By James Preston Allen, Publisher
“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”
— Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 1776
The (ultra-right wing) Conservative Caucus is out drumming up patriotic support for the coming conflict over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian investigation — an investigation that by all appearances will catch Trump in an increasing tangle of lies and deceit. If it comes to any conclusion before the midterm elections, it might just cause an implosion that will shake the very foundations of our government and the economy, or maybe not. My guess is that when his actual taxes are eventually investigated it will be exposed that the president is neither as rich nor as smart as he keeps telling everyone. In the meantime, blind followers have their marching orders and it’s beginning to show.
Besides screaming that “the liberals are coming for your guns” and the liberal media and universities are trampling “free speech,” the following is The Conservative Caucus’ to-do list to stopping the “coup” against Trump, including:
- Recruit up to 2 million patriots for Trump using e-mail, postal mail, the internet, and videos;
- Flood the Republican-controlled congress with a tidal wave of petitions;
- Create an information war room to push back on fake news reports about the Trump Administration;
- Produce and air TV, radio, print and internet ads that are pro-President Trump and anti-impeachment, anti-Deep State, and anti-coup;
- Build a campaign war chest of $10 million that the TCC can draw on each time the liberals and the establishment forces launch a phony new Trump scandal.
Curiously, these talking points are the same ones being parroted by Fox News and the Sinclair Broadcast Group.
These are the offensive actions of a narcissist who will never admit to being guilty of anything. These are not the actions of an innocent man.
First, the “liberal media” accusation — some 90 percent of the media in this country are controlled by a handful of corporations. Only a few could be accused of “being liberal.” Fox News and SBG are in hundreds of markets and are clearly partisan and proud of their very conservative bias. Trump and his Fox friends’ attack on the news media has only resulted in fewer news media outlets to defend what they consider to be mainstream, which from my perspective is often bereft of anything more left of center than a car chase or the weather lady in a tight dress.
However, when truly threatened by Sinclair’s heavy-handed propaganda — forcing all of its affiliates to read scripted political attacks — several TV news stations in Los Angeles and elsewhere stood up to call it out. I was actually shocked that the normally banal chatty news teams and their editors broadcast something of critical importance. Maybe, just maybe, this fake news attack will produce some backbone in the otherwise feckless newsrooms of America — the ones who are suppose to be the defenders of the First Amendment, the purveyors of truth.
Yet, what we are now witnessing is the power of the press being used in a disinformation campaign by embattled right wing partisans to undermine American confidence in the veracity of the news distributed by establishment corporate media. I have my own criticisms of the corporate media, but being too liberal isn’t one of them.
They are mostly siren chasers, caring more about the next car chase or homicide than they are about investigating truly important news stories. The news as we know it today has drifted far afield from when Walter Cronkite reported on the Vietnam War and concluded that it was a lost cause.
Now we are confronted daily with talking heads who only read the news and opinionaters who have never seen a battlefield or reported on a crime scene. On the far right of the spectrum, the opinionaters are nothing more than political partisans implanted in news rooms acting like shock-jocks on talk radio. They are only there to provoke and insinuate, not to expose and reveal. I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse as the Mueller investigation uncovers the unseemly truth about Trump, the Russians, the 2016 election and money laundering.
There’s going to be a right wing backlash against revealing the facts about Trump and we are already beginning to see it being played out in Orange County with their uprising over immigrant sanctuary status in California and the plight of the homeless. These people are scared and have been whipped up into frenzy with disinformation and propaganda by the same “news” media bringing you the “liberal fake news” message.
The failure of the press now — as is often the case — is the failure to place current events into historical context.
What we are offered instead is a cacophony of visual excitement with a few seconds of narrative, a crying relative or a shocked neighbor, and the police saying the obvious about a dead victim. This kind of infotainment is now being converted into a form of information warfare where everything is opinion and nothing is fact, where the outrageous lies of a few extremists are balanced against the proven facts so the evidence of global warming goes unheard and the data showing white people commit more crimes, yet more people of color are locked up in prisons is ignored. Or how about the biggest lie that recently came out of the NRA: banning military assault rifles will mean that the liberals are taking away all of your guns.
This and much more is circulating out there on the internet and social media and now the uber-right media is shaping public opinion against common sense and reason. It is a war of words using some very basic psychological warfare techniques that have been employed by our own government abroad to manifest confusion and create the conditions for regime change. And as much as Putin and Trump deny it, it’s being used as a weapon right here at home.