Political issues – Page 11

The post-truth era indeed

AI image by DALL-E 3

Google for the term “post-truth era” and you’ll find a great many hits, many of them in the most august of publications. For example, just a couple of weeks ago, The Atlantic ran a piece with the headline “We’re already living in the post-truth era.” This morning, in a review of an HBO documentary about Alex Jones, the Washington Post writes “A new HBO documentary about the right-wing conspiracy theorist behind Infowars explores the mainstreaming of ‘grift’ in a post-truth era.”

The irony is that, even as the mainstream media write about the post-truth era as though they had nothing to do with it, they deny their own ongoing guilt — providing an unlimited amount of space and air time for the repetition of disinformation, as though intentional disinformation is just another side of the story and something to be taken seriously. And thanks, of course, for all the hits and ratings.

It’s encouraging that there does seem to be some limit on how far media people are willing to go. Executives at NBC News must have been surprised at the blowback over their hiring of the Republican disinformation agent Ronna McDaniel as an “analyst.” Even Chuck Todd, who was notorious for allowing Meet the Press to be used as a platform for the unchallenged dispensing of right-wing disinformation, suddenly acknowledges that McDaniel has been gaslighting us.

But even if the blowback causes Ronna McDaniel to lose her sinecure at NBC News (it was reported that she’s getting a retainer of $300,000 a year), we’re still all on our own in a post-truth era.

It’s nothing new that NBC News provides a platform for right-wing gaslighting. What’s new is that with Ronna McDaniel they made it so brazenly obvious.

Television and cable news are a zone where it’s not safe to go without gas masks for protection from the gaslighting. Even those print publications with the most respected of names allow themselves to be used by people with agendas, agendas that are often disguised. For example, The Atlantic regularly prints articles by people who have accepted money from the Koch network, and The Atlantic even has Koch people on its staff. We mustn’t forget that the new publisher of the Washington Post used to work for Rupert Murdoch. We learned a great deal about the New York Times after James Bennet was forced out as editorial page editor. Members of the Koch network spilled a lot of ink about that. Their version of the story was that a bunch of young new “woke” members of the New York Times staff were intolerant of conservative voices on the editorial page. I see it differently. It’s that those young “woke” members of the New York Times staff haven’t normalized, as so many older journalists have, providing a free platform for right-wing disinformation and gaslighting. Conservative voices are one thing (Liz Cheney, for example), but intentional disinformation is something else.

The New Republic, in a blurb this morning about a new podcast, writes, “The revolt among NBC personalities is extraordinary — and could force a real debate about all the ways the media enables Donald Trump and MAGA.”

I wish I could be that optimistic. Even after Trump is in prison, I’m afraid the media will look for ways to keep the MAGA bonanza (of hits and ratings) alive.

Update: This evening, NBC News announced that they have reversed their decision, and NBC won’t be taking on Ronna McDaniel after all. Now we will get to see whether the mainstream media and its pundits can explain and defend the principles that justify its existence.

Ronna McDaniel. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The arc of justice

U.S. marshals escort Ruby Bridges to school. New Orleans, Louisiana, November 1960. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

–Theodore Parker, 1810-1860

We could say that we believe in the arc of justice, but that would be a useless statement, because our beliefs, whatever they may be, have no effect on the reality outside our own minds. Even if our beliefs guide our actions in the real world, the effect is weak and indirect. As much as we might like to, we can’t change the world simply by wishing and by thinking. Beliefs may indirectly lead to change, especially when lots of people hold similar beliefs and act in accord with them. But beliefs alone don’t change anything. I’ve had a saying about this for many years: You can believe until you’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t change anything.

But we can make an if-then proposition that I think is sound and reasonable. It’s this: If there is such a thing as the arc of justice, then to stand in its way, inevitably, sooner or later, is to be found wrong. Not only does that mean that one’s thinking was wrong. It also means that, at some point in the future, one will enter into a state of shame for having stood in the way of the arc of justice.

We could cite many examples of this proposition, from Rome to the present. Religion’s track record is especially damning. For example, the largest Christian denomination in America, the Southern Baptist Convention, militantly supported slavery during the 19th Century. During the 20th Century, it supported racial segregation. In 1995, though it took 150 years, it apologized for its history. Even after the apology, some of the meanest people in the country remain in control of the Southern Baptist Convention and still stand in the way of the arc of justice. But at least, as the arc of justice moved on, church people had to admit that they were wrong. It’s because of the arc of justice that we don’t burn people at the stake anymore, or put people like Oscar Wilde in prison, or hang people for stealing a crust of bread, or beat our children.

Over the centuries, moral error after moral error by the church, in spite of its claim to speak for God, shows that the arc of justice — and this should be no surprise — is and always has been more powerful than religion. Not only that, looking toward the future, religion weakens as the arc bends toward justice. The arc bends. To the degree that it is ossified and refuses to bend, religion inevitably breaks. Church people see the decline in church membership as a moral emergency. I see it as moral progress.

As liberals, this is where our confidence can come from, as well as our optimism. It can be the basis of a politics. It’s why I say that the entire spectrum of conservatism, from dishonest both-sides centrism to the neo-Nazis, is wrong, wrong-headed, and causes harm. And for many people, merely to stand in the way of the arc of justice is not enough. They work to reverse moral progress and roll back the clock.

Theodore Parker, a theologian, is sometimes referred to as a heretic. He saw long ago that the church is not an instrument of moral progress. Rather, far more often, it has been the opposite. I can’t take seriously the claim that religion has ever been on the leading edge of the arc of justice. Classical philosophy, if the church had allowed it to evolve rather than repressing it, would have brought far more light to the Dark Ages than the church ever did. The Enlightenment might have come sooner, had there not been so much resistance. It is ideas, and an expanding concept of justice and fairness, that lead the arc of justice toward greater justice.

The Enlightenment, of course, brought a revolution in moral philosophy. Still, for a hundred to two hundred years, utilitarianism was the state of the art in ethics — the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number. There are still utilitarians, but ideas about justice and fairness have expanded. I am among those who see utilitarianism as obsolete after John Rawls’ justice as fairness (1971). The course of the arc of justice in our time, I believe, is best described by John Rawls’ justice as fairness. As Theodore Parker says, our sight, in any era, may reach but little ways. But from what we can see now, the arc of justice is bending in the direction described by John Rawls.

Rawls’ philosophy may be complex and a challenge to read, but its key idea boils down to something simple, and, to most minds, obvious: We cannot justify being unfair to anyone (usually the poor, the stigmatized, and the weak), even if others want to gain (usually wealth and privilege and power) from that unfairness. This idea is steadily being integrated into liberal politics. Meanwhile, the interest of conservative politics in wealth, privilege, and domination increasingly finds so much fairness threatening. Most people have never heard of John Rawls. Still, as though by magic, Rawls’ philosophy is in the Zeitgeist. Conservatives feel it as clearly as liberals feel it, which is why they are in such a panic to resist it. It puts wealth, privilege, and power in a different light, light that is not to conservative liking.

Thomas Piketty caused quite a stir in 2013 with Capital in the Twenty-First Century. His second book, A Brief History of Equality, got less attention. But in this second book Piketty argued that there has been a steady improvement in equality since 1780, and he explains why he is optimistic about future progress. Given that millions have died since 1780 in the struggle against domination, Piketty’s optimism may seem misplaced. But I think he is right, because even when those who crave domination win, they don’t — can’t — win for long. Just ask the enslavers of the 19th Century, or the Nazis of the 20th, or the racists of the Civil Rights era. In a decade or two, ask Putin. Ask Trump, once the courts are done with him.

We have just been through one of those times, when those who work together to block and reverse the arc of justice get the upper hand. This is what happened when, in 2016, Donald Trump was installed in the White House by wealthy elites whose domination is threatened by fairness, aided by “populist” subjects who were all too easy to deceive.

Now the arc of justice is catching up with them. For some, prison. For others, only shame. Still, some of them are so hardened that will never feel any shame for the ugliness of their actions and their ideas. But the children of the future, from what we already can see now from the direction in which the arc of justice bends, will see things differently.

Of course Haley won’t drop out

This photo came from Facebook. The sign was posted here in my rural red county, which voted 77 percent for Trump in 2016 and 78 percent in 2020. Apparently someone thinks the sign is funny.

The insanity of the political media herd is on full display this morning after yesterday’s Republican primary in South Carolina, where the vote was 59.8 percent Trump and 39.5 percent Nikki Haley. A headline in the New York Times says, “After South Carolina, Trump’s March to the G.O.P. Nomination Quickens.” Most of the stories this morning wonder why Haley won’t drop out after such a “decisive” win by Trump.

The answer is obvious. It’s a total no-brainer. The reason Nikki Haley won’t drop out is that she knows that Trump is as good as ruined. But for reasons that are cowardly if not intentionally deceptive, the mainstream media won’t say it. Trump’s financial house of cards is soon going to come crashing down because of the half billion dollars he now owes to the state of New York. He is facing prison sentences for state crimes in New York and Georgia, and for federal crimes in a trial in Washington. It’s possible, if the state of New York has to seize Trump’s properties and determine how much equity, if any, he has in his properties, that we’ll find out who owns Trump’s debt. The media keep reporting, as though it’s true, that Trump said in a court filing that he has $400 million in cash. Who could possibly represent that as believable other than our mainstream media?

The New York Times doubles down on its deceit. In “Five Takeaways from Trump’s Big Win Over Nikki Haley in South Carolina,” the Times makes these points: One, “It was a home-state failure for Haley.” Two, “Voters looked past Trump’s legal woes and political missteps.” Three, “To win a Republican primary, you need Republican voters.” (That’s a ridiculous point, because, to win a general election, you need voters who aren’t Republicans.) Four, “Haley isn’t giving up her case that Trump can’t win.” And, five, “All that’s left is the delegate math, and money.”

That’s all that’s left?

It’s irksome for me to believe that the New York Times would print such misdirection. The only reference to Trump’s “legal woes” is that Republicans “looked past” it. I admit that, for the sake of my blood pressure, I did not read every word of every lame story in the mainstream media this morning about the South Carolina primary. In what I did read, though, I didn’t find any reference to the obvious point that the reason Haley won’t quit is that she expects to get the nomination after Trump goes down.

What the political media should have reported this morning is that the Republican Party is divided. Somewhere between 26 percent and 40 percent of Republicans in South Carolina don’t want Trump. Nikki Haley is way head of the other alternatives to Trump. That is a big deal, and it’s only February. Haley’s numbers will grow as the courts take Trump apart. The big question is, how many of those Trump-forever Republicans would turn out to vote for Haley in November, and how many would just stay home to register their rage?

Here in North Carolina, early voting for the March 5 primary started February 15. I monitor the Facebook group of the Republican Party in my county. They are complaining because turnout for early voting is low. I believe that’s because they are increasingly demoralized, and some are having second thoughts about Trump. They’re also at each other’s throats over local issues, mostly related to the schools. (They don’t want any schools to close, but they also don’t want to pay enough taxes to keep them open. Their response to this problem is Trump-style rage and blame, aimed at other Republicans, because Republicans run the county.)

When the results of the North Carolina primary election are known on March 5, we’ll learn a lot from how many Republicans and unaffiliated voters in North Carolina turn against Trump. In North Carolina, registered Democats cannot vote in the Republican primary. Unaffiliated voters get to choose the Democratic ballot, Republican ballot, or Libertarian ballot. There are seven options on the Republican ballot for voting against Trump: Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Asa Hutchinson, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ryan Binkley, Chris Cristie, and “no preference.”

Why do the mainstream media want us deceived? The answer, as I see it, is: Clicks and ratings. There is only one political picture that gets everybody to click, Republicans as well as Democrats. In that picture, Trump is unstoppable, Haley is finished but won’t admit it, the courts are forgotten, Democrats are blind, and the earth is flying out from under President Biden’s feet. The headline at Russia Today is “Trump Crushes Last Republican Rival.” A headline at The Atlantic is “How Donald Trump Became Unbeatable.”

As I see it, there are three important things to keep in mind about our political media. They are not geniuses, they are a herd, and their job security depends on clicks and ratings.

War worry in Europe

Foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, Nov. 29, 2023. Source: U.S. Department of State via Wikimedia Commons.

One of my sources of information is Apple News, which includes subscriptions to a good many newspapers that are otherwise behind paywalls. During the past few weeks, I have been seeing a lot of stories with scary headlines in the Times of London in which military leaders express their worry about the risk of war with Russia and their concern that NATO is dangerously unprepared. I’ve seen very little on this subject in American newspapers. What should we make of this?

An example of one of these scary headlines was today: “Nato should ‘prepare for Russian missile strikes in Europe.'” The article is a long interview with Lieutenant General Alexander Sollfrank, who is commander of NATO’s military logistics center in southwest Germany.

For an overview of this war worry that is not behind a paywall, I recommend this piece in the Guardian from January 26: “Why are European defence leaders talking about war?” The Guardian brings up one of my concerns: “Planning for warfare, a remote contingency, is what militaries do and there is always pressure from generals and defence ministries to spend more.”

Plus I’m always concerned that the Times of London may have agendas and a point of view that would not align well with my own. But there also are some obvious points of real concern:

“A wave of anxiety has gripped European defence ministers and armed forces as politicians and military leaders believe that Nato-sceptic Donald Trump could be elected as the next president of the US — and that Russia may not be forced out or defeated in Ukraine. This febrile mood has prompted growing warnings that Europe could find itself involved in a war in Russia, even though at present Russia is embroiled in Ukraine.”

I don’t know what to make of this. But I do think it’s something that needs to be on our radar screens. Americans are distracted, and the American media can’t be counted on to understand what’s important and what’s not.

Here are a few more links:

CBS News: U.K. army chief says citizens should be ready to fight in possible land war.

NATO: Setting the record straight.

GlobalAffairs.org: Why is Sweden telling its citizens to prepare for war?

The Hill: NATO admiral warns of potential all-out war with Russia.

The American media are reporting, however, on how happy Russia is about Western division over military aid to Ukraine and Israel-Gaza issues: Russia projects confidence as it pursues alliances to undermine West.

Update 1:

Today (January 29), the Times of London has another one of these scary headlines: “Zelensky warns Germany it risks being sucked into World War Three.” Zelensky made this warning on a German talk show, in which he also asked Germany to give him long-range Taurus missiles. Zelensky also said, according to the Times, that “Putin could turn his attention to Germany, Poland or the Baltic states after Ukraine.”

This coordinated talk about World War III in Europe has all the marks of a coordinated media campaign. That does not necessarily mean that someone is trying to deceive us. But what worries me personally is that there are several new hot spots right now (Jordan, Yemen, and the Red Sea, in addition to Gaza), and those (such as Iran and Russia) who think they can profit from chaos see new opportunities. Right-wingers in the U.S. Congress are begging for some kind of retaliation against Iran.

Update 2:

Today (Jan. 30), the New York Times is writing about this: “For Europe and NATO, a Russian Invasion Is No Longer Unthinkable: Amid crumbling U.S. support for Ukraine and Donald Trump’s rising candidacy, European nations and NATO are making plans to take on Russia by themselves.”

A big win for Trump?? Who says?

Trump in New Hampshire. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Do the American political media actually believe their own delusional spin — that Trump is so powerful that he may actually get back into the White House? Or is it, as not a few people on the left (including me) see it, that the media have a strong — and dangerously perverse — self-interest in keeping the Trump era going, because Trump has been a bonanza in delivering clicks and eyeballs to an industry desperate for clicks and eyeballs?

“Trump gains speed with win over Haley,” writes the Washington Post this morning. Trump “crushed” Haley’s momentum, the Post writes. That’s the theme that dominates the New York Times’ New Hampshire coverage as well.

I am increasingly worried about what is happening at the Washington Post. At the Post, it seems that Trump was what made the difference between profit and loss. The “Trump bump” made a lot of money for the Post. But the Post lost 20 percent of its subscribers after Trump left office and may now be losing money. Pretty much all the mainstream media including the New York Times rode the Trump bump.

The Washington Post got a new publisher on January 3. That’s Sir William Lewis, who is British and who comes to the Post from the Murdoch media empire. The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, of course doesn’t want to lose money. How can reasonable people not suspect that Bezos thinks that the Murdochification of the Washington Post is the way to make money?

Who am I do disagree with the Washington Post’s elite political team? No one; I’m just an obscure blogger and veteran of the newspaper business whose personal politics don’t accord very well with the media elite. But at least none of my salary or job security (I’m retired) ever came from the Trump bump.

I see the present political situation very differently. The media elite see New Hampshire as a huge win for Trump and a dead end for Nikki Haley. Not I. No one, it seems, expected Haley to get 44 percent vs. Trump’s 55. That means that surprisingly close to half of the Republicans who voted in the New Hampshire primary do not support Trump. That seems to have spooked Trump, and Marjorie Taylor Greene said that Haley’s numbers are “fake“.

The Republican Party is headed for a civil war that can only be vicious. It is impossible to imagine a united Republican Party in November. They will turn their guns on each other, and no matter what Republican is on the ballot in November, half of Republican voters will be motivated to stay home.

As always, the stories about Trump “crushing” his opposition conveniently forget that Trump is going to be crushed by the law — convicted by the criminal courts and financially ruined by the civil courts. And yes, that’s going to happen before the Republican National Convention, which starts on July 15. It is all too likely that the internal warfare that we’ll see at that convention will be a televised riot like nothing the world has ever seen before. The mainstream media are still afraid to touch the growing evidence that Trump’s cognitive impairments are getting worse. The Biden campaign, though, is posting videos drawing attention to Trump’s slurring of words, confusing one person with another, and not understanding what’s what or who’s who or where is where. Trump is one big gaffe away from being caught on video with a gaffe so shocking that the mainstream media won’t be able to ignore it anymore. Even Fox News is acknowledging that Trump is “increasingly confused on the campaign trail.” Trump’s handlers are in a bind. They have to put him out there, if he’s to be seen as a real candidate, but the more they put him out there the more they risk the gaffe that will put an end to him.

It seems all too likely that, when the history of the presidential campaign of 2024 is written, that history will be as much about media as about politics. The rightwing media will be all-lies and all-gaslighting all the time, as always. The mainstream media is compromised with conflicts of interest, addicted to Trump. And we are unprepared for the “tsunami of misinformation” that AI will pour into the media including social media.

The wages of neoliberalism

A Boeing 737 Max: Why isn’t there a mass movement to refuse to fly on them? Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This morning in the news, we learned that a front wheel fell off of a Boeing 757 as the jet was preparing to take off from Atlanta for Bogotá. The FAA is investigating. Also this morning in the news, we learned that the CEO of Alaska Airlines is angry after loose bolts were found on “many” of the airline’s Boeing 737 Max 9 jets.

Since photographs showed the the big hole in the fuselage after a door blew out of an Alaska Airlines jet (and the missing door was later found in someone’s backyard), and since the wheel that fell off the Boeing jet in Atlanta was seen rolling down a hill, it would be hard even for Fox News’ expertise in lying to gaslight us on such plain facts. But there’s still a lot of disinformation and propaganda to be milked out of such plain facts. The right-wing media have milked it to the max.

The problem with Boeing, the right-wing media say, is workforce diversity! If your blood pressure can take it, here’s an article from the Guardian, “Worried about airline safety? Blame diversity, say deranged rightwingers.” Elon Musk, of course, has endorsed and amplified that idea.

In the real world, the understanding of what happened at Boeing is very different. Boeing was once a company run by engineers. Brilliant design and careful manufacturing were the highest values. But Wall Street and rich stockholders see Boeing only as a money machine, and the theology of neoliberalism blessed a takeover. Keep in mind that, though ordinary Americans hold modest shares of stock, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own 89 percent of all American stocks. Once upon a time, McDonnell Douglas and Boeing were competitors. But in 1997, McDonnell Douglas took over Boeing and — knowingly and intentionally — made Boeing’s engineers subordinate to the money people.

The other factor in Boeing’s ruin was self-regulation, as a consequence of neoliberalism’s glorification of the market and demonization of government. Internal Boeing emails that came to light after two 737 Max crashes show that people inside of Boeing understood what was going on, but that they had no power to do anything about it. In one such email, an employee wrote: “This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” Another employee wrote, describing the incompetence of regulators who were watching a Boeing presentation, that the regulators were “like dogs watching TV,” because they couldn’t understand the presentation. I can only imagine the bitterness and hostility that must now define Boeing’s company culture. And, of course, many engineers left and took their expertise with them.

Why is it always ordinary people, crammed into Boeing jets like cattle, who’re on board when these things happen? In 2022, there were 10,000 to 15,000 flights of private jets every day. According to this article, “Just 1% of air travelers account for 50% of global aviation emissions.” And yet how often do we read about billionaires’ jets going down? The private-jet industry claims that private jets are safer than commercial jets. If that’s true, it’s not hard to understand why.

Once again, I’d like to argue that Boeing is just one case of a great many in the global struggle that is behind almost every important thing happening in the world today. It’s the super-rich against the rest of us. Ninety percent of us are nothing more than just another natural resource to be exploited, lied to, and kept divided so that the 90 percent can’t organize the power to challenge the 10 percent. One of the things that blows my mind is that they’ve figured out how to make even their disinformation profitable. Fox News has net income of about $1.25 billion a year. The propaganda is so effective that society’s worst losers can be passionately and angrily convinced that what’s good for billionaires and dictators is good for them.

Minority rule can’t be easy, nor can it be stable. This is the overarching political struggle of our time — taking back wealth and power from a tiny minority who already own almost everything but who want everything, including unchallengeable power.

The ecology of corruption

Two angles of the iron triangle: Ronald Reagan with Rupert Murdoch, 1983. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Corruption and national security

Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter, “Letters From an American,” is a must-read every day. Today’s newsletter, though (the link is to Substack), is particularly important. It’s about international corruption. Richardson quotes an FBI statement to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City from 2011:

International enterprises, the FBI statement said, “are running multi-national, multi-billion dollar schemes from start to finish…. They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military…. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder…. These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”

Take note of this “iron triangle”: organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders.

Russia, of course

Richardson touches on how the collapse of the Soviet Union, the looting of Russia by oligarchs including Vladimir Putin, and the need to launder Russian money in the West made the United States one of the money-laundering capitals of the world. Richardson writes:

“In March 2023 the Treasury told Congress that ‘[m]oney laundering perpetrated by the Government of the Russian Federation (GOR), Russian [state-owned enterprises], Russian organized crime, and Russian elites poses a significant threat to the national security of the United States and the integrity of the international financial system,’ and it outlined the ways in which it had been trying to combat that corruption. ‘In light of Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine,’ it said, ‘we must redouble our efforts to prevent Russia from abusing the U.S. financial system to sustain its war and counter Russian sanctioned individuals and firms seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.'”

The vast right-wing conspiracy

Richardson does not mention “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” But clearly the “iron triangle” of corruption and “the vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton described are pretty much one and the same.

The Wikipedia article on the vast right-wing conspiracy quotes Paul Krugman:

In some of his books, Krugman has used the phrase (“Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy”[¹]) to refer not to a conservative Republican-leaning campaign against Clinton (or Obama), but more generally to “an interlocking set of institutions ultimately answering to a small group of people that collectively reward loyalists and punish dissenters” in the service of “movement conservatism.” The network of institutions provide “obedient politicians with the resources to win elections, safe havens in the event of defeat, and lucrative career opportunities after they leave office. They guarantee favorable news coverage to politicians who follow the party line, while harassing and undermining opponents. And they support a large standing army of party intellectuals and activists.[²]”

In Krugman’s view, the network of foundations that fund conservative scholarship, the national and regional think tanks and advocacy groups, talk radio media outlets, and conservative law firms through which they pushed their agenda to move the Republican Party to the right, far surpass in funding, size, inter-connectedness or influence anything the Democratic Party or the American political left/liberal movement have at their disposal.

The iron triangle

In short, it’s all of a piece, and it’s the piece that overhangs the greatest struggle of the present times — democracy vs. authoritarianism, economic fairness vs. the super-rich, the Putin-Trump axis, the iron-triangle politics of the Republican Party, and the terrifyingly effective machinery of disinformation that sells the billionaire politics of the oligarchy to deplorable Americans who don’t have a pot to piss in, such that every national election in the U.S. is now a deadly conflict between the international ecology of corruption and those who struggle against it.

Wikipedia notes:

1. Krugman, Paul R. (2004). The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, pp. 217, 269–71.

2. Krugman, Paul R. (2007). The Conscience of a Liberal, p. 163.

Is it obvious now?

“One down, two to go,” said Elise Stefanik, gloating over the resignation of Liz Magill as president of the University of Pennsylvania. Magill had blindly walked right into Stefanik’s right-wing gotcha trap during a congressional hearing. An orgy of right-wing glee followed Magill’s resignation, amplified by a clueless media eager to pose as nonpartisan and principled.

Magill’s cautious answers, which were intended to respect the difference between speech and conduct, were exactly what Republicans would have wanted to hear, if right-wing speech had been the issue. But, to Republicans, left-wing speech is a different matter. To Republicans, the protection of left-wing speech on campus is so dangerous, even in the absence of conduct, that, not only does the principle of free speech not matter, liberal heads must roll.

As a Democratic member of the House (Robert C. Scott of Virginia) pointed out, Republicans wouldn’t hold a hearing in 2017 after white supremacists marched through the campus of the University of Virginia shouting, among other things, “Jews will not replace us.”

The issue I’m drawing attention to here has nothing to do with Israel and Gaza. My point, as I’ve argued before, is that all the fuss and spilled ink about free speech on campus has nothing to do with the principle of free speech. Rather, it is a right-wing propaganda strategy, funded by right-wing money and furnished with lipstick by right-wing think tanks. Its purpose is to weaken the standing of America’s universities and to advance the right-wing project of corporatization and right-wing control of education. This propaganda has been very effective, partly because so many well-meaning people who actually do care about free speech have fallen for the lie that it contains — that the right actually cares about the principle of free speech. For the right, it’s the perfect disguise for what they want to do to American education (and what they are already doing, in the states where they have the power to do it).

Now right-wingers have a university president’s head on a platter. They hope to have two more, and soon. They hope to also get the heads of the presidents of Harvard and MIT.

So far, I’ve seen only one piece in the media that saw through the lie (though only partly). That is in the Washington Post, “Republicans say they believe in free speech. Except when it comes to Israel.” I say “partly” because I don’t think it’s Israel that makes the difference. I think what makes the difference is whether speech serves, or opposes, right-wing power.

Why did Magill walk into the trap? I can only guess. But my guess would be that she was thinking in principles, and like a lawyer, but that she’s fatally naive on the matter of persuasion and propaganda.

Update 1:

Here’s a fine example of how right-wing interests use the media and how the media fall for it. The headline in the New York Times this afternoon is “Are academics best suited to lead big schools?” The idea is that maybe academics are not qualified to run academia! Who might be qualified, then? We know their answer to that, of course: political figures and our corporate masters.

Update 2:

Paul Krugman writes about this issue in his column for Dec. 15, 2023: “The Biggest Threat to America’s Universities.”

Update 3:

Here’s an example of how eager Republicans are to put money men in charge of universities: “Lee Roberts, former McCrory budget director, to serve as interim UNC chancellor.” Pat McCrory was a Republican governor of North Carolina. Roberts was appointed to the university’s board of governors by the state senate, which is controlled by Republicans. As the story in the Raleigh newspaper points out, Roberts has no experience in university administration. It’s all about money. What’s to stop university chancellors who are academics from choosing university vice presidents who’ll deal with money issues? Money rules, and the money men will do everything they can to accelerate the corporatization of universites.

But is it a crisis?

Students chilling each other’s speech. AI image generated by Dall-E 3.

Today at the Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff has a piece with the headline “The latest victims of the free-speech crisis.” If there are free-speech issues on campus, and no doubt there are, is that really a crisis? Or is someone trying to distract us from the real crisis of free speech — the banning of books, laws threatening librarians with jail sentences, efforts to reverse New York Times v. Sullivan, and legislating — legislating! — what teachers can and cannot say. A recent article in Foreign Policy reports that these Republicans actions to limit speech are spreading abroad.

In right-wing (and centrist) propaganda, one of the most common ways of intentional deception is to create false equivalencies to slam the left. An excellent example is claiming that the property damage caused by the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020 was somehow just as bad, and just as serious a threat, as the violent right-wing attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. At the Capitol, people died in a violent attempt to stop the constitutional functions of government, subvert the will of American voters, and install a neofascist permanently in the White House.

Yes, BLM protesters lit a fire in the entryway of a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, on July 20, 2021. That was at 1:30 a.m. No one was hurt, and federal agents quickly extinguished the fire. They hurt their cause with such behavior, but BLM is not a threat to this country, unless it’s a threat to draw attention to racism, discrimination, racial inequality, and racially motivated violence against Black people.

I mention the false equivalency of the BLM and Capitol cases because I myself encountered it during the Thanksgiving holidays. I was told that “people like me” use January 6 to distract from the BLM protests. I of course replied that it’s the other way around. The implication was that the BLM protests were worse than January 6. I’m sure that many people think that, and, if they do, can we think of any reason for it other than racism?

Some of the contributors to Greg Lukianoff’s organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, are among the most right-wing and billionaire-run organizations in the country — the Bradley Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute. If Lukianoff’s efforts to protect free speech have ever attempted to hold conservatives accountable for their attacks on “woke” speech, I’m not aware of it.

Lukianoff, in other words, is a right-wing propagandist, and his foundation is a right-wing propaganda outfit. Lukianoff, and many others, use the red herring of free speech on campus to draw attention away from the organized and well-funded attacks on democracy from the right, attacks that use the coercive power of government whenever possible, as in Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. If Greg Lukianoff was really concerned about free speech instead of producing the propaganda for which he is paid, then he’d be writing crisis alerts about his billionaire contributors, the Republican party, and the corporatization of American universities.

A few lonely voices have tried to point out how right-wing propaganda is attempting to gaslight us on the matter of free speech. For example, “Remember This Article? It Was Conservative Propaganda, and a Lot of Us Fell for It.”

A more nuanced view from an academic, Wendy Brown, was published in the New York Times: “Why Angry Critics of Woke College Kids are Missing the Point.”

From the interview with Wendy Brown:

“We need to appreciate that young left activist outrage about a burning planet and grotesque inequality and murderous racial violence and gendered abuses of power is accompanied by disgust with the systems and the rules of engagement that have brought us here. Young left activists are pulling the emergency brake because it feels as if there’s no time for debate and compromise and incrementalism; because many see conventional norms and practices as having brought us to the brink and kept us stupid and inert….

“My point here is that if we just focus on this generation’s political style — and we have to remember youth style always aggravates the elders — we ignore their rage at the world they’ve inherited, and their desperation for a more livable and just one, and their critique of our complacency.”

I’m with the kids. The kids, after all, are the ones with no money to corrupt them, unlike Greg Lukianoff, his billionaires, and his friends in the think tanks and media.

Update:

European universities accept €260 million in fossil fuel money

We have a serious media problem

This past Sunday (Nov. 5, 2023) the New York Times started hyping an utterly screwball poll saying that Trump was leading Biden by an average of four points in six swing states. Right-wing subscribers to the Times swooped into the comments section to gloat. Times pundits doubled down on their usual snide and superior lecturing of Democrats while repeating and amplifying the usual Republican fictions.

Three days later, reality struck in the form of an actual real-world election. In the real world of elections, as opposed to the imaginary world that the media herd have bought into, Democrats won, bigtime, in multiple states, while MAGA Republicans got their you-know-whats handed to them.

I have no idea why political polling has gone haywire. Is it the “weighting” that pollsters apply? I have a hunch, though it’s untestable. When a pollster calls, more than 85 percent of the people who get the calls refuse to answer because of what they see on caller ID. My guess is that while most people roll their eyes and ignore the call, MAGA types are much more motivated to answer, because a poll gives them a way to register their rage and demoralization as their world falls apart. The hope of revenge is pretty much all they have left.

What’s frustrating is that there is no way for rational people to discipline the media for their malpractice. The New York Times thinks it knows better than everyone else, and nothing short of a major scandal (such as a reporter nailed for making stuff up) penetrates the Times’ unlimited faith in its own infallibility.

What we can do as rational people is to always keep in mind how Republican propagandists, starting in 1996 with the birth of Fox News, figured out how to use the principles of journalism to destroy journalism. For years, newspapers as a matter of principle refused to print the word “lie,” because that word wasn’t “objective,” even when reporting on Republican lies that journalists knew perfectly well were lies. That coincided with the rise of the internet and the ability to count clicks. Lies are designed to be provocative and thus get lots of clicks. Good government is boring to most people, which is why the media mostly ignore President Biden’s accomplishments. Whereas lies about Biden are never boring and thus get repeated and amplified by the mainstream media.

The New York Times poll that they hyped on Nov. 5 got lots of clicks. But the poll got the current political mindset of American voters exactly backwards, as the election on Nov. 7 showed. What’s worse is that the New York Times will learn nothing from this very public display of their own ongoing pattern not only of being wrong, but also of the now blind and baked-in pattern of being manipulated by right-wing propagandists. And worse still is that the mainstream media will never admit to having been a megaphone and amplifier to all the lies that led, starting in 1996 with the rise of Fox News, to an attempted right-wing coup against the government of the United States.

And they’re still not telling us that Trump is doomed, becaused they need the clicks.

Update:

The Biden campaign has sent letters to major media outlets scolding them for their distorted coverage of polls:

Biden campaign sends memo to media outlets asserting disparity in polling coverage