this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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remember when mandela actually became president of south africa after spending 27 years in prison, he made a speech and said something like "the boers are no longer our enemy, they are our countrymen." Basically, they are our enemy now, because they've fallen victim to the propaganda that's been fed to them by the television they watch, the online communities they frequent, the churches they go to and the radio personalities they listen to. But if one can reach out to them, talk to them and get them to listen and hear, then it might be possible to deprogram them from those hateful stances they hold against people who are not like them.
For example, one can try to talk to them about immigration by asking why they don't like immigration. they might respond like "the immigrants take our jobs", which is the lie that is told to them so that they want to fight other working class people instead of focusing that fight on the people who actually are responsible for their suffering: the wealthy.
And then what happened?
Facts Don’t Change Minds – Social Networks, Group Dialogue, and Stories Do
The best way to break someone out of a partisan media death spiral is to cut the power cord to their television.
I absolutely agree that there are a host of people in a gray zone of misinformation who can be pulled back from the brink. But I'm not multi-billion dollar media mogul capable of saturating their every waking hour with counter-programming. And I'd be foolish to assert I could undo in a few short dialogues what they've ingested after decades.
If you look at what the Feds did with TikTok, that's the real working strategy. Cut people off from a contrary media diet. Shut down radio stations. Starve out newspapers. De-tenure professors with unorthodox historical bias. K-Street Project any lobbyist who won't exclusively back your people. Purge political parties of anyone sympathetic to rival views. Blacklist the Dixie Chicks and get Donahue fired.
That's how you shape the public discourse.
Not by politely asking your 60-year-old uncle to turn down the Michael Savage Radio Hour for a minute and reconsider his white nationalist views.
South African here... a disturbingly large proportion of the "boers" don't see it that way - and it's been more than thirty years.