Brainwashing or Hyperbole?

 

In the film the Brain-washing of My Dad, when Jen Senko saw how her father turned from a kind and gentle bleeding-heart liberal into a vicious hateful conservative, she wanted to see how that could happen. Was this actually brain-washing? Wasn’t brainwashing what Communist governments did to their prisoners of war by bombarding them with images, lights, and sounds on a 24-hour basis?

 

Senko knew how her father and many others were swept up in a general movement to the right that was supported by new right-wing media. Would this amount to brain-washing? Or is that hyperbole?

 

As a result, she consulted with an expert on brain-washing Kathleen Taylor a neuroscientist from Oxford University in London. She has written a book on modern brain-washing. Taylor pointed out to Senko in her interview how there are two ways of looking at brain-washing. One of them was the traditional way that people were subjected to

 

“this forced psychological torture where people are put into situation where they are put through horrors and brow-beaten into believing or pretending to believe something new. That is brain-washing by force…Then there is brain-washing by stealth which is where they are not forced to believe stuff but all of the information that comes at them is pushing a line. So there is no alternative in terms of information. If you control the information that goes into a brain, you control to a great extent  what that brain will do and what that brain will believe.  You are not forcing them to believe anything, but you are making it difficult for them to think anything else because their horizons are narrowed.”

 

Reminding me of the German Philosopher Immanuel Kant,  George Lakoff told her, “You can only understand what the neuro-circuits of your brain allow you to understand. Any fact that does not fit that will be ignored or rejected…They don’t know their brains are being changed.”

 

Taylor added, “The information is familiar; you don’t have to think about it. If those beliefs are very passionately held, you may find that any belief that threatens these is rejected out of hand.’

Dr. Taylor said there are 5 factors in this kind of belief change:

 

  1. Isolation
  2. Control
  3. Uncertainty
  4. Control
  5. strong emotions

 

That is the matrix for effective brain-washing technique. If these are present, brain-washing works! How does that apply to right-wing media such as Fox News? That’s for my next post.

 

The War on Christmas

 

Fox News had millions of devotees. Many of them were not just fans, they were zealots for Fox. In her effort to understand her father whom she had felt had been brain-washed, Jen Senko interviewed a bunch of them in her film. And the interviews were telling.

 

One young man Matthew Saccaro author of I was a Teenage Fox Robot. He had been a fan of CNN until his grandfather turned him on to Fox. His grandfather explained to him that CNN and CNBC were just liberal propaganda.  He saw Bill O’Reilly as the champion on the rights for little people. Now he considers that “totally ridiculous.” According to Saccaro O’Reilly taught him that the  American Civil Liberties Association, (the “ACLU”) was a terrorist organization that was trying to take away all their rights. If you think this is an exaggeration, consider this headline to one of O’Reilly’s stories: “The ACLU aiding Al Qaeda. This is an amazing story that you most likely won’t see anywhere else.’ Well of course you won’t see it anywhere else because most media outlets have journalistic standards, and don’t just offer far-fetched right-wing propaganda uncritically. It was like saying the January 6th riot at the capital was just a bunch of tourists.

 

Saccaro now knows this was “as big a lie as you can get,” but at the time he was convinced that finally there was someone on TV who “gets it.” He also thought “if we can’t say merry Christmas we are as bad as the terrorists.” Now Saccaro says, “this is the insane kind of bullshit that Fox News gets people to believe.”

 

Fox had another ratings ploy that garnered a lot of attention. This was the alleged “War on Christmas” by the Left-wing in America. Roger Ailes told his people, “Let me think. 90% of people love Christmas. So CBS, CNN, and MSNBC can take the other 10% and we’ll say ‘Merry Christmas’ and make all the money.” Of course, the so-called “war on Christmas” was pretty tame stuff, typically hyped and exaggerated by Fox in order to enrage their own viewers. And it worked. Americans on the right loved it. That is a common tactic on Fox. Get the viewers enraged.

Steve from Paris found his father acting in similar ways after he got hooked on Rush Limbaugh. He said, “It doesn’t make any difference how many facts you put out there, it’s all about the emotions of anger, hate and fear.” Those are the emotions that get one’s attention engaged. The more engagement, the more revenue for right-wing media. Hate sells.

 

One interviewee named Chuck explained how he had dated a nice loveable woman. He called her a “sweet lady,” but after they broke up, she started watching Fox News around 2004 during the presidential election and got a steady diet of right-wing propaganda. In his view it was propaganda. And then

 

“that sweet loveable likeable person was gone and was replaced by Fox and corrupted by Fox into this intolerant willfully ignorant compassionless individual. I tried to steer her away from Fox to anything else but Fox and she got sucked into that fox hole and now that sweet little person I once knew is gone. And I miss my friend and wish she would come back.”

 

As Bill Reilly said, “He was not going to say Happy Holiday. He would say Merry Christmas to everyone even if they were standing by a synagogue.” Those wicked liberals were not going to steal Christmas from him and his family.

 

Merry Christmas.

A Political Agenda for News

 

Jen Senko interviewed Edward S. Herman for her film The Brainwashing of my Dad. Herman had written a very influential book with Noam Chomsky a saint of the Left-Wing. The book was called Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.  In the interview Hermann explained how Fox News had made its right-wing views explicit without any pretext anymore of objectivity. With the withering of the Fairness Doctrine, it had a license to do exactly that. And Fox did not pull any punches. People loved the fact that it did not pull punches. Americans were ready for extreme right-wing views on television as it had already demonstrated in right-wing talk radio.

 

According to Herman, Fox was “blatantly biased.” Claims that it was fair and balanced were mere camouflage for the real Fox News. According to Herman it had a political agenda and it was the agenda of Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. Herman said Fox “had an effect on the media. It was already pretty fair to right, but it drove the media even further to the right.”

 

David Brock, the author of The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine agreed with Herman that the most important effect of Fox was the effect it had on the rest of the American media. It did not just influence its own viewers, frequently its false claims and highly biased stories “bled over into the mainstream media.”

 

Brock explained that media was in an ecosystem where one media source would affect other media within the ecosystem. So, if Fox got it wrong, a lot of media got it wrong too and hence the American public was strongly influenced by the right-wing bias on Fox.

 

Although Fox News had mainly older viewers many of those oldsters introduced their children and even grand children to Fox as well. As a result, the influence of Fox was growing exponentially in America. And with that growth, went right-wing views. Right-wing views were exploding as Fox News popularity exploded.

 

This was wonderful—for the right-wing.

For the rest of us, not so much.

 

The Biggest Megaphone in the World:  Fox News

 

After Right-wing talk radio the next big thing in Right-wing politics in the US was television. In particular Fox News.

 

As Jeff Cohen said, “One of the biggest steps “forward” in handing our whole media system over to a handful of corporations was the Telecommunications “Reform” Act of 1996. Before then it was completely bi-partisan…Consumer rights advocates were calling it the Time-Warner Enrichment Act…The few fat media companies got even fatter.” Cohen called this “bi-partisan corruption that explains why we have the media companies we now have.” And he suggested strongly that media companies had bought Clinton and the Republican Speaker of the House with large political donations in order to get this done. They bought both Democrats and Republicans.

 

This set the stage for something even bigger—the launching of Fox News by Rupert Murdoch. Fox quickly became the major cable news service in the US and the effect on other news organizations’ was “profound”, according to Jen Senko. He owned a lot of media organizations in TV, newspapers, magazines and books and as a result had a huge influence on news in the US

 

Rupert Murdoch owned Fox News but Roger Ailes built it. It was his brainchild. Without him Fox News would be much different.

 

Gabriel Sherman wrote an influential book that explained the mind of Roger Ailes. The book was called, The Loudest voice in the Room: How the Brilliant Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News and Divided a Country. His control over Fox News was pretty absolute. Bombast was the key.  American conservatives loved loud opinions. In 1988 Bill Clinton had an infamous affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky. Fox News covered it with what Sherman called “wall-to-wall” coverage.

In 2000 Fox News milked another issue for a good part of the year. That was the Bush Gore election and the Supreme Court.  Fox did not cover it as a dubious case that went to the Supreme Court for resolution. Fox, under Ailes direction, covered it as showing how the Democrats were sore losers and undemocratically tried to win in the Supreme Court when they had lost the election. Fox really treated it as Democrats trying to steal the election. They barely mentioned that the court’s decision was based on party lines in the court. This was not entirely different than the republicans in 2020 after Trump’s narrow defeat by Biden and the legal melee as a result of 61 law suits launched by the Trump campaign, all of which they lost except for one minor case that hardly had any bearing on the result at all.

 

In 2001 Ailes and Fox treated the disaster of 9/11 as a holy war of the US against the Muslim radicals in the Middle East with George W. Bush the heroic John Wayne figure who would lead America to victory in the desert.

 

Fox News became Ailes megaphone and it became the biggest megaphone in the world. All of these incidents helped Fox to explode in the ratings and become the biggest voice in news on the cable networks and that voice distinctly spoke with a strong right-wing accent. It was the voice of Roger Ailes who selected spokesmen and women who mirrored his right-wing views.

 

Ailes realized that what Fox needed to do was make the news simple and black and white. Subtlety and nuance were irrelevant. Banished for good. Good vs bad was always the issue. And America was good and its foes were either bad or frequently even evil. Its anchors or hosts wore American flags on their lapels and preached the exceptionalism of America that was beset by traitorous lefties and lily-livered liberals.

 

Ailes really made not just Fox News, but America go much further right-wing. And he did it smoothly with cunning. He convinced the audience that they were fair and balanced, as their motto asserted, but actually he was moving his audience and the country much further to the right. Ailes was very good at what he did. And he helped make the Murdochs immensely rich in the process. And, in time, he helped give birth to Donald Trump.

Trump was the child of Fox News.

 

Blinded by the Right

After Bill Clinton was elected President of the United States, Rush Limbaugh spear-headed a campaign of vitriolic hatred  against him. As Jeff Cohen said in the film The Brain Washing of My Dad, “Limbaugh becomes almost the leader of the opposition.” He spread the rumour, without any evidence, that Vince Foster, a Clinton aide was killed and the body was found in Hillary Clinton’s apartment. This conspiracy theory was around for years. Probably it is still around. It probably had an effect on Hillary losing the presidential election in 2016. Yet it was all nonsense on steroids.

 

Limbaugh told his listeners that after Bill Clinton was elected he was part of a global coalition that would get the UN to come and take over the American government and take their guns away and put dissidents in concentration camps. This theory is still around too and hampers the work of the UN.

 

Jen Senko’s father was convinced that Bill Clinton was a murderer and wanted to destroy the country to protect himself. Hillary said “there is a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband from the day that he announced he would run for president.”  David Brock, author of the book Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an ex-Conservative, admitted that he was part of such a conspiracy. He said,

 

“I knew what she was saying was true. I was involved with it and new very much first hand  that people I was working with in places like the American Spectator magazine back in 1993 shortly after Clinton was elected were trying to figure out how to get him thrown out of office. How to impeach him.”

 

According to Jeff Cohen, “the role of Rush Limbaugh in the ascendancy of the right-wing-wing in America was crucial.”

Even more important, the role of such conspiracy theories was part of the right-wing movement. And it still is. Hatred blinds.

 

Champion of the Overdog

 

Rush Limbaugh had an important role in the brain washing of Jen Senko’s dad.

 Jeff Cohen said that Limbaugh became “the champion of the overdog. Any powerful group that was challenged by scientists or medical people was the victim. For example, the tobacco company was the victim.” Likewise environmentalists and Ralph Nader, consumer advocate, are victims. The world is topsy-turvy in other words in the land of the extreme right.

 According to a commentator in the film here are the top 10 Limbaugh lies, that his followers were prepared to believe:

 There are more Native Americans alive today than when Columbus arrived.

  1. The government is going to be able to get into your bank account with the health care bill and make transfers without you knowing it.
  2. Egyptian men are soon going to be able to have sex with their dead wives for up to 6 hours after their death.
  3. President Obama shut down NASA space flights and turned the agency into a “Muslim outreach department.”
  4. The US has more forestland than it did in 1787.
  5. President Obama wants to mandate circumcision.
  6. There is no conclusive proof that nicotine is addictive and the same thing with cigarettes causing emphysema, lung cancer and heart disease.
  7. If the ice caps melted the ocean levels wouldn’t rise.
  8. Styrofoam is biodegradable.
  9. I’m not making this stuff up folks!

 

President Donald Trump gave him a Medal of Freedom.  US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas officiated at Limbaugh’s 3rd wedding. According to Jeff Cohen, Thomas does not listen to mainstream media, but he records Rush Limbaugh’s show! That 3-hour show was Thomas’ “window into the world,” according to Cohen.  A pretty dim window I would say. Similarly, Justice Antonin Scalia, the darling of the right, also said, “I get most of my news, probably driving back and forth, to work on the radio…talk show guys mostly.”

In America little is revered more than ignorance.

Rush Limbaugh was Trump’s kinda guy. Some Americans love bullies, and the more ignorant the better.

 

Hate: The Secret Sauce of American Talk Radio

 

One of the central characters in the story of right-wing extremism is Rush Limbaugh.

 

Rush Limbaugh was Jen Senko’s father’s hero. As Senko said, “The way my father talked about Rush Limbaugh it was like he found a new religion, quoting him constantly as if he were the word of God.” In other words, it was a reaction that was similar to the fealty of Trumpsters to Donald Trump. They too were (and are) enthralled.

 

Limbaugh exuded confidence when he interviewed someone. There was never any doubt that Rush was right. In the film The Brain Washing of My Dad, Steve Rendall said when he was interviewed by Limbaugh if Limbaugh disagreed with him it was very difficult to overcome his confidence. This was very effective at quashing dissent.

 

Senko said that her father talked as if he was in a cult.  That is why she used the word “brain-washing’ in her title to her documentary film.

 

Limbaugh’s fans believed him no matter what the facts were and no matter how obvious the facts were contrary to what he said. Limbaugh was a God to his fans. This is very reminiscent of Trump.  The devotion of their fans was theological. Not agreeing with the leader was heresy.

 

Rendall pointed out that talk radio was different in one important way from other media. They invariably listened to talk radio alone. And they are listening to the other person, like Limbaugh and there is then a personal connection between listener and talk show host.

 

Limbaugh said people listened to him or other hosts for only one reason—they wanted to be enraged. That is what they listened for. They wanted to be mad. That gave them a high. Getting angry was like a drug. He admitted that if he embellished the truth with confidence and cockiness he could make people mad and then they were hooked. This was particularly effective to get people to hate the person Limbaugh was lambasting.

 

Hatred was the magic sauce of right-wing talk radio.

 

The Demise of the Fairness Doctrine and the birth of the politics of Resentment

 

Jen Senko said her father got “brain-washed” by all this right-wing extremism.   He had been a Democrat but he, like so many others, became “a Reagan Democrat.” In fact, he became a Republican, because after watching right-wing media continuously, he found he had been wrong for all those years. He had stopped watching news from Walter Cronkite and other such news providers and switched entirely to Fox News.  Fox News became his Bible for news. And Fox News shaped her Dad there was no doubt about that. Whether that amounted to brainwashing was of course another matter.

 

The odd thing was her father Frank Senko actually flipped his previous values and turned against what Jen Senko saw as the core of his being and identity. It was that profound a change.

 

Part of this change in her Dad occurred as a consequence of the removal of the “fairness doctrine.” How can removing fairness do that?

 

The so-called “Fairness Doctrine” in the US required American media to broadcast news in the public interest. It operated for 40 years and in 1949 was voted in as law by the US Congress.  It was effective until 1987. As Thom Hartmann said, “as a result radio and television stations had real news.”

 

It did not require equality of all views. That would have been impossible, but it did require media to recognize that it had to consider views other than their own or that of their owners. If people felt their views were not being considered they could complain to the station and if that did not give relief one could complain to the FCC who might give relief and force the station to include more views.

 

The doctrine was dropped by the Reagan administration. They saw it as unnecessary government interference. This resulted in an explosion of talk radio in the US. And the gloves were off. No more mealy-mouthed opinions. Extreme views were not just tolerated, they were encouraged. Americans loved those extreme views.

 

Talk radio started off as local radio but eventually some of them went national, starting with Rush Limbaugh in 1988, immediately after the demise of the fairness doctrine. Fairness was government interference.

 

As Steve Rendall, a senior magazine writer said,

“In 1987 I couldn’t believe what I heard. I heard over and over again gutter racism,’ and this was coming from different talk show hosts, but the main man was Bob Grant. I heard black people referred to as ‘savage.’

 

Other racial slurs were common.

 

As Rendall said,

“The allure of the Limbaughs and the Grants was that they tapped into a kind of resentment and a kind of insecurity on the part of mostly white men, and in large part, of aging white men. A kind of injured pride.  A feeling that the world is passing them by. It’s typical of demagoguery. That your problems aren’t really caused by you. They are caused by these other people that aren’t like us.”

 

It is all their fault. Men like Jen Senkow’s father at this stuff up. Jeff Cohen put it this way: “Talk radio was always in the hands of right-wing backlash artists.”

 

Or as Rendall said, “A bunch of white guys on the right railing against the women’s movement, the civil rights movement…”

The American right-wing was unleashed. Good-bye namby-pamby. Hello polarization. Because, of course, extremism on one side always gives birth to extremism on the other side.  And America would never be the same again.

 

 

Trickle-down Economics

 

 

The Powell manifesto or memorandum set the stage for Ronald Reagan to support supply-side trickle-down economics.  Famously, Reagan said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” That was a bedrock part of the right-wing movement that emerged in the United States. It still is very important.

 

The idea was to put in place policies, particularly tax policies, that would benefit primarily the wealthy, and then the money spent by the wealthy would trickle down to those with less wealth and all would benefit. In time.  This economic theory has since been largely discredited, except by people like Donald Trump and his friends who benefit greatly from those policies. Benefits to the wealthy are obvious. Benefits to the less wealthy are much harder to find. Naturally, people like the wealthy have been quick to find the benefits.  It is hard not to like something that benefits you.

Thanks to the vast network of right-wing organizations however, these views have been so widely promulgated that that even those who don’t benefit from them are frequently heard arguing in favor of them. People like Senko’s father The Brain Washing of my Dad.

Studs Terkel said in the 1990s, “the only thing I’ve seen trickle down is meanness.” Jeff Cohen, also interviewed by Jen Senko in the film  was a professor of Journalism at Ithaca College, and he said by that Terkel meant, the kind of Country Club cronies “looking down on the less fortunate”. Cohen said, people like Russ Limbaugh tried to get white middle-class males as angry at vulnerable groups in the film  as some people did in country clubs in the 1950s.  Terkel meant that this mean streak was what was disseminated in the 1980s.

Someone else said, “the only thing I’ve seen trickle down is the rich pissing on the middle class.” The reality was that money was taken from the middle class and given to the rich.

Ronald Reagan, we must remember, was the one who brought us the expression, “Make America Great Again,” that was later adopted by Donald Trump. Reagan advocated for a return to a simpler time, a mythic time, when white males were in control, unencumbered by worries about others such as black Americans, gay, lesbians, and when Evangelical Christians did not have to worry about catering to other religious groups such as Muslims. They could be safely ignored. Donald Trump has tried the same thing, with a lot of success.

According to Claire Connor, author of Wrapped in the Flag,

“they saw America of 1900 as the apex of when we were great as a nation. 1900. Before the income tax. Before the fed. Before any progressive legislation was considered or passed. Before child labor laws. Before women had any rights. Before women even had the right to vote.”

 

According to Connor, Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society,

“talked a lot about 1900, as this glorious time in American history, and he said, ‘there were pockets of poverty, but it was a healthy kind of poverty. Poverty free from government interference where every man understood that relief from dire want was entirely his own responsibility. Thus the blessings of liberty outweighed the poverty.”

 

Ronald Reagan, known as the Great Communicator,  said this:

“Looking back, we lived in poverty or pretty close to that all the time, but we didn’t know that at the time, because the government didn’t come around and tell us that we were poor.”

As Rick Perlstein said,

“Conservatives were all about balanced budgets. They were all about making people eat their spinach. They came up with this new theory called ‘Supply-side Economics.’ And Supply side means basically that you give money to business and that way they’ll produce more plenty that will trickle down to ordinary people. And it was what George H. W. Bush in 1980 who called this  “voodoo economics” because it sounded like magic. It was like he was promising you the candy store. He said he could lower everybody’s taxes and by doing so everybody would benefit. It was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes. In actual fact how it turned out was hurting the very working-class voters who trusted Ronald Reagan with their economic future. Of course, inequality just sky-rocketed. The rich got richer and the wages of ordinary people just stagnated.”

 

It did after all, sund like magic.  And people wanted it to be true. So they did not demand evidence. In fact, the message was so powerful that Donald Trump used the same discredited claims to sell his tax cuts that mainly benefited the wealthy during his first presidency and again, most recently, in the second. And once again, poor people, who were not getting the breaks, got screwed again.

Funny how that happens.

The Effects of the Powell Memo

 

The Powell memorandum impacted law, media, business, politics and education, in many ways.

The groups had meetings where issues of all kinds that were important to those on the right could be discussed. The issues ranged from fur trade commission, restricting rights of gays and lesbians and their ilk, de-regulation of businesses, gun deregulation, anti-tax, anti-immigrants, pro-lifers, evangelicals and many more.  Many of those issues are still important issues, except perhaps the fur trade. The genius of the meetings was that they provided a broad tent where all kinds of people appeared who often did not agree with each other on much, but they learned to like each and spread their respective gospels. These meetings benefited many right-wing groups.

 

Conservative think tanks exploded around the country. The Heritage Foundation was established in 1973, 2 years after the Powell memorandum was created.

One thing these groups established was balance in the media.  In other words, media need no longer be objective, as had always been the goal, now instead, media would be balanced. For example, if a newspaper wanted to cover the issue of climate change it must give an opportunity to both sides of the debate to be heard. This sounds pretty good, but it had flaws. For example, even if 99% of scientists agreed that climate change was real and was caused by activities of humans, if a media outlet wanted to report on the issue it had to give a platform for both sides. This gave far too much weight to crackpot ideas often funded by industries affected, such as the oil and gas sector. They managed to have their minority views get equal time with independent science. As a result these views received much more attention than they should have received. “Balance” really did not work well in practice.

In fact, this helped to establish the age of extremism and polarization in which we now live.

There was a large group of meetings led by Grover Norquist who founded Americans for Tax Reform and The Americans for Tax Reform Foundation to lobby governments to reduced taxes on wealthy business people and provided education opportunities for people with the right views.

When Hillary Clinton complained about “a vast right-wing conspiracy” she actually had a point. When you look at the vast number of right-wing organizations from legal foundations to media organizations, to think tanks, to advocacy groups, and many others, the network was indeed vast. Some called the Norquist Meetings the headquarters of the right-wing conspiracy. Personally, I don’t like to call this movement a conspiracy, but it was clearly a growing movement, well-funded and supported by American business interests.