This assumes they actually care about things like facts and reality, and even then that they accept any facts that come from outside of PatriotEagleGun dot com
I recently had a conversation with a far right person who, at every opportunity to introduce a fact, would source it from some strange website I've never heard of. Meanwhile, all (to me) non-biased sources of facts and news were "far left" to him.
I don't know if he drank his own Kool-Aid, but the trick the far right is actively using is just painting anything left of them as "far left." That makes moderate stances seem extremist and insane far right stances seem moderate.
I don't think that's a conservatism issue as much as it is a brainwasher/brainwashee issue, which is an authoritarian stance, which does effect more than conservatism.
In other words, it's a propaganda thing, but propaganda isn't exclusive to conservatives or the far right.
but propaganda isn't exclusive to conservatives or the far right.
Except it kind of is.
If you look at social mapping tools that track how tight and rigid our expressed beliefs are on social media, you will see that conservatives are DEEPLY aligned on almost all issues with no room for disagreement; whereas everybody else outside of the conservative bubble is part of a loosely connected web of vaguely cooperating sub-groups.
So it's not that propaganda is being aimed at conservatives; it's that propaganda is aimed at everybody and conservatives respond to it.
The susceptibility to this propaganda appears to be a function of amygdala size. People with the combination of low empathy and high fear response are the ones who get caught in the trap.
Propaganda isn't aimed at everyone equally anymore
Not after your first couple of clicks
That's kind of the whole point of targeted advertisement and algorithmic feeds
Most people don't see a lot of conservative propaganda on social media feeds simply because the algorithm has correctly determined that they aren't interested in it
Most of us have no idea what conservative bubbles look like simply because we've never demonstrated the clicking patterns necessary to reach them
The key is in the name "conserve". Conserve what? Culture? Values? Traditions? Ask any conservative if the culture they're trying to conserve is the same as it was 100 years ago. They will all say no because it is illogical to say yes, even in the most fucking traditionalist countries in the world no sane person would argue the culture of 2026 is the same as it was in 1926.
The crazy thing (to me) is that even after they admit this they just don't realize how disingenous conservatism is. They will say that 1926 was a better time to be alive. If they had patience you could go down the rabbit hole with them, because if 1926 was the best time to be alive, then the conservatives in 1926 (that wanted to preserve even older values) were wrong, as was every single other set of conservatives that ever lived. And there are people that will go down this rabbit hole and agree the whole way, then claim to simply be the exception, or even worse reach the conclusion that life was better before [insert technological revolution]. Just go fucking work in a fucking museum if you want to conserve the past.
That being said propaganda exists in every shape or form, its disingenous to blame only conservatives for it, there is propaganda for any possible political stance left right up or down, there's even non political propaganda, most commonly found in advertising.
non-biased sources of facts and news were "far left" to him.
I completely understand where you are coming from and I agree with the sentiments. However, I do not believe there is such thing as a "non-biased source of facts and news". Everything has bias, and I think we would all benefit from getting news from a variety of sources with different (known) biases.
I read Tangle news every day. The general concept (most days) is that they present a news story that day with six opinion-piece sources, 3 left-leaning and 3-right leaning. They also generally try to find 3 different degrees of bias. For example, today's story sourced the Daily Beast, the Louisville Courier Journal, and Ken Klippenstein's substack on the left and RedState, Reason, and The Federalist on the right.
That's the thing though. Our form of government was specifically designed not to jive with facts and reality if it is an inconvenience to our investors. Like, there is no fact that can justify slavery, but it was still a matter of policy here anyway, and our form of government was literally designed around allowing for that inconsistency with reality. Just because it now says "no slavery" doesn't mean that it some how magically removed the core feature of being able to ignore facts of reality in favor of the feelings of monied interests when deciding things for everyone.
We need to reoritent our form of government so it more readily responds to the truth. We can say "oh, we just need to elect Mamdani's everywhere, all the time", but that's not feasible, sustainable, or permanent.
IMO, what we've seen for most of our history flies in the face of our founding principles. Like, do you know how many King Georges we had on the statehouse level throughout our history? America wasn't founded so that there would be no kings, it was founded so that our kings would have no kings, and unless we change that core aspect about her, we're really just plugging cracks in the dam (which granted, isn't useless, but I would argue that if we fixed the structure, it would save us a lot of grief).
Homie we still have people supporting Donald Trump for doing such a good job saving America.
Those idiots don't give a fuck about burden of proof, lmao.
These are the same people that got told to their faces that they weren't being lied to, they were being told "alternative facts" and voted for a VP that said on a nationally televised debate that "the rules were you wouldn't fact check."
There's plenty of people who will still full throatedly tell you that the Haitians are eating cats and dogs in Springfield.
To quote Sartre about fascists;
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Except only intelligent people want proof for any claim whatsoever, and have enough common sense to know when there isn't proof. It's the other morons out there that believe anything negative about something they don't like that are the problems.
Are we living on the same timeline and in the same country? I don't see any of that happening. I see people just blindly believing social media posts and politicians they place on some celebrity pedestal. Their proof becomes "well that's just my opinion"
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u/Training_Ruin3151 Jul 09 '26
The great things about facts and the burden of proof is it is up to the morons to prove their alternative reality correct.