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by jasonellis
3508 days ago
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Unfortunately, I do not have any data, only my own experiences. I have spent much of the past year debunking countless fake news stories posted to Facebook by people I know. Many of them with college degrees. I was told several times that Snopes is a liberal/democrat operative and has been proven to be wrong in the past. When requested, I was never provided with cases where Snopes was has been wrong. I was also told that PolitiFact.com was started and run by the Clinton campaign. These "news" articles got even worse with the Podesta emails. It's easy for the blatantly false alt-right sites like InfoWars to make up stories and then these click-farming sites run those stories with even more sensational headlines. This was the case I saw with the "Spirit cooking" and claims that the Clinton camp was really a pedophile ring (using an email chain referencing kids in a swimming pool as "entertainment" as proof. In context, the emailer was someone speaking of bringing their own 3 kids to the party) I don't know if these people were tricked, or if they were willfully ignorant because these "news" stories mad them feel justified in their preexisting hatred of all things democrat, liberal, and Clinton. |
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People who should know better STILL believe that the reason Clinton lost is that she really is "corrupt." "She is corrupt because of the email leak." The emails I read seemed extremely banal ("Should we be bad and get a latte?"), even inspiring in some cases (Chelsea communicating about the Haiti earthquake response). I never saw anything concrete that made sense to me come out of that, and I spent a good amount of time looking into it, including reading through the text of emails which had been cherry-picked as being supposedly "damning." Getting together with "elite" people is not in and of itself proof of corruption: how could she do her work as First Lady, Secretary of State, and Senator, without that?
Ranting about "corruption" is one of the tricks of demagogues. Just read this Wikipedia article and tell me that is not a spot on description of what we are witnessing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue
It is so, so very tragic. People have still not realized what has happened. People are calming down when they should be panicking. The implications of this episode, just for our prospects of surviving Climate Change, are tragic.