Bret Devereaux

I still don't think liberal America has started to reckon adequately with how many millions of brains have been irreparably rotted by right-wing mediahttps://twitter.com/pookleblinky/status/1282483254357098496 …

Biden: after Trump is thrown out of office, Republicans will once again be good-faith participants in a shared project of national governance Republican voters: latest Q-drop indicates Biden has 6 children currently in basement, JFK Jr. needs us armed and ready

I wonder how much this is actually a change in the public information level and how much this is just that the nature of the internet is that the generally abysmal information situation for much of the public is now much more visible.

Of course it's true that voters across the political spectrum have always been pretty low information but I think esp. elderly and conservative voters are being absolutely assailed with crackpot stuff in a way and at a rate that's relatively new

A lot of what I hear about this is anecdotes like the above about people and their relatives, but I think studies about, e.g., what gets shared most widely and rapidly on Facebook bear me out

That's probably fair. I think what will be interesting is if it proves to be a useful strategy in the longterm. There are left-crackpots, but by and large, the party does not boost their signal the way you have Q-Anon supporters running for GOP office.

Obviously you have the gateway brain-melt of a certain 'news' station and talk-radio that feeds into that. But all of that, to some degree, is sustained by the political patronage of the party. What I wonder is if they don't reconsider if it gets them all unelected...

I mean, if we look at the timeline of the phenomenon, it doesn't seem to be associated with winning? Like, the last election where the GOP won a majority of, like, *voters* was the 2014 midterm? I think the oddity of the EC-win in 2016 despite the pop-vote failure obscures this