memes

I think this is the order of operations:

Conservatives believe bizarro conspiracy theories because they need to assign the ills of society to anyone other than the responsible ruling class.

Liberals point to this and say “See, look at this foolishness, if you don’t want to end up a rube like this, you need to trust The NY Times and WaPo and CNN, etc.”

Thus, leftists that are otherwise critical of capitalism but still want to be seen as being part of reasonable society, develop a bias of taking those sources at face value least they get branded with the scarlet F of fake news.

The issue is that capitalists understand this already, and have astroturfed their views into grassroots media aswell as they have conquered mainstream media.

Simple: there's no dissonance involved whatsoever.

Disbelieving a media narrative is a proactive action. You have to personally know more than the reporter to disbelieve what they write or say. If you don't, then you fall into a type of stupor wherein you believe everything they write except the things you personally know about. An engineer may know that a certain article about bridges is bullshit, but they'll switch to a politics link and believe everything as per print.

In such a scenario the conventional beliefs the world are self reinforcing. You either work your way towards a rabbit hole of disbelieving everything on media or you just don't. So there's no dissonance involved. You never make the mental effort for there to be one.

A lot of this is a byproduct of vague "anti-authoritarian" sentiment: "Yes the US government is evil, but all governments are evil. The evil shit the US accused these other evil governments of doing is probably true, US may have ulterior motives for pointing it out, but the best propaganda is often the truth so why would they lie?"

Over time though this logic does just lead to viewing the US as the lesser evil, since you're getting bombarded with anecdotes about the evil governments evil deeds constantly, and if it's all true then yes, the conclusion to draw is that as bad as the US is these red fash nations must be worse!

I think there's some other shit going on here too, media portrays life under "authoritarian" governments as a 24/7, 1984-esk nightmare of constant horror, and since life even for the poor in the west isn't THAT cartoonishly bad there's not way it can be REALLY authoritarian, unlike the Tankie-North Cubrea where everyone is shot every time they get a haircut. I once showed my lib ass sister some pics of daily life in the USSR a friend from Poland sent me and she was shocked to see such things as people eating ice cream and swimming pools and families on camping trips! The idea that anyone lives a normal life in the BAD COUNTRIES is inconceivable to them, which in turn convinces them that the US can't be that bad since they can eat ice cream and go camping here.

Thing is there's nothing you can do to help these people. They aren't helpless dupes who got tricked by oh so clever propaganda, they talked themselves into believing this shit because it allows them to be a bit rebellious while also feeling smugly comfortable with their western life.

I don't have enough theory or analysis under my belt to make any broad kind of comment, but I can speak to personal experience as someone who is still trying to purge myself of this particular brainworm (thanks hexbears). The propaganda is insidious, they get you young, and a lot of the time, it fucking works. I grew up on the tail end of the cold war, so I might have copped it a bit worse than some of the younger folks here, but I got shown my first piece of explicitly anticommunist propaganda about age five. Obvs I'd picked up bits and pieces coincidentally from other media, but primary school was the first time we got herded into a room and subjected to an "educational" video, which probably deserves its own post tbh. Despite being vaguely dissatisfied with capitalism and getting into punk in my teens, watching the Soviet Union ~~fail~~ collapse under the concerted effort of western hegemony (see? Fucking insidious.) kinda cemented me into the "but human nature / only works in theory" mindset for a long time, without actually understanding the theory at all.

All that to say, my gut reaction a lot of the time is still "China bad, communists want to steal your stuff" until the rational part of my brain kicks in and goes "Hang on a second!" - Most of that is due to reading the discourse here. But that rational bit takes effort. Consciously overriding the gut reaction is -hard-. Reading and internalising theory takes time and energy. And when you come home exhausted from a 40 hour week generating revenue for someone else, you don't necessarily have the mental resources to do that. Of course that's by design and I absolutely fucking hate it, but I get it because I'm still living it, and I don't think this kind of experience is particularly unique.