Marjorie Taylor Greene hit out at a British Sky News journalist over Signalgate, telling her: “We don’t give a crap about your opinion”. Martha Kelner approached the MAGA Rep. at a press conference on Wednesday (26 March) and as she started to ask a question, Taylor Green interrupted her and demanded to know: “What country are you from?” When the journalist told her she was from the UK, Taylor Greene launched into an angry verbal attack. She said: “We don’t give a crap about your opinion and your reporting. Why don’t you go back to your country where you have a major migrant problem?”
It works. People vote her in.
Around 2015 someone (most likely Cambridge Analytica) found out that to drive engagement, all you need is outrage. Ever since, it has influenced online discourse and politics worldwide. It’s been a downright paradigm shift: suddenly the objective truth doesn’t matter anymore. Reality is malleable. Once you realize this you see it everywhere: engagement bait, usually in the form of outrage porn. That’s the first step. The second one is echo chambers and polarization.
Someone simply figured out how human brains worked and hijacked the system behind it. That’s it, that’s the whole deal. The world’s best psychologists aren’t employed by medical companies or in academia; they’ve been hired by venture capitalists to find every possible flaw in the human psyche, in order to identify and then weaponize those, ad infinitum. This is not a battle than can be won by fact-checking and calling for decorum.
We’ve been at war for our very attention and insight for almost a decade, we’re losing badly and no one even understands, let alone has a constructive way to fight back.
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Apparently outrage isn’t enough because we got stuck with this nightmare
This realization came way before 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
Worked even before trough religion and fear mongering.
People are fucking stupid. The lack of school funding works.
Scumbags?
Yeah, the rest of the world forgets how many Ray-Ban and eagle and flag t-shirt wearing, truck driving, chubby, bearded, gym bro weirdos and how many vapid, bleached blonde, red lipstick wearing, pearl clutching Karen’s there are in America. She’s got their votes on lockdown.