(not-Americans, please don’t read because you will want to bomb us).
When The Pisser King “won” the election, one of my first thoughts was: oh great, now we’ll get days of the left trying to figure out how this was our fault. The grim festival of blame-laying among progressives/the left/Democrats: Do you wish it would stop already, for the love of all that is left to cling to? So do I.
“Comey; The Russians; Wiki Leaks; Tim Kaine was boring; Hillary was a bad candidate/too shrill and she won the popular vote so doesn’t count; Bernie was an egomaniac who couldn’t bear to get out of the race; the heinous and frightening acts of right-wing voter suppression; the unending anti-Hillary propaganda machine; the “Bernie surely would have won”; the cheating, plus too many of us are sexist, racist and stupid, and we forgot to sew the noble white laborer into our quilt of justice.”
The election swung on so few votes in the critical swing states that a logical case could be made for just about any theory (to that end I blame myself for not heading to my birthplace to swing Pennsylvania. Sorry Hillary you deserved better, I let you down and I know it). But basically, the lame stream media done it. By “it,” I mean degraded our political ecosystem to such an extent that Donald J. Trump was elected president. Right-wing media did more than any other entity to make this possible.
By “lame stream media,” I mean pretty much all conservative media, from the Alex Joneses and the Breitbarts to the David Brookses and the Wall Street Journals to the sewer that is Fox Nooz (The Fear-Mongering Propaganda Machine That’s Dividing This Nation).
Look, there is simply no way to make the conservative policy agenda sound nice without bullshitting. The things that conservatives want – lower taxes on wealth, less environmental protection, less help to the poor, etc., – are not good ideas, so those espousing them must try to bullshit us. We will help more people by helping fewer of them, and we will collect more taxes when we cut them. Insinuation and hyperbole and question begging and no details, retreating into vague appeals to our freedoms. “Bullshit”, basically.
Who was it that relentlessly and over multiple decades portrayed Hillary Clinton as a scheming criminal when her actual record was that of a dynamic progressive feminist and advocate in her inner younger days and later a typical center-left politician, and nearly always cleaner than her detractors’?
Who worked the bellows of the Tea Party, birthers, idiots obsessed with death panels FEMA camps, gun grabbing and martial law, none of which ever materialized nor were ever likely to? Who fanned fear of immigrants and Muslims and “urban youth” and socialism and women’s bodies, and atheism and other things that are not particularly dangerous, while denying that we are globally killing ourselves with fossil fuel emissions? Who took safety laws, trigger warnings and safe spaces and morphed them from little things that barely even existed at liberal colleges into dastardly, outrageous threats to the Republic?
Who made it so that Republican members of Congress are shitting their pants over the possibility of primary challenges from their own party? (Gerrymandering and) the right-wing media, of course!
Who saw that there was an enormous amount of money to be made in telling a regular sort of person who is frightened of change, and maybe a little bit mean, that they are right to be hateful and fearful? (like most things terrible things in this country, it goes back to Reagan. In 1987, when he had the FCC scrapped the “Fairness Doctrine” requiring tv and radio broadcasters to balance their political programming, there was no consumer internet).
This Guy!
Right-wing media is only a bit younger than media itself. But – YOUNG PEOPLE LISTEN UP BECAUSE YOU WERE NOT YET ALIVE TO REMEMBER WHEN THE REPUBLICANS CAME IN AN RUINED EVERYTHING THAT OTHER TIME – it was filtered, through an exceeding amount of editorial scrutiny and far, far, far, far fewer outlets than today. There was no national platform, known to all, readily available 24 hours a day basically for free, perpetually refreshed with new content, that was fully committed to advancing an extreme, ideologically right-wing agenda in 1987.
Used to be, you had to sign up for scary Ron Paul’s newsletter, probably at the gun show, maybe at the hobby shop (please google, as you may have never seen this much verbal diarrhea of the most racist, sexist and otherwise close-minded variety). Paul may have wanted America to be “free”, but the “America” he is/was speaking of is very small, very white, and needs to see a psychiatrist), and wait for it to come in the mail with the Reader’sDigest, to read the latest about the coming race war. It took some non-negligible effort to absorb weird, wrong, dangerous ideas. Now you can enter a world of impending conflict and bloody struggle against your enemies anywhere and always. It can fully replace the reality you see with your own eyes. And it badly wants to, because then it can sell more things to you.
“What’s going to happen when those Syrian refugees open fire in a Chick-fil-A”? Fox News’ Todd Starnes, November 17, 2016.
The bile is coming in over the transom so quickly it’s getting hard to keep up, as the conservative media signal their latest xenophobic and Islamophobic outburst, this time targeting refugees fleeing war-torn Syria. Not interested in having a serious debate about how or when to accept mostly Muslim refugees in the wake of the Paris terrorist massacre, Fox News sponsored a far-right hate brigade that not only targeted refugees, but President Obama, too. It’s a bigoted bank shot for conservative commentators: Accuse Obama of coddling would-be terrorists (including widows and big-eyed, Dickensian orphan children), who are viewed as encroaching on our borders. Or so goes the battle cry, which accuses the president of abdicating America’s national security — and allegedly doing so on purpose.
*Fox’s Jesse Watters: Obama is inviting in “the barbarians at the gate.”
*Fox’s Andrea Tantaros: “Everything that the president is doing seems to benefit what ISIS is doing.”
*Ben Stein: Obama’s “hatred of America” may be “because he’s part black.” “He does not wish America well.”
TRANSLATE: there’s a dark, invading force that Obama won’t stop. In fact, he seems intent on welcoming it across the border so it can wreak havoc here at home.
The Fox meltdown over refugees seemed like unique brand of rhetorical manure.’ I mean, Obama putting Muslim refugees above the safety of Americans? Opting for a “forced infiltration“? But if you hit the rewind button to October and November 2014, then you remember, ‘Oh yeah, they did pretty much the exact same thing, with their full-scale meltdown over a domestic Ebola outbreak that never happened.’
Some Fox talkers went so far as to connect the refugee/Ebola dots, although they fail to see it as problematic.
“He’s (Obama), imported illegal aliens. Remember he brought all of the Ebola victims into this country?” – Watters
Yeah, I remember, you turd. I remember Ebola. In terms of sheer, unmitigated fearmongering, Fox News led the rabid,wild, right-wing wolf pack. There was Dame Elisabeth Hasselbeck suggesting America be put on “lockdown”, and her douchenozzle Steve Doocy absurdly claiming the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention was lying about Ebola because it’s “part of the administration.” (Naturally, Fox also promoted a conspiracy theorist who claimed the CDC was lying when it cautioned people not to PANIC.)
*Laura Ingraham: “Obama’s willing to expose the U.S. military to “the Ebola virus to carry out this redistribution of the privileged’s wealth.”
*Michael Savage: “Obama wants to infect the nation with Ebola in order to make things fair and equitable in the world.
*Fox’s Keith Ablow: Obama won’t protect America from Ebola because his “affinities, his affiliations are with” Africa and “not us … He’s their leader.” Ablow added, “We don’t have a president who has the American people as his primary interest.”
Andrea Tantaros shrieked about how people who traveled and showed symptoms will “seek treatment from a witch doctor” instead of going to the hospital, while Rush Limbaugh implied Obama wanted Ebola to spread in America. This is the levels to which Fox talkers and their allies sink in their Obama Derangement Syndrome, over and over:
The Obama administration didn’t supposedly bungle the Ebola scare because it was incompetent. It bungled Ebola because Obama wanted Americans infected.
President Obama, the man devoid of skeletons and scandals, loving father of two daughters, was conspiring to have Americans infected with Ebola. Character Assassination will always be a feature of politics. There will always be people who lie and deceive for political ends, and, to a greater or lesser extent, succeed at it. There will always be conspiracy theories, and sometimes actual conspiracies, and hatred, and fear, and ignorance, and vengefulness, and all the other rots. The extent to which these rots thrive depends on the environment. There is none more hospitable to them than right-wing media, which is now everywhere and multiplying like rats in a Pappa John’s.
It’s just heinous, fetid stuff; the kind of hate speech that has rarely passed for ‘mainstream’ conservative rhetoric in modern American politics.
Last week’s attack of collective stupid to making the rounds of Facebook was a story from a fake news dump claiming that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is about to leave the Supreme Court, because she “doesn’t like Donald Trump”. Which makes not the least bit of sense to anyone with a brain, But this is fake news we’re talking about, so “plausibility” isn’t high on the priority list to start with. ABC News debunked the stupid fake story, but its truth-squad attempt has its own problems, mainly an ambiguous headline: “No, Justice Ginsburg Hasn’t Said She’s Resigning Because Trump Won.” Oh. So she’s resigning for some other reason? No, she isn’t fucking resigning at all, “What” is the name of the guy on second, Han shot first, George W Bush did loads of cocaine in college, and global warming is still a fact.
What I’m getting at here is that when even a debunking is ambiguous, we’re pretty much screwed.
WE are just as capable – of not more because, “brains”, to flood the Internets with fake stories. Anyone with a wifi password could. All these jackals did was, back in December, create a fake news site called “Success Street” – Internet Archive link – ran a story breathlessly announcing Ginsburg’s imminent resignation, complete with the idiotic, breathless headline, “Breaking News: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is RESIGNING From The Post of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court!!!!” Then they had the story reposted verbatim at multiple fake sites, then got forwarded all over Facebook, because everyone knows a “credible” news outlet will never use more than four exclamations in a headline (another dead giveaway: the story was loaded with a bunch of paragraphs in all-caps, just like real news is. And as is typical of a lot of these sites, the story is a mix of genuine and completely made-up quotes). Boom. It’s NEWS.
It’s hard to see hope for this country going forward.The mantra of “More for me! Fuck you!” had so permeated the landscape, is so in control of every. fucking. thing. from what was once a news media actually dedicated to bringing people news, to every level of government, to neighbors who will help each other hook up a new dishwasher but lose their shit at the idea that their taxes might help that same neighbor take care of her kids if she lost her job because her company, owned by greedy assgoblins, moved overseas (and more so if said neighbor is black or brown or looks furrin). We are the antithesis of a “United” states, and getting less and less united every day. What hope is there, with the vulgar talking yam and his rapacious weasels preparing to literally take over the world? The enormity of it all is drowning me. I wake up each morning and wonder if I’ll make it through the day. I have to keep going, putting one step in front of another and watching the horizon fearfully, hoping I can get strong enough, soon enough. Being kind oldz, it’s tougher than ever. I see little hope, at least not until the masses rise up. But I don’t even credit the masses with the drive and intelligence to stage a revolt. Even so, the rapacious weasels will have so altered our legal framework as to make recovery well nigh impossible. Greed over people, and party over country are increasingly difficult obstacles to overcome, but the very existence of country as most of us knew it depends upon fighting for legitimate information to be more widely available than propaganda is (and for propaganda to be labeled as such: trash).
I recently had a guy who only watches Fox News mansplain to me that I need to get out of my liberal echo chamber and listen to what the “other side had to say” about women’s issues. My head shot off the top of my neck from irony buildup. I thought I was going to die. My dad, until he died last year, was himself an old, white man. He never once even thought about watching FOX News. He was a man of science and liked, y’know, empirical facts, and honestly if he had opened that Necronomicon,, and he was assaulted by all those lights and bells and alerts, I think his blood pressure would have risen to stroke-level within 30 seconds of viewing. The whole “well, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, why can’t they?” thing that older, white conservatives seem to sputter on about was anathema to him. He understood that the world was not a level playing field, a pretty simple concept. Even though he was born into an orphanage and grew up on a chicken farm in NJ, he still understood that as a white person and a man person, he had a leg up. Here’s the problem, though. If we walked into an auto body shop or tire store or hospital ER, doctor’s office waiting room or filling station, odds are high that I will be assaulted with some right-wing fanatic shouting about the evils of liberalism. I never hear a” leftist”. I might hear some fact-based news sandwiched in between the right-wing shouters, who weirdly kept insisting that the media is a liberal conspiracy.
I remember, as a kid in the 1970’s, we used to hear how horrible the counter culture was, how we where going to lose a generation to drugs, socialism, etc all the right-wing boogymen. Now it seems we have lost a generation, a generation of olds to Batshit Media. Between scrapping the “Fairness Doctrine,” and allowing media outlets to be held in very few hands, the chances of ever placing new sources in the service of the public again are faint.
Since the election I have come to the conclusion that humans do have Original Sin, and it’s got nothing to do with Trees, Knowledge, Clothes or Sex. They are, as a whole, simply too fucking fearful, hateful, bigoted, stupid and greedy. They thrive on anything and everything that tells them that’s OK, from Ayn Rand, Nigerian Princes, and the Tea Party through to the NRA, Sov-Cits, the Christian Right, the Alt-Right and Trump.
Before the election I felt the GOP was on the brink of falling apart. And I guess I still feel like they’re falling apart. Dems on the other hand are coming together, ever since the convention, slowly, but still. Maybe I’m an optimist. HAHAHAHAHA
postscript: something to look forward to: one day a hoard of white power thugs is going to unwittingly set upon Roger Ailes, beating him to within an inch of his life and that will be moment he finally realizes what he’s created.