False Narrative about Jasmine Crockett

[Pete1111]

This YouTube channel below continues to post far-fetched fictional stories about Jasmine Crockett.

Even though the channel mentions in the fine print these are fictional, IMO this bullsh!t should not be allowed.

The narrative paints her as worthy yet all of these nonstop confrontations are false.  One gets an impression that she grinds all these people to dust when she hasn't.  From the comments, one can tell many many people believe these reports are true.  A lot of negative emotions are stirred.

 

Again, the above is fictional.   I complained to YouTube.  

Thoughts?

 

[stevenkesslar]

10 hours ago, Pete1111 said:

Thoughts?

How do you solve a problem like Maria?

In other words, good luck.

That's a simple answer.  Here's the book length version, anchored in a really thoughtful Politico article.

How Gen Z Became the Most Gullible Generation

The almighty algorithm is fueling conspiracy theories among young people and ruining their ability to tell fact from fiction on the internet.

That recent article does not answer your question.  It just expands it.   Or, I could say, it expands the horror.

Arguably, we now have an entire generation of Americans who knows nothing but this.  This is reality now.  Meaning, there is no reality.  Reality is the bullshit they see on the internet. And believe.

I have a specific memory, which is weird one, about when this started.  So I'll blame it on Barack Obama and Big Bird!  😨

There was a moment in the debate in 2012 when Romney was pushed on how he would cut the federal deficit.  He said he would cut PBS.  So one of Obama's clever staffers used that to come up with this clever meme-like idea.

 

I forget the name of the woman who came up with the idea.  But she said in an interview that the point was not really the ad, which was funny and effective.  The point was the meme.  It spread online virally.  Big Bird!  So the whole idea was that Romney was a doofus, because he saw the villain as Big Bird.  To go one step further, in 2012 the Obama campaign was generally viewed as having done an amazing job of using social media, like Facebook, to get Millennials to vote for him.

While I was delighted with Obama winning, I also remember being horrified at the time.  And thinking we are introducing gremlins into the body politic.  In fairness, the ad and meme are funny and effective.  And it is about a real issue:  budget deficits, fiscal priorities, economic stewardship, just expressed in a funny way.  But it felt like we are really bringing this down to a dumb level, and it will probably only get worse.

It did.  In 2016 there were a lot of articles about how Trump had artfully used Facebook algorithms and simple and often deceptive micro-targeted ads to win.  Most of it was probably bullshit that Facebook pushed to promote how effective Facebook is.  But by 2016 I felt the gremlins have now come back to haunt us.

2024 was a cesspool.  It becomes more and more stupid, and less and less connected to reality.    To their credit, I would say The Nelk Boys came up with some wicked funny stuff mocking "woke" bullshit that I laugh my ass off when I watch it.  Trump credited them, probably appropriately, with helping him to win by getting young men to watch their funny pro-Trump videos.  So, again, it is not all just lies and bullshit.  It was getting young men to laugh at woke bullshit.  It is a way of doing politics.  But there is no question that social media has lowered the standards, to the point that there are almost no standards left.  Reality is just whatever bullshit you see on social media.  And nobody trusts anybody like Walter Cronkite to mediate the truth.  So I just believe whatever Trump says, if I'm MAGA.

That said, we have been here and done this before.  We've had periods of massive polarization (like The Civil War) where a lot of journalism was no more lies than and propaganda.  This is not new.

One of the most interesting comments I heard in the last few years was by one of my nephew's wife.  I was with a few of my brothers and a few nephews and nieces. And we were talking about whether we were optimistic or pessimistic about the future.  The comment the wife made is that artificial intelligence is going to be the huge challenge of her generation, that will cause massive problems.  But she is optimistic that eventually Millennials and Gen Z will figure it out.

I hope.  It will likely get worse before it gets better.  But I hope she is right that eventually young people will sort it out.  And I also think she is right that Boomers probably don't even matter, anymore.  Even though she didn't say it that bluntly.  I think it's younger generations who will have to sort out, assuming they can, whether this great social media experiment is really new and improved, or just a nightmare of lies and bullshit.

I will say this.  We are for sure no longer in the cute days when Barack Obama was using social media to spread funny memes that are based on truth. The social media titans, especially X and Musk, are aligning closer and closer to Trump. Give us our fucking tax cuts.  Get rid of regulations and laws we don't like.  Fuck everything and everyone else.  We are the new robber barons. We bought America. We run it.  We tell people what stupid lies we want them to listen to that support what we want.  Fuck you and fuck what you want.  We could give a shit.

I think a powerful reaction to all that is going to build.  A lot of younger Gen Z, especially young men,  voted for Trump because they reacted to real things: Biden's inflation, wars, COVID lockdowns, attacks on toxic masculinity, cancel culture.  Now the pendulum is probably going to swing the other way.  And, like my nephew's wife suggested, this bullshit is part of the reason why.