Democrats vs. MAGA

The part of the population that Trump has captured seems to be as dumb as Trump himself.

All the racist stuff, "build the wall" and every other somewhat popular item Trump has made an issue seems to be something that Democrats can address. They can explain alternatives and propose a more reasonable solution.

There is one thing the Democrats did not count on. The attack on GLOBALISM. The results were seen in the Trump first term, but neither side took much notice of the tariffs on steel. MSNBC barely touched it. The US does not make all grades of steel and metal alloys. Those are imported and some are high tech materials. There was a problem, but the makers of products just paid the higher price, often to European steel.

China was the target for Trump, Chinese steel. "The U.S. tariffs affected about $350 billion in imports from China, or about 18% of the total, while China’s tariffs covered about $100 billion, or about 11%, of goods imported from the U.S. " From my state Trump gave subsidies or some support to soybean growers, exporting it to China. More at link:

https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/in-u-s-china-trade-war-bystander-countries-increase-exports/

The US is dependent on China for most of its consumer products as well as a good part of industrial products. Bulk chemicals are made in China, India and other places in Asia. These bulk chemícals are essential for drugs and sweeteners as well as polymers.

The disruption to life that Trump could bring about by isolating us, paying high tariffs for essential products as well as military issues would bring chaos in four years.

The MAGA wing of the GOP has no idea how the US government is involved in global trade and directing the traffic of goods. They just want to reduce the federal government to nothing. Their favorite saying is that "the government does not make anything."  Basically they only want an army and a mint to print money. This is just not going to work. Not even California is ready to operate as an independent state.

Misinformation

One has to figure out what to make of news items. Polls may be properly taken and not manipulated, but as polls at this point are +/-4% accuracy, they mean nothing. You can follow the polls going up and down on some news item, such as Israel. Those items do affect the election, but only about two weeks before the election. The general public, voters, has no memory of things half a year before.

More worrying is the misinformation, fake videos and so on. The video clips may be real, but even the Biden campaign clips the worst bits together. In the case of Trump, hearing a whole minute of his speech comapred to the ten seconds does not improve it much. His attention span in the strream of consciousness speeches is not that long. He has no theme other than "The US is going to hell" and "they are invading our country." Underlying is the basic theme all the way back to Reagan: government is evil, taxes are bad.

Controlling social media will do little, but it is nevertheless necessary for the craziest conspiracies. It will help. But not much.

As the case of women in developing countries shows, only education will help us move to a world where we have some control of the material that is fed to us on a daily basis. That and the mute button on your TV remote.

The Internet is a worse situation than the TV, as you can follow links fed to you and go "down the rabbit hole" as we say. Young people and seniors are most at risk. The working age public is exposed to friends and coworkers daily who will guide them and also expose them to a variety of views. Simply hearing that normal people have a variety of views on Israel and Palestine for example introduces a healthy discussion. As opposed to screaming at peole on message boards and social media.

Tucker Carlson famously "proved" that mostly immigrants and illegals are serving time for felonius crimes. But those crimes were related to being illegals such as staying here with no visa! None of those crimes were against American Citizens.

The education really should start in high school. Show them that if you Google these two items you will get two different results (as well as paid ads related to it):

1 vaccines cause autism

2 vaccines do not cause autism

Vaccines cause an immediate reaction, which may be severe for a few days for some. That is in fact your immune system working. 

Similarly, try googling these:

1 Is crime increasing?

2 Is crime decreasing?

The second will give these. Also, use Bing or other searches to check on Google.

The search engines are put together to give you answers you would like, based on your search hisrory. Not so much the facts. This keeps you browsing and getting them ad income.