President Joe Biden had conspiracy theorists in a tizzy after posting what appeared to be his reaction to the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl win on Sunday night.
“Just like we drew it up,” Biden posted on X alongside a photo of “Dark Brandon,” the meme created by hardcore—and very online—supporters of Donald Trump that Biden and his team loved so much they adopted it as their own.
The post was apparently referencing far-right conspiracy theories which posit the NFL and high-level government operatives conspired to rig the Super Bowl in Kansas City’s favor to give maximum exposure to a yet-to-be-announced endorsement from Chiefs star Travis Kelce and his girlfriend Taylor Swift.
Not a USer, what I find utterly bonkers is seeing clips of them discussing the dark Brandon conspiracy on fox news, like it’s real and relevant political discourse. Wtaf is wrong with that portion of you population.
Am USer. I have no explanation, but I can assure you that being up close to this shit doesn’t help it make any more sense. I come from a conservative white family in a mostly white area, and sure I can see how people get into that insular world and are conditioned to reject rational inquiry, but at the same time we live in the information age, people!
The problem is that there is too much information. And information doesn’t come with a disclaimer of whether it’s fact, opinion, conspiracy, or otherwise batshit.
We have passed the age of information, we have entered the age of misinformation.
Upvoted with a frown of agreement on my face.
Or went back to it? I think there was only a short period of time in human’s existence when only the intellectual elite could reach the public with the new technologies because it was too complicated or pricey for the common people. Now we’re back to bar-room level of information quality.
/disagree
There used to be something called The Fourth Estate (of Government). Used to be.
Was that press accessible for the average people at that time? Everybody being able to read is fairly recent too.
News organzations should not be allowed to express opinions, but only recite news.
Did people think more critically before? Or maybe there was limited dissemination in the past? Crazy BS maybe didn’t travel as far?
I’d like to think we could differentiate between fact, opinion, and BS more in the past, but that’s probably not true.
I think learning everything about the world from the random unqualified people around you is exactly how most people in history have done it. As long as it’s a person you like and they say it with confidence, it will probably stick.
But now it is easier to see that process happening and avoid it. It’s also easier to locate authoritative sources of information.
Except… even though this works for many of us, it paradoxically makes the problem WORSE for a huge number of people. We have easier access to all the opinions out there, but that means any given shitty opinion has the potential to reach millions rather than somebody’s social circle.
I agree. What I have no idea about these days is how to solve this.
It might be a ‘there is no solution’ type problem, but it would be nice if more people and organizations as a whole recognized this issue.
Maybe publishing questionable information over a long period of time or our lack of holding orgs and individuals accountable contributed. I’d think it hard to legislate accountability without reducing freedom or speech, press, and opinion (that isn’t toxic, but that’s subjective and part of the problem isn’t it).
The Younger generations do at least.
The US is very dysfunctional for anyone but the upper middle class. We all see our taxes taken out of our check, and the services provided to us are very limited: no working healthcare system, limited affordable housing, abusive elder care industry, few social safety nets, student debt & cost of education, etc.
One party (Republicans) is convinced the government is broken (it has lots of problems) and their solution is to… break it more. They throw a lot of red meat to their voters (hatred toward minorities, LGBTQ+) to keep them energized and distracted. They also seem to be literal fascists lately, and are breaking our voting systems through pushing misinformation to make people distrust our institutions.
The other party (Democrats) ignores their progressive supporters and pushes milquetoast half-meassures to solve problems. They are weak, inept. However, they aren’t interested in literally erasing LGBTQ+ people or marginalizing racial minorities. Nor are they interested in breaking our democratic processes.
Corporate-owned media has been pouring gasoline on this trash fire the whole time. I hate people who do this whole “both sides” shtick (Because the parties are not the same, it’s fascism vs a party that still seems to believe in democracy), but that’s what I think of when I see things like this . This is an article about how right wing talking heads are pushing some conspiracy about Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl, and it appeals to that part of my brain who wants to laugh at dumb people who disagree with me. But I have to point out, nobody actually cares.
People are lonely and bored and are making how they vote into rooting for some sort of sports team. You can see it in the replies to your post: someone called the right wing a “cult”. I’d like to say there is some grand conspiracy where corporations are dividing the working class but the truth is probably far more bland: Rage gets clicks, and this is dividing us. It’s not hard to do because the USA is a very flawed place with a lot of wealth inequity.
Oh lawd. I hope they are just as concerned about the cuts to SpongeBob and Patrick in their box. They had a box!
And Usher was pulling some serious MJ vibes with that rhinestone glove. I bet that means Epstein is involved somehow.
They’re servile morons.
They would get along quite well with brexiters. Some segments of the human species are… special.
Raised on evangelical TV preachers and AM radio talk show hosts. The more radical, fire, thunder, brimstone, and fear you can throw at them theatrically the more they love it. Think WWE, carnival freak show barkers, snake oil salesmen…they eat it up. Used to be there was this view of an intelligent, reserved country folk that whiled away their time reading and listening, having a plain sense of what’s right. A quaint image. The lot of them have been taken in by hucksters and proudly show off the Emperor’s new clothes.
They’ve joined a cult.
My sneaking suspicion is that a majority of the adult population has passed well beyond the sub-acute level of lead exposure and is now showing the side effects.
Lead paint, TEL, 100LL.
Think of it as “throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks”. That is the role of intellectuals or pundits, whatever you want to call the class that disseminates ideology / PR. There are lots of them and they spout all sorts of crazy stuff. Now basically it’s like the theory of evolution through natural selection. Except as individuals we are intelligent and can make decisions like “oh that sold clicks” or “oh that helped pass that law”. Who decides that? Well those who work for those that own everything and who see it as their job to increase profit.
So basically ideology is like a secretion of a specialized class that is filtered and selected to “work”.
So my theory is that after decades of wealth transfer and increasing inequality, dwindling middle class and lowering of effective quality of life, you need “stronger secretions” to control the masses. Because the old ideology doesn’t work any more. One word for it is late stage capitalism.
Another environmental aspect that plays into this I think is climate change - since we already failed to prevent what could result in our extinction or at least in countless genocides, what social contract remains? Why even pretend to be civilized when our civilization obviously has gone insane? Like a decadent indulgence in an orgy of hatred. Or just insanity like in “Don’t look up”.
Unfortunately the terrifying thing is nothing is actually physically wrong with those people that is making them believe crazy shit. They don’t all have dementia or something.
America is just so dysfunctional that it shoots perfectly normal people off the deep end into crazy (very hateful often) conspiracy views like a particle accelerator shoots protons into stuff to make them explode. Some businesses actually target that as their explicit business model here (YouTube).
We have no idea!
I’m interested in what it’s like to live in a country where the culture, society, people are more…United. I don’t mean all the same.
I don’t think the melting pot saying is true anymore. People don’t want to blend together, lack of a sense of community or pride, nothing to be proud of anymore?
Lots of get mine mentality.