There's still high level politicians who believe "hands up, don't shoot" and that Michael Brown was murdered.
Some people still thinking Kyle Rittenhouse went to a BLM protest in order to murder black protesters and indeed that's exactly what he did.
That smirking MAGA kid sought out a Native elder so he could get in his face and block his way.
Don't say gay is literally don't say gay.
Nascar crews hang nooses.
Trump actually said people should inject bleach. There's definitely ambiguity here, but a speck 9f charitable reading indicates otherwise.
Publish the worst spin then print a retraction once stories already have traction is the play. And once people make up their minds they're loathe to change it. Not quite what happened here and the retraction didn't take long, but wanting to believe the worst is the sop. Sucks.
Yeah, I think this is an important series of points. I'm being dubbed a righty on here - ridiculous, though I understand why - and I am more than happy to admit to widespread acceptance of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, whatever you want to call it, on the right. There are mounds of conspiracy theories, false interpretations, and outright false information which gets canonized in right leaning circles.
The problem is that there is a
lot of this on the left as well - but they think they're too clever to fall for it and it makes them the ideal dupes for it. For a lot of them the believe they're a collective of big-brains orbiting each other, and they hardly believe that people with the twin towers of integrity and intellect matchings their own could be either incorrect of dishonest - so there is a lot of uncritical acceptance of smears of the bad people going on. This is the left's version of "I do my own research" - and many of them are totally unaware of their massive blindspots.
You've given some great examples, but there are plenty more. How many people still base their understanding of George Zimmerman on the
misleadingly edited tape of Zimmerman's call to 9/11? That was practically the launching off point for BLM and a huge portion of the public perception was stirred up by the media deceptively editing tape to make it seem like something it wasn't. Or what about the infamous "good people on both sides" comment by Trump, where the full speech radically changes the context? Or more generally, things like Covid mortality rates or the number of unarmed black people killed per year by cops or the gender wage gap - you talk to your average left leaning person and they're oftentimes wildly misinformed on the subject but passionately defensive of that misinformation. There are huge parts of the left-leaning narrative which are based on falsehoods and misinformation and they're so busy blaming the other side for it that they don't realize they're neck deep in it too - and the trusted media is usually the group that is spewing the bullshit.
The now infamous incident of Loiosh's absolutely ass-blind acceptance of the idea that the Florida House Bill 1557 (the "don't say gay" bill) made saying gay illegal is a prime example of this. The guy hears a boatload of smears from talking heads and, without a hint of exploration of self-reflection, he believes it wholesale to the point where he accuses others of believing anything when he is literally spewing misinformation fed to him by the media. His response? Double down - "oh, it's just a one off, this isn't a systemic problem." It's almost pathological, this naïve acceptance of their own misinformed state by hyper-critical analysis of that of others.
It's the same problem I see with highly university educated people... They think they are way, way smarter than they are, and while falling for the inverted version of the things they are hypercritical of right leaning people for. They are downright defensive about protecting their tremendous bias in certain areas. It's frustrating, because the whole cornerstone of the Western tradition - the story of Socrates - is one of profound humility in one's ignorance. The more educated people get these days the more they resemble the self-assured in their ignorance Athenians Socrates was interrogating - but they don't see it.
