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Gunman shot dead in Mar-a-Lago was ‘fixated on Epstein files’ and big Trump supporter
(www.the-independent.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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politics
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Yeah I whine about it a lot too, the point is that there is literally no action an American can take that's correct. Do something? Rash, juvenile, doomed to fail, too violent, they should have large protests and walkouts instead. Protest in the street? Too civil, pointless, also doomed to fail, why aren't Americans taking up arms by the millions to kill the government. Every action is the wrong one.
I'm glad I wasn't the only person to notice.
What you both are noticing is a tactic of propaganda called FUD. It stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
The goal of this propaganda is to promote a feeling of hopelessness, on a large scale this will decrease political participation ("why vote, it doesn't matter anyway, laws don't matter they'll just ignore them, the idea in the OP is dumb and anyone who thinks this will work is too"). By targeting the social spaces of the opposing party (or all parties in the cases of some nation-states) the adversary can attack the morale of the population, disrupting or delaying a cohesive response.
It doesn't take too much creativity (and now, with LLMs, absolutely none) to make posts that say some variation of 'that won't work and you are dumb' on every topic. This is why you have this perception of a mass amount of criticism, it's being fabricated at scale across all of social media (Fediverse spaces had a brief period of obscurity but are now part of the propaganda campaigns).
That isn't to say that there are not legit criticisms, but they are being signal boosted significantly as part of these FUD campaigns.
I've been calling it the "Reddit Defeatist Brigade". As your comment states it isn't confined to reddit. I wondered if it was some sort of propaganda because it's so prevalent. Now I know.
It's your stupid monkey brain thinking that you are talking to 'that one guy called internet' instead of thousands of tens of thousands of different people.
Maybe, just maybe that’s different people with different opinions and you’re lumping them all under one umbrella?
Hmmm, almost like that should be the approach with large, continental polities with a plethora of regional political subcultures in it.