The Cult of Propaganda

This is mostly a rerun/repeat of a previous blog from last year that focused on Fox News, but with a few updates. (See DOMINATION OF THE MEDIA, NOT AN ENDGAME IN ITSELF).

Now that the Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG) is vying for a larger share of the news market across the United States, the need to sound the alarm bells is stronger than ever. With all that we are learning about the corruption within the Trump Administration, (see 501 Days in Swampland by Joy Crane and Nick Tabor https://tinyurl.com/y89zqrml) it’s safe to say that SBG will likely get their Xmas wish list granted in full. Once that deal goes through, there will be large swathes of the American public who will have no other recourse than to SBG for their local newscast.

Most weekdays I listen to the first hour of NPR’s show On Point. Invariably, but especially during the last fifteen months or so, I’ve been fascinated at the Conservatives who call in. Where in the past the occasional Conservatives calling in would have sound arguments based on a different set of organizing principles, I’m surprised these New Types of Conservatives even listen in on the show. Not because the program shares any particular viewpoint but because none of the factual information presented by On Point’s panel of journalists and commentators ever seems to pierce through the veneer of false facts these New Types Conservatives have absorbed from other, more dubious sources. It’s as if we had been listening to two separate broadcasts.

The effect is jarring. It tells you the severity of the impasse, we, as a society, find ourselves in these days. As books like Madeleine Albright’s Fascism –a Warning, or Yascha Mounk’s The People vs Democracy, Why our Freedom is in Danger…remind us of late: we are in very troubled waters. Picture the hellhole of Syrian refugees the world over. The possibility of losing all the ground the world community painstakingly cobbled together after the calamities of two World Wars is so real we can taste the bitterness such loss would bring to all of our lives.

Having raised a generation on false equivalencies and alternative facts, Fox News’ spoon feeding of the Orwellian Pablum has weaned a cohort of the electorate away from reality, unable to recognize differences of opinion from actual facts. And now, SBG is banking on the freedom of the press and some Trumpian cronyism to add their own biased sound bites to the propaganda swamp.

Since none of us are immune to propaganda—a reminder to re-read Orwell’s 1984 if you haven’t in a while—we are now faced with an almost cataclysmic conundrum. How do you retract from and reeducate a populace who has come to believe the claptrap that has been fed to them as legitimate news? How do you let them know that they’ve been inculpated into a propagandist cult? When the inconvenient truth of science and logic and verifiable facts has become the bogeyman, where do you go from there?

 

As standard bearers, the Trump Administration has returned the Federal Government to a Boss Tweed Tammany Hall. Is there even one Trump Cabinet member who isn’t trying to destroy the very Department they’ve been assigned to lead? Imagine purposely hiring an illiterate person to teach school. Hiring a pedophile to run your daycare. Letting a pyromaniac run your local fire department. These irreconcilable traits should render the actions of these Cabinet officials felonious.

But in the Trump World we live in, where real news is fake news and fake news is real news, a timetable for reckoning is up in the air. Obfuscation rules unless each and every citizen pays very close attention to the details.

 

 

 

 

 

DOMINATION OF THE MEDIA (not an endgame in itself)

  The greed for power seems to override almost everything these days. Fiscal orthodoxy goes out the window in the face of this hegemonic hunger. This is how the lines get crossed, where George Washington’s cautioning the country to beware the strength of political party over love of country has come to prevail. These, I believe, are some of the short-term legacies that Fox News has released onto society as it normalized the complete and utter disregard for factual truth in order to organize behind one political party.

Having raised a generation on false equivalencies and alternative facts, Fox News’ spoon feeding of the Orwellian Pablum has weaned a cohort of the electorate away from reality, unable to recognize differences of opinion from actual facts. Ironically, unlike in a fascist dictatorship where the press gets usurped to create its own bombastic propaganda, Fox News was allowed to infiltrate the traditional news media waves and make its headway onto U.S. soil on the wings of democracy’s love of freedom of the press.

I’m certainly not arguing for anything less than that freedom. However, with that liberty comes certain responsibilities. As early as 2003 when I read Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, I was concerned about the long-term effects a channel like Fox News might have as it ingratiated itself into American culture. As Fox News was allowed to grow without a glitch, fed by ratings and sponsors unconcerned by how profit was accrued, the most problematic consequence of this movement to date was the election of Trump.

Viewers, already inclined by religion and primed by the Reagan era, were ready to be baited by the time Roger Ailes set up shop in 1996. They saw in Fox News an ally in form if not necessarily in content. It wasn’t much of a stretch to go from the hyperbole of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network to the “supposed” news format that Fox was offering. It did not hurt Fox’s growth that it coincided with the cable industry’s rise with its 24/7 news cycles along with the advent of the Internet.

Since none of us are immune to propaganda—which is why Orwell’s 1984 is such an important tool for young minds to read—we are now faced with an almost cataclysmic conundrum. How do you retract from and reeducate a populace who has come to believe the claptrap that has been fed to them as worthy news for twenty years? How do you let them know that they’ve been inculpated into a propagandist cult? When the inconvenient truth of science and logic and verifiable facts has become the bogeyman, where do you go from there?

Listening to the commentary these last few days as pundits analyzed the shooting at the Republican baseball practice by what appears to be someone with a left-of-center ideology, it was all too clear that competing realities are at play. We have lost the capacity for common ground when we cannot organize ourselves as a society to agree on simple facts. Rarely do you ever hear of left-wing militia groups in the U.S. Period. End of that debate.

No one in their right mind would argue for violence. Violence only begets violence. But the bellicose language we observed during this last political cycle at Trump rallies primed the public and lowered the bar on what was socially acceptable behavior. The distance between rhetoric and action isn’t as far as people would like to believe. Add to that component a country where more than half of its citizens worship at the altar of ammunition and firearms, completely unable to distinguish a second amendment right advocated in the latter part of the 18^th century when muskets had yet to be invented vs. the array of firepower available on any urban street corner in the United States today.

Is it any wonder we have arrived to what we have in 2017—Trump as president and Senators being shot at baseball practice on suburban fields! The only sound of sanity to be heard this week? When Fox News finally decided on the first honest proclamation in its twenty-one year history: They finally dropped from their logo the “Fair and Balanced”. Hallelujah. Praise the lord and pass the ammunition.

Sheriff of Nottingham

If you’re a guy of a certain age you have vivid memories of Robin Hood, be it from film, the TV series, even the Classics Illustrated comic book. Whichever the source, the common denominator villain was always the Sheriff of Nottingham. He may have had his cronies in devising plots to capture Robin and his band of merry followers, but there could be no doubt in any young reader’s mind that the sole foil to Robin’s philanthropy was invariably the greedy Sheriff of Nottingham. (Cue: hissing and booing.)

Interspersed with Robin’s adventures of stealing from the rich to feed and clothe the poor, there were often scenes where the Sheriff applied some form of torture to a captured wretch in the hope of gaining ground on his nemesis. In the Sheriff’s twisted psyche, inducing fear, pain and panic—but especially pain— in his prisoners equated with collecting valuable information towards his goal of exterminating Robin Hood. To say nothing of the streak of sadism that seemed to ooze from the administration of torture. You likely were too young to know anything about sadism back then but you knew it was pure evil at its core. (Cue: more hissing and booing.)

Even at a very young age, you understood viscerally that the torture equation was falsely predicated on a faulty understanding of human psychology, even of human nature. That under extreme pain conditions anyone could be coerced into stating any gibberish fed to them simply to have the pain stop. Even worse, that someone chose to die from such torture, honor-bound to a code that would not permit him/her to breach a solemn oath they had made to friends, to a cause. There were no CliffsNotes to debate the moral/ethical conundrum for your young brain to process the Sheriff’s actions but you just knew and detested his means and methods.

Fast forward into the early aughts when President Bush Jr. signed a still-classified directive giving the CIA the power to secretly imprison and interrogate detainees. Without any of the traditional oversight the CIA ordinarily had to curb its excesses, this Bush directive amounted to carte blanche for torture, well-documented over the last fifteen years. (See US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report 12-9-2014). After the Justice Department completed what are now known as the Torture Memos, Condoleezza Rice told the CIA in July 2002 that the “enhanced interrogation” techniques were approved.  It was no coincidence that throughout Bush Jr.’s administration, my Sheriff of Nottingham gag reflex was constantly being triggered.

In 2010, Dick Cheney said on ABC’s This Week, “I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program.” Was there ever any doubt that Cheney was/is one incarnation of the Sheriff of Nottingham?

Time and again, various opportunities to prosecute those who perpetrated those horrors were stifled, both nationally and internationally for obvious reasons. The consequences of any one country acting on behalf of The International Court to bring to justice high-ranking officials in the Bush administration would be courting a diplomatic nightmare. Good old Canada towed the line, shutting down a Bush investigation initiated by the Center for Constitutional Rights just in time for a Bush visit to Canada. It’s the same motivation that informed the Obama Administration from going forward on this matter. Fear of retribution, even on contrived facts, is a strong, if toxic, detriment. Without any prosecutions the possibility remains that a future U.S. presidential administration could claim torture is legal again, merely a question of policy choice, and revive its practice. Sound familiar?

Which brings me to Steve Bannon.

From the minute this man was introduced to us on the Trump campaign, my ire was ignited. What he said, what he suggested, what he intimated, all had the aura of a Sheriff of Nottingham in the house. My concerns over Bannon’s influence on Trump and his Cabinet did not diminish when I learned of Bannon’s admiration for, and supposed devotion to, something called the Strauss-Howe generational theory. It was like adding fuel to my ire’s fire. The theory is too complicated (convoluted?) to take up here in this short blog. Suffice to say, that in Bannon’s worldview we are in a generational period of Crisis. Think End Times but for political junkies!

If the man advising the supposedly most powerful man on the planet believes in a theory that should produce a Crisis in our times, doesn’t it stand to reason that this advisor will do all he can to accommodate his theory. If Bannon, in order to feel good about himself, needs his theory to work, what is there preventing him from orchestrating a Crisis out of nowhere? What best way to do so than to create an atmosphere of havoc and unsureness, where U.S. citizens begin to doubt facts and truths. Welcome to the real Trump empire. Forget hotels and casinos; imagine instability and chaos and all the profiteering opportunities to come.

The difference between perception and reality can be quite infinitesimal. In the wrong eyes, it can also prove catastrophic. In the end, if we, as an aggrieved society, should have learned anything over the previous Bush/Cheney era, it is to be vocal and engaged. All together now: Loud hissing and booing!

Our New Silent Spring

You know the country is moving into dictatorial waters when obfuscation of verifiable facts is part of each White House daily briefing. Imagine a three-card Monte scam being performed for the benefit of the widest possible viewing audience. Political pollution lies at the very heart of earnest propaganda. These times are akin to a neo-Silent Spring scenario, one of our own making, lest we speak out and act up.

The Trump Administration knows that you need only start with the smallest of truths on which to attach your lies. The gullible will give you the benefit of the doubt while those with a vested interest to make Trump’s cause successful will double-down on behalf of his Administration to ensure their reins on power stay intact. Truth not only be damned, but falsehoods welcomed with full employment for the most blatant liars.

The political marketing began on day two of the Trump administration as first Trump, and then his army of minions, argued over the numbers who attended his Friday Inauguration. According to various news outlets, the tally of demonstrable lies during these first seven days of Trump’s Administration reached into the mid-twenty range, give or take your political bent or your grasp of rationality when faced with facts. Not the “alternative” factuality Trump’s spokeswoman, Kellyanne Conway, endorsed on network television but the facts as facts, for lack of any clearer terminology.

These people are not fools, contrary to subjective observation. Just as in any abusive relationship, the pathology always starts benignly, growing more and more egregious as the perpetrator learns that he/she can get away with it. And so we have the early seeds of manipulation in full deployment mode, whose unintended goal will be the gaslighting of democracy. Purposeful lies versus innocent—if sad—delusion come to life, now that Trump has reached the Oval Office and brought the circus with him.

When Trump criticizes legitimate news organizations, over and over again, enough times so that a near majority of the electorate begins to perceive these faithful spokespersons as suspect, society has a real problem. When this swayed constituency chooses fringe news outlets for validation of a skewed reality, this Administration’s job will be mostly done. The legitimacy of democracy, capital D, will go on trial; a mock trial, yes, but one that nonetheless will produce real effects, outcomes that will beget more outcomes as the foundations of our society get tested.

Whose revolution will it be? The battle is just begun.