Thursday Roundup: 11-21-24

Some of the most insightful information Public Enlightenment saw this week.

Michael Tomasky offers clear-eyed analysis of the right-wing’s dominant media influence in this country.

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

Our information ecosystem is awash in disinformation and messages of hate. Every American must understand this if we are going to fight our way out of the toxic muck of low-quality information. If you click on only one link in this post…READ IT HERE.

James Fallows further muses on Tomasky’s theme in his piece “Swimming in the Sea of Disinformation.” He says it’s not a new problem that Americans rely on “pictures in our head” to draw half-baked conclusions about national events they haven’t personally witnessed. Fallows was inspired by the speakers at an event he attended in Dayton, OH. There he saw Jimmy Carter’s grandson deliver an eloquent speech about the problem we face. Some of the younger Carter’s words…

After the election, as I started watching the blame game unfold, I received clarity from a despondent Biden staffer. He asked, ‘How do you spend a billion dollars and not win?’ The staffer missed that one of Trump's new supporters spent 44 times that much to buy Twitter and control the narrative. We have to observe that it worked.

Fallows is a hero of mine and I highly recommend his newsletter. READ IT HERE.

J.P. Hill offers a class struggle critique of how young men are lied to by billionaires to get them to act against their self-interest titled “Acting in our own self interest, fellas.” It’s a tale as old as time.

This solidarity, this understanding that all of the struggles of the working class around the globe are tied together, is the only way we get free. Overcoming billionaires and their systems of capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy takes an enormous amount of power. And the number one tool that the bosses use to stop us from building that power to topple them off their perch is divide and conquer. That’s why they give podcasters the big bucks to tell us women are the problem, not the corporations poisoning our water and creating a world where microplastics inhabit our brains, and our balls. That’s why they tell us to blame women who run for office, instead of the billionaires who buy elections. The ruling class is afraid of us, and more than anything they’re afraid of the masses locking arms across lines of division and rising up.

We cannot move forward towards better outcomes until we detach ourselves, especially our men, from the constant barrage of billionaire lies and anti-social messaging that we consume each day. READ IT HERE.

Here’s to healthier information!