In interviews, AfD supporters spout straight up Russian fake news propaganda. Others have the same complaints heard by Trump supporters in the US.
Interviewer interviews AfD supporters and asks them what about your life personally is going wrong that makes you like the AfD, and they talk about immigrants, the EU, etc, but when he asks again about their life personally, they have nothing to say. Another interviewer had the same experience with Trump supporters–they rave about whatever concern is in the right-wing zeitgeist at the moment, but have nothing to say about how their life is bad that makes them want to vote for Trump.
Back to Germany, people often are concerned about immigrant crime, but outside of a few highly publicized attacks, these attacks are rare.
Interviewees are straight up ignorant about the horrible things Hitler did.
Democrats have a difficult media arena because Republicans have a synergistic bullshit ecosystem that globs onto the same messages and is naturally integrated from biased news to biased think tanks to biased pundits and influencers. It even ropes in people whose content isn’t focused on politics, but they fall for the bullshit, and then become bullshit spreaders themselves, like Joe Rogan.
People say don’t clickbait, but they only click the clickbait, so they are voting with their clicks.
A Biden tweet about football was doing better than a Musk tweet, so Musk had engineers come in on off-hours and “fix it” so that his own post would do better.
Musk has turned Twitter/X into his personal propaganda machine that leans right wing.
After Shirley’s daycare video accusing specific day care centers of fraud simply because they didn’t open up their doors to a group of men, the state checked on those centers and found they were all operating normally.
“Paul is understandably upset about a video about him that has been posted to YouTube.
The video “is a calculated lie, falsely accusing me of taking money from Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro,” wrote Paul in the Post. “It is, of course, a ludicrous accusation, but paid trolls are daily spreading this lie across the internet. This untruth is essentially an accusation of treason, which then leads the internet mob to call for my death.”
In short, it is “a provably false defamatory video,” according to Paul.
Defamation is a crime. And Paul is not without options for addressing it.
For one, he can use his own speech—as he is doing—to counter the false information. Paul has his own channels of communication, huge audiences on social media, and relatively easy access to mainstream media outlets, like the Post. He is not without options for correcting the record here.
He could also threaten to sue the creators(s) of the video. Sometimes, the threat of legal action is enough to get results—and in fact, that’s what happened here.
“The individual who posted the video finally took down the video under threat of legal penalty,” per Paul’s Post op-ed.
If the mere threat hadn’t worked, Paul could have actually sued the creator(s) of the video. If he successfully proved the video was defamatory, a court would order the creator to remove it.”
The guy who attacked Ilham Omar had a sad life of divorces, estrangement from family members, 10 DUIs, and limited money. He supported Trump and followed right wing podcasts. He posted racist stuff online. It’s possible that he blamed his crappy life on the left and blacks, and that motivated his attack.