More than half of the $23 million-plus [Trump] raised has come from people who identify their occupation as “retired.” Other titles of people who gave the most contributions in aggregate include “attorney,” “CEO,” “sales” and “home maker.”
That’s awful but not surprising. I would wager that the Venn Diagram of people who donated and people who watch Fox News 24/7 is probably pretty close to just 1 circle.
Like the pillow guy and everyone else on there, they’re grifters playing on the fears of the elderly. It’s not unlike the scammer call YT vids where they take control of the computer.
It makes me sad because I do feel like this older demographic is more susceptible to the fear mongering so they are taken advantage of as a result, but while they’re sending money the rest of us have to suffer the consequences of their actions if it ends up tipping an election one way vs another. There is no good answer, sadly. Snake oil salesmen of some sort have probably existed since ear the beginning of modern civilization.
It just wouldn’t feel so wretched if they weren’t the ones that told us growing up to not listen to everything we heard on the internet, or to always watch out for slick fellas looking to cash in on you, then them turn around and get taken for just that. Then they turn around and yell at us about how we’re now the ones being unreasonable for having listened to them all those years.
I feel bad they’ve been taken advantage of. But I don’t feel bad that they let themselves get to that point.
Everyone has to know when enough is enough.
Yep, and don’t forget that they’re the ones who taught us to stand up for what’s right, but now they stand up for someone who is clearly a career criminal and the worst kind of racist, and a lying, cheating theif. Their response to all that? A resounding “meh, politics. It’s all political”
Yeah, you are definitely not wrong. My mom is one of them now and the brain rot is real, but also so much of my childhood makes sense. It was always there in some form.
Whoever heard of a grifter scamming retirees?
This was my first thought - the religious and the elderly are always the best targets for grifting. The right has so few committed ideologues. Most of them are just in it to steal grandpa’s pension checks.
Indicative of declining critical thinking skills, as is voting against your own self interest, or clear evidence of the power of propaganda?
I vote for the latter. Fox is psyop masquerading as a news channel.
Why not both? Anyone can fall for propaganda but the worse your cognition the easier it’s going to be to get sucked in.
Edit: IN. Sucked IN.
Sadly, I believe you’re correct, as I’ve seen firsthand its effects on someone without cognitive decline.
A few years ago my mother’s demeanor and topics of conversation (I lived 1000 miles away, but we spoke by phone frequently) changed markedly over the course of weeks.
Much more fearful, a sudden focus on border issues, illegals…took a minute to tweak, but then I asked if she’d changed news providers. Uh-huh, Fox it was.
A couple of years ago, my mom somehow seemed very insistent about the “caravan” crossing the border. Turns out she had started watching Fox news when I didn’t even know her to pay attention to news at all.
I was trying to explain to her that this was really small potatoes news since - at the time - I had seen very few headlines about it on the usual subs on reddit. I also encouraged her to strive toward empathy about why a person would leave their home and all their previous life to travel by foot through Mexico to the US. And then after more news came out, tried to point out that they were asylum seekers from a country the US had intentially interfered with to maintain control in the region. She never got super Trumpy, but she seemed to keep talking about the “border crisis” almost every time we had a discussion. I then flatly told her that this was a distraction because of mid-term elections.
Eventually, she abandoned Fox news, but I’m not sure if it was my brow beating or some other reason. She started watching CNN a lot and a few times that I’d walk through the living room in the evenings, Don Lemon’s big head (or Chris Cuomo) was just always at this shrill tone of exasperation. One day I told her that just because we may agree with what’s being said here doesn’t make this news either. News shouldn’t tell you how to feel about what’s going on in the world.
I’m harkening back to my college journalism days when my professors bemoaned the 24-hour news cycle. Working in a newsroom, we would sneer at the way TV stations covered current events. And now, I don’t know how or when we will ever get to a point where the news can be communicated during prime time that doesn’t get editorialized to hell - on either side of the aisle.
Fucking boomers. Like 50 % of the worlds problems
It’s not my fault
Good. Let them die off from hunger.
