[Kalamata]

You are right.

Even my husband is shocked when in his Sunday School class, so many Christian men are equally fooled. He counters their misconceptions with facts, and they appear shocked and in disbelief.

I just wonder what we (and DJT) can do about it, more than what is being done now.

[Kickass Conservative]

The Democrats are intent on repeating their mistake and starting another Civil War. We are probably already there, but in a period of Détente.

Like the song says, don’t know where, don’t know when.

Not sure what the final straw will be. They are so over the edge that when you read of Truman or Humphrey, they appear to be Right Wing Zealots compared to what their Party has become.

As Hilary just said, 40% of Democrats are Socialists. Am I surprised that her statement wasn’t even mentioned in the News, not at all. It just shows that people don’t think that statement is outside the norm of thinking nowadays.

Just pontificating outside the Thread being discussed. Carry on.

[freepertoo]

In my little Christian church on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, we understand what is happening and believe that Trump was anointed by God.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Even my husband is shocked when in his Sunday School class, so many Christian men are equally fooled. He counters their misconceptions with facts, and they appear shocked and in disbelief.

I just wonder what we (and DJT) can do about it, more than what is being done now.

That’s why, to me, there is only one issue - delegitimating “the media.” Without “the media” and its ability to propagandize the masses ^{we the people}, the Democrats would be dead in the water. I’ve been on that case since Carter was a president, and I have some conclusions/recommendations:

1. the issue is not the “media,” it is the specific format of "information” which the media are used to propagandize with. Namely, the “topical nonfiction” format known as “the news.” Journalism. If you are whining about “the media” and not laying a glove on journalists in particular, you are a loser. Granted that fiction can be effectively used against us, nobody is going to support censorship of nonfiction, so it is utterly useless to whine about it. But (as a mater of facts and logic, and hence of law) journalism has its vulnerabilities.
   • Journalism as we know it is wire service journalism, and all wire services - and most spectacularly, the Associated Press - have a powerful homogenizing tendency. That is, wire service journalism generates "a conspiracy against the public,” as Adam Smith predicted of any meeting of “people of the same trade.” (And the AP “wire” is a virtual meeting of all major journalism outlets in the US, ongoing since before the Civil War, which by Smith’s logic makes a conspiracy against the public inevitable).

   • Journalism is known (by journalists themselves, and anyone who cares to look) to be negative. And yet journalists claim that journalism is objective.

   • A claim that journalism - known to be negative - is objective is effectively a claim that “negativity is objectivity.” But that is a statement of pure cynicism.

   • The cynicism - the extreme skepticism - of journalism is directed at society rather than government. In fact, cynicism towards society cries out for unlimited government to save society from itself.

   • The combination of cynicism toward society and naive faith in government promoted by journalism is precisely what socialist propaganda wants to sell.

   • The promotion of socialist propaganda is the “conspiracy against the public” which a reading of Smith requires us to expect from wire service, and especially AP, journalism.

2. The upshot is that the AP and its membership should be sued under Anti-Trust legislation, and the AP itself destroyed. Because the mission of the AP - the conservation of scarce, expensive bandwidth in the propagation of news - is anachronism in the era of plentiful, inexpensive data transmission bandwidth.

3. Campaign Finance regulation either has to directly regulate journalism, or it has to carve out exceptions for the membership of the AP to putatively avoid violation of 1A. But freedom of the press must mean that the government cannot regulate journalism and it cannot prevent anyone from being a journalist. The FEC is unconstitutional, root and branch. And the justification of the FCC is very sketchy.

If you whine about “the media” but cannot call out journalism, you can never make progress. The issue is not that journalism is not objective - of course it isn’t, and cannot be - but that the people are indoctrinated with the propaganda that journalism (somehow) is objective. And that the bias inherent in journalism is toward pro-socialist, anti-freedom, propaganda.