There will always be a con man or grifter out there somewhere. The uneducated and gullible population I think is the bigger issue. People need to have their defenses up against deception, which requires critical thinking.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Trust in authoritative figures (for example, actual Journalists) was burned for political gains by mainstream parties and their billionaire owners (and by "owners" I mean of both the Media and the Parties) since at least the 80s - the essence of Neoliberalist propaganda was to use convoluted half-truths, purposeful misinterpretation and information flow control (mainly cherry-picking) to deceive people into supporting that which wasn't actually good for most of them in the medium and long term (who can forget things like "trickle down"?) and the increasing disconnect between what people were told and what they saw happen and felt, ground away the trust people had in those autoritative sources of information (and in lots of other things: trust in experts as autoritative sources of information and interpretation in their own expert areas was also ground away quite likely due to how that Neoliberal propaganda also made heavy use of technocratic speaking "experts" - notice how even the trust on medical doctors for health-related things, such as mask wearing during COVID, was clearly lacking).

Almost everybody can be deceived about things they have no expertise on, but at some point in the past at least many if not most of those people were in some way anchored to objective-reality (-ish) by trustworthy sources of information and interpretation, and that's not the case anymore because that trust was sistematically abused during at least 4 decades.

In the US both the Democrats and the Republicans were doing it with gusto, so the rise of populists like Trump is really just the reaping of a crop which both those parties sowed.