I am not lying when I tell you that the only time that I watch Fox News is when there is some big event, like a political debate or a major presidential speech, or some major breaking news story. I usually tune in briefly, just to see what their take on things might be, and then I shudder and turn the channel. I took a quick look last night and what I saw was more nakedly racist than anything I have ever seen on my television in 45 years of life. It was far worse than anything I could have anticipated. And the world they had created for their audience was so distorted and toxic that I was fearful for the country.
Because I watch Fox so infrequently, it’s like a nephew you rarely see so you notice the changes that the parents don’t. Little Johnny’s eyes are darker than they used to be, and his evil has sprouted up six inches, seemingly overnight.
Every day, a little more all the time, imperceptible to regular viewers, that news network is making people worse human beings.
It has consequences, and they aren’t good.
It has spread to the rest of the networks. It is the owners, the very character of the people who are the chairs and CEOs of NewsCorp, Viacom, Comcast, TimeWarner, Disney–and ClearChannel and Sinclair as well. They are not economic actors but active promoters of their own individualized personal vision of politics using the power of the media to translate that into political reality.
And that vision is Hobbesian. And tyrannical.
Some might call it fascism, a mixture of politics and profits – ugly.
Yes, fasicsm is exactly what I would call it. That’s because that is quite clearly what it is. Funny how it just seem to creep into the mainstream without so much of a peep from our “real american” friends…
Remember, the Civil War didn’t start at Fort Sumter
Of course, you can go further
Still, 1850 seems most equivalent, right now. From Tom Coburn to Kris Kobach.
I would have put us even deeper into that decade, but that’s just a quibble…
Maybe when there’s a cane beating on the Senate floor.
However, I also forgot Speaker of the Nevada State Assembly, Ira Hansen
So maybe you’re right.
I’m thinking that we are at 1925, with the effective legitimization of the Klan. And that the Republican Party crazies elected in this election seek to go back to 1830, the aftermath of the Nat Turner rebellion when white militias could kill with impunity — and did.
There’s a long bit of co-dependence by the majority of whites in this country between those two dates.
1928
Yes, Fox is an obscene cesspool of lies, bile and distortion. It exists to spread the propaganda of the “conservative” movement and give its viewers (seekers of “conservative” news) the illusion that they are responsible “informed” voters and citizens. It gives them supposed reasons for their virulent hate, so they can forgive themselves their thoughts of violence, to the extent they have remnants of conscience.
But it is only a (small) part of the horrendous “conservative” movement, which is bidding to become the worst political development in American history. We can’t neglect the instigators, strategists and “news-makers” of the hatred and propaganda, monsters like Bachmann and Coburn, for example, who spew irresponsible barefaced lies for Fox to vomit back to its willing viewership. At every turn the “conservative” movement seeks to drag its followers ever deeper into the moral cesspool, give them ever more sewage to gorge upon, and essentially ensure the fundamental depravity of mankind (h/t Davis X) is brought ever closer to the surface of consciousness.
The American Right are now openly sowing a race war, because it has brought them great success to date. So much for “post-racial” America, ha-ha. Their heavily armed followers are chomping at the bit to engage in political violence in “defense” of the nation’s “integrity”. The leaders of Team Conservative and their media organs will thus continue with their race strategy–indeed they will amplify it, because there is no apparent downside. They certainly have nothing to fear from the (non-Fox) corporate media, which parrots their every particle of propaganda without question or challenge.
So drag the fearful and angry white rubes ever deeper into the sewage, Team Conservative! Party First!
Well, Progressives are fanning the flames as well, with all the hatred of we “old white men”.
Examples?
Right here. I’ll start collecting links if you wish.
It’s the white power party. That’s the beating heart of the coalition. Well that and billions in dark money.
It’s not at all surprising. Obama just tea-bagged them. In his sensible, measured, reasonable, thoughtful, extremely adult way, he basically double-dog dared the Republicans to shut down the government, impeach him, riot, whatever. He couldn’t have enraged them more if he went out and said “You want a piece of this? COME ON AND GET SOME”.
And the imbecilic cowards running democratic election campaigns this year should be taking a long hard look in the mirror. Or really, they should be getting out of politics.
What was it that old German from WWII said about Fascism? That it just sort snuck in while no one was paying attention. It creeps.
We are NAZI. Hitler is laughing in his grave.
Not much laughter in Hell.
I’m an expat living in Asia, and when I return to the Midwest to visit family members every few years, I head out with my brother or one of my best friends to Greek restaurants for gyros! Love those things. The Greek places we go to always have Fox News blaring on those up in the corner t.v. nests where ceiling and wall meet. Since Fox News is not part of our satellite t.v. package where I live in Asia, I have no access to that wretchedness for years on end. Here’s what their news stories sound like to my fresh ears, “The she devil bitch known as Michelle Obama, hosted another voodoo party barbecue in the Rose Garden this afternoon. Prominent Communists, perverts,
and baby killers were invited to the Satanic rituals to denounce America and our Lord Savior Jesus Christ. After confiscating firearms from real patriots, the party goers signed a blood oath to destroy America.” Over the top you say? No, really, this is how their tone sounds to someone who lives outside of America.
do they get discounts to run FOX? and airports? motels? I always wonder why it’s always Faux running
I refuse to patronize businesses that play such filth.
I never watch FOX, either, if I can help it. When staying overnight as a guest with people I see maybe once a year, I found that the friend’s husband turns it on first thing in the morning and watches off and on all day.
It’s brainwashing. The commentators are coached to perform with extreme emotion and project incredulity at everything the President does, as if they were shocked and horrified. Once I could detach myself from the frenzied pitch, I found myself dissecting what they were actually saying. Pretty much all lies and projection, with an unhealthy dose of fearmongering.
They have fake dissenters, too, which is a comical Devil’s Advocate ploy. I would say it was all incredibly silly, but it’s believed by so many that it’s not silly, it’s insidious.
You are looking at the storyteller when you should be looking at the audience.
The storyteller has created the audience for its own purposes. And for too many people, even if they chose there are not alternative sources of stories.
The audience was there before the story teller.
The audience was created by earlier storytellers. People like to hear the same stories told again and again by different “readers.” Christian churches have long been adept at this.
If the story tellers didn’t tell stories the audience already liked or wanted to hear the stories would not have had the success they did.
The human mind is easy to inculcate. Early in our development, it conferred an advantage in surviving. With property ownership, etc., it became a weakness that could be exploited. With each technological innovation, the weakness is lessened and those in power innovate more sophisticated methods to exploit the weakness.
Some people never tire of hearing the same old story again with none to very slight modifications. Others can only hear/see it so many times before saying “enough already.” Religion and entertainment sequels appeal to the former group.
Familiarity by being repeated over and over creates a huge part of the audience. And the familiar soon becomes comfortable.
I’ve watched the transformation of some previously good people as the Age of Rush Limbaugh got underway in the 1990s. And then he got mainstreamed. And families couldn’t have Thanksgiving dinner together anymore. There were friends that excommunicated their liberal friends and neighbors. Good people got captured by a seductive and repetitive story and then were told, like any about-to-be-abused person, to not listen to anyone else.
It’s the people within a particular artificially narrowed and exploitative media environment. Recovery is possible if that media environment can be shut down for three months. Difficult, but possible. Some people have already had that withdrawal experience on their own. There are people with the TV on these stations all day long; when they shop, it’s there. When they go to see the doctor or get their car fixed, it’s there.
Like an electronic cult. More insidious than regular cults because of the absence of physical separations between the cultists and others.
Who were those Democrats that decided the New Dealers got it wrong or the policies were too old-fashion to live on and went ahead with GOP calls to end the fairness doctrine? Idiots that didn’t know the enemy 1/10th as well as FDR did.
MNPundit gets it. Propaganda can never be inauthentic. Think through what that means.
There is a strand of thought in the interpretation of totalitarianism that contends that the pseudophilosophy is external (imported or fabricated) and hence inauthentic. The purpose of this is to exculpate the “victims” of the propaganda. It was, by this argument, all the Dictator’s fault, who somehow overrode and suppressed the innate goodness of the People.
This is false and infantile and neglects the fact that the Dictator is never an individual, but a faction. Letting the faction off the hook guarantees that the whole ghastly cycle will repeat itself, soon or late.
Propaganda exploits human yearnings and desires and fears but that’s not the same thing as being authentic.
Torches of Freedom
White slaveowners raped black women but the white community was taught that it was black men that raped white women.
I see the problem. The propaganda is not to be read or interpreted literally. It consists of allegories, projection, and a witches’ brew of other filth. But its meaning is never on the surface. The specifics are always fungible, because they are typically false; if one charge were refuted, another must be swapped in to take its place.
To take your example, “the propaganda” was not the proposition that black men rape(d) white women. “The propaganda” was the proposition that black men ought be lynched for <strikethru>raping white women</strikethru>bla bla bla. If the specific charge had been disproven, it would have been instantly replaced with another.
Sorry, I didn’t see the problem.
The word “authentic” does not mean “true”.
Propaganda is classically, definitionally, entirely false. It may be fortuitously partly true, but it cannot be comprehensively true, else it would not be propaganda.
“Authentic”, in this context, means that the propaganda is an authentic expression of its audience, i.e. it echoes its audience back to itself. It cannot do anything other than hold them up a mirror.
Have to disagree. A mirror is a reflects what’s already there. Propaganda persuades and changes what was previously there.
Like Cosby? Think about it.
Wasn’t consciously thinking of that when I used that example. Probably because it’s not clear to me that the sexual assault allegations against Cosby is a propaganda effort. Although it likely has fed into the violent black man stereotype for those with such beliefs. At this point, Cosby has so many individuals and groups attacking him that if he’s not guilty of rape or sexual assault nobody cares.
Well I did note that the media seemed to have a definite glee in showing photos and interviews of obviously white women attacked by the bestial black male.
Yes, maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. One thing I know about those kind of accusations is that there is always a lingering doubt. But my point was the speed and noise that the media trumpeted rape accusations by white women against a black man. In contrast, see how they immediately cast doubt on that (North Carolina?) black woman who accused the white La Crosse players of raping her. The situations should be interchangeable with race, but aren’t.
Doubt wrt to the LaCrosse players was trumpeted loudly by Faux, etc. The indictment slowed down the doubts among others. It did for me but fortunately I had enough doubt from the initial report not to jump to on the left-wing and/or feminist mob side or rightwing side. Not that either of those two sides learned a lesson — the Faux folks just got lucky on one.
Have been considering a diary on the Cosby issue. The reporting has been uniformly poor. Doesn’t mean that the allegations, or some of them, aren’t true. Only that there are valid reasons for doubt. OTOH, doubt such a diary would be of interest here.
Well, it would interest me, but possibly only you and me.
Touched somewhat on it in “A Kiss can be an Assault” and the comments.
As I remember the Fairness Doctrine was an FCC rule. With Reagan in the White House, the FCC was effectively in GOP hands. And Jesse Helms used to end run the Fairness Doctrine regularly when he delivered his patented editorials on WRAL-TV. He would allow on the “opposite voices”, allow them much less time than he used in the original, and context his rebuttals before, and a dismissive putdown after their short statements.
It worked when it was to both parties’ advantage that it work. It collapsed when it wasn’t. It only takes one party to do that. But the Democrats never took seriously what removal of the threat of FCC action could mean.
More serious is the lack of enforcement of the public service obligation, which still exists, and allowing owners to own multiple outlets in one market, effectively capturing it with a media monopoly. ClearChannel exploited the ownership rules to put Rush Limbaugh in every rural radio market in the US.
I stand corrected, the “Fairness Doctrine” was implemented in 1949 (early in the TV era) and ditched by Reagan’s FCC guys. (But the Democratic Party has never made an issue of it or attempted to restore it.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 did away with most regulation on ownership, etc. (iirc Clinton not only signed it but touted it as a public good.)
Immigration has been a recurring hot potato in this country since colonial times. And has always been an economic issue that the “haves” have had to exploit to get their way with the “have nots.” Slavery without racism would have killed off the business before it could have developed. Maintaining the racist ethos — legally and/or culturally — has been integral to all US historical developments.
Yep, this: “Slavery without racism would have killed off the business before it could have developed. Maintaining the racist ethos — legally and/or culturally — has been integral to all US historical developments.”
Slavery is not necessarily a product of racism, seeing those people as less than us so it’s ok. Racism was the excuse and the catalyst for support. African Americans weren’t targeted for being black. They were targeted for being technologically inferior. It was exploitation — racism was just the consequence, not the cause.
We probably shouldn’t ignore that the bedrock of racism is ethno- and religious centrism. Also that slavery wasn’t invented in the US colonies and didn’t even emerge until much later than it was introduced into other western hemisphere colonies.
The original coerced emigration from Africa to the US colonies was similar to that for white people. They were indentured servants for four to seven years and were legally entitled to receive some goods and property when their contract ended. John Punch’s case initiated the legal change that indentured servitude could be for life for a Black man. The first Black man to own a Black man consigned to lifetime servitude as Anthony Johnson in 1655. So, racism against Africans was nurtured and developed after life servitude had been established.
Should also note that later waves of non-Black immigrants experienced tremendous hardship and were subjected to various forms of racism by the resident white people. Large numbers of those immigrants easily adopted the US anti-Black racism because it afforded them a psychological feeling that they weren’t at the bottom of the economic ladder and could exploit their white skin as making them superior in the labor market.
Before abolition, it was a bit more complicated.
http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415963095
No disagreement here. Well put.
Let’s get historical here. The Spanish introduced the Portuguese system of slave trading in the Americas, based on the Portuguese system in Africa. Spain exported indigenous American slave out of the New World for some substantial time, and the British copied their policy in the British colonies in the Caribbean. The planting of the Carolina colony in Charles Town in 1670 brought African slaves from Baradoes to Carolina. When the elite of the colony decided to export rice, they brought large numbers of African slaves from the rice growing areas of West Africa. Those slaves knew the agricultural technology of how to successfully grow rice. A large proportion of these people also had significant resistance to malaria. The only technological advancement that Europeans had was firearms and a system of trade.
In Virginia, slave became imported more as cycles of prosperity reduced the supply of indentured servants. Africans “seasoned” better than indentured English; they were more likely to survive the hot summer weather and insect-born diseases. Until Britain developed its own trans-Atlantic slave trade, Virginians purchased from Portuguese and Dutch traders.
The colony of Carolina created the early frontier by instituting complex diplomatic and military relations with the native Americans and by using indentured servants in a secondary role in catching fugitive slaves. They also played off tribes against each other, but always had tribes that would be paid bounties for the return of runaway slaves. That is how a minority of white people controlled red, black, and white and became the richest of colonies on the eve of the Revolution.
By the 1680s-1710s, strict racial laws that created the categories and definitions of “white”, “Negro”, and “Indian” were on the books of both states. And that racial balance-of-power continued as the engine of the frontier until 1890, when other non-white objects of warfare replaced the role of Indians.
The modern police forces are in fact the lineal descendants of organizations that functioned as slave patrols.
They don’t even consciously know it. And get all bent out of shape whenever anyone calls them out on their racism.
Africans were targeted both for their inability to fight back against the european powers AND for their distinctive appearance, which made them easier to control. Race was always a fundamental element of slavery in the US, though not always so in Africa itself.
The Portuguese exploited the fact that Arabs had for quite a while and other Mediterranean nations going back to the Egyptians. One African kingdom, and it generally was a monarchic-society that did this, would enslave other peoples and sell them as slaves. Consideration that slavery was morally wrong is a product of the European enlightenment and several other philosophical or religious traditions. Africans could not fight back against the European powers because they were divided against each other. The same was true for Native Americans.
This has been going on for decades. Maybe we’re in the end stage.
It’s a conditioning, to make people bitter, uninformed, and small both in their morals and their ambitions. A constant repetition of resentment of anyone not like yourself; reinforcement of the “every man for himself” philosophy.
This.
It’s a mixture of “every man for himself” and conjuring words that delineate the listener as a member of the “good” tribe.
Critically, Fox also provides a victim card for it’s “less successful” viewers by constantly repeating that when libruuuls help the poors and blahs, it does so by taking things from the “good” tribe and giving it to the “others.
In essence, a Fox viewer is told repeatedly that they are liberty-loving RealAmericans (members of the correct tribe) and that any failures can be directly traced to libruuls helping non-RealAmericans.
The trends discussed in this thread are real and troubling. Yet for all that, President Obama is still doing better than the white man party’s last president, who won his second term with the narrowest popular-vote majority of any RE-ELECTED president in American history, 2.4%, and whose approval in the second half of his second term never broke 40%, averaging 37% for the whole term. And this despite the fact that he was reelected along with Republican majorities in both houses.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx
Obama’s popular majority in his reelection was 7.2% over Romney, nearly the same as his first-term margin of 7.3% over McCain, near the median of historical presidential victory margins.
If you look at Bush’s long term popularity trend, from beginning to end it is one steady decline except for the two big blips of 9/11 and the Iraq invasion of 2003.
Compare that with Obama from 2009 to now:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/178736/obama-job-approval-averages-23rd-quarter.aspx
While he is at or near the lowest approval of his presidency, it’s nothing so drastic as Bush. The recent senate losses resulted from the perfect storm of Obama’s lower approval, lowest voter turnout since 1942, and huge number of seats at stake in conservative states.
So at this point a very important question is how Americans as whole (not just Fox viewers or rednecks), see Obama’s immigration policy. Huffpollster reports the reaction as, I would say, guardedly positive, and among Latinos, very positive. And this will bring significant (though not insurmountable) advantages to the Democrats in 2016.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/21/obama-immigration-polls_n_6198302.html
My point is that, despite the fascism of the media and a large part of the country, there are strong, steady countervailing trends. A report from National Journal puts things in proportion. It shows very clearly why long-term demographic trends favor Democrats nationally.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/bad-bet-why-republicans-can-t-win-with-whites-alone-20130905
To me, one of the most interesting findings is that the share of whites voting Democratic is increasing, not decreasing. The Republicans are the White party, but the Democrats are not the Black party, they are the diversity party.
Finally, I do not see any reason why Hillary Clinton would be the only possible Democratic candidate that could attract a significantly higher percentage of the white vote than Obama got. But she definitely is the one with a lot of old, old baggage.
Tut tut! Shame on you for calling HRC an old baggage.
:-,)