WAPO: Trump shared highly classified intel to Russians in Oval Office

[Dill]

(05-16-2017, 10:04 PM)hollodero Wrote: So yes, I get "the Bubble", grasped the concept. I browse FOX some times, I even browse the comment section in Breitbart. You can add more accuracy to that picture, but in general the Breitbart crowd is the hard core. That the core is quite settled in an alternate reality where Trump is good and those who oppose him are Soros-payed devils is not news to me. I know similar cores in my country, and those are not people I would address, for there's no point. The FOX crowd the somewhat broader core and the rest of the conservatives partly the rest of the Trump defender. I wouldn't throw everything the latter group says into the bubble perspective or refer their arguments to "arguments of FOX, where truth is slaughtered." I think this picture is flawed, but I tried to make this point before and it didn't come out too good.

I guess many conservatives, many Trump-defenders would rightfully refute that your starting point fully applies to them. There are other details I see differently. As I said, recently I don't see as much a pro-Trump crowd, but more of an anti anti-Trump crowd defending the president. Who, in short, still are more annoyed by people like you than people like him. Now that sure is oversimplifying it, but that's how I see things. At least when restricting it to the somewhat limited horizon that is this message board.

Of course, I lose my sympathy now for defending Trump after that whole Flynn-Comey-Russia thing. Benefit of the doubt is good and fine, but a person only can get this benefit so many times. It's too much now. I believe that to be a rational argument, and I believe as long as I keep talking to individuals from the conservative side without immediately associating them with FOX bubbles, I have a better chance of a meaningful exchange. I hope people don't automatically associate me with a Hillary backer, a liberal, a democrat or whatever and throw me in that box, so I should grant the same favour and not throw them in bubbles either.

That doesn't mean I do not recognize the bubble.

I haven't supposed you don't recognize the bubble, though I may conveyed that impression given my emphasis on its central role in maintaining Trump's presidency. If so, sorry!

I don't believe I have put all conservatives in a bubble, or made them all Fox News watchers. (And am I not a Fox News watcher?)

However, I have asserted there IS a Fox bubble and made some claims to the effect that it is bad for US politics, has been for two decades. And at the moment, it bouys support for Trump like nothing else. This claim is descriptive and empirical. It is a partial answer to the question of why people would continue to support a boorish president lurching from crisis to crisis.  Someone who made fun of a handicapped man and calls women pigs.

The Fox bubble offers an alternative explanation of every crisis event we have been discussing in this forum. It recasts Trump's actions as heroic, fighting embedded obstruction. And it is rehearsed on the network everyday across a range of media and programs. It has become more intense or "radical" over the last year. It appears at points even in this thread, in local newspapers, in people I talk to on the street, on Facebook where old high school friends pop up to complain about "leakers" rather than Russia.  Where those well rehearsed points appear in arguments devoid of alternatives, I have no problem locating my interlocutor within the Fox bubble.

Whether conservatives fit the bubble depends on what they say, or do not say, not whether they self identify as conservatives. Many say they don't watch Fox or listen to Hannity. But if you ask them what Hillary did at Benghazi and they they suddenly have a list, where did that come from? If they don't have that list, if they don't buy that list, then you don't find me bubblizing them.

Criticizing Anti-anti-Trumpsters is not just criticizing Anti-anti-Trumpsters. It is also supporting Trump.
People who are more annoyed with people like me than people like Trump still don't have to support Trump, a president whose indiscipline and ignorance risk undoing decades of diplomacy.  And some don't support Trump. But when they do, repeating the Fox Talking points about presidential rights and nothingburgers and hysterical liberals, then I see no sign this is the spontaneous response of millions of independently arrived at conclusions. It follows a template which has been readapted to differing political circumstances since the late '90s. It systematically severs evaluation of Trump from the facts of his behavior. Pointing this out is about analysis and description of a current political trend, not "meaningful exchange."

This emphasis on Fox does not exclude the influence of other right wing media sources, big donors, conservative think tanks and a network of evangelical churches and universities.  It is not oversimplifying. Were the US public sphere constituted as it was back in the early 70s, I would not be talking about bubbles and Trump would not be president. But this is 2017. There is Fox. And because there is Fox, Trump is president.  Still.