey, is my view.”
Carlson went on to call Iraq a “crappy place filled with a bunch of semiliterate primitive monkeys” during a 2008 call-in on the show, which he was a regular guest on from 2006 to 2011. He added of Afghanistan: “It’s never going to be a civilized country because the people aren’t civilized.”
But as the Tuck once said, "What even is white supremacy?"
Actually you know what, here's the Guardian link, it's a treasure trove of the Tuck's garbage personality:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/mar/12/tucker-carlson-fox-host-under-fire-racist-comments
Out of all the “reporters” I’ve seen the worst by far is terms of being wrong and racist about everything is Tucker Carlson of some fucking Judge idk what the fuck her name is.
Yeah, it's pretty terrifying how many Americans spend hours a day watching fascist propaganda. Trump was nothing compared to what's coming in the next decade or two.
Straight up. And there's no hope that these fox news viewers will die off. Young people are watching even more fucked up shit on YouTube, they'll be even worse.
I had the same reaction when one of those daytime preacher shows was on and the guy started to segue from one of the generic bible verses on love and peace to the republican talking points on why this doesn't mean you have to be nice to minorities. I went from tuning those shows out as kid until the cartoons came on, to just not watching broadcast tv and it gave me a "They Live" moment where you realize that background noise from your childhood was telling people to hate each other.
Having immigrant enclaves is extremely cool. For over a century they were a substantial part of America that didn't suck. Knowing that you can come into contact with a different culture just a few bus stops away is one of life's delights. I feel sorry for the people who feel like their own culture has to be their entire world.
What would Murdoch's white genocide news hour do with the knowledge that there were over 1000 German-language newspapers publishing in the US at the turn of the 20th century?
Would they demonize the antiassimilationist krauts? Or would it be for them the one example of "speak English!" going wrong?
Well those Germans aren’t melanin-challenged and thus are the good type of culture, well, until the war machine deemed them the enemy and then even being white couldn’t protect them from violence and oppression.
That’s modern sensibilities. You have to go back in time to the era where people had important debates like are the Irish even human, are Italians black and are the Germans bug people.
Who knew that the all powerful media tycoon from the 90s james bond movie was a prophecy?
What would Murdoch’s white genocide news hour do with the knowledge that there were over 1000 German-language newspapers publishing in the US at the turn of the 20th century?
Yeah this is completely wild to me, even in my chuddier days I’ve always been fascinated by other cultures. I always wanted to go to big cities like New York or Los Angeles and San Fransciso or Europe and Asia and Africa for the myriad of peoples, languages, and foods you could find their. I guess this came from reading adventure stories as a kid and that might be the thing saved me from becoming a member of Tucker Carlson’s audience.
Complaining about people "not being able to speak English in the United States" is just the way racist white folks complain about brown people existing here without appearing too racist i.e. they would just be complaining about something else and implying immigrants shouldn't be coming here even if they spoke perfect english.
The way conservatives complain is 100 percent socially acceptable racism. The complaint doesn’t even make sense as most immigrants I’m willing to bet have better English than their domestic peers since if you learn it as a second language you don’t learn the lazy shortcuts with grammar. They just want to complain about Spanish speaking people, or maybe Chinese people now as well.
………..…but I’m going to have a very controversial take here. Having a set language everyone speaks is very important if you want to minimize factions in a large society and isn’t a natural thing for people to do at such a massive scale. There is a reason most large societies have coercive systems in place to encourage a common language. If your ideal society is hyper local you can avoid this, but when operating on large scales this type of cultural control is inevitable.
they would just be complaining about something else and implying immigrants shouldn’t be coming here even if they spoke perfect english.
Reminded of the 90s, when every aspect of black culture - music, clothing, accent, food, religious affiliation, tattoos and piercings, you name it - was interrogated ad nauseam. Black people were over-sexed, lazy, ugly, extravagant, tacky, gullible, poorly mannered, and gross.
Then white millennials began adopting the black aesthetic and there was another panick over the "influence" black culture had on the stupid idiot kids. This became a new kind of justification for white flight and school segregation.
Finally, once white business interests had entirely appropriated and monetized black culture, we saw a pivot into Rural White Pride and a veneration of all the "bad" culture of 90s-era black communities now sanctified beneath a Confederate Flag.
True I meant more fuck we’re done pretending we’re not Nazis, anyone darker than the Grand Tuck himself can’t vote type shit.
My path here was basically lead by a reunderstanding of our history. The lie about this nation I was told in school was washed away. And the harsh truth that we are a fascist nation is now a sober reality. Always has been :astronaut-1:
My path here was basically lead by a reunderstanding of our history. The lie about this nation I was told in school was washed away. And the harsh truth that we are a fascist nation is now a sober reality. Always has been
Hello fellow
doomerBloomer
Is free speech good?
I often think we should be holding anything that purports to be informing the public to some kind of standard. Without a doubt, Fox News thrives in this zero accountability meaninglessness.
But knowing this fucked up state they would probably leave Fox News alone and go after leftwing twitter accounts. Why would a bourgeois state censor its own most effective propaganda outlet? We know the role of false consciousness in maintaining capitalism.
It just seems like the FDA said hydroxychloroquine was not a good treatment for covid and they had evidence-based reasons, but there were people on Fox News practically every day saying we should all be taking it. It seems like a pretty low bar to require "news" organizations to not tell people to take dangerous drugs during a pandemic in direct contradiction with the FDA.
And yeah, Fox News is the tip of the iceberg, but I still think destroying it would do much good. I don't know what we can do but organize a boycott of their advertisers. I'm sure they get a lot of direct funding from people that simply want to support the propaganda though.
Americans love having the freedoms to do the most useless, normally harmful shit. But the moment you talk about actual freedoms like worker control of labor and resources they get defensive as fuck. My grandpa literally told me today that America is the only country to attempt a government where the people rule.
Free individual speech in personal spaces, yes.
Free corporate speech on public platforms, no.
The never-ending reproduction of bourgeois cultural hegemony has me convinced that free speech is, in fact, bad. Every major media institution lies and fearmongers with absolute impunity. The Murdoch press is perhaps the most noxious, but everyone from the New York Times to One America News is doing the same shit, only catering to different audiences. These institutions as they currently exist need to be destroyed.
There have been several attempts at doing advertiser boycotts, but to me this just falls into the classic liberal trap of trying to do politics through consumption. I don't think it's going to cut it. When push comes to shove, the forces of reaction will shovel their money into a furnace if it means they can keep the public propagandized. MSNBC and Fox News are advertisements in and of themselves. Advertisments for empire. There is no need for them to turn a profit as long as it keeps the gears of hyperexploitation churning. The profit is just a bonus.
Yes, they are all clearly lying to everyone, else they would present one clear and consistent view across all outlets, which, by the way, has no market value for any participant. They cannot all be telling the truth but they can all be lying.
I think it's pretty delusional to think we can immerse people in such a inconsistent environment and lie to them constantly without ending up with a public that is basically functionally insane.
Fox News is bad but I think Sinclair is way worse. My parents eventually shut off Fox News because even they got the feeling they were being played. But the local news, they've trust the local news for decades. And Sinclair is way more subtle than Fox News, if you're not aware of this stuff it's surprising what they slip in there.
I know people who listen to "local" radio and watch "local" news and even read "local" (1%-owned) newspapers. I actually can't speak for the radio, but the local news seems to be basically nothing but petty crimes and cops solving them mixed in with one or two feel-good stories about like a local girl selling lemonade to pay for her brain cancer treatment, plus high school sports. I couldn't believe that people actually consume this kind of media in 2021, but I think large numbers of Americans get their news basically from these sources plus extremely cringe Facebook meme pages. That's it.
I used to think that we're surrounded by people who haven't changed their minds about anything since the nineties or even earlier—people who are living as though we are still in the 1990s, but with smartphones and internet—but their opinions now might be even more reactionary than they were back then.
My lib parents listen to NPR in their car. I know that's a step above local news but it still really did feel like nails on a chalkboard to me when I found myself with them in their car (in the before time) listening to that shit. Only a few years earlier than that, I used to love NPR. Radiolab made me feel so good. I even listened to Planet Money, although I remember in one episode, they asked an economist if the stock market was just going to keep going up forever, and that question was kind of too much even for lib me. I even listened to the Freakonomics podcast—a lot. I heard their entire episode when they did a fellatio-style interview of Boris Johnson when he was just the mayor of London. I stopped listening to Hidden Brain (aka soft phrenology) years ago but I remember the guy did one or two episodes about "billionaires bad," which was cool. I maintain that Shankar is better than the average lib unless someone here can produce proof to the contrary. I may have ultimately escaped NPR because their politics podcast either ignored or shat on Bernie in the 2016 primary which was pretty off-putting, although I still listened to every fucking episode of Nate Silver's podcast leading up to the general election. (He isn't NPR but might as well be.) Once they were completely proven wrong I lost interest in them.
What's so odd to me is that I know lots of fellow liberal millennials had pretty similar media consumption habits but just kept consuming liberal media even after it was completely, objectively, stunningly proven wrong in 2016. The process with me was gradual, not instantaneous, but 2016 really did profoundly shake me out of that ideological dumpster (and into this current one instead).
Because of my previous bourgeois listening habits I don't really trust myself to be in charge of any kind of leftist organization.
This might be a bit of a late response but I am in similar situation. I stopped listening to NPR and dont really listen to anything else but music now. Do you have any recommendations/ what you are listening to now after NPR?
If it's not Marxist, Leninist, Maoist, or related to Hegel or Lacan or Freud in some way, I'm probably not listening to it. My favorite podcasts are:
- Revolutionary Left Radio
- Red Library (sadly they're going to stop soon but they have a great back catalogue)
- Why Theory
- This Is Hell
- Cosmopod
- Millennials Are Killing Capitalism
- QAnon Anonymous
- TrueAnon
- Historic.ly
- Citations Needed
- Trillbilly Workers' Party (the lightest out of all of these but pretty wholesome and still Marxist)
- Hexbear's very own Explaining to Austin (for more light listening when I need a break from how fucked up everything is)
- Moderate Rebels
- Well There's Your Problem
- The Dollop (this is one of the first leftist podcasts I ever listened to. I still have a softspot for it but I barely ever listen anymore. Same for Dave Anthony's other great podcast, West Wing Thing)
These should keep you pretty busy :)
Is free speech good?
What is the alternative?
Not really interested in the Speech Police pulling me over for trafficking in disinformation.
You're not allowed to display swastikas or do the nazi salute in Germany. I wouldn't mind that here.
We also used to have the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to at least pretend to present "both sides" of the issues. But I have doubts that such a corrupted state as ours would not hold leftwing perspectives to a much harsher standard than Fox News if they had authority to.
But would it matter? We get censored on social media regularly.
You’re not allowed to display swastikas or do the nazi salute in Germany. I wouldn’t mind that here.
Maybe if they did it for the Confederate Flag. Even then, this shit is so comically easy to selectively enforce. I can absolutely see that guy who yanked the Confederate Flag from a white nationalist march getting busted for "Displaying Treasonous Symbology" while the original owners walk.
We also used to have the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to at least pretend to present “both sides” of the issues.
Sure. Back when broadcast media was a natural monopoly and cable didn't exist. The theory being that you didn't want a singular view dominating the three different local broadcasters in your media market. The FCC had a whole host of rules that regulated who could own broadcasting equipment, how it could be used, and what it could be used for. That whole period of time culminated in the Reagan Era. Any media system that gives us President Ronald Reagan and just kinda normalizes white nationalism under the Nice Polite Republican banner-head is maybe not so great in hindsight.
On top of all that, we had the House Unamerican Activities Committee, the Hollywood blacklists, and a host of other public-private partnership censoring tools.
We get censored on social media regularly.
It's a big game of wack-a-mole between various political and economic interests. But sites like this can exist and even flourish under the current laisse-faire rule of law.
A tighter media regulatory environment would be used first and foremost to silence leftists. White Nationalists would just reincorporate themselves as Concerned Citizens Councils or plead Religious Liberties Exemption and continue to fly by untouched.
Free speech exists so that no opinion or thought can be suppressed. It is good.
The problem with Fox News racism is that it is inherently in bad faith and manipulative.
It's not an "opinion" nor is it a thought, it's lies to manipulate the masses to hate outside minorities so that they look away from insane inequality and corruption from their own system. They're knowingly spreading falsehoods to lie to their audience, that's not what free speech is for.
If they were genuinely concerned about the consequences of mass immigration, it would be a different story. But since it's just random words with no motive but personal profit at the cost of others, it shouldn't be protected by "free speech".
