Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) pressured Republicans to name the specific crime they are accusing President Biden of as they proceed with their impeachment inquiry.
Ocasio-Cortez noted the recent arrest of a former FBI informant for lying to the agency, fabricating the claim that Biden accepted a bribe while vice president to take actions to benefit the Ukrainian energy company his son served on the board of.
“At this point, the story isn’t the fact that the basis of this impeachment inquiry is wrong. The story is, ‘Why it is proceeding anyway?’” she asked, saying Republicans have “no charges.”
“I have yet to hear in the chairman’s opening the allegation that they are specifically charging the president of the United States with. I am hearing about the ‘Biden family.’ I am hearing about this and that. I am not hearing the specific allegation by this committee. What is it? It is not here. And that is the problem,” she said.
Calling them out also will not work. Modern republicanism hinges on Democrats being the enemy. It is a belief that lacks any specific evidence, but the idea has been repeated so many times through accusations with no evidence, predictions that never come to fruition, and outright lies that never get corrected that from the perspective of a Republican, even if some single allegation is proven false, they are hearing so many bad things about their countrymen that some of it has to be true.
The Russians perfected this type of propaganda and it is based on a couple quirks in how our brains work. First, even a wacky lie pushes your beliefs in the direction of the lie. Second, if a lie is repeated it is more likely to be believed. Wrap this up in a major media ecosystem that says over and over “You can’t trust other sources of information. Here are 10 reasons Democrats are pedophiles” and you have armed people storming into pizza shops searching for children locked in a basement that doesn’t exist.
The final quirk of our brains that sort of seals the deal is that direct contradictory evidence to a belief does not weaken the belief, it makes it stronger. The believer rationalizes a defense of the belief in light of the contradictory evidence. Changing someone’s beliefs requires an effort akin to cult deprogramming.
They should still fight against it. They just roll over whenever Republicans lie about vaccines, borders, transgender people, Ukraine, Israel. When there’s not even a dissenting “opinion” from our president it’s really easy to tell why only Republican trash is heard
The dissenting opinion is unlikely to be heard. Here is another brain quirk for you: we hate seeing information that contradicts our beliefs. The attention-optimized algorithms of social media have made it possible to spend a whole day consuming information without seeing anything we disagree with. Traditional journalism is no longer the source of shared truth for our society, we have surrendered that to the algorithms with the net effect of fracturing society into groups with very different ideas of what the truth is.
IMO the recent rise of far-right political power can be directly attributed to the “post-truth” bubbles we have found ourselves in. I know I have overused the brain quirk gimmick, but these bubbles are creating a huge amount of fear and uncertainty. This over-stimulation of our amygdala reduces empathy and causes us to further constrict our in-groups. This makes it easier for power hungry politicians to push out-groups into “enemy” territory and leverage the fear of the enemy into raw political power.
I do acknowledge the irony, as I type this message, that I will be heard only by people that share my values. My hope is that you the reader see that empathy is the cure, and choose not to close off your in-group despite the feeds and the mod bans and the powerful men profiting from this mess.
I basically only have empathy left. I’m just trying to think of a way to help people I know that isn’t “stop watching propaganda.” Like I can’t think of something to convince my mother in law that the earth is more than 6000 years old because she thinks the English translation of the Bible is the greatest evidence of anything so y’know. It’s those lies that people so easily believe that if just explain where the lie came from it’s easy. But the bible is kinda a paradox in that, and I’m not risking that conversation because I don’t have money for my own place yet
But what does “fighting it” look like?
Yes, and then taught it to the GOP. The current GOP also uses other Kremlin tactics, an interesting example is “firehose of falsehoods”.