Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday removed every member of a scientific committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to use vaccines and pledged to replace them with his own picks.
The 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices had been in a state of flux since Kennedy took over. Its first meeting this year had been delayed when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services abruptly postponed its February meeting.
Older American here, I remember the Before Times, so I can speak to how I’ve seen things change/crumble. Over the last twenty or so years everything has really accelerated. Social media is the biggest tool that outside and internal forces have used to destabilize democracy.
Democratic rule is terrible for business, people may make choices against your bottom line. On top of that, people like Iran, Russia, many others out there, want to crush America and never gave up their wars against us.
The KGB handbook details how to do what’s been done to the US in great detail, how to amplify and boost the most confusing, chaotic rage-bait from both sides of every contentious issue until people basically tune out and just go along with whatever the government says. Makes people not get involved in electoral politics anymore. They did this in other countries that they’ve absorbed/annexed or have created sympathetic populations within.
If it was just Russia we probably could have countered it and defended better against it, but you combine that with the efforts of many other cells, different nations and contracted organizations doing the same thing, then add dopamine-addicting social-media algorithms and a deeply sabotaged education system, carefully tweaked interest rates and health-care obstacles, so that people are forced to work 6-days a week and are barely able to afford anything and can’t spend any time learning or being curious, then a lot of very strategic messaging targeting specific portions of the population with racist, xenophobic ideas, and you have what we have now. A huge population held hostage by the smallest, dumbest, loudest segment.
And it’s coming for you next.
(Also, this was all done before AI could specifically target every individual’s most personal fears, desires and vulnerabilities, and could produce 100% convincing images and videos. We are all massively, thoroughly fucked.)
I’m not old, but not young either, and I’d agree with your observations. It’s getting very concerning.
This can all be tied back to Fox News really.
This is what happens when you let a propaganda channel masquerade as news for 3 decades in your country with basically no pushback.
Just the fact that they haven’t somehow been sued into oblivion, or curtailed by the government at all lends legitimacy to them.
The thing is, they were just sued for like a billion dollars by Dominion over the voting machine bullshit… and it’s just a drop in the bucket for their legal team.
now it largely branched out to propaganda networks, which is a favorite among millneals, genz conservative like oan and newsmax. additionally they follow the right wing grifters now.
I’m worried about my country becoming the Christian version of Iran.
A very valid worry, considering how Iran was and what it became after the fundamentalists got power. A shadow of its former self, even as one of the most modern and populated nations.
on reddit i was pointing out in the 1st term of trump how much russian back articles were being pushed on the subs, it was clear by then how they were moderating it even back then too.(this was before russia had a hold over r/conservative)