1 Comment

"But we are increasingly faced with people who are fed fiction and who will believe it, and therefore they're willing to believe anything, because they are looking for simplistic narratives in a confusing world." This is very true, but I recently stumbled upon something disconcerting on the "liberal" side as well. Many do not seem to have a good grasp of what is necessary to effectively push back. For example, I was reading another substack about the large corporations that had promised not to fund election deniers, and of course, there are many that are now doing just that. Reading the comments, there was a rather long thread dedicated to how one might punish these corps, including the usual boycott them and buy local, etc. (this has never worked). NO ONE had any real steps to offer, or seemed to understand the complexity and scope of this undertaking. One person suggested an app be built to show who all these corps are so people could avoid them. Yeah-- we're less than a year out and you're gonna get a dev to create an app (with whose money?), make sure it functions, market it, and convince people to use it, etc. Plus, what exactly, would this accomplish other than feeling like you had "done something" when in reality it would have little or no effect. There are some good groups out there that are using direct action to effect change, but I worry when I see people who don't seem to use critical thinking skills. BTW, thanks for the great article.

Expand full comment