It's kind of weird, Trumpers are always talking about the media when they seem to be the ones overwhelmingly brainwashed by it.
You have a point. However it's pretty much a viewpoint choice what "brainwashed" means. In a larger sense, it should be understood as people whose thoughts have been overwhelmed by a massive one-sided media of some sort.
The fact that a lot of people are choosing other media sources than yours doesn't raise you above the "brainwashed" class.
Cognitive dissonance is a known psychological phenomena that occurs when the information we are getting is at variance with either our beliefs or actions. Before "brainwashing" is complete, we go into cognitive dissonance. We resolve it by believing what we are being told, regardless of other facts. Or we resolve it by putting more emphasis on the raw facts. Often this makes people social outcasts of some kind, but it's one way to live that is less dependent on societal set factors.
I imagine..... well..... this goes back in literature to some of Dostoyevsky's observations...... that intellectual persuasions often contradict ordinary people's experience. Dostoyevsky was an Orthodox Christian believer with deep Russian nationalist convictions He wrote about Western-educated returnees coming back to Russia with intellectual convictions and ideals about reforming Russia. In a sense, not so different from today's college educated Americans...... progressives....... whom he believed had lost touch with their better angels or their souls somehow. His heroes were ordinary people with ordinary virtues and beliefs.
Putin today rules Russia more like a Czar. He makes a show to be at the Orthodox Church on Sunday.
Xi today rules China more like an Emperor. He is funding university Confucian centers all over this country.
Both cases are quite high on the cognitive dissonance scale if you insist on believing they are committed communists of any kind. But they are not.
And neither should we be so. We should put American ideals first.
Students today often experience cognitive dissonance when trying to be both educated and "American". The folks who go whole hog on progress are certainly leaving most of their native "American" ideals behind. Stuff like Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Belief, Equal Protection under the law, or Justice for All as some would say.
I probably don't read enough media to be seriously affected by it. Whether conservative or liberal, I always see it as propaganda really. Don't believe a damn thing.
But you apparently have a pure stream of truth you drink deeply from, and frankly, have little to say a thousand other libs aren't saying.
The reason I don't really believe the elections this year were run well in some states has more to do with statistical analysis and legal information about changes in the rules around those elections.
I was saying that there would be massive fraud well ahead of the election. I tried to tell Trump. Trump's team did not act before the election when they should have. Not anywhere near the effort they should have made.
I believe it will get more expensive for Dems or anyone to manipulate elections in the future, maybe prohibitively expensive, even for megabillionaires and the CCP.
Because most people really aren't all that brainwashed. A lot of people are turning away from propaganda "news" sources and looking for, and finding, actually accurate information.
The efforts of big social media outfits to regulate speech and belief will fail, will actually create a huge backlash.
The Jazz, if they got up on a soapbox and did a program on the Chinese government's breach of their agreement to let Hong Kong be a politically independent place, and crying out about the human rights abuses, would probably win a very large fan base, maybe ten times the LA market or the Houston Market. But the NBA now would not tolerate such exuberant moral stands.
But the whole NBA would be blacked outta China, and hundreds of millions of Chinese would find some secret place to get a video of a Jazz game. Right now, there's this thing about Bibles. People in China are ripping them apart, and making a hundred copies of each page, and sewing them into the linings of their coats. A hundred million Chinese Christians who would die for one page of the Bible. Might die for one page of the Bible, in fact.
That makes a scholarship each game a rather pitiful alternative.
Just sayin'.
