[ncgl]

During dt's first term I believed this as well and eagerly awaited the Mueller investigation.

Then when he won reelection I concluded I was consuming media in an echo chamber.

This fear you're commenting on goes way farther back than dt.

Ballroom, mueller investigation, Benghazi, guantanemo, tan suit, parkland, Alex Jones, mission accomplished, 911. These all got airtime. Some longer than others.

You're commenting on the nature of media to fill silence with noise, and the expectation we place on the reader to triage the news.

[itsalwaysgood]

Biased newsfeeds are one thing, cronyism and flooding courts/weaponizing the judicial system are a different thing.

It could be the case that the level of cronyism and weaponizing we see today is the same amount as in the past.

It's up to the reader to determine how much of their opinion is due to bias, and how much is due to a real increase in nefarious political strategy. Some are more diligent about checking their sources that others.

[lo_zamoyski]

> weaponizing the judicial system

To be fair to Trump, he was the target of lawfare after his election loss in 2020, for instance. He claimed later that he would have vengeance. Not a magnanimous move, but Trump is not magnanimous. He has stated before that he enjoys destroying his enemies, with relish and verve.

In any case, when we fixate on one political figure or party, we lose sight of the general picture. In sociological terms, Trump is not very important. He is more of an expression of the times than their cause. He may catalyze certain changes, but he's hardly alone in doing that. In the broad sense, the general historical trajectory is not really deflected by him.

A wiser perspective is to look at broad trends. One should read Plato's Republic. The decadence of society described in that book - degenerating into timocracy (rule by honor), then oligarchy (rule by wealth), then democracy (rule by freedom), ending finally in anarchy - are a good context for understanding how these processes tend to play out.

[cosmicgadget]

So those boxes of classified documents were totally innocuous? "Find me votes" and alternate elector slates weren't to advance his stated goal of reversing his loss?

[ncgl]

I think my point is you're expected to triage find me votes vs 911. And the fact that find me votes is in the news isn't indicative of democratic decline, its the way the news work.

[cosmicgadget]

I am not sure I understand. Both of those events are significant: a sophisticated terrorist attack on the United States and a president trying to coerce a swing state governor into changing its election results.

News triages the newsworthiness. Viewers triage what elements of the news that are most meaningful to them.

I don't really see the problem, except qualms about execution.

[ncgl]

News triages newsworthiness based on clicks, its incentivized to get an emotional reaction out of you.

The reader has to wade through all that to triage the absolute importance.

After years of consuming media that led me to believe dt was a Russian spy or at best a political underdog I stopped believing there was some grand scheme that he's trying to overtake the government. Half the country voted for him twice, the dedicated investigation did not convict him of collusion, the supreme court is doing its job.

Do you not see the trend to keep you anticipating some terrible coup etc?

[dragonwriter]

> To be fair to Trump, he was the target of lawfare after his election loss in 2020, for instance.

To be fair to reality, no, he wasn’t. He committed a number of very serious crimes flagrantly out in the open and the Justice Department was inordinately slow in responding to them out of a number of factors, including institutional partisan bias (even under Democratic Administration the bulk of the federal criminal investigatory apparatus has always been Republican, including political appointees at the FBI, and every single FBI director in the bureau's history), concern over appearing political trumping concern over enforcing the law, and, well, a number of other things.

[AnimalMuppet]

One I wonder about but cannot prove: I wonder if the Justice Department wanted the prosecutions to wait until 2024, so that they would tar Trump during the campaign. If so, they were well-served for that bit of trying to put a thumb on the electoral scales. Trump was able to delay the cases until after the election. If they had begun a year earlier, we might be living in a very different world.

[cosmicgadget]

It would be insanely on-brand for the dems to do this and they would deserve this outcome. But we don't.

[potato3732842]

Speaking of Mission Accomplished and 9/11, I recently watched Tucker Carlson's 9/11 series. I was expecting garbage but it actually did an amazingly good job building off of Fahrenheit 9/11 using the stuff that's come out in the 20yr since. If you take a step back the contrast does a really does a good job illustrating how just by sprinkling bullshit into the data the state, the media, etc, can do a sufficiently good job keeping people from connecting the dots or knowing what questions they ought to be asking.

Moore knew something stunk, but he was groping around in the dark in a totally different political climate less receptive to questioning authority.

[tremon]

What's the intention behind your second paragraph? It seems to suggest that the current political climate is more receptive to questioning authority?

[jayd16]

Why would losing an election mean you were wrong?

[cosmicgadget]

Mueller report unfortunately got way too little coverage.