NOVEMBER 15, 2020 – My parents worried about “liberals.” Liberals favored consolidation of school districts and public libraries; they usurped local municipal authority by passing legislation that created a metropolitan-wide “council.” And of course liberals raised taxes to pay for “government programs” that my parents viewed as wasteful and ineffectual.
At the national level, my parents favored a strong military to oppose Soviet-backed communism, which, in my parents’ view was all communism, no matter where it might appear. Although my parents didn’t view “liberals” as communists, they saw liberals’ naiveté as an open door to communism.
My parents were smart, educated, well-informed people. They hung out with smart, educated, well-informed people. With little else to go on, I went along with their world view.
Fast forward half a century. My parents’ deep critique of liberals and worried prognostications about liberals’ “naiveté have been rendered naive—nay, dangerous.
In time my parents’ conservative views were hijacked by multiple dark forces, a coalition of narrow religious zealots, anti-government extremists, anti-intellectuals, anti-government extremists posing as intellectuals, and more recently, followers of baseless conspiracy theories. These forces leveraged, then commandeered foundational blocks of our democracy—most notably, the First Amendment—to their anti-democratic ends: suppression of voter rights; questioning the integrity of elections; imposition of narrow, minority-view religious tenets on the majority; further consolidation of economic power in the hands of the few at the expense of the middle-class and marginalized segments of society; and most acutely critical, rejection of science.
The dark forces first appeared on the horizons of my parents’ day. I saw this in my dad’s subscriptions to the weekly rightwing rag, Human Events—the print version of GoebbelsNews—and monthly Imprimus, published by conservative Hillsdale College (MI), of which the self-styled anarcho-capitalist, libertarian Lew Rockwell served as editor. Human Events was crassly conservative. Imprimus was—and remains—sophisticatedly “fringe.”
Through a string of highly-compensated strategists and the old-fashioned method of trading physical mailing lists, dark forces worked the levers of “free speech” and arm of the very government they assailed—the United States Postal Service—to win converts.
Then came cable news and the internet; Citizens United and an explosion of rightwing disinformation. At the base (pun fully intended) of this concerted campaign are ratings and . . . the quintessential hallmark of America: the right to make a buck. Strike that. The right to make mountains of bucks and to complain when “socialists” want to tax any of it.
A former Fox News contributor, now Democratic strategist, Julie Roginsky calls “GoebbelsNews” propaganda “crack cocaine.” Fox viewers got hooked on it and now, driven by the country’s leading crack dealer—the Orange Man—are seeking a higher “high.” The Dealer in Chief tells them “Fox is fake,” and now his followers are rushing to even more insidious crackpot cocaine dealers proliferating across the rightwing media spectrum.
We’ve become a nation of over 73 million crack addicts. Unless and until we get the toxic substance out of their hands, lungs, and brains, we—all Americans—are screwed.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
