Rachel Maddow looks at the closed loop world of right wing lies
I really think that everyone should watch this.
Rachel Maddow points out that the right wing media machine has become so large, so well funded, and so isolated from any outside sources of verification, fact checking or questioning, that it is impossible to debunk their lies to a large portion of the public. Worse, politicians who believe and repeat those lies are taking the “new truths” for granted and lending the weight and prestige of the US government to these lies.
“OK Ludwig, we knew this, so what else is new?” you might ask.
What is new is the scope and the nature of the large, self reinforcing closed loop of “sources” and the self protecting nature of a mass paranoid delusion, where word of mouth, that fits the group think, is the only acceptable truth and there is no way to communicate to these people because they get all of their information from that loop. There is no fact checking because fact checking is replaced by repetition through the loop.
What is new is that elected officials in America play along or worse, believe the nonsense themselves.
The delusions and fantasies of the spin doctors and pundits become the “truth.” Since no evidence that would challenge this new “truth” is ever admitted into the closed loop of the right wing media, right wingers act and respond to these fabrications as if they are true. There is a very dangerous and deep consequence to this.
No democracy can function if the voters have no understanding of the realities they are voting on, because their only information is fabricated to begin with and by default, live in a paranoid and delusional dream world. This is a truly large scale manifestation of the big lie theories of Goebbels. We have some large percentage of our population cut off from any reliable means of communicating facts or challenging the accepted memes of the propagandists. What is different though, is that in a place where the media is completely state run, everyone begins to suspect the propaganda because they have no choice but to hear it. here, because people choose to enter the false information loop, because of that choice, they have a false sense that they are in control of their information - thus lending the lies more credibility to those who become vested in them the longer they stay in the closed loop.
It is impossible to argue the facts of science because one in the echo chamber will not ever hear them. It is impossible to argue policy because one in the echo chamber is on a war footing over battles that do not exist. The point is that there is a vast enough mutually reinforcing system, from multiple sources, from radio, television and the internet, that they can and do all cite each other as the truth. Verification never leaves the bubble, because the bubble is large enough to always find ten people agreeing with whatever outrageous outrage of the day - and that standard, the standard of repetition is the new criterion for verification.
Maddow starts with the lie that it cost 200 million a day and a tenth of the Navy to send the president to India. This is completely untrue. However, the echo chamber of the right self -verifies and it “becomes true” to them. She goes on with example after example of this phenomena.
