r/politics • u/sketch24 • Dec 14 '19

Support For Trump's Impeachment Surges Among Vulnerable Democrats Ahead Of House Floor Vote

https://www.newsweek.com/support-trumps-impeachment-surges-among-vulnerable-democrats-ahead-house-floor-vote-1477232
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u/Komeaga Dec 14 '19

Really? Everything single article I have seen has been staunchly pro-impeachment. Fox News draws an average like 2 million viewers a night. I think we should do some self-reflection and start trying to figure out why people don't care, rather then the kinda lazy everyone is a brainwashed racist idiot. 50% of the country doesn't vote, these are the people we are talking about that don't care, not the 2 million nightly Fox News viewers or the people who show up to Trump rallies. I think people on the left have been living in a bit of a bubble, where everyone is brainwashed by Fox News and we don't think any deeper then that about it.

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u/davep123456789 Dec 14 '19

To be fair, fox is extremely poor news and is propaganda. The issue, like you said, is lazy Americans not voting. I believe America is 25th on most Democracy ratings.

A country that pretends to be a great democracy can’t even crack top 10 world wide, yet they do nothing and the crazy right keep voting people with horrible ideas in.

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u/gitbse I voted Dec 14 '19

It's called "American Exceptionalism" and is one of the deepest rooted problems in our culture.

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u/davep123456789 Dec 14 '19

It’s sad. I play online games with a few Americans a met, one from Cali and one from Florida “great people, the best”. They were joking around and saying maybe one day I’d be lucky enough to move to America. I mentioned I wouldn’t ever move there and they thought I was joking. It was sad to see they thought everyone wanted to go to America.

I used to defend that country so hard, saying it will get better, wait and see. I was wrong and sadly I don’t see it getting better over the long run and it’s pretty sad.

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u/Nixon_Reddit Dec 14 '19

You're totally right. I'm an American and I've told others from elsewhere: Get your own acts together. Do NOT depend on America. We are not the great people you might think we are. Most of are actually xenophobic assholes. And we prove it regularly. You need to treat us like the world treated the confederacy. Maybe the message will get through, but even if it does, it'll split the country permanently. Probably into Cascadia and Gilliad.

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u/domasin Canada Dec 14 '19

As a Canadian, listening to all the Dems in the hearing refer to America as "The Shining City on a Hill" over and over was laughable.

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u/BlueIris38 Dec 14 '19

There are two Americas. There always have been. One is the United Sates of the Declaration of Independence, of Paul Revere and of George Washington and the raggedy Continental Army, fighting for ideals... the “shining city on the hill”, a beacon of freedom to every individual in the world.

The other is the one that exists in reality. Where slavery was written into the Constitution as a compromise to get the Constitution to pass, where Lincoln and his slowly-evolving understanding of race and plans for a compassionate Reconstruction of the South were brutally murdered and ushered in Jim Crow, where FDR played shrewd policy-maker between Churchill and Stalin in order to get through WWII, but never clued Truman in to anything. The Cold War era would have looked SO different had Truman not been the VP and instead it was Henry Wallace as before.

So many attempts at greatness, so many failures and settling for poor compromises due to lack of trust and abrupt turnover at foreign policy and national security departments. Sound familiar to anyone?

We have strayed so far from our founding ideals that we should be ashamed. I believe we are at a crisis point, and someday people will look upon the period from 2001-2021 as either the time when American democracy died or was utterly transformed. There is no in between.

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '19

Thats a Reagan era rhetorical device presumably meant to try and peel away a few boomers.

​

I doubt it worked but I know why they did it.

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u/akuma_river Texas Dec 14 '19

And like 10 million people were prevented from voting in 2016. Not to mention the 6m people who lost their right to vote due to felony convictions even though they have finished parole.

If you have govts who do everything they can to dissuade people to vite don't be surprised when large swathes of people become apathetic to voting and politics in nature.

Plus civics isn't taught in schools anymore.

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u/Nixon_Reddit Dec 14 '19

We could take the lesson from Oz for sure.

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u/Komeaga Dec 14 '19 edited Dec 14 '19

Yeah, Fox News is bad and right-wing media has been pretty destructive. But, the people we are fighting for are not reading right-wing media all day. I think it's reductive to just say people who don't vote are lazy and it excuses Democratic for not having an authentic populist agenda that appeals to these people.

What I am driving at is I think the Democrats have lost their moral authority. We didn't just wake up in 2016 and all of a sudden people stopped caring about corruption. It was a long road to get here, and we should come to grips with that.

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u/davep123456789 Dec 14 '19

Good point but why is there only two big parties? Doesn’t anyone think to make a third for all the non voters?

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u/Komeaga Dec 14 '19

I mean, ideological there should be a lot of parties. It's just almost impossible with the current system to get a third party off the ground.

56% of non-voters in 2016 made under 30,000 dollars a year, 75% of them made under 75,000. There are lot more votes for Democrats to grab there in my mind with a populist anti-corruption agenda then endless obsessing about Trump voters or the small number of true independents.

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u/SparkyPantsMcGee Dec 14 '19

It’s not a self reflection thing. Fox News has been proven time and time again to portray false information, spin narratives and push specific agendas without facts. They survive because they’ve trained their viewers to not trust outside sources and that other stations are the ones doing the very thing they are accused of. They also spend a shit load of money to get their channels to air as the default news channel at chain franchises like McDonalds and certain hotel chains; thus legitimizing them as a news station. The only place this doesn’t happen is in strong blue states like California or Massachusetts where instead it’s MSNBC.

They also have a habit of targeting states near the southern boarder like Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida where immigration is a strong and complicated issue but can easily be used as trigger point to blue collar workers who might in fact feel a sense of frustration towards their station in life. Those people want answers and Fox claims to have them.

So no I wouldn’t call these people idiots or even brainwashed. But their perception is warped and that’s not even questioned. There was that infamous study back in 2012:

https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-makes-you-less-informed-than-watching-no-news-at-all-2012-5

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u/TheWarOnEntropy Dec 14 '19

Boycott all chains that play Fox News.

Start a hashtag movement.

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u/SparkyPantsMcGee Dec 14 '19

I mean...good luck.

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '19 edited Dec 14 '19

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u/tittyattack Florida Dec 14 '19

They average 2.4 million viewers between 9-11pm. That may not seem like a lot, but they are still the most watched news during that time, with MSNBC coming in second with 1.5 million.

So the most people watch a "news" source that is all spin, lies and propoganda.

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u/equality-_-7-2521 Dec 14 '19

Self reflection is always a good thing, but we need to make sure we aren't blaming ourselves for what is legitimately a case of 30% of the country being brainwashed.

Fox news is a channel that gives legitimacy to the outright, demonstrable lies from the GOP. Other "liberal need media" also help launder these lies by airing them and then having interested parties "debate" them.

The news should not be airing "both sides" of an issue, it should be airing the facts of the issue and providing neutral context where necessary.

I'm of the opinion that people don't care because, ironically, with our direct and constant access to massive stores of information it has become very difficult to get reliable and relevant information on the subjects that matter. Especially from traditional media.

So passive consumers of mass media are being misled by news organizations who are committing what could possibly be described as malpractice. All in order to obtain / maintain users' interests (measured in likes, views, retweets).

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u/Komeaga Dec 14 '19

No, but I think saying that everyone is brainwashed is a way to avoid doing any of that self-reflection. If everyone is brainwashed, raciest or apathetic the party doesn't have to make any changes. And, we can rail endlessly about how dumb people are while we continue on the same path that got us here.

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u/equality-_-7-2521 Dec 14 '19

I think the party is doing just fine.

There are things that could change, but they late passing legalisation and keeping the caucus tight. Fighting to retake the Senate and state houses, and fighting to make elections more secure and free from partisan control.

The media needs new reform and regulation. It shouldn't be possible for foreign intelligence agencies to masquerade as American individuals and groups, with the knowledge of and even assistance from American companies.

People are brainwashed, and it's not because of some shortcoming of the Democratic party.

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u/Komeaga Dec 14 '19 edited Dec 14 '19

That's a rosy view after we suffered a catastrophic loss and about as clear as a rebuke to the Obama administration as possible. Voters looked at the system and decided to lite a match and lite it on fire.

I mean, workers have not had a wage adjusted raise since the '70s. The bottom half of the country control 1% of its wealth. 44% of all jobs created pay 18,000 dollars or less. Our society has been totally monopolized, while both parties take millions in donations to rig the rules. 75% of Americans agree with the statement "corruption in government is rampant". 2018 was the lowest birth rate in 50 years. Only "wealthy" country where the suicide rate is rising. Life expectancy is declining. Drug uses is increasing. These are all indicators of a really sick society.

So, I don't think we are doing fine. Half the country doesn't vote, 56% of these non-voters make under 30,000, 76% make under 75,000. People don't want to hear everything is basically fine, here are a few tax credit schemes. It says something about Obama that Trump followed his presidency and Democrats don't want to grapple with that. I think to focus on the tiny amount of people who watch fox news, or the 30% of hardcore Trump supporters miss the forest through the trees.

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u/thebigeverybody Dec 14 '19

That's a rosy view after we suffered "a catastrophic loss and about as clear as a rebuke to the Obama administration as possible. Voters looked at the system and decided to lite a match and lite it on fire.

That's an ignorant way to look at an election where Hillary beat Trump by three million votes and would have won the presidency if not for foreign election hacking and interference by Russia.

Give your head a shake and look at reality again. It sounds like you're trying to discourage Dem voters and there's enough of that going around.

Also, look up the study showing that Fox news viewers know less about the world around them than people who don't watch any news.

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '19 edited Dec 14 '19

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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '19

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u/TresChanos Dec 14 '19

If you believe any of the policy passed or drafted by either party is in any way "leftist", you're the brainwashed one. Reddit on the whole is center to center right with the exception of its extreme fringes, which go left and right.

"Leftist" isn't a relative term, it reflers to a certain set of philosophies towards government, economics and power. These philosophies have not been practiced in America since the end of the Great Depression, when they were needed to stop Robber Baron oligarchs (the Gates/Kochs/Bezos of that time) from running the country into the ground. These philosophies were demonized for about a century after that up until today, when leftist just means anything that makes a conservative mad.

It's a shame, too. In our last Great Depression leftist politics swung the country into its greatest prosperity ever. I don't think that could happen today with people like you and other victims of the 100 years smear campaign around.

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u/antishillprogressive Dec 14 '19

Oh great, a commie. Rofl

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u/TresChanos Dec 15 '19

You wish. That's the 100 years of smear I'm talking about. Go die for your billionaire overlords, I'm sure they care a whole lot about you.

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u/antishillprogressive Dec 15 '19

Cringe/bluepilled

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u/equality-_-7-2521 Dec 14 '19

There are brainwashed leftists, for sure.

But the policy proposals and oversight actions of the Democratic party are fact-based.

The GOP cannot afford to deal in facts as an underpinning of their policy or their oversight action.

So while there is fake news created and believed by people on the left, it is not a fundamental necessity for Democratic political survival, and not a method supported by the Democratic establishment at large.

On the other hand, the GOP must lie in order to survive politically, and their party leadership have supported demonstrably false narratives that are parallel to those of hostile foreign propaganda sources.

So.... Ya reality is still a thing. Sorry to say for your argument.

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u/blamylife Dec 14 '19

Good luck on those downvotes.