I’d argue it started with Bush and his No Child Left Behind bullshit. It forced a certain curriculum to leave out common sense and critical thinking skills

Children aren’t the problem. it’s adults who get their constant education off anonymous memes. The year 2007 introduction of the Apple iPhone changed everything about USA society. We had the Fox News Rupert Murdoch problem since 1996, but the shit memes people flock to and “shit postings” addiction are the learning / education / study problem.

Shitpostinh education is very predictable adult education outcome. Cal Sagan predicted in in 1995: “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding (from 1995) of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one videocassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. “Beavis and Butthead” remain popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning—not just of science, but of anything—are avoidable, even undesirable.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, year 1995

Own your president Trump.

People need to own up to anonymous no-identity social media addiction. The egomania they get chasing junk (drugs) off of Apple iPhone / iPad / Samsung / machine devices. Donald Trump is entirely an Apple iPhone addict in egomania off machine lust, as too is Elon Musk.

nothing of this could have been possible without a ruined education system and mindless propaganda.

Nothing is more mindless than the education people get off of Lemmy memes, Reddit memes, Bluesky memes, Fox News HDTV, Joe Rogan. That’s the education that creates an audience for Donald Trump. Self-centered eoomania, like the Middle East gets with one religion vs. another religion. Fiction addiction problems are raging in USA.

Even if your theory was true

My theory:

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985 [email protected]

What is looking like more of an idiot than he already does going to accomplish? He’s the most idiotic politician in living memory, by far, and there are some absolutely colossal morons on that list.

He is a Reality TV star. People can not resist mocking Donald Trump. Mocking isn’t resisting, mockery is all part of the Kremlin media techniques. The more idiotic he and Elin Musk behaves, the more people rush to their social machines and LOL. People can not resist his orange skin color, it makes skin color a constant topic (brown, black, white, orange, etc).

Introduction to the Kremlin media techniques of year 2014

1. Peter Pomerantsev September 9, 2014: Russia and the Menace of Unreality. How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare

2. Adam Curtis, BBC, December 31, 2014: On The “Contradictory Vaudeville” Of Post-Modern Politics - “What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called Vladislav Surkov, who is a hero of our time. Surkov is one of President Putin’s advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way.”

3. Book reading from December 5, 2014 on the subject by Peter Pomerantsev

I REALLY hope trump is just actively destroying the US either in the name of putin

People won’t discuss that this was all planned in a November 2013 Moscow meeting and announced one month later in December 2013… shortly before the February 2014 Ukraine invasion. https://lemmy.world/post/27627662/16165977

Are they just stupid or have they been paid off?

Neither one. they are in a cult. Donald Trump is entertaining / clickbait / meme leadership. The novelty of having a 78 year old man shit-talk on an Apple iPhone they can’t resist. They have brain damage from it all.

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985 [email protected]

Play stupid games and win stupid prices.

He is playing Vlad Putin 8D Chess, not Donald Trump 1D Checkers. https://lemmy.world/post/27627662/16165977 This was all planned in 2013.

Introduction to the Kremlin media techniques of year 2014

1. Peter Pomerantsev September 9, 2014: Russia and the Menace of Unreality. How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare

2. Adam Curtis, BBC, December 31, 2014: On The “Contradictory Vaudeville” Of Post-Modern Politics - “What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called Vladislav Surkov, who is a hero of our time. Surkov is one of President Putin’s advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way.”

3. Book reading from December 5, 2014 on the subject by Peter Pomerantsev

Is there anything that can be done to hold Reddit accountable or make people aware of they way they are censoring speech?

Many people on social media platforms don’t realize the spam filters can be abused by attackers to prevent certain topics from being mentioned. And on front-page subreddits they do not publish comments, they look published if you are logged in, but if you check from off-axis they are unpublished. I’ve been posting some of them here and on Bluesky, but nobody cares (on Bluesky, but people have here) [email protected] maybe some tech press will cover it.

Lifetime (of the person) bans on Reddit for individual subreddits and accounts are dumb. That sites been around for decades. I can only image how many people got banned there at age 16 and are completely different people at age 22. I never see people bring this kind of criticism up.

Not sure what your point is and I’m not interested.

Repeating: “MAGA is death-wishing people that disagree with Elon Musk and Donald Trump values and leadership.”

And you see value in using Lemmy social machine systems to announce that you are not interested. That in itself says a lot about the current state of affairs.

It’s just a thought experiment to imagine MAGA heads exploding.

Fantasy. Simulacra. MAGA is death-wishing people that disagree with Elon Musk and Donald Trump values and leadership. Pretty much the entire nation is adopting death-wishing and social machine conventions of mass dehumanization. Trending towards more and more self-destruction as a nation.

Are we talking about the same person? Trumps ramblings are more incoherent than ever.

Yes, his chaos and nonsense has gotten more aggressive, even stronger in favor of Russia, etc.

Biden is too old” crowd are silent.

I haven’t witnessed the people who said that go silent. They changed topics that there were cats and dogs being eaten in Springfield Ohio, topics that JD Vance “couch couch couch”, topics that eggs are expensive, topics that Canada is bad, topics that Greenland needs to be taken over by the USA, topics that Ukraine started the war against Russia, they are anything but silent, they are commenting all over every media platform they can find free time to utilize.

Then have Obama run against him.

Every social media platform has these kind of answers. As of Obama would even desire a third term, he isn’t an egomania admirer like Donald Trump. Barack Obama is an intelligent, thoughtful, moral leader who values education and understanding. He isn’t a entertainer who values wrecking humanism and creating maximum content animation for news networks and social media consumers to react-comment to.

He has zero sense of humour: an inherent inability to recognize or invoke it.

There is a humor-like mocking of watching human beings suffer at the hands of government and business systems, “human tears”, “liberal tears”, “Ukraine tears”, values of winning and defeating humanism with systems of power. Donald Trump is very motivated and works many hours to socially arrange this domination and damage over human persons that don’t please his ego.

I rarely hear about apple at all.

It’s the influence on people’s behavior that’s far more my concern than the faith I have in people expressing self-awareness they have in terms of what they say (what you hear them say). Absolute addicts to technology can often not discuss their extreme addictions. You can witness the behavior all over in public since year 2010.

“One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992

The USA population and society has really lost all sense of what life was like before there was a constant notification stream of antics from billionaires. People are absolutely engrossed in the screen game of LOL at Donald Trump and Elon Musk so much they have no sense of life before 2008. There are huge numbers of people in March 2025 behaving as if Donald Trump is a new event and have lost every sense of him having been elected and in office in 2017.

By funding you mean resuming advertising on the platform, right?

yes.

I think the USA has taken a deep dive in international standing since January 2025, and Reddit is a USA-flavored USA-centered content publisher in terms of front page community. Things were pretty anti-USA with all the support of Israel in 2024, but now in 2025 with Elon Musk being the center of all USA society attention every minute of every day, sites like Reddit are being turned away from (or people only reading to mock the USA) - where the HiveMind is extremely USA technology consumerism / technology lifestyle worship.

For example, I never witness anyone on Reddit criticize Apple Computers for funding Twitter / X in 2025. It’s tech addiction as the primary religion on Reddit. And I think those outside the USA are sick of that machine lust / machine mind behavior of Elon Musk, Zuck, Amazon, etc.

“Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.” ― Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, 1992

The second it’s validated and becomes public knowledge, it’s no longer “privileged” knowledge and no longer makes them feel special for “knowing” a “secret truth”

Ahh, the (2 thousand year old) Bible verse Romans 11:33 theory of James Joyce’s work ;)

But democratized tech doesn’t guarantee democratic outcomes.

Far from it. We really need a major confrontation of the audience, information warfare needs to be educated to every single person of every age. Continuing education about science and mythology needs to continue, as people continue to flock to fiction and abandon non-fiction in every area of life.

People just can’t be serious about democracy and LOL and meme away their nation, the USA (where I live), it’s been absolute crisis since 2014.

“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985

Conspiracy theorists: crickets

Agreed, FACTUAL EVIDENCE of a conspiracy theory is collected by reputable Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University and crickets. People flock to conspiracies with no evidence, but once one appears with authentic validation… nothing.

Troll accounts that had attempted to influence the US election had also been tweeting about vaccines, a study says. Many posted both pro- and anti-vaccination messages to create “false equivalency”, the study found. It examined thousands of tweets sent between 2014 and 2017. Vaccination was being used by trolls and sophisticated bots as a “wedge issue”, said Mark Dredze from Johns Hopkins University. “A significant portion of the online discourse about vaccines may be generated by malicious actors with a range of hidden agendas,” said David Broniatowski from George Washington University. The researchers reviewed more than 250 tweets about vaccination from accounts linked to the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA). In February the agency was named in a US indictment over alleged election meddling.

source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45294192

Important Reminder

August 24, 2018

All across the world every major news site covered this story in August 2018. Even Fox News covered it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45294192