politics

Because she's a billionaire in the land of legal political bribery, so she has the means to tell our politicians what to do far more than the other way around.

Yes, but don't you see? She's a woman, and therefore needs to be told what to do and think by the super smart and totally handsome male politicians. /s

Devil's avocado here, but it must be nice to go through life with nothing ever being your own fault. There's always a convenient plot against you, and you'd be a billionaire running a casino on the moon if it weren't for {insert scapegoat here}.

Of course it's Pelosi, she can't let anyone else get their grubby paws on her precious ice cream! /s

Anything to make it sound nefarious, because to Republican voters, everyone is as dishonest, tribal, and ammoral as they are.

This is all Fox "News" and other conservative outlets do all day every day, take the news and add sinister innuendo to it. If Biden were doing a state visit to the UK, Fox would almost certainly say "Biden flees overseas to avoid American's scrutiny of his administration's failures" or the like. If he had that state visit planned but canceled it due to some urgent matter, the headline would be "Biden cancels state visit. Health concerns? What's he hiding?"

Republicans basically spin any positive or neutral information about their many enemies, everyone outside their in-group, as an attack on them. Republicans have no empathy, so of course the sun moon and stars all revolve around them in their view.

We all lived through COVID, so we should already know this.

20% is definitely a lowball estimate.

It’s much higher than that. This is the side effect of giving idiots access to social media as a platform to spread their stupidity.

I prefer:

“At least 1 in 5 Americans have a critical thinking deficiency.”

it was 1 in 3 the last time i looked at a fox news poll

Trump kinda tried that already… just with bleach and light.

Keeping those details vague is intentional. The purveyors of such conspiracy theories know that the worst thing they can ever do is make a clear falsifiable statement.

They thought she was going to endorse Biden at the end of the Super Bowl and that the White House had rigged the game for the Chiefs to win in order to maximize the spectacle and coverage.

Regardless of the nuance, when 20% of people - let's be conservative and say 10% even - translates into tens of millions of people, it normalizes very odd, if somewhat tamer, theories and ideas.

This is a cornerstone of rightwing thinking and spreading conspiracies. Qanon says "there is a secret democrat soros-clinton pedo ring and they all talk about it in code via emails. That's why the Clinton emails/server are so important." Then Breitbart says "liberals protect pedophiles and are corrupt with their emails and servers." Then Fox News says "Are liberals protecting pedophiles? Who can say. But this Clinton lady and her emails/servers are very corrupt and that's bad for America. We're just here asking questions and protecting the country."

Each version is more diluted so as to be more palatable to less and less extreme audiences. But it's a foot in the door. Because now someone has an opinion about pedophiles that is clearly laid out as one party's issue, so they are now receptive to things like "Biden is inappropriate with children." While further up the extremism ladder (or down the spiral, depending on your preferred analogy) they're already saying he's single-handedly running pedo camps or whatever insane idea they have that week.

It's just the same crap over and over again.

20% of the country is deliberately misled and probably suffering from things like lead poisoning.

1% of the country is the reason for that.

Be the change you want to see in the world.