I was not a fan of trump, at all, but even I noticed this. If trump scratched his butt in public, figuratively speaking, the media jumped on him for it, and would then decline to cover any story about whether butt scratching (figuratively speaking) was ever appropriate. The media also cast his supporters in an incredibly dark light, which was worrying because that was roughly half of voters who voted for a major candidate. Media coverage was hysterical at times (at other times, their concerns seemed appropriate)

Seeing footage of Trump supporters and speaking with them is sufficient to expose them as bad people, I don't really think there was much spin. In fact, I would say the media was far too nice to him and his supporters, and continues to be.

This line of reasoning is why media has gotten away with being as deliberately dishonest as it is.

You can find unflattering footage of anybody's supporters.

I was never a Trump supporter, but as someone who has friends and family who are/were supporters, I resent the situation where people think like you do.

In fact, I think that attitude is part of why these people end up voting for Trump. They know what the cool kids on the blue team say about them when they aren't in the room (hell, even when they are in the room). Not to give all Trump supporters a pass, but they're not all (or even most) the cartoon character you have in mind.

But the ones who aren't cartoons don't really do enough to counter the ones who do. Just a bunch of whataboutism and "anything to own the libs" mentality.

And honestly being supporters of a person instead of a policy or a position is itself a psychological failing.

And how many on the blue side are actively policing their own?

> And honestly being supporters of a person instead of a policy or a position is itself a psychological failing.

You'll get no argument from me on that front, but I think that's a pretty bipartisan failing.

Edit: although thinking about it more, it's the person who is going to get your pet agenda items enacted, so practically it probably works better.

> You'll get no argument from me on that front, but I think that's a pretty bipartisan failing.

Not really? Has there been any cult of personality like Trump's not only among Dems but also among Republicans, aside from him, in American politics within living memory? (awk phrasing, but I think you get the idea).

Maybe Reagan? But even then, it wasn't this level of incredibly personal devotion.

Think about it: we never used the terms "Obama supporter" or "Romney supporter" in 2012, or "Obama supporter" and "McCain supporter" in 2008. And people supporting those candidates didn't wave flags with candidate names on them, etc.

I guess I was thinking more in the sense that people follow parties instead of picking individual issues.

But on supporting people, I think Obama definitely had devoted fans. Bernie did as well. I don't think Romney or McCain had the kind of draw to build up a big fan base. A lot of candidates that come along just aren't very exciting to anybody but their corporate handlers.

It's not all that surprising that an Obama or Trump character gets a strong following. Both of them reached out to people who felt like nobody in power cared about them.

> I guess I was thinking more in the sense that people follow parties instead of picking individual issues.

Yeah, we definitely have a problem in this country with limited options. I think a sizeable majority likely want at least one or two other parties in the mix.

I had friends who became Trump supporters, and I unfriended them. I believe in morals. I believe in God. There's no way I can be friends with people who, at best, only pay lip service to those concepts while using them to further patent evil.

To be clear, I'm not really on the "blue team" either. But that's a team that hasn't been taken over by the worst of its fans, nor is it motivated by things such as xenophobia, willful and prideful ignorance, and malice.

I think the view that you are advocating for basically bends morality to accommodate the fact that so many people have to do and believe x. I'm a religious person. I don't believe in changing the criteria just to avoid an unsavory conclusion about people.

> I had friends who became Trump supporters, and I unfriended them. I believe in morals.

Ironically, the behavior you describe is immoral in my view. I also am a religious person, and I also don't believe in bending morals or that talk will heal all disagreements. However, with political opinions, the primary reason otherwise well intentioned people support bad things is that they don't understand that they are bad. Shunning someone actively makes that situation worse. Sure you can't win people over by arguments, but you can influence them gradually, and if they are your friends, you should want to do that for their own good.

I understand your perspective, but I do not think that they do not understand that the things are bad. From what I can tell from conversations those people, they, for the most part, just don't give a shit about what's good and bad.

Have you heard of the fundamental attribution error?

https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/the-fundamental-attribution...

I think it's relevant here.

Added to "don't understand" and "dont care" is a third option: "don't agree", based on different upbringings and cultural values, some of which you or I would find abhorrent, because of our own upbringing and cultural values. But I think you should recognize that there is a good chance you'd have the same beliefs if you had the same life experience.

> But I think you should recognize that there is a good chance you'd have the same beliefs if you had the same life experience.

What's the point of this line of thinking? Ok, maybe we'd also join the Taliban if we grew up in orphanages in Pakistan after Russia invaded Afghanistan. So?

The thrust of your arguments here (the article and the life experience thing) seems to be to not hold anyone morally accountable for anything.

The point is to recognize the humans on the receiving end of your judgement. They aren't inherently bad people. There was a series of events that led them to where they are, just like you. They are capable of all the same things you are.

Once you recognize that these people are human, you have a chance at maybe effecting some kind of change. Looking at them as animals means you will never effect any positive change, and you'll probably contribute to an even worse us-against-them kind of environment.

Are you saying unfriend as in real life? I've only heard that term referring to social media, which I don't see as the same thing as real friendship.

Do you pay taxes to your government? There's a good chance you're funding some evil shit (among good things as well obviously).

Are you part of a church? Some of the people involved with that church probably do or have historically done some pretty evil shit.

I think life is messier than the picture that you're painting.

Yes, unfriended in real life.

Your examples are so many degrees removed that I do not think they are apposite. For example, people who supported Trump did so with full knowledge of his attitude towards immigrants, asylum seekers, etc., his rhetoric about building the wall (which many of his supporters cited specifically as their reason for supporting him), his "birtherism" re Obama, etc. Thus, they can much more strongly be said to affirmatively support those things than, for example, an American taxpayer whose money goes to help the Israeli government bulldoze Palestinian homes, or do any of a number of other foreign policy things that qualify as "evil shit".

So indirection washes away the evil? Is complacent support that much better than affirmative support?

Compare actively supporting "birtherism" to passively supporting blowing up brown kids with drones.

I think you're better off looking for common ground with the people around you, rather than putting up barriers based on which politician panders better to them.

Edit: Case in point: we disagree here. I don't hate you for it, I'd hope you don't hate me, and I think this is a fine conversation to have. The alternative is we could each say fuck you and go our separate ways, and the world is a slightly worse place for it.

Agreed, I did the same. I decided a couple years into his presidency that I'm fundamentally morally incompatible with people who could support such an abhorrent asshole. Not to mention their incredible propensity for confirmation bias, which is frankly reason enough on its own to remove them from my life. I lost a few acquaintances and one friend during the latter Trump years; I regret nothing, and would happily do so again.

It is good to see someone else doesn't believe that we should start moving moral goalposts just because society starts sliding into depravity.

What would all these people objecting to this do if they were in a time and place where some real shit was going down? Lynchings, genocides, etc? I guess they'd stand by and be ok with it and rationalize those things.

That was my point in another part of this thread though: we are in a time and place where real shit is and has been going on.

Just look at some of the numbers for casualties in the middle east as a result of US adventures over there. And most of us are standing by and funding it.

Trump is distasteful. But castigating people who feel like he has something to offer them where nobody else does isn't doing anything to improve things, it's just further galvanizing them.

cool kids? unreal.

> Seeing footage of Trump supporters and speaking with them is sufficient to expose them as bad people,

Only in a moral framework where not wanting people who speak a different language to move into your neighborhood,[1] makes you more of a bad person than writing software that gets kids hooked on social media that's bad for their mental health, or exporting jobs to China, or figuring out how to dupe people into buying more cheap imported crap they don't need, etc.

[1] Or insert any other worldview common to ordinary people from Ohio to Mexico to India.

Lots of bad ideas are common to ordinary people around the world.

And if you adopt a moral framework that emphasizes those common ideas in defining the category of “bad people” then you’ve got a powerful justification for elites to dominate ordinary people. You’ve also got a powerful tool for white cultural supremacy, because in that framework most people in say Bangladesh are “bad people” who need to be educated in “good ideas” from white countries regarding multiculturalism, sexuality, etc.

That's true, so don't define categories of "bad people", and just stick to categorizing the bad ideas.

> Seeing footage of Trump supporters and speaking with them is sufficient to expose them as bad people

You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people, as if they have no other motive than to do evil. I didn’t like him either, but give me a break and try to let go of that media narrative. His supporters were just people. Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight

Mask off, at least 46% of Americans are bad people. Most people in every country are chiefly interested in furthering their own goals.

Wanting to further your own goals !== "bad people". You can want to further your own goals while helping others.

I believe this "further your own goals" thing is a particularly American thing.

There's a saying that Americans vote with their pocket-books. It does appear to me that whatever other policies they claim to espouse, when it comes to the crunch they vote for tax reductions.

I suppose that's partly because of pork-barrel politics, and the huge tides of money that wash around US election campaigns. If all the politicians are bought and paid-for, then they can't be trusted to handle taxpayers' money properly.

Absolutely this. Media had my neighbor yelling in my face and threatening to fight me over our differences in opinion over masks. Objectively he's not a bad guy, and I told him that I think we have more in common than not, then went inside.

We really need to stop this cycle of hate. I want to feel safe in my neighborhood and get along with folk. We don't need to agree, but we need to recognize that we are Americans and on the same damn side in the end.

> You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people

So? You judge the moral and intellectual merits of things by how popular they are? That's your call. I don't.

> Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight

Not really. Only one set of nutjobs actually stormed Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of an election. You've bought into a narrative that minimizes what is an insane fact.

QAnon nuts aren't all conservatives, just as the people inciting riots and looting during BLM don't represent all liberals. Black and white thinking is stupid in this day and age yet it seems to persist

The ideals of Qanon were implicitly accepted into the American right, and have been working their way into the mainstream. How do you think MTG got where she is?

The Republican party is the party of conspiracy nuts. If you don't like it, then kick them out. But you can't, because a significant percentage of your group would be gone, and a larger percentage don't disagree with much of what the Q-tards believe.

Great to see percentages thrown out without citations, unless you’ve of course spoken to most of them throughout the US personally.

Also I’m not a Republican so

I assume you know how to use google, yes?

I literally just googled "what percentage of republicans believe in qanon".

This is the first result:

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-02-24/a-q...

Stop being so fucking obtuse.

It seems you don't read and are the one that is fucking obtuse. Your link says 25% (not a larger percentage) agree with some "central tenets" of QAnon (as do 16% of the population as a whole), the central tenets that is mentioned in the article being a pedophile ring in the government, which to be quite honest is not that far fetched considered the whole Epstein ordeal, so not surprising to see these stats.

It's easy to see why such a large portion agree with that CENTRAL TENET (capitalizing so you can read it when you skim this).

If you actually go into the study you might even see that compared to the 25% of republicans, 14% of independents and 9% of Democrats are also QAnon believers. So to say that it's solely a Republican issue is disingenuous no matter how the media paints it (even the article you linked over exaggerating its source).

Don't be so fucking obtuse and learn to read past headlines

Now you're being deliberately obtuse, and/or disingenuous in your response.

> the central tenets that is mentioned in the article being a pedophile ring in the government

The central tenets (plural) of the study the article references are as follows:

-The government, media, and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.

-There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.

-Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.

Quite obviously that's significantly more extreme than your ridiculously watered-down interpretation of the survey's questions.

More interesting tidbits:

-43% of QAnon believers are Republicans, compared to 19% of Democrats.

-QAnon believers are 2.7x as likely to be conservatives than liberals.

-QAnon believers are 4.6x to get their news from far-right sources than from mainstream news outlets.

QAnon is predominately a right-wing problem. Trump rallies were rife with Q imagery. It also permeated the January 6 riots.

In your mind, "both sides" is valid. In reality, "both sides" is complete horseshit. The right is full of morons and assholes, and imo intentionally obtuse and/or disingenuous people such as yourself fall squarely into the latter bucket.

MTG got where she is because she's a representative from a small, hard red district. The whole country could absolutely hate a representative and it makes no difference because it's the populations of those small districts that vote.

MTG got to where she is because she was willing to parrot Qanon bullshit to gain the position.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/marjorie...

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-02-24/a-q...

> QAnon nuts don't represent all conservatives

They represent all conservatives who vote republican. Literally, in congress and as our last president. If you vote for a qanoner you can't say they don't represent you.

Sure, just like all who voted for JFK were right then and there baptized as Catholics

They were certainly represented by a catholic.

Not all of the people who stormed Congress believe in QAnon, nor did I even cite that as a reason at all, so who cares? Can't really see why you brought it up except to try to strawman.

> QAnon nuts aren't all conservatives, just as the people inciting riots and looting during BLM don't represent all liberals.

Logical error here; your point would make sense if someone said "all conservatives are QAnon believers".

The problem isn't "black and white thinking"; it's somehow shrugging your shoulders at the fact that a former president of the US incited a mob to storm Congress in an attempt to stay in power, as if this is some kind of third-world country. "Oh but don't hold people voting Republican accountable for that", you argue. Why not? Party hasn't even held him accountable and are likely going to nominate him again.

Washington D.C. is a high crime city, but you can safely walk in the National Mall at any hour of the day or night alone, and people do. If it were anywhere else it would be a place be a place most people wouldn't feel safe at when alone late at night in a city like DC.

Know why?

Because Capitol Hill and the Mall are secured six ways to Sunday. It is the seat of the US global empire. Congressmembers and high officials are common sights all around DC and they move around pretty freely. It is common to see them around town. It would seemingly be easy for extremists to find these people and intimidate of harm them, and yet this almost never happens.

That's because DC itself is highly secured, at least where the government people live and work. Congress and the Mall are a secure fortress within a secure city. There are soldiers, air defenses, snipers, and heavy surveillance everywhere.

The J6 protesters had no guns, no supplies, no secure communications, no central command. They were no match for capitol security. The police officers who allegedly died that day are not listed at "line of duty" deaths, i.e. no one says they were killed by J6 protester violence. Capitol security shot and killed an unarmed woman protester, the only death attributable to direct violence. This was also not the first time protesters had occupied the building.

I don't claim to know what actually happened on J6, but it is quite obvious that many of the media narratives about it are highly incompetent at best.

You can only lie to my face so many times before I start to question your credibility.

? This is just dumb. Who cares whether they were armed? The point is that they had the motive to do wrong and they took action in furtherance of it. They don't deserve leniency for being various forms of incompetent.

It's pretty disgusting you'd make the moral choice to peg the media as lying instead of being appalled that people stormed Congress and fought the capitol police.

Do you hold the other occupiers of Congress to the same standard?

Congress chose to let them in because they could have stopped them if they didn't want them inside.

You probably didn't read and understand what I said.

THE CAPITOL IS ONE OF THE MOST SECURE SITES IN THE WORLD. UNARMED PROTESTERS DID NOT STORM IT. THEY WERE ALLOWED INSIDE.

That the media cannot figure something so simple out tells all.

Google "video of january 6 protesters breaking into the capitol."

Fuck your deliberate obtuseness.

That's the "basket of deplorables" thinking. You'll hear less-dressed up terms like "garbage people," like someone ought to be thrown out with the trash, applied to huge populations. It's kind of wild.

Nah, about 15-20%. Hillary's "basket of deplorables", as stated (IIRC "about a third" of Trump supporters was how she put it—her entire point was that most weren't actually awful). That was just true. Generous, even. The rest were along for the ride for various reasons, often because they felt compelled to vote for the candidate most likely to support a pro-life position.

Maybe not 46%, but c'mon. No Democrats ever came up to me at a restaurant and told my three year old they hoped Daddy was smart enough for vote for Hillary. I don't recall any attempts by Democratic supporters to run a Trump bus off the road. I've never seen the equivalent of "Fuck your Feelings" flags flown by liberals. Remind me of the years long conserted effort on the part of liberals to claim a Republican politician was born in some other country. How many of that 46% you refer to believe to this day that Obama is a secret muslim or Kenyan? Please be honest.

You clearly haven’t lived in San Francisco if you think crappy behavior is limited to the right.

The vile they’ll spew at someone who doesn’t adhere 100% to their views is pretty shocking.

And in terms of violence didn’t some Democrat shoot at a bunch of Republicans playing baseball a few years ago?

>You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people

They're not all bad people, most are just stupid.

You realize Hilary lost election using that same argument?

Labeling your political opponents as “trash” turns off a lot of people.

Sometimes spades need to be labeled as such.

You're a jaded, delusional, and bitter redditor.

Jaded, absolutely. Bitter? Rarely.

But delusional? Not at all. Please feel free to embarrass yourself attempting to prove that anything I've stated is incorrect.

That kind of rhetoric sounds awfully similar to what led to the tragedies in Cambodia, Yugoslavia and Indonesia.

I hope your political views mature someday to the point you realize how counterproductive it is.

Really? Recognizing that people who vote out of bigotry and ignorance are trash is what led to that? Calling out people who openly and proudly believe in conspiracy theories is what led to that? Assuming you aren't a Trump supporter, what would they have to do in order for you to believe they are bad and need to be called out as such? Start lynching Blacks en masse? Firebombing the offices of lawyers who represent asylum seekers?

My impression from this thread is that you'd make an excuse even if they started doing those things.

You're so deep you can't even if see how damaging your own rhetoric is.

You really think 42% of the US are bigots who will lynch blacks and firebomb lawyers?

I think you need to take a break from social media. There is a big world out there that you don't know a lot about.

It is of course ironic you take a condescending tone while trying to convince me I am judgmental and condescending.

I don't engage with any social media, and I'm out there in the world plenty. I read the news, I've spoken with people. We can all hear what Trump says, we know his policies.

I have had Trump supporters say to my face that asylum seeking children getting separated from their parents and never seeing them again is A-ok and deserved because it was the parents fault for trying to escape their country and come here. Those are the people you're defending. You think speaking further with them would make me despise them less?

> You really think 42% of the US are bigots who will lynch blacks and firebomb lawyers?

Why do you think my hypothetical is about literally every single one of them engaging in those things? If the Proud Boys and such groups started getting more active and doing such things, do you think most Trump supporters would care? Or would they keep at it with their far-right politics and support for him?

You don't engage with social media? What are you and I doing right now?

I've had terrible experiences with people on the left, but unlike you I don't paint half the country with the same brush. It's not an accurate representation of realty and completely unproductive.

You're basically doing the same thing the worst people on the right do - condemning millions of people because of the beliefs of a few.

Who cares? I'm not making an argument as to what wins elections, I'm stating moral conclusions.

If you really think that this started with Trump, you must not have been paying attention before. The media (conservative media in particular) hounded Obama about some extraordinarily stupid things. Famously there was a significant controversy one time about the color of his suit [0]. I honestly can't remember whether Bush 43 got similar treatment. Maybe the prominence of clickbait/outrage journalism didn't come about until the end of his presidency? Or maybe the incidents have just faded from my memory.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama_tan_suit_controversy

I don't remember that one, but I do remember fox talking about how obama was "disrespecting the office" because he took his suit jacket off in the oval office. It was at that point that I realized fox is not a serious news organization, because who could seriously think that was worth talking about? And then when trump got two scoops of ice cream, every major "news" outlet except fox ran stories about it, and I decided to stop taking any of them seriously, because they exist to make money by pissing people off, not to help us understand what's going on in the world.

I remember left-wing media hounding Bush 43 for his pronunciation of nuclear:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/09/why-does-bush-go....

That Slate article is actually pretty fair to Bush. But others from that time, which I cannot find, were not so fair. Nuc-u-lar versus nuc-lee-are certainly gave my left-leaning extended family reason for an hour of Bush-bashing at one of our gatherings. While I thought then, and still do now, that the whole thing was ridiculous.

It got way WAY worse with Trump.

Many news organizations happily threw out their journalistic integrity to "fight Trump". Honest reporting became taboo. You were either FOR or AGAINST Trump, and anyone not choosing a side was just secretly on the other side.

TBF, the man DID try to overthrow an election. Perhaps those news organizations were on to something.

Some of the stuff they covered was ridiculous, too, but they guy was an absolute machine for creating gaffes and outrageous behavior. Giving him the same treatment as any other candidate would still have looked like "picking on him".

If anything, they didn't pick on him enough for some things—I still can't believe the man became President after suggesting his supporters might assassinate his opponent, if she won. And that wasn't spin or bias, that's just what he did, the whole thing's available for anyone to watch. When he did that and his campaign kept trucking along without a hitch was the moment I decided our democracy itself was in danger (which turned out to be very right—maybe I should join a think-tank or become a political commentator or something, I also got a ton of the course of Iraq more-correct than most commentators)

Who attempted to overthrow an election and where?

The people who built a gallows outside of the building where the election results were being officially counted and threatened to use it to lynch the person presiding over that count if he didn't produce a fraudulent count in their favor and then stormed said building with every appearance of intending to carry out that threat.

The call to the Georgia Sec. of State asking to find 11,809 more votes was far closer to the genuine overthrow attempt.

…by covering the nonsense of the Trump show, they lessened the impact of the news of the real evil of the attempted overthrow. Instead of being presented as the danger it was, it was reduced to the season finale of the Trump show.

Please share some examples of the unfair reporting on Trump. But while you're looking, take note of how many articles were on substantive evils he was constantly committing.

It is inarguable that there were many examples of unfair or plainly factually wrong reporting on Trump. This list was compiled just a year in: http://thefederalist.com/2017/02/06/16-fake-news-stories-rep...

> But while you're looking, take note of how many articles were on substantive evils he was constantly committing.

The implication you are making is that it's acceptable for the media to report inaccurately or unfairly if the subject deserves it.

> It got way WAY worse with Trump.

Trump was a birther FFS. He was part of that lovely group of people who thought Obama was the antichrist for wearing a tan suit or eating arugula. He made media worse, not the other way around. They sullied themselves by pandering to his and his supporters' insanity. This happened way before he became president.

Fox has always been biased and never trustworthy. Trump is definitely what broke the rest of the mainstream media though.

Before Trump they dumped on Obama

Before that they dumped on Bush II and Chaney

Before that they dumped on Clinton

Before that they dumped on Bush I (I remember the ridiculous attacks on Quayle)

I'm sure they did it to Regan too, and Carter before that, and Ford before that.

But I would agree that any pretense of "balanced" or "fair" reporting got thrown out of the window with Trump. It's like they aren't even hiding their intentions anymore.

For some reason they don't seem to go after Biden to the same degree.

Before _that_ that, there was yellow journalism.

Before that, there were revolutionary pamphleteers.

The Trump hysteria was a reversion to the norm.

> I honestly can't remember whether Bush 43 got similar treatment.

Probably, but the main thing at that time was 9/11 and the Iraq war. Media was pushing the weapons of mass destruction narrative hard, and woe be the person that disagreed.

> Because it’s clear to me that that’s when journalists believed that their moral obligation was to further the agenda of their respective political parties and not care about the absolute truth.

For that to be harmful, it doesn't even have to be all journalists, just enough of them that people come across that bias often enough to be familiar with it.

I'm certain that many journalists value the truth and fairness over party, but I'm also certain that too many journalists put party/ideology over truth and fairness (in many areas), and the news organizations have become more tolerant of bias.

The NYT and Bush was earlier.