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Comment by brokensegue | Hacker News Reader

I think the media has made it plenty clear he's a fraud. The citizenry is to blame (or I guess maybe the education system or lead)

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Anecdotally, most of the people I know who support his policies do so in hopes that their financial choices will work out. They are educated and financially well off individuals. Do they check all the boxes (international dev, economics, science, etc)? No, but they can be considered educated over the general US pop.

Not a great comparison obviously, but education was great in the Weimar republic as well, with a diverse and thriving press and near 100% literacy. The United States can't match those numbers.

It seems its always about something else besides educational level.

Germans were grappling with losing WWI. Americans are grappling with being overtaken by China.

54% of all Americans read and comprehend at a Grade 6 lvl. This probably includes the President and his closest advisors.....

It's partially an educational problem. I'm old enough to have been taught an idealized version of U.S. history in school. We learned things like how George Washington chopped down his father's cherry tree, but when his father asked him if he had done it, he "could not tell a lie." There was Honest Abe, who, as a child, walked 5 miles to return 2 cents that had been given to him as change in error.

Now, maybe this stuff wasn't all historically true, but in a sense it was better than true. It set an expectation for an ideal President. Serious dishonesty was taught as being disqualifying for the office of President, and honesty was taught as the deepest American value. Even if, in reality, prior Presidents hadn't always been honest, it created a tendency for voters to strongly prefer honest appearing candidates. Nixon's resignation was maybe the strongest affirmation of this principle that ever happened. I think it was with Clinton that this broke, and people started not to care too much about honesty and exclusively focus on their own perceived interests. Certainly the media environment, economic conditions, and the decline of mainline Protestantism had something to do with it too.

> I think it was with Clinton that this broke, and people started not to care too much about honesty and exclusively focus on their own perceived interests.

Or, more likely, when Fox News was launched (1996) during his tenure.

Well yes, it's complicated. That's part of what I meant by the "media environment." In the post-war period, broadcast media was mostly dominant, but it was both regulated and subject to the fairness doctrine, but also limited. There were only a few channels per metro area. News was only on an hour or two per day, and it wasn't that popular, so it lost money, but it was required by law as public interest programming in order to retain the FCC broadcast license.

The lower production costs, higher reach, and nonexistent regulation of wide bandwidth cable TV created the space for Fox, and then also to a lesser extent, MSNBC.

In my opinion, the distorted information propagated by these outlets had a synergistic effect with the changes in the emphasis of the educational system in the late 80s-early 90s to deemphasize honesty as a core American value.

You are right about everything except it goes back to Nixon.

I think the media continues to sane-wash him. The AP news headline of his recent meeting with Mark Rutte was

"NATO secretary-general tells Trump he’s motivating alliance members to spend more on defense"

It doesn't say anything about Greenland. It should have because Trump continued to push it:

""We've been dealing with Denmark, we've been dealing with Greenland, and we have to do it. We really need it for national security. I think that's why NATO might have to get involved in a way, because we really need Greenland for national security. It's very important," Trump said."

From Reuters, which seems to be doing a moderately better job.

"Trump wants to control Greenland" along with "Trump threatens to annex Canada" should be at the top of every headline because its complete insanity. No one voted for this, no one wants this, if Biden had said it or Obama had said it or any president had said it at any time every they would have become a laughing stock and every politician and voter would have risen up against them.

But it gets swept under the rug, in the same way all his insanity gets swept under the rug. Where were the headlines when he openly admired Arnold Palmer's penis? Nowhere, instead we got "Trump attacks Harris on immigration".

I've got my explanations but they all make me sound like a raving conspiracy theorist. Nevertheless, its my only explanation. This is what happens when its us vs. the billionaires. They can always outspend, and everyone really only cares about the bottom line.

Billions of dollars spent on elections by people with insane net worths and you're going to blame the citizens who largely struggle to get from paycheck to paycheck? Hacker News attracts a real "social bully" element for reasons I can't rightly determine.

It's easy to assume everyone thinks the same way. It's hard to comprehend just how different other lifestyles might be, so it's just easier hand wave it all away. It might not even be intentional or consciously being done.

Most politics chatter is in-group therapy sessions. For SC libs under a Republican administration the analysis becomes: did the majority push the Republican button? And the analysis ends there.

For this therapeutic session there is no room for looking beyond the absolute surface of the issue, like you did.

But unfortunately these narratives don’t just get trotted out among apolitical libs. The political scientist Rachel Bitecofer had a social media meltdown when Trump won. And again the analysis was “who pushed the Republican button”.

Those same citizens voted for Trump so they could put screws in iPhones and their children would have a bright future working in coal mines and factories.

It's both, we know citizens have power (Wisconsin), we know money has power(Elon Musk)

But Wisconsin was wondering because people hate Elon Musk.

My worry is that billionaires would fund anonymously both political media and they also own their own social media and so citizens would kind of less vote ... Or billionaire power would overcome that of citizen.

I think we need citizens to be aware of this but I also understand politics is a shitshow and i have so many hassles, why take another one.

And to that, I have no answer. i myself am stuck on this dilemma. I am really going to stop reading news because I don't think I personally can do anything. I have better things to do like studying or building software which can do better impact.

Though it also doesn't sucks to know about politics except I have seen people are really set in stone of politics, myself included.

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