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Comment by gmd63 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not excusing elected officials. I would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE. I'm just pointing out that the Trump admin deliberately lied about its connection to Project 2025, which made DOGE's connection unclear to people who consume Fox News etc.

People are downing my comment for suggesting that many people who don't take the internet straight into their veins every day might have had a hard time connecting the dots between DOGE and Project 2025.

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I think at some point people need to take some accountability for their own information ecosystem.

It really is a Catch-22 though, since the imperative and ability to do that is itself derivative of the information ecosystem.

Which is why I blame, more than anyone else, the actual smart people (largely cynical, craven, and greedy) who didn’t through their weight against this stuff when it could’ve mattered.

All they had to do was skim any decent daily, weekly, or monthly newspaper or news magazine in 2024. Folks whose only news sources are Facebook shares and Fox News are simply stupid. The reason they don’t know WTF is going on may be due to their news sources, but they chose those. That’s a really stupid thing to do.

> Folks whose only news sources are Facebook shares and Fox News are simply stupid.

Maybe or maybe not. What I do know is that they are large in number and a political opponent should realize this and strategize accordingly.

Well, sure. There’s most of a century of science behind the finding that votes aren’t really made or motivated by the things a democratic idealist might hope they are, nor do most voters have half a clue what’s going on or how anything works.

All modern campaigns assume large segments of the electorate are very dumb. Because they in-fact are. You’ll get your ass handed to you by a less-idealistic campaign every time if you pretend things are otherwise.

The trouble now is the huge private media empire capitalizing on that fact was deliberately built over a period of 40+ years and is now entrenched. Countering that is gonna be hard and take generations. Everyone alive now is going to have to suffer for decades before it maybe gets better.

> would go further and blame Vivek Ramaswamy for playing a huge part in pitching the failed DOGE

Ramaswamy is a useless idiot. He wasn’t useful in getting DOGE to exist. (He rallied voters in states Trump couldn’t or otherwise would have won. It’s why he was easily cast aside–he didn’t bring anything to the table.)

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