Hacker News Reader

Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

The thing I don't get is that while you and others can clearly see the propaganda going on with US media, when it comes to Trump, people on the left all of a sudden go along with the propaganda and conspiracy theories such as Russiagate, or that Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian conspiracy. People want to believe what they want to believe, I don't know if the propaganda is done to control people, or it's what the people actually want - to believe their government is a force for good, that we're the good guys, etc.

View on HN

The propaganda exists across the entire political spectrum. Americans have been pushed to fight against each other so that they're too tired, angry, and distracted to focus their efforts on those in power.

Yup, it's "Divide and Conquer" all the way down. Not even just political, or mainstream media, but everywhere. - Endless distractions to keep us bickering with each other, instead of addressing the bigger issues.

My wife (who read National Review back in high school and voted for Bush in college) was intensely anti-Trump and went down the rabbit hole of listening to all the NYT podcasts, Maddow, etc.—the pee tape, “walls closing in,” bank records showing ties to Russia, the whole nine yards. I’d love for someone to try and put together an objective montage of those stories as they developed over time, cross referenced against the Mueller and Durham reports.

Jimmy Dore has done a good job chronicling all that.

Also Aaron Mate. He won an Izzy Award for debunking russiagate.

Links please.

Jimmy Dore show on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thejimmydoreshow

Aaron Mate is a regular on his show.

Jimmy has been debunking the Russiagate conspiracy for years now. He's a comedian turned truth-teller. I stumbled across his show many years ago, and my honest first impression was that this guy looks like a shady used car salesman, so I was very skeptical of his claims. He will go into angry tirades often.

But after seeing enough of his segments, and seeing how things unfold over weeks and months, I realized he's actually legit. Whenever I see news unfold now on mainstream news, for example - the Nordstream pipeline being blown up and Russia being blamed for it, I know I will get a more accurate assessment of the truth from Jimmy Dore. And again, it's not that I take his word for it, I see how things unfold weeks and months later and turns out he was right.

Note: The left smears Dore as a right-winger. That's so bullshit. He's actually progressive and more left than the establishment left - antiwar, wants universal healthcare, pro-union pro-worker, free-speech. Dore was one of the first people to endorse and interview AOC when it looked like she was a legit anti-establishment lefty (that turned out to be wrong). The left doesn't like him because he criticizes them from the real left and reveals their hypocrisy and corruption.

Links please.

> People want to believe what they want to believe, I don't know if the propaganda is done to control people, or it's what the people actually want - to believe their government is a force for good, that we're the good guys, etc.

I'd put it a bit differently but I think we have the same idea in mind: people believe what resonates well in their minds because they are already tuned for this. So if someone likes to believe that natural medicine is good, then their mind is more likely to believe in big pharma conspiracies and that homeopathy is valid medicine (yes, I'm aware that natural medicine can be evidence-based and homeopathy is not natural).

In that sense, propaganda always needs to consider how minds are tuned already to give them something that they like to consume.

You sound like you've fallen for the right-wing media propaganda. That is propaganda too. Even more blatantly so, perhaps.

If you want a more neutral perspective on American media, look at foreign media. Trump is worse than the US media are willing to tell you, and Hunter Biden's laptop seems to be entirely made-up by US media and a couple of political figures.

Are you aware that there is a site that has posted all the photos from Hunter Biden's laptop? There are thousands of photos of him in very shady situations. You're telling me those are all made up and photoshopped?

I have no problem believing that Hunter Biden has done questionable things. But nobody is arguing to elect Hunter Biden as president, and unlike Trump, Joe Biden doesn't hire his own children as part of his administration. So politically, it's irrelevant. We should be much more concerned about all the shady situations Trump has been in.

But also, people with political agendas have been messing with that laptop for years, so it's hard to trust anything coming from that laptop anymore. Whatever evidence there may be has been quite thoroughly compromised. The fact that it was handed to people with a political axe to grind, rather than to the police, was a mistake.

US liberals, sure. Actual leftists have as much contempt for both Trump and Biden, they are both part of the same ruling class.

"As much" sounds rather extreme. Biden has plenty of shortcomings, but he's not running the government as a mafia don and is objectively doing a much better job. I agree that US politics is too much of an oligarchy, but how they rule still matters, and Biden is a breath of fresh air after 4 years of Trump.

Biden spearheaded the destruction of Yugoslavia, was a big part of the austerity measures in the 90s and 2000s and was vice president during the vast increase in drone bombing.

Trump assassinated a foreign dignitary, but not much else. His rhetoric is worse and aesthetically he’s somewhat worse, sure.

I don’t see much practical difference.

I'm talking about his presidency. The breakup of Yugoslavia was decades ago, and it was falling apart by itself, not because of anything a specific US senator did. Of course lots of mistakes were made by many parties around the breakup of Yugoslavia; by the US, by various European countries, and most importantly of course by several Serbian leaders. It's a bit much to blame it all on Biden. But it was falling apart no matter what the US or EU did, unless you want them to support genocide.

It is true that Biden was heavily involved in foreign affairs during that time, but that may actually be why he might currently be the perfect president to have during the war in Ukraine. For a US president, he's doing a much better job at finding a good balance in supporting Ukraine without escalating than I can imagine any other recent president would have done.

Was Biden responsible for the drone strikes? I thought that was Obama's thing. It was certainly a terrible atrocity and something that should never have happened. With Obama's presidency I had high hopes and ended up mostly disappointed. With Biden, I had very low expectations, but he's surpassed them. Not my favourite guy, but definitely better than Trump. Better than Bush. Possibly even better than Obama.

Although I'm deeply disappointed about his union busting. Train union busting, even. I thought he liked trains. That is where I expected much better from him.

Biden repeatedly argued for bombing my neighbours, which then happened.

Of course Biden wouldn’t support unions. Like his entire party, he represents one faction of US capital.

For what it’s worth, US communists and trade unionists don’t talk about Biden the way liberals like you do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com