How Right Wing Con Artists Get Away with Doing Anything They Want to Do
I thank historian and journalist @rickperlstein today, for pointing out the article below on Twitter. It’s about how Trump is using trade wars to shake down American businesses — that is, to create problems for American businesses, who are then paid off or protected to some degree — for example, as farmers were just paid off with the $12 billion farm subsidy. But they apparently won’t be paid off or protected unless they support Trump.
“A shakedown racket depends upon creating problems for those to be shaken down. And, as the hardships deepen, the protections Trump provides his supporters will become all that more valuable.
“ As for those who don’t support Trump? The administration can simply respond, ‘No can do. There’s a trade war going on. Blame Europe for your problems. Blame Obama for the lousy deals that forced us to institute tariffs in the first place. It’s not our fault.’ ”
The author points out how the Right Wing propaganda network will spin whatever lies they need to, to blame Democrats for the problems, and to make Trump and Republicans seem innocent.
How can the Right Wing get away with using the U.S. government as a tool to carry out unethical activities?
The same way they have purged voter rolls and done many other forms of voter suppression. The same way they have done gerrymandering. The same way they put immigrant babies in cages, demanded ransom money from their parents and lost the records of which children belong to whom. The same way they robbed Obama of a SCOTUS appointment and many district court appointments.
The Right Wing does exactly what they want to do, spins lies about it on the ever expanding Right Wing propaganda network, and then goes on to do even more con artistry the next day.
The lies praise Republicans and blame Democrats. Right Wing media have done this hundreds of times over recent years. It works. And it will continue to work until Democrats, citizens and mainstream media wake up and fight back.
Democrats have seldom fought back forcefully, even when we’ve been in power. It’s also only recently that Democrats have begun to recognize the great importance of state and local elections. These are the elections that end up deciding whether gerrymandering and voter suppression will be done.
Democrats also need to get used to being eternally vigilant about voter suppression, gerrymandering and other over-arching issues that affect Democrats’ ability to create progress in all other areas. Democrats must act more powerfully.,
Deception of the public is a major issue. Here’s an article explaining how Right Wing propaganda demonizes Democrats, persuading itself and others that Democrats are evil.
The Trump administration has pulled back the curtain to reveal many of our nation’s flaws. One of them is that we are highly vulnerable to propaganda, yet we are unaware that we are. Many of us believe that we and others are totally independent individuals who make our own choices without ever being influenced by outside forces. That’s unrealistic.
Most Americans mistakenly believe that there is nothing that we can or should do about this situation as a nation or a society. Or we may believe that only stupid or uneducated people are vulnerable to propaganda, which is far from the case.
Right Wing Lies Even Democrats and Mainstream Media Believe
It’s convenient for the Right Wing if people believe that poor education is the only cause of propaganda vulnerability. Because if better education were the sole solution, it would be a long term solution. In the time it would take for us to significantly improve the educational system, Republicans would have the time to solidify control in ways that would make their control unlikely to end for generations.
Improving education is a worthy long term goal. However, we need to use other solutions to deal with our propaganda problem in the mean time, to keep our national situation from getting worse.
We have this president and this Republican dominated Congress, because we allowed the nation to get immersed in Right Wing propaganda. It persuades the voters to elect con artists. And it persuades them to mistrust mainstream media — so they can never learn the truth.
There are ways some of us are working to change that. We need more people to join us.
I wish mainstream media had a laser focus on truth. Although mainstream media report a whole lot more truth than Right Wing media, mainstream media are a mixed bag. Most of them are Right Wing biased to some degree.
This happens because media have longstanding habits, like bothsidesism — pretending that “both sides” of a political argument are always equally valid.
When lies are given equal credibility with truth, the lies have the advantage by being given a credibility they don’t deserve.
All of us are vulnerable to Right Wing manipulations, especially if we are unaware of them. Much of the time we are influenced to let Right Wingers make the rules about what we’ll think or do. That needs to end.
We need to become aware of propaganda and take steps to stop it. Here are just a few of the many kinds of actions we can take.
We can pressure advertisers to remove ads from media programs that contain constant lying and/or hate speech.
We can let mainstream media know we expect them to report the truth. We can recognize and praise the TV hosts and writers who do, and pressure the ones who don’t. If media organizations don’t respond to citizens’ demands for truth, we can switch our patronage to those who value truth.
We can even have protests outside media organizations’ offices, demanding that they thoroughly cover protests and other events by the Resistance if those events are receiving inadequate coverage.
I’ve written numerous other articles explaining propaganda’s role in electing and maintaining support for Donald Trump, the Republican dominated Congress, and other Republican officials. You can read other essays by me here.
