Quote Originally Posted by TitoFan View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Kirkland Laing View Post
I'm sure I posted a clip of this before. It's very well done but any kind of Trump event is going to attract endless nutters. It's a target rich environment for anybody wanting to nutpick to produce content. Here's another guy who does this regularly at a recent Trump event:

https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/sta...88240347570176


Yep. As I said... an extremely small minority. Ripe for nutpicking, like you said.

Geez... but just the fact that people like this exist at all, should scare the bejesus out of people.

Well... look no further than the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th.

Like the prosecution would say: "No further questions, your Honor."

These people have always existed. A large chunk of humanity has and always will be not intellectually equipped to understand even slightly complicated things. From medieval peasants burning witches right through to antivax microchip people and people who think lizard paedophile cannibals run the world. It's just much more noticeable in the mass media/internet age. Back in the day there were gatekeepers to what news and information was made widely available. In America there were three television stations which removed all the crazy from the news that people might see. Newspapers were the same. They'd publish the occasional crazy letter to the editor but just to highlight to their readers how fucking whacked some ideas were compared to reality. Crazy people were limited basically to letters to the editor or chain letters to spread their bullshit and so they had limited reach into the wider public. Today with the advent of the internet and the ability to start your own youtube or streaming channel and broadcast crazy shit there's nothing holding the crazy stuff back and a huge chunk of the population are unable to work out that the crazy stuff is in fact crazy.

And it's spreading from the internet into mainstream media because it makes money. Fox News currently make their billion dollar a year profit by basically seeing what's bubbling up from the internet fever swamps and running a few reports on it for a few days on different shows. If it gets traction, if people are engaged by it they run more. So things like Dr. Seuss, critical race theory and drag queens become culture war footballs. The crazy shit has taken over one political party entirely, the congressmen and senators (the non crazy ones anyway) know it's all bullshit but daren't speak out about it or they'll get primaried by a crazy person and get booted out of their seat. The internet crazy to mainstream crazy pipeline could easily and quite soon cost America its democracy.

The internet has a lot to answer for. It turns out, with the benefit of hindsight, that allowing all the world's idiots to get connected was a very bad idea.