I am reading Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. It also very clearly explains information systems in democratic society vs autocractic or totalitarianistic ones. I am not done but I highly recommend this book.
Hi Asha - I’ve just joined you (through your participation in Joyce Vance’s substack). As soon as I read your recommendation about Renee DiResta’s book I went out and bought it. Considering she talks about RFK, Jr I the very first pages of the introduction, I await your November 21 talk with her with a mixture of fascination and dread. Keep up your critical work. I’m counting on you!
Lots to think about, Asha. But the first thing that came to me was Hyde Park Corner in London. When I was last there (2005-ish) there were competing speakers with varying levels of audience size. I hope that tradition continues. Mum and I just browsed the content so to speak. The video you included was prepared in 1947 after the war had ended. Curious timing? I’ll give the questions more thought for our class assignment.
In 1947, it wasn't as easy to buy the Marketplace of Ideas - which is precisely what EM had in mind with the purchase of Twitter. People wanting to spread this kind of message would have had to talk - face-to-face - with their friends and neighbors ... some of whom may have been, for example, Masons.
In 1947, Americans were still very close to the patriotism of the war effort: working together to defeat fascism & authoritarianism that directly threatened their lives & their futures, took their friends and family members to war (and sometimes did not return them).
This is why I feel it's important for informed, rational voices to fight for that public square. I get it's better in the Good Place and it's a great place to organize and recharge - but the battle for popular opinion - and for truth, facts, evidence, data - isn't going to be won in spaces where everyone already agrees that these things are important.
Thank you, Asha, for sharing your voice and your expertise here.
Now, how do we get this information to the folks most in need of learning?
Hi Inkwrat- I know I’m not Asha answering, and that I am new to this group, but I wanted to let you know that I totally agree with you, that the battle for information won’t be won in spaces where everyone agrees. I also believe face to face is still the most effective way to get a point across. I strongly feel like we must listen, to seek first to understand and then to be understood. It will take relationship building. I wrote a short substack that touches on this with actionable items. Here it is if you’d like to read it.
In 1962 a fresh-faced young William Shatner made a Roger Corman film called, "The Intruder" (also known as "Shame" and in the UK "The Stranger"), where a white supremacist comes into town to recruit for his organization in an atmosphere where the Southern town is facing forced integration of its high school. His organization is never named as the KKK, but clearly it's the KKK. Interesting role for a young Jewish actor. It was inspired by actual events in Tennessee. I've known Bill for 25 years and never asked him about that film, I guess because it didn't seem important until now, but he has reached the point at 94 years of age where he just flatly refuses to engage in political discussions.
It almost seems like the writer saw the wartime short Asha picked out and turned it into a feature length film. The hero of the film is an unemployed blue collar worker actually played by character actor Leo Gordon in what I think is the only "good guy" role in his entire very long Hollywood career. And screenwriters and novelists Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson and William F. Nolan make their only acting appearance in a feature film in this movie.
You can watch it on YouTube for free. I think it's good prep for this assignment.
There's a great Twilight Zone episode (The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street) where two aliens lead the citizens of a small town to suspect and attack each other in response to their turning off the power. At the end when the town is on fire and you hear shouts and shots, one alien turns to the other and says "Do you see how easy it is get the humans to turn on each other?" Trump is an alien!
First of all, one of my all time favorite episodes of the Twilight Zone. And more than a hint of writer Rod Serling's response to the ongoing influence of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
Oh, Ron. I just watched the movie and aside for the jarring racial slurs throughout the message was finally uplifting. And I think you may be right about its similarity to the 1947 piece. Thank you for your insider knowledge and for my having discovered that I can watch YouTube on my telly! Who knew?
High Katherine. Racism and nativism will likely never go away as a tool for elites, or wannabe elites to manipulate the masses in populist movements. It’s particularly odd here in the United States where we really are what Hitler called us “a mongrel nation,” composed of wave after wave of immigrants, each achieving political dominance, each trying to close the door to the next wave, each being subsumed as they break out of their ghettoes, intermarry, become culturally indistinct. I thought Gangs of New York, though brutally difficult to watch, illustrated this in glaring detail. All the more odd as one of the reasons we became, as Hitler also put it, “too rich too soon” is because of our diversity and the innovation and competitiveness it produces.
I’m currently readind a book edited by University of British Columbia anthropologist Megan Daniels, “Homo Migrans” which compiles some brilliant archeological and anthropological work on human migration. I encouraged her to combine all that historical data with the current global immigration wave and it’s socio-cultural ramifications, and she got excited about the idea and has started work on an article she thinks could be a book.
I asked Megan to further illuminate the influence of German archeology and the whole “blood and soil” thing the Nazis used to gain power in relation to the racist-nativist movements driving politics here in the US and especially in central Europe. This is far from the first climate and over-population driven mass migration in human history and it will only accelerate as drought, famine and soil and water contamination spread and explode species extinctions. We had a couple of movies about all that too. “Soylent Green” and the original “Rollerball.”
My coping method has been to reduce my news intake. Though if Asha is recommending this book (which is a topic that I have noticed this election cycle: perception vs reality) I am getting it, as well as recommending it to others. I just read about how the new government agency DOGE headed by Musk and Ramaswamy intends to look through the budget to cut trillions. He said something about we'll all get a haircut but we'll be better off. Odd analogy since "getting a haircut" is not a traumatic experience for most people, unless they are Sweeney Todd or don't know what the hell they are doing. I detect a little of each in those two. When the price of eggs does skyrocket under the incoming administration, we need to understand if this is acceptable, and not allow Fox and Fiends (my computer seems to have temporarily lost the 'R'), we can counter the narrative spin.
My conclusion about Trumps genius ( yes I use that word) is that he doesn’t tell people what’s REAL, he tells them what they FEEL, even if it’s wrong, and thus validates them and their beliefs. He mirrors them.
Since we are talking about a marketplace of ideas, I have something to share in relation to a previous post by another student. I read this student's posting, and it was referring to "dark money" and "charities" that influence political outcomes. This is high level stuff to have read, but the press corps members who report this either don't know the truth, or are biased.
The government is not transparent, despite Obama, and Obama made less effort to make it so than many would believe. This was good, not bad. The list of organizations and services below (first link at bottom) are from the State of New Jersey, Department of Human Services (DHS), Division of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS). Most of these enormous programs oversee the lives of people who have been in psychiatric facilities like Greystone, which is infamously violent (see link from NJ.com on the bottom of the page -- the conditions there don't really appear to be the fault of most of the staff, for one).
It's known that psychiatric consumers are more often the victims of crime than the actual perpetrators of crime. But if something paranoid happens to someone, he or she may be so distraught that he or she becomes aggressive with someone else. This means court. It is unknown in preliminary court hearings what the evidence is, or would be, because the distraught, vulnerable member of this protected class hasn't been put together enough to have any evidence of the triggering scenario that led to the outburst. When this is true, there can be ongoing investigations into who has victimized the mental health consumer, and these are conducted in a cloaked fashion so perps don't learn of any investigative activity.
Also, aside from the triggering of psychotic symptoms, addiction psychiatry tells us that people who are addicted to drugs or alcohol may typically be unable to "feel good" without the substances, and this can be because of sociological circumstances, also. So addiction is treated in a sensitive fashion, also.
But there is another element to this, too: that patients who have recovered from the acute phases of violent psychotic episodes have the civil right to live in the community, but there is need to watch them for further aggression due to psychosis. And with addiction, there are typically drug dealers involved, and even though addict behavior can be treated as a disease (there is even parity for it with all major insurance providers, as well as Medicare and Medicaid), the state likes to collect information on narcotrafficking.
There is also the need for clandestine investigation into the hospital Greystone, itself, due to the harms done the patients who then reside in the community under the care of the DMHAS agencies listed by the first link from a State of New Jersey webpage. Greystone is frequently litigated in low profile ways (typical, too, during the Obama era) so that the institution of government isn't permanently scarred by public condemnation. (It's an ethic, but this has become much higher profile, so writing it here is good. Because the state funds these "charities" -- which are founded with 501c3 status as entities, but operate simply by not making profit as government contractors that stay within the rules of 501c3's and are transparent by way of frequent audit by officials from the actual government -- the state itself is paying back the patients/victims by offering them good housing and support when they're discharged.
If there was a misunderstanding that this low profile stuff from state agencies that no one has ever heard of is "dark money," then I wish that would stop. There are true, valid, ethical, even moral reasons why sometimes things should be quiet. Because patient psychiatric evaluation is done by biopsychosocial standards, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) -- the "medical privacy act" -- is used legitimately to dissuade people from prying (and it's the real way it is used for psychiatry).
Asha, maybe you can have a talk with your friend Chris Cuomo, he seems to have drifted astray. Maybe he is inadvertently normalizing trump, i hope it’s not intentional
Professor Rangappa, Asha, as always you stir so much in my core being. I know this film. I am older than most in this excellent class. I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1960’s and 1970’s. My father used to take my sister and I to the “Boston Common”. A park in downtown Boston across the street from the State House where the state government sat. The Governor. And across the street from the Public Garden. The Public Garden had the Swan Boats snd beautiful foliage. It was okay. My love was the actual Boston Common. Literally Boston’s marketplace of ideas, crackpot and mainstream. I got a kick out of hearing the various speakers just like the man in the film. My father was a Jewish combat veteran of World War II. He enlisted after Pearl Harbor. He recognized the threat NAZI Germany posed to the entire world. Not just the world’s Jews. He taught my sister snd I so much that is so relevant now, to your posed questions, and to reality of our new government. For example “speaking in code”. When the man in the film says he cares about “real Americans”. Not Negros and foreigners”. My father would have loved to audit your course. All your classes. When the onlooker says hr heard this type of talk before. In Berlin. And the person next to him asks in raised and suspicious tones, “In Berlin? What were you doing in Berlin?” The entire snippet of dialogue and your evocative questions touch my heart. I thought i had learned this all and digested it by the age of ten. As it was inculcated at every family gathering we had. The film was made in 1947. I think this helps elucidate why the man raises suspicions about “the Catholics, the freemasons the Negros and alien foreigners.” To have said “The Jews “ in his litany would have seemed to obvious and painful for American audiences who just fought snd many family members died for America’s National Interests namely fighting the NAZI fascists in Europe and the Asian Fascists of Tojo’s and Hirohito’s Japan who had the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Fascist Japan sent troops to much of Asia murdering civilians in China, Korea. Philippines New Guinea, Vietnam (then a part of s larger French possession known as IndoChina, with its eyes on Australia and India. Burma. The world was st war. Twenty years after WWII ended my father was bringing me and my sister to Boston Common. A vivid “Marketplace of ideas”. Men stood on box crates advocating their ideas. Your questions are apt. The intentions of man speaking in the film is to poke hid fingers in thr eyes of the crowd (metaphorically) to raise their fears of the “other”, the strangers, foreigners, my entire family fit the bill of the others, speaking with heavily accented Lithuanian Jews and their offspring who talk English fine, but the habits, particularities, what they wore, what they ate, how they ate, so many rules snd restrictions. They were easy for the trumps of the 1940’s to target. . You ask what competing speakers might say, and thats good, insightful. And a respondee before me pointed out trump’s “genius” for talking to the masses telling them how they feel. Beyond a literal answer to your question, trump’s singular skill like s borderline personality disorder in psychology, both the boderline personality snd trump have a preternatural “gift” skillset. Not a bug, but a “feature” for them to zero in on a person’s look, to zero in on thr person’s fears. The mere act of zeroing in feeds the predator and he grows louder, more certain of his attack. To compete the opposing speaker should remind and reassure. Remind the audience of listeners whatever the pitch is, and reassure them with.fact based non arguable points, facts, snd tell the masses he/she id speaking factually, whereas the opposer is pulling on your fears, trying to scare you. Of the others, remind them “this is the future he she wants, is advocating for, this is my solution. My plan is a pathway for how we, our American society can get there. We are here at point A. We all agree snd recognize we must move from A to B. But how. This is my pitch. My plan. How we get there. A series of steps. Action items we must do. And so do them. Lets agree to come back every month yo assess progress we have made. Any challenges we want to discuss? Measurable goals. Baby steps to discuss how we overcame the challenge. Discuss.
The "marketplace of ideas" has always included at least one store with really bad ideas. The difference in the Information Age is that one well-financed "Bad Ideas Mart" (especially one that is willing to exaggerate/lie and play on people's fears/frustrations/prejudices) can overwhelm the marketplace and limit competition . . . and then they start franchising!
The speaker plays to the audience's fear of losing out to "others." A tried and true ploy that worked well for Trump in the campaign. Fear is more powerful than truth because it turns off reason and evokes an emotional response. The professor seemed to be able to reach the one listener with whom he spoke, but would he have been successful if he tried to redirect the audience's attention by speaking from a different corner in the park? These days he would be distrusted because he is an educated and thoughtful "elitist" who can't see the truth that's right in front of him. FDR seems to have been successful in his fireside chats when he said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Could he have done this in Lafayette park with a crowd and a competing speaker? Dems will have to figure out how to counter loud appeals to fear. Having a trusted figure is a necessary first step. Who would that be now?
I am reading Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari. It also very clearly explains information systems in democratic society vs autocractic or totalitarianistic ones. I am not done but I highly recommend this book.
Thank you for the assignment! Anything to distract from the election results
Hi Asha - I’ve just joined you (through your participation in Joyce Vance’s substack). As soon as I read your recommendation about Renee DiResta’s book I went out and bought it. Considering she talks about RFK, Jr I the very first pages of the introduction, I await your November 21 talk with her with a mixture of fascination and dread. Keep up your critical work. I’m counting on you!
I love this video! I have been watching this since 2016! I am glad to see others have found it!
Lots to think about, Asha. But the first thing that came to me was Hyde Park Corner in London. When I was last there (2005-ish) there were competing speakers with varying levels of audience size. I hope that tradition continues. Mum and I just browsed the content so to speak. The video you included was prepared in 1947 after the war had ended. Curious timing? I’ll give the questions more thought for our class assignment.
In 1947, it wasn't as easy to buy the Marketplace of Ideas - which is precisely what EM had in mind with the purchase of Twitter. People wanting to spread this kind of message would have had to talk - face-to-face - with their friends and neighbors ... some of whom may have been, for example, Masons.
In 1947, Americans were still very close to the patriotism of the war effort: working together to defeat fascism & authoritarianism that directly threatened their lives & their futures, took their friends and family members to war (and sometimes did not return them).
This is why I feel it's important for informed, rational voices to fight for that public square. I get it's better in the Good Place and it's a great place to organize and recharge - but the battle for popular opinion - and for truth, facts, evidence, data - isn't going to be won in spaces where everyone already agrees that these things are important.
Thank you, Asha, for sharing your voice and your expertise here.
Now, how do we get this information to the folks most in need of learning?
Hi Inkwrat- I know I’m not Asha answering, and that I am new to this group, but I wanted to let you know that I totally agree with you, that the battle for information won’t be won in spaces where everyone agrees. I also believe face to face is still the most effective way to get a point across. I strongly feel like we must listen, to seek first to understand and then to be understood. It will take relationship building. I wrote a short substack that touches on this with actionable items. Here it is if you’d like to read it.
https://substack.com/@lindamaetx/note/p-151418141?r=1r6229&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” --Steve Bannon, 2018.
“This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.” - Jonathan Rausch, reacting to Bannon's statement.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html
The market forces that punish ignorance are more intense in professional sports than they are in politics or medicine or climate.
In 1962 a fresh-faced young William Shatner made a Roger Corman film called, "The Intruder" (also known as "Shame" and in the UK "The Stranger"), where a white supremacist comes into town to recruit for his organization in an atmosphere where the Southern town is facing forced integration of its high school. His organization is never named as the KKK, but clearly it's the KKK. Interesting role for a young Jewish actor. It was inspired by actual events in Tennessee. I've known Bill for 25 years and never asked him about that film, I guess because it didn't seem important until now, but he has reached the point at 94 years of age where he just flatly refuses to engage in political discussions.
It almost seems like the writer saw the wartime short Asha picked out and turned it into a feature length film. The hero of the film is an unemployed blue collar worker actually played by character actor Leo Gordon in what I think is the only "good guy" role in his entire very long Hollywood career. And screenwriters and novelists Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson and William F. Nolan make their only acting appearance in a feature film in this movie.
You can watch it on YouTube for free. I think it's good prep for this assignment.
https://youtu.be/5KUuTJW269M
There's a great Twilight Zone episode (The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street) where two aliens lead the citizens of a small town to suspect and attack each other in response to their turning off the power. At the end when the town is on fire and you hear shouts and shots, one alien turns to the other and says "Do you see how easy it is get the humans to turn on each other?" Trump is an alien!
First of all, one of my all time favorite episodes of the Twilight Zone. And more than a hint of writer Rod Serling's response to the ongoing influence of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
Oh, Ron. I just watched the movie and aside for the jarring racial slurs throughout the message was finally uplifting. And I think you may be right about its similarity to the 1947 piece. Thank you for your insider knowledge and for my having discovered that I can watch YouTube on my telly! Who knew?
High Katherine. Racism and nativism will likely never go away as a tool for elites, or wannabe elites to manipulate the masses in populist movements. It’s particularly odd here in the United States where we really are what Hitler called us “a mongrel nation,” composed of wave after wave of immigrants, each achieving political dominance, each trying to close the door to the next wave, each being subsumed as they break out of their ghettoes, intermarry, become culturally indistinct. I thought Gangs of New York, though brutally difficult to watch, illustrated this in glaring detail. All the more odd as one of the reasons we became, as Hitler also put it, “too rich too soon” is because of our diversity and the innovation and competitiveness it produces.
I’m currently readind a book edited by University of British Columbia anthropologist Megan Daniels, “Homo Migrans” which compiles some brilliant archeological and anthropological work on human migration. I encouraged her to combine all that historical data with the current global immigration wave and it’s socio-cultural ramifications, and she got excited about the idea and has started work on an article she thinks could be a book.
I asked Megan to further illuminate the influence of German archeology and the whole “blood and soil” thing the Nazis used to gain power in relation to the racist-nativist movements driving politics here in the US and especially in central Europe. This is far from the first climate and over-population driven mass migration in human history and it will only accelerate as drought, famine and soil and water contamination spread and explode species extinctions. We had a couple of movies about all that too. “Soylent Green” and the original “Rollerball.”
Goodness, Ron. Thank you for this class today. So many lessons to be learned from history. Keep up the great work.
Thank you for all this detail, Ron. I’m glad I came back to this thread this morning.
My coping method has been to reduce my news intake. Though if Asha is recommending this book (which is a topic that I have noticed this election cycle: perception vs reality) I am getting it, as well as recommending it to others. I just read about how the new government agency DOGE headed by Musk and Ramaswamy intends to look through the budget to cut trillions. He said something about we'll all get a haircut but we'll be better off. Odd analogy since "getting a haircut" is not a traumatic experience for most people, unless they are Sweeney Todd or don't know what the hell they are doing. I detect a little of each in those two. When the price of eggs does skyrocket under the incoming administration, we need to understand if this is acceptable, and not allow Fox and Fiends (my computer seems to have temporarily lost the 'R'), we can counter the narrative spin.
My conclusion about Trumps genius ( yes I use that word) is that he doesn’t tell people what’s REAL, he tells them what they FEEL, even if it’s wrong, and thus validates them and their beliefs. He mirrors them.
Since we are talking about a marketplace of ideas, I have something to share in relation to a previous post by another student. I read this student's posting, and it was referring to "dark money" and "charities" that influence political outcomes. This is high level stuff to have read, but the press corps members who report this either don't know the truth, or are biased.
The government is not transparent, despite Obama, and Obama made less effort to make it so than many would believe. This was good, not bad. The list of organizations and services below (first link at bottom) are from the State of New Jersey, Department of Human Services (DHS), Division of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS). Most of these enormous programs oversee the lives of people who have been in psychiatric facilities like Greystone, which is infamously violent (see link from NJ.com on the bottom of the page -- the conditions there don't really appear to be the fault of most of the staff, for one).
It's known that psychiatric consumers are more often the victims of crime than the actual perpetrators of crime. But if something paranoid happens to someone, he or she may be so distraught that he or she becomes aggressive with someone else. This means court. It is unknown in preliminary court hearings what the evidence is, or would be, because the distraught, vulnerable member of this protected class hasn't been put together enough to have any evidence of the triggering scenario that led to the outburst. When this is true, there can be ongoing investigations into who has victimized the mental health consumer, and these are conducted in a cloaked fashion so perps don't learn of any investigative activity.
Also, aside from the triggering of psychotic symptoms, addiction psychiatry tells us that people who are addicted to drugs or alcohol may typically be unable to "feel good" without the substances, and this can be because of sociological circumstances, also. So addiction is treated in a sensitive fashion, also.
But there is another element to this, too: that patients who have recovered from the acute phases of violent psychotic episodes have the civil right to live in the community, but there is need to watch them for further aggression due to psychosis. And with addiction, there are typically drug dealers involved, and even though addict behavior can be treated as a disease (there is even parity for it with all major insurance providers, as well as Medicare and Medicaid), the state likes to collect information on narcotrafficking.
There is also the need for clandestine investigation into the hospital Greystone, itself, due to the harms done the patients who then reside in the community under the care of the DMHAS agencies listed by the first link from a State of New Jersey webpage. Greystone is frequently litigated in low profile ways (typical, too, during the Obama era) so that the institution of government isn't permanently scarred by public condemnation. (It's an ethic, but this has become much higher profile, so writing it here is good. Because the state funds these "charities" -- which are founded with 501c3 status as entities, but operate simply by not making profit as government contractors that stay within the rules of 501c3's and are transparent by way of frequent audit by officials from the actual government -- the state itself is paying back the patients/victims by offering them good housing and support when they're discharged.
If there was a misunderstanding that this low profile stuff from state agencies that no one has ever heard of is "dark money," then I wish that would stop. There are true, valid, ethical, even moral reasons why sometimes things should be quiet. Because patient psychiatric evaluation is done by biopsychosocial standards, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) -- the "medical privacy act" -- is used legitimately to dissuade people from prying (and it's the real way it is used for psychiatry).
https://nj.gov/humanservices/dmhas/home/hotlines/MH_Dir_COMPLETE.pdf
https://www.nj.com/news/2019/06/unsuitable-for-human-beings-doctors-give-chilling-details-of-conditions-at-state-psychiatric-hospital-beg-court-for-action.html
https://nj.gov/defender/documents/MHA%20OversightCommittee2022AnnualRep-FINAL.pdf
Asha, maybe you can have a talk with your friend Chris Cuomo, he seems to have drifted astray. Maybe he is inadvertently normalizing trump, i hope it’s not intentional
Professor Rangappa, Asha, as always you stir so much in my core being. I know this film. I am older than most in this excellent class. I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1960’s and 1970’s. My father used to take my sister and I to the “Boston Common”. A park in downtown Boston across the street from the State House where the state government sat. The Governor. And across the street from the Public Garden. The Public Garden had the Swan Boats snd beautiful foliage. It was okay. My love was the actual Boston Common. Literally Boston’s marketplace of ideas, crackpot and mainstream. I got a kick out of hearing the various speakers just like the man in the film. My father was a Jewish combat veteran of World War II. He enlisted after Pearl Harbor. He recognized the threat NAZI Germany posed to the entire world. Not just the world’s Jews. He taught my sister snd I so much that is so relevant now, to your posed questions, and to reality of our new government. For example “speaking in code”. When the man in the film says he cares about “real Americans”. Not Negros and foreigners”. My father would have loved to audit your course. All your classes. When the onlooker says hr heard this type of talk before. In Berlin. And the person next to him asks in raised and suspicious tones, “In Berlin? What were you doing in Berlin?” The entire snippet of dialogue and your evocative questions touch my heart. I thought i had learned this all and digested it by the age of ten. As it was inculcated at every family gathering we had. The film was made in 1947. I think this helps elucidate why the man raises suspicions about “the Catholics, the freemasons the Negros and alien foreigners.” To have said “The Jews “ in his litany would have seemed to obvious and painful for American audiences who just fought snd many family members died for America’s National Interests namely fighting the NAZI fascists in Europe and the Asian Fascists of Tojo’s and Hirohito’s Japan who had the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Fascist Japan sent troops to much of Asia murdering civilians in China, Korea. Philippines New Guinea, Vietnam (then a part of s larger French possession known as IndoChina, with its eyes on Australia and India. Burma. The world was st war. Twenty years after WWII ended my father was bringing me and my sister to Boston Common. A vivid “Marketplace of ideas”. Men stood on box crates advocating their ideas. Your questions are apt. The intentions of man speaking in the film is to poke hid fingers in thr eyes of the crowd (metaphorically) to raise their fears of the “other”, the strangers, foreigners, my entire family fit the bill of the others, speaking with heavily accented Lithuanian Jews and their offspring who talk English fine, but the habits, particularities, what they wore, what they ate, how they ate, so many rules snd restrictions. They were easy for the trumps of the 1940’s to target. . You ask what competing speakers might say, and thats good, insightful. And a respondee before me pointed out trump’s “genius” for talking to the masses telling them how they feel. Beyond a literal answer to your question, trump’s singular skill like s borderline personality disorder in psychology, both the boderline personality snd trump have a preternatural “gift” skillset. Not a bug, but a “feature” for them to zero in on a person’s look, to zero in on thr person’s fears. The mere act of zeroing in feeds the predator and he grows louder, more certain of his attack. To compete the opposing speaker should remind and reassure. Remind the audience of listeners whatever the pitch is, and reassure them with.fact based non arguable points, facts, snd tell the masses he/she id speaking factually, whereas the opposer is pulling on your fears, trying to scare you. Of the others, remind them “this is the future he she wants, is advocating for, this is my solution. My plan is a pathway for how we, our American society can get there. We are here at point A. We all agree snd recognize we must move from A to B. But how. This is my pitch. My plan. How we get there. A series of steps. Action items we must do. And so do them. Lets agree to come back every month yo assess progress we have made. Any challenges we want to discuss? Measurable goals. Baby steps to discuss how we overcame the challenge. Discuss.
#4: the competing speaker can lie. This will seed confusion, incorrect assumptions, and will make listeners more malleable toward being controlled.
The "marketplace of ideas" has always included at least one store with really bad ideas. The difference in the Information Age is that one well-financed "Bad Ideas Mart" (especially one that is willing to exaggerate/lie and play on people's fears/frustrations/prejudices) can overwhelm the marketplace and limit competition . . . and then they start franchising!
The speaker plays to the audience's fear of losing out to "others." A tried and true ploy that worked well for Trump in the campaign. Fear is more powerful than truth because it turns off reason and evokes an emotional response. The professor seemed to be able to reach the one listener with whom he spoke, but would he have been successful if he tried to redirect the audience's attention by speaking from a different corner in the park? These days he would be distrusted because he is an educated and thoughtful "elitist" who can't see the truth that's right in front of him. FDR seems to have been successful in his fireside chats when he said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Could he have done this in Lafayette park with a crowd and a competing speaker? Dems will have to figure out how to counter loud appeals to fear. Having a trusted figure is a necessary first step. Who would that be now?