Prior to the conflict, I wasn't a fan of liberals. But at least they were better than conservatives because they didn't want to glass the Middle East, protested against the Iraq war, made fun of right wing bullshit on Fox News, and didn't want to gun down Muslims or Hispanics. Or so I thought.
Liberals have gone full :frothingfash: and are literally regurgitating 1930s Nazi talking points about the Slavs. As I Russian speaker, I stopped going on most subreddits now due to the obscene racism. I've seen shit ranging from "Aktually, Ruzzians are not white or European" to "Lets break Russia up and commit mass ethnic cleansing". It's not even just Russians, I've seen a massive surge in racist posts about Chinese and Indian people since the war started.
Liberals are literally swallowing the most inane nonsense from Ukraine like "Russian orcs shocked at seeing toilets for the first time". And lets not forget the "Russian brainpan too smol to launch nukes so lets nuke them ourselves" posts all over :reddit-logo:
Anyone who even remotely suggests that we shouldn't arm and send 16 year old Ukrainians to be blown up in human wave attacks is called a Kremlin agent.
Amazingly, many right-wingers like Peterson or Candace Owens have better takes on the situation than liberals do. Does anyone have an explanation for this?
Probably. Americans have a huge cultural disadvantage because we've been indoctrinated our whole lives to believe that we're immune to propaganda, that the news doesn't do propaganda, and that even if the government is lying to us it doesn't try to propagandize us.
Look at how the Libs reacted to Russiagate. If I recall correctly the initial allegation was that Russia spent something paltry like 200,000 dollars on targeted ads, and the Liberals lost their goddamn minds. They were utterly obsessed for years and years on end. It was all over the media, it dominated their analysis of the election. And even if it was true the way they thought it was it was a drop in the ocean. Hillary spent an unprecedented one billion dollars on her campaign. No reasonable person would believe that the tiny amount of ad buy Russia did would tip the scales.
They were also in complete denial about the nature of the American electorate. Many of them simply refused to believe that the GOP's core voters really were exactly as mean, cruel, racist, and committed as they appeared. They couldn't accept that their idealistic, unrealistic vision of America could elect someone like Trump, so they grasped on to any explanation but the truth. Bernie bros, ignorant rural voters, Russian interference. But the simple truth they failed to accept was that the petiti bourgeoisie wanted Trump, they voted for Trump, and Trump got enough votes in America's stupid election system to win.
Americans taken as a whole have very little media literacy and are not skeptical about the media they consume. Whatever you put in front of them, if it confirms their biases, they just uncritically accept without a second thought.
I assume that at least some nations in Europe just don't have as intense of a propaganda saturation as the US. I also suspect being outside the core of the Evil Empire gives people a little more perspective to see that America is full of shit.
I have had libs deny straight to my face the exit polling showing that the median Trump voter makes above the national median income and is college educated. Like straight up denying official data that shows that Republicans aren't toothless trailer trash from the hinterlands, but instead their nice well mannered petit bourgeois neighbors. They get incredibly mad.