MSNBC: The Age Of Misinformation And How To Fix It

Agree with @jbview that “the single most important story in U.S. politics right now” is the way the GOP “has sent clear signals that standing up for the constitution and the rule of law was unacceptable.” Politicians respond to incentives. 2024 is at risk. https://t.co/acXP8qx4ql pic.twitter.com/NZgxWsS0Ef

— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan) May 11, 2021

The articles I was discussing
–@Max_Fisher NYT – “Belonging Is Stronger Than Facts”: The Age of Misinformation https://t.co/C7CeVpau8D
-my @PNASNews – Why “Backfire Effects” Do Not Explain the Durability of Political Misperceptionshttps://t.co/cpaiFQhUw1https://t.co/YsKSSJSfh7

— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan) May 11, 2021

Occidental Dissent is focused on the PMC now.

Who are the PMC? The absolute beating heart of the PMC are post-graduates and the professoriate ensconced at elite Ivy League universities who are even worse than the “journalists.” These are the people who are paid to come up with all of the stupid ideas like transgenderism or critical race theory that radiate out and trickle down through the elite media to the rest of society.

Dissent Magazine:

“The Ehrenreichs characterized the PMC as distinct from both the old middle class (self-employed professionals, small tradespeople, independent farmers) and the working class. Emerging with monopoly capitalism in the late nineteenth century, the class came into its own by the mid-twentieth century and formed a core of the New Left. In their essay, “class” is both “a common relation to the economic foundations of society” and “actual relations between groups of people, not formal relations between people and objects.” In other words, the authors felt that their erstwhile New Left comrades related to the working class in a distinct way, not simply as fellow workers.

When the social worker confronts her client, or the manager his worker, they do so in an “objectively antagonistic” relationship. The PMC are “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”

These contradictory interests are a product not only of social location but of social function. A mediating class, the PMC only exists “by virtue of the expropriation of the skills and culture once indigenous to the working class”—cultural production, social reproduction, and so on. They relate to the working class with a mixture of “contempt and paternalism,” while workers interact with them with “hostility and deference.” As such, even as the working conditions and pay of members of the PMC deteriorate, it’s not a certainty that they will line up on the side of the working class, much less that such a coalition would be without tension. …”

The PMC are “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” You could say that the PMC as a social class are the American clerisy. Their job is to control our culture, manage the sacred narrative and keep the lower orders spellbound.

National Association of Scholars:

“The overall D:R donation ratio was 95:1. Among the 12,372 professors sampled, in raw numbers, there were 10,260 nondonors, 2,081 Democratic donors, 22 Republican donors, and 9 donors to both parties across both election cycles. According to Hughes (2017), 12 percent of Americans make political donations, so the 17 percent of professors in this sample is above the national average, but it is below the means of 22 percent for Democrats and 32 percent for highly educated Americans. This can in part be explained in part by the 21.3 percent of professors not born in the United States. The donations are almost exclusively to Democratic candidates and committees.

As can be seen in Table 1 below, the overall ratio of Democratic to Republican donors is more extreme than the registration ratio. The ratio of dollars contributed to Democratic versus Republican candidates and committees is $21: $1. As is evident in Table 1, the most elite institutions such as Berkeley, Brown, Bowdoin, Cal Tech, and Colby have the most extreme registration and contribution ratios. It is also apparent that donations are skewed in favor of the Democrats. …”

Brendan Nyhan is a political science professor at Darmouth College.

He was on MSNBC this morning to complain that ordinary people are communicating with each other on Facebook and live in a social media bubble where “misinformation” is spreading.

Campus Reform:

“At Dartmouth College, 99.5% of the faculty, administration, and staff who contributed money throughout the 2020 election cycle donated to Democrat candidates or Democratic-aligned organizations, a Campus Reform investigation using numbers from the Federal Election Commission revealed. …”

I have no idea why these people are so distrusted and dismissed as self-serving partisan Democrats rather than as “experts” who possess the “truth.” Could it be because that is an accurate perception?

Medium:

“While it is difficult to prove the role of political rhetoric in any specific event, the parallels between Trump’s racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric and the hateful language in manifestos like the one posted by the El Paso shooter are obvious and undeniable. …”

Brendan Nyhan saw obvious “parallels” between “Trump’s racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric” and the “hateful language” of the El Paso shooter. While it is admittedly difficult to prove a causal connection between Donald Trump and the El Paso shooting, it didn’t stop him from doing it anyway.

Can a man literally become a woman on a whim by wishing it were so or is that a Big Lie spread by the PMC?