As we just had an election, we are reminded of the way the media plays a role in elections in modern America. Both sides of the isle have their own respective forms of media, but over the last six to seven years we have seen a major evolution of media. The evolution of media has seen this change in the right-wing that has become a major problem in the way we consume.
The king of right-wing media is Fox News, but there are other big players such as Infowars, Breitbart, and One America News. All these major outlets continue to push the same ideals of the right-wing to their viewers. To understand the right-wing, we must understand their most important fundamental: Religion. Christianity is the biggest anchor to every argument from abortion to same-sex marriage, to health.
Social Media: It’s influence.
How do you make information become more consumable, quicker to access, and update live? You use social media. In this digital information age, there are two major platforms for you to get information from thousands of news outlets and people posting it. You can go to the cesspool known as Twitter where arguments occur every second of every day in every comment section. A place that has recently been nearly turned on to its head with its recent purchase by Elon Musk. A place that at this rate could very well end up like the next Myspace.
Or you can go to Facebook, owned by Meta, a company that is quickly draining all its funds and laying off its employees to try to push the Metaverse. A future that we, as a society, aren't quite ready for yet. A platform that I personally quit using years ago due to the outrageously insane ideas that I have heard, those that which people genuinely believe in. A place where fiction is almost always seen as fact. A place where the phrase “don’t believe everything you see on the internet” is hypocritically said, whilst the one saying it indulges in believing the headlines written by the satirical site The Onion are true headlines.
In general, you can see Twitter as left wing and Facebook as right wing, but the crossover of users and the recent changes blur the line.
2016 Election:
Remember when everyone thought it was a joke, Trump was going to win the election? You see the hats everywhere, the constant repetition, “Make America Great Again.” All the right-wing outlets convinced people that America is the best country on earth, while also saying it used to be better back in the “good old days”. You saw the common argument on Facebook that always led to “America is not great,” with the response being “if you don’t like it, leave.” In fact, that continues today.
Trump knew how to get his voters, created a character, this idea of going against the norm, that conservatives are being stifled. He was politically incorrect, said what he thought, a manly man, the perfect representation of what the right wanted. He made politics another one of his reality shows. Winning was all that he focused on, it’s human nature, he said he would win so much his supporters would be bored of winning. His philosophy became, the more blatant the contradiction, the better. If I straight deny it and go on like it didn’t happen, you must decide what I meant.
Fact Checking:
The right denies facts, claim its Fake News.
They have a denial in science leading into Conspiracy: From things everyone questions like the JFK assassination, to dangerous scientific denial that vaccines cause autism and those essential oils cure everything, to off the deep end with QAnon and the Deep States.
I looked at Google Trends to help me with this part. Fact Checking.
Every election cycle, it peaked in October to November, but after 2016 the floor of the chart rose and all the time we heard, fact check this, and Snopes that. Social Media began to put fact check warnings on posts. This combats the means of putting belief over knowledge.
2020 Election:
Why did we vote for Biden? Most people say it's because we had to, he was the lesser of two evils, we had to “vote Trump out”
You heard it in the last election: Crooked Hillary, now it’s Sleepy Joe.
You heard it in the last election: Make America Great Again, MAGA, now it’s Keep America Great.
You heard it in the last election: Childish arguments for debates, this perpetuation of the character Trump.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Philosophy:
We must take the philosophical stance in trusting in one senses, not what we see day to day in our media outlets. We easily can listen to believe in those who are in a position of power over us.
In Fantasyland, Kurt Andersen said have seen protestant and enlightenment virtues taken them to the extreme.
You are not the boss of me.
My intuitions are equal to facts
My skepticism is profound, except concerning my beliefs.
All three concepts of Self-righteous individualism.
We reject reason. We engage in this fantasy to relieve stress, this stress in the society where the economy is going downhill, violence is rising, and god knows else what is going wrong.
As I said earlier, the fundamental of the right-wing is religion. Philosophy challenges the existence of God, and if we take the philosophical stance removing the existence of God from the equation, the explanation of the earlier arguments such as abortion, health, and same sex marriage, mostly do not exist in a logical reasoning that would be left. Every argument on social media goes straight to religion which contributes to this divide of religious thought and secular thought.
We must mindfully consume media.
Conclusion:
We have created these images associated with our ideals. That leads to idolization of these images and figures.
What the right-wing media tries to encapsulate is “the good old days”, this nostalgia fantasy that older generations believe in. That America was great back when everyone was Christian, when discrimination was normalized, when marriage was only a man and a woman, and a man was a man, and a woman was a woman.
It’s the fantasy that all of that was perfectly fine, justifiable. The fantasy of the American Dream.
The book that was attached to this topic is Fantasyland and as said by Kurt Andersen the biggest fantasy portrayed is The American Dream.
When I think of it, I think of the George Carlin quote -
“...they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
We hope that this deep divide of the country is only a phase. We can only hope.
I hope we can do more than hope.
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