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> In a district where 92 percent of people voted for Kamala Harris, fury and despair have arguably never been better business. In Washington, D.C., ‘rage rooms’—facilities where customers can pay a modest fee to take out their frustrations on helpless plates, cups, and glass bottles—have enjoyed a noticeable uptick in demand since Donald Trump’s victory in the election last week.
Keen observers have been yelling this for so long. Now after that drubbing only they are realizing now how MAGA thrives by building and enlarging the misinformed bubble thanks to fox and bro podcasters.
> A billion dollars was spent on this campaign. Hundreds of millions of dollars was spent on focus groups, polling, voter targeting and data analysis. What did the data show? Who was responsible for it? Why do so many of the decisions seem so alien and wrong? Should more of us have spoken up about our doubts earlier? What didn’t we know about the decisions that were made?
> Why the huge focus on Liz Cheney? Was there any data that this much attention on her was going to bring in specific voters?
> What happened to the economic message? Why could the campaign never settle on a simple message that would speak to working and lower middle class voters?
> Why didn’t the Harris campaign try to deal with the obviously effective anti-trans ads? How was this discussed and what prevented a better pushback?
> California just voted in harsher penalties despite low crime rates, thanks to TV news, a $16 million campaign, and a slow defense by criminal justice advocates.
> Trump voters backed abortion, minimum wage and family leave — but don't get that Project 2025 would take it away
> Perhaps out of fear of insulting their audiences, the pundits, journalists, and political consultants engaged in the lengthy post-mortem about Donald Trump's horrific victory Tuesday are avoiding the most obvious cause: ignorance. Millions of people who desperately want more progressive policies cast their ballots for a man whose agenda is exactly the opposite of what they want.
> The problem wasn't Democratic policy or messaging. It's ignorance. As Heather "Digby" Parton wrote at Salon Wednesday, people backed Trump's "aesthetics and attitudes" but knew nothing about his policies. Before the election, Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou at the Washington Post polled voters about policies without revealing which candidate proposed them. Harris' were far more popular — even Trump voters generally liked her ideas more, as long as they knew they weren't hers.
> The problem is most people simply do not absorb quality information. Instead, increasing numbers of Americans have a media diet that is mostly a bunch of lies, conspiracy theories, irrelevant diatribes and other such bunkum that right-wing propagandists use to deceive people.
> As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters told MSNBC, "We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage." Political organizers and pundits don't want to face that, because it is such a massive, hard-to-wrangle problem.
> Adam Serwer of the Atlantic reported from an Atlanta MAGA rally before the election and was struck by how much the voters he spoke with lived in a bubble of ignorance, with all their "information" being conspiracy theories and lies they absorbed from right-wing propaganda.
> "Their conspiracism serves to distract them from Trump’s actual policy agenda and his authoritarian ambitions," he wrote. Journalist Lindsay Beyerstein agreed, arguing that ignorance is willful, chosen by people who enjoy the permission not to be troubled by facts.
> It all comes down to the information environment. Inflation is down, growth is up, border interceptions are down, crime is down, vaccines work great--and none of it matters. Trump created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore or deny all the facts and focus on hate.
Trump considers his base stupid and he admits that:
> What's sad is that Trump and his allies don't even hide how much they think his voters are ignorant and deluded. Even back in 2016, Trump was raving about how he loves "the poorly educated."
> No one — absolutely no one — has more contempt for the intelligence of Trump voters than Trump or the people surrounding him. They see their voters as a bunch of yahoos who are stupid enough to believe their lies.
> The reality is more complicated. In some cases, it's people who are busy and disconnected, making them vulnerable to the pressures to give up real news in favor of an easily accessed and more pleasant diet of social media garbage. In other cases, as Beyerstein noted, it's people who long to have their bigotries justified, and so choose lies over facts.
> Evidenced by the willingness to vote for progressive policies, many clearly aren't stupid. They can read a ballot and understand the value of a minimum wage raise or protection for abortion. But when they're just looking at a name on that ballot and have to rely on outside information for context? It's hard to understand your choices when all the information you're swimming in is lies.
It's an exceptional dilemma when the electorate is not stupid not to vote for progressive policies but stupid enough to be benefitted by a wannabe autocrat. This indicates a grim situation of the country.
Trump and his minions openly mock the ignorance about their base and yet they continue to vote for him.
> Trump has solidified his grip on nearly half the voters in this country because, as journalist Lindsay Beyerstein tweeted last night, "he created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore or deny all the facts and focus on hate."
> Our modern information ecosystem, the social media and cable news silos have allowed him to construct an alternate reality for the Republican Party and they eagerly accept it because it feeds their sense of fear and loathing of the other.
Ultimately it's the anxiety coupled with rabid nativist feeling seeking for a scape goat: sometimes jews, sometimes trans kids, sometimes immigrants who run the nation. It's classic fascism in making.
> And it isn't just the kooky QAnon conspiracy types — Trump managed through sheer repetition to convince otherwise normal people that his first term was a golden age of peace and prosperity and that the country today is a dystopian hellscape because the price of eggs is higher than it was five years ago.
> On some level, these people know that's all nonsense and Trump knows it too. This anti-democratic coalition has a deep, entrenched grievance with the modern world and they use politics to express it. "This is happening all over the world," The Atlantic's Tom Nichols wrote of the anti-incumbent wave elections, "among people who think that others are unjustly living better than they are - even while they themselves are living well."
4B (or "Four Nos") is a radical feminist movement that emerged in South Korea during the mid-to-late 2010s on Twitter and on the website Womad. The name refers to its defining four tenets which all start with the Korean-language term bi (비, 非), roughly meaning "no". Its proponents do not date, get married, have sex, or have children with men.
In the United States, interest in 4B increased after the re-election of Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential race. Social media videos primarily reflected the idea that men had voted against women's rights by voting for Trump, and that women should not engage...
