So why is the progressive rhetoric so stuck in the past? This is consistent on most issues, so it can’t be accidental. Why does the Left keep fighting against Jim Crow, slavery, book bans, contraception bans, Nazism, fascism, and enslaved women who have no control over anything in their lives except who they vote for (see recent ads for Kamala Harris)?
It’s the same reason why Harris can’t answer any questions without mumbling and looking lost. The actual agenda of the Left can’t be openly revealed. It’s so radical and scary to almost everybody that it can’t be explained. The few people who are in the know are concealing it and feeding these outdated talking points to the plebs on their side.
Clarissa's Blog 
Well, if Ellul has anything to say about it, it’s at least partly because the way you program that in the first place is: media saturation and constant repitition. Then, once your polls say your target percentage has absorbed it, you stop talking about it (because past that point, people get irritated and start to question it). If no contradicting update is then issued, then the original talking point remains programmed in, as sort of a default setting.
So:
“Masks and social distancing are saving lives! You’ll kill grandma if you don’t!”
then, later:
“We did the best we could with the information we had: we were pure of heart and the resisters were spiteful and reckless. They didn’t care about grandma.”
There’s a tacit admission there, that the first statement was untrue. The brighter NPCs will catch on, absorb that implication, and spout the new talking point instead, jettisoning the old one without any trouble. No questions, no internal conflict, no niggling of conscience.
Weirdly, the not-so-bright NPCs seem to absorb *both* talking points and never register a conflict, but simultaneously believe both, and spout them back when stimulated by the correct cues.
FOX news still exists, and the MSM would prefer not to alert anybody to the existence of any non-MSM media (which can’t even be called their competition now: there is no competition because it’s stomping them), so that one never gets updated. All opposition media is “FOX News” — a symbolic representation of everything that is wrongetty wrong wrong wrong about “conservatives”. Mustn’t mention that FOX is MSM like the rest, that their viewership is aging and declining like the rest, and that every single TV news network has been losing ground to the internet for decades. That’s taboo. One can’t look at the stark fact that “some dude in a sweatshirt” now outranks them in viewership by orders of magnitude *even when YT tries to censor him*. Better not even admit the existence of anything so threatening as Substack.
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–there’s a third group, the seriously slow, who are incapable of updating. So the original point remains fixed. That crowd still beleives the vaccines worked, masks work, and they’re still out there faithfully getting boosters, because their doctor (who gets a kickback payment for every shot) told them to.
That’s me theorizing, not Ellul. Ellul tends toward: subsequent talking points easily replace earlier ones. And you do see that. But I think it’s not the only way it plays out.
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Yes, and it’s quite amazing to see people hold two contradictory views and not even notice.
And you are spot-on about the Fox News obsession. I have several very conservative young men among my students. I can bet they’ve never watched Fox News and wouldn’t be able to find it if asked. Young people don’t watch TV. Even I don’t watch it. I disconnected cable years ago and never noticed it. But in spite of me never discussing Fox News as my source of information – because it isn’t – people still go on and on about their fantasy that I watch it all day every day. Even in the past I only ever watched Tucker on it. And he’s not even on it anymore.
I watch Matt Walsh daily while making breakfast and packing lunch. There’s no secret. If I watched Fox, I’d say so but I’m not nearly ancient enough.
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A common position is that some favored ideology was a good idea which failed in practice. If people actually want to move forward, it is important to discuss the failure of your own side’s outdated ideology, which is often very similar to the current bad ideas being pushed.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2024/10/29/apartheid-was-not-well-intended/
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