Epstein Files | WSJ releases 50th bday letter from Trump to Epstein

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Paine said:
Keep your eyes on the prize. Theo Von isn’t the problem, he's the symptom. The real answer isn’t scapegoating him, it’s confronting the broader media ecosystem and building a culture that meets people where they are, both digitally and materially.

Democrats need a strategy rooted in narrative and infrastructure not reactionary finger-pointing.

Bernie going on Theo Von’s podcast proves the point. He didn’t scold or moralize. He showed up, talked like a human being, and reached millions of people, many of whom have never felt spoken to by mainstream politics. And it worked. The clip of Bernie explaining class politics to Von’s audience went viral. People respected it. That’s a roadmap, not a fluke.

This is what liberals still refuse to understand. The way to counter right-wing influence in the Rogansphere isn’t to sneer at it, it’s to compete in it.

Instead, they blame the platform and the audience. They hand-wave away real alienation and insecurity among young working-class men as if it's just a pipeline to fascism, but it’s not. It’s a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. If the left doesn’t fill it with solidarity, community, and material hope, the right will fill it with resentment and fantasy.
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For me pointing to Rogan and Vonn isn’t blaming them personally it’s recognizing that America has devolved into a nation that values the opinions of carnival barkers.
 
I dont know who Theo Von is and don't want to know. I've yet to see any podcast that I can stomach....even those I mostly agree with. Its all pandering one way or the other it seems to me.
 
For my part, I'm highly uncomfortable in a world where perception seems so much more important than experience, training and statistics. It's not that perception isn't important but the data you get is so unreliable and easily swayed.
 
Paine said:
I think the problem isn’t that perception has replaced expertise, it’s that people lost trust in the institutions claiming expertise.

People often turn to figures like Rogan or Von not because they reject truth but because they reject gatekeepers who too often used truth selectively.

That’s the real crisis: who gets to interpret experience and represent reality.

After years of elite failure, folks are looking for truth-tellers outside the club. That’s not ideal, but it’s understandable. Rebuilding trust means showing results not just citing credentials.
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The problem is that they lost that trust, not because of outcomes, but because so many of these "truth- tellers" lied implicitly or explicitly about these outcomes. No small part of the problem is that many people have either had professional restraints about how they can respond to those misrepresentations or lack the platform to debate on a level playing field.
 
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If Dems have any sense (which probably not) they would have Dem adjacent social media hammering this relentlessly. The Epstein Files is where Trump has a real frailty with MAGA and Q — don’t allege anything. But demand, day after day, the truth. This is a very rare opportunity to undercut the MAGA/Q/MAHA support of Trump. Not top down — not via political leaders. Bottom up.

FFS. See the opportunity, let the MAGA and Q sharks do the work but feed them chum daily until they cannot do otherwise.
 
Paine said:
That’s fair, but part of the issue is that the “experts” often earned their platforms through elite gatekeeping, not public trust.

When they misled or filtered reality through institutional bias, they forfeited credibility. The rise of podcasts and alt media didn’t happen in a vacuum: it was a direct response to legacy voices failing to meet the moment.

None of this is ideal, but it’s understandable. When institutions are caught lying or spinning key issues, people are going to lose faith in them even when they’re actually telling the truth later. That’s the cost of broken trust.
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Could you give me some of these issues that they were "caught" spinning? What would be equivocation in politics might be demanded in science, for example. When science is filtered through political spokesmen, it's probably not going to be the scientists doing the spinning.

Not that scientists are flawless. They can be frauds. Take the ulcer thing. That was terrible science. So was the failure in the 19th century to accept the value of antisepsis. It's still not going to be the smart money bet when it comes to twisting facts and figures. If caught out, politicians ,pundits and spokesmen move on the the next speech, scientists to their next occupation.
 
Paine said:
Sure, and to clarify, I wasn’t just talking about scientific issues. The collapse in institutional trust is about more than bad science communication.

Take Iraq and WMDs. That wasn’t a scientific failure, it was a political and media failure, with experts and prestigious outlets echoing falsehoods that led to a disastrous war. No real accountability ever followed. Same goes for the 2008 financial crisis, where elite economists, bankers, and regulators missed or downplayed warning signs, then got bailed out while regular people suffered.

Even with COVID, yes, science evolved (as it should), but public messaging often came from political spokespeople, not scientists. And when they overpromised or shifted positions without transparency, trust eroded further.

This isn't to say podcasts or populist figures are always right, but they tap into a very real narrative: that legacy institutions like media, political leadership, and academia misled the public at key moments. People remember that. Even if these "truth tellers" aren’t always accurate, their rise reflects a vacuum left by those institutions.
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You do realize that almost every single one of those came out of the same Republican think tanks and rightwing media foundations that Democrats have been literally the only ones to challenge. Can you you tell me what's wrong with this picture when the lying bastards who caused the damage get the benefit? That's almost as bad as ignoring how bad for the economy the Republicans have been in virtually everyway for the last 75 years.
 
Paine said:
For those who haven’t watched him, Theo Von isn’t trying to be malicious. He comes across as pretty naive but genuine. He actually cares and is authentic in his own way. The challenge is that other actors in this space exploit that authenticity. They use people like him as conduits to mix in baseless or misleading claims alongside ones grounded in fact.

This blending makes it harder for audiences to separate truth from distortion. Authenticity becomes a tool, intentionally or not, to launder misinformation through trusted voices.
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Nah Theo is MAGA
 
You might want to look into the story behind an informant named Curveball and the whole project by Shrub's people to manipulate and lie to the media. It's true that Judith Miller at the New York times was an absolute shill for the war. It's also true that, especially in the Senate, Democrats got a serious case of gnat nuts once it became clear that the Republicans had the votes to pass the resolutions to go to war and proceeded to cover their ass. But to put equal blame or even close to is to show a total lack of understanding of the advance planning even before Bush was elected to find a way to go after Saddam.

You might also want to go after the rules a lot of the media were reporting under before you go too wild with your claims about liberal media being so supportive.
 
Bigs23 said:
For me pointing to Rogan and Vonn isn’t blaming them personally it’s recognizing that America has devolved into a nation that values the opinions of carnival barkers.
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Seriously? It’s unfiltered conversation. I mean, it could be disorienting if you are used to CNN or The View interpreting for you…
 
Paine said:
I get that many falsehoods came from Republican think tanks and right-wing media; that’s no surprise. But it’s also important to remember that a lot of Democrats and liberals supported the Iraq invasion, and much of the liberal media went along with it.

This credibility gap goes way back, as early as the 1970s with both Johnson and Nixon lying about Vietnam. That erosion of trust in government and institutions set the stage for the deep skepticism we see today.

The problem isn’t just who started the lies, but how the entire system, across both parties and media, enabled them to stick.

Democrats often fail to effectively counter misinformation or rebuild trust with people who’ve been fed falsehoods for decades.

If we don’t address that, those lies will keep winning, and the real damage continues. The economic harm from Republicans is clear, but ignoring how misinformation spreads only makes it easier for them to keep doing harm.

Democrats seem content to hitch their wagons to the institutions people have lost trust in. Is it any surprise that their image suffers when they do this?

It’s the same dynamic: even when Democrats say the right things, people don’t trust them because the institutions behind those messages are already discredited. This cycle keeps repeating, and until it’s addressed, real progress will stay out of reach.
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I just want facts to be recognized as facts. I don’t care who or where it comes from.

To me there is a bigger distortion of the truth coming from the right over the last however many years. It’s what I see not what I want to see.
 
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