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Ocasio-Cortez Rips GOP for Rushing Ahead With Medicaid Cuts 'When Everyone Is Asleep'
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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I understand the issue. It's clear. What I don't understand is this article focusing on Ocasio-Cortez's "by the light of day" comment.
Are people watching these proceedings live on C-Span with their hand on the phone ready to call their congressperson's office? If Republicans pushed this through "during the light of day," would it make any actual difference? Why can't congresspersons challenge this in the middle of the night? Does Ocasio-Cortez think Republican constituents will be making those calls to change the minds of their politicians? 🤔
Yes, actually. The propaganda machine usually needs a minute to spin up and align talking points. Pushing things through at midnight gives them the ability to carefully prepare the first round of headlines and social media posts for when Americans wake up.
First impressions are by far the most important in propaganda.
Republican voters are way more engaged than Democrat or progressive voters. Any day of the week.
It's why they have so much more content, content creators and social media presence. They put in the work. But not just put in the work. They target specific areas that are effective for either changing public opinion or applying pressure to government to get their issue across.
They put in the work because the oligarchs are aligned with them, so they have a basically unlimited firehose of money to pay people to shill for them.
Meanwhile, leftists have to rely on volunteer labor.
That can be part of it. But it isn't the whole reason. They're engaged. They do strategize and organize much better.
Because it's literally their full-time job.
No it isn't their full time job. That's making excuses for why they're more effective. They're more effective because they had orgs that figured it out while they also had enough social awareness to understand the assignment given to them. Defend your party. Succeed. Create content. Share content.
So you're saying the staff at orgs like the Heritage Foundation aren't getting paid? Where's their $108 million in expenses (according to Wikipedia) going, then?
Sorry, you're right in that case. Heritage foundation does. But the guy driving around my neighborhood with decals and posting online with his multiple "own the libs" groups is not full time. He's an electrician who's probably autistic.
The Internet is a massive force multiplier. This is why groups like the heritage foundation works to research how best to utilize it. They don't focus their people on public protests or half the shit the left does. They utilize that Internet. They take advantage of people who are not full time but are passionate.
Just think for a minute how many people have shown up to protests across the country for the past 10 years. Think of what they could accomplish if they instead created content like this. We need eyes and ears catching this stuff, distilling it down, creating it and then sharing it.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJe5IKDvJsv/
That's my point: the left doesn't have the equivalent of groups like the Heritage Foundation to figure out how to do that force multiplication. It takes resources to do that, and the only people supplying the resources are doing so in service of capital, not against it.
A protestor and a trained think-tank analyist who does propaganda as their full-time job are not interchangable. You can't just tell protestors to create content like the right-wing bot farmers instead; they don't have the skillset for it. They also don't control the platforms like Murdoch, Zuckerberg and Musk do, for that matter. There are many, many strategies that make right-wing propaganda so effective that left-wingers simply cannot replicate without a fuckton of money, no matter how much unskilled volunteer labor they have.
What the heritage foundation and others do is not special. Everyone can do it. That's what makes it so effective. Listen to me, you don't need to pay millions of dollars in research. Heritage foundation is not on my bridge or putting stickers on my neighbors car or creating Facebook groups or taking over Reddit communities. They nudge things but it's the people doing it. Heritage foundation steers. But there isn't anything mystical or impossible to figure out here. But the left have to get on the same page. Coming online every day to read another article and then still waste time commenting and reading other comments is just not going to cut it. We need to call this stuff out as often as possible. The next election is around the corner.
Really? Okay then, how do I do this myself? Or how do I do this myself? Or how do I do this myself?
That first one, anyone can do. Just like how a real estate agent created a libsotiktok. Those are small instances of what the right are doing. Almost all of it you can do yourself.
Really? Anyone can order local TV news stations across the country to read scripted propaganda of their choosing? You're just going to straight-up deny Sinclair Broadcast Group's unbalanced political power exists?
I don't think that's what you think it is. Instead of paying multiple individual script writers for the same story across multiple small stations they probably have one script writer whose script gets reused for each station. I bet news stations buy scripts from each other all the time to save money and time. The anchors are not just speaking off the cuff. Someone has to write the script. Why reinvent the wheel. If you have a larger station fully staffed, use those resources and trickle down to the smaller stations who don't have the resources.
I was speaking to the fact that someone cut that up and implied it's some secret brainwashing effort. I'm saying anyone can take clips and infer whatever they want to people. It worked on you
I'm really not sure what point you think you're making. Of course they're all reading from the same script; that's obvious! In fact, my point was that right-wing propagandists have the power to write the script and force it to be read, while left-wing people don't because they don't own a fuckton of TV stations.
I feel like you're being intentionally obtuse. Stop it.
Dems fall apart, Reps fall in line.
Meidas touch is catching up
I really hate Meidas touch. It's clickbait titles going on about nothingburger events. "Trump slammed" "republicans make catastrophic mistake" "Republican makes career ending move" Its just a left wing version of Info Wars
Make up your mind. Either the left competes with the right or you just sit and complain how they don’t compete with the right enough. And I disagree with nothing burger. The DOJ keeps getting wiped in court. And the congress is scrappy, dems are tripping the magamind congress into admitting mistakes. And you’ll need this exposure for the midterms so people know exactly what kind of scum their rep is.
But we need shit like that.
I think that comment is proving what I'm saying. Every time there's momentum on the left, it's not perfect and therefore can't support it. Without any media being supported there's no momentum.
If you look in the right, they're still pissed off about Rosanne. I just saw a YouTube comment yesterday pissed off at John Goodman for being a back stabber. Lots of upvotes and jokes. And that rallying is absent for anything on the left
It does engage the low information center to center left.
Then don't watch it. It's not for you.
Why aren't they? It's their medicaid benefits.
I think you are overestimating just how much constituents are invested in what their politicians actually do...
Many many many persons feel the side effects, the burn, of their elected politicians deviating from what they hoped. And yet each election cycle, these politicians continue to be voted in.
I mean, they get mad, but mad enough to watch C-Span and make calls...? 😅
I guess but it has been many years of them feeling the burn from their own party. Can't tell if any of them are waking up or not.
Honestly, they're not.
I hate to say it, but the system needs to crash and burn for people to wake up. I need and want to avoid that at all costs, but some people... most people... don't seem to be able to learn without it.
I believe you’re right, unfortunately.
They won't. These people wouldn't care if they were burning alive as long as it meant whoever they hate was suffering even more.
It's been a slow burn, like a frog in boiling water, with policies mostly affecting younger people. The Heritage Foundation came up with a detailed 50 year plan in 1973 to completely take over the country to make it more corporate and Christian, and we've been seeing that play out ever since Reagan.
Second Thought has a good video about them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eeCPRD0Hgg
This is classic language to pacify you, to make you think someone is out there speaking and a fighting on your behalf.
They're literally attacking Medicare? Don't worry AOC is putting the GOP in their place, she's SLAMMING them and ripping them a new one!
I want to believe you're wrong, but... I can't. 😔