guns, Right-wing Extremism

Fear and Rage on Fox

 

In the film The Brainwashing of My Dad, there was a lot to be said about Fox News, because it played a big role in his brainwashing, according to Jen Senko.

 

Fox News is built on fear and rage. Much of it generated by Fox to amplify engagement and make more money. As Dr. Cynthia Boaz pointed out in the film, “the idea is to terrify and terrorize the audience during every waking moment…when people are afraid, they don’t think rationally. And when they can’t think rationally, they’ll believe anything.”

 

I don’t claim to be a reliable watcher of Fox News. I try my best to watch it to get the ‘other side of the story.’  I must admit that in the case of Fox I just can’t watch much of it. I have asked friends for suggestions about more sane conservative view point but have not got many suggestions.

 

Eric Boehlert said, “Fox News is built on this formula of just getting people to get really angry. It’s phony outrage…They really are acting about how outraged they are.”  For example when Sean Hannity shouts at his readers, “Obama attacks America.”  Or another example, when Judge Jeanine Pirro Judy says to her listeners, “I told you that you need to be afraid, because they are coming for you,” and points her finger at you watching on the screen. Or when David Michael Lynch says, “ISIS is coming in to America. I would bet my life on the fact. They are already here. I’ve caught these people before and I’ve seen Qur’ans, prayer rugs, you name it.”  And we should always remember this basic principle: Phony outrage=Lies.

 

As a result of all of this one young man from Cedar Rapids Iowa spoke in the film about how his father, a Fox News regular viewer was convinced that Obama would deliberately trigger a civil war. As a result, he went to the local store to fill up on ammo before the government took it all.

 

That is a common reaction in the United States to many problems.  I remember when I lived in Arizona for 3 months for about 10 years and they had problems on the news. Almost any kind of problems.  The first thing people id was to head to store to buy ammunition.

There is no monopoly on shenanigans

American Fascism, Critical thinking, Fascism, Freedom, Right-wing Extremism

Language is never neutral. Or at least it is very difficult to be neutral. In 1994 Newt Gingrich on behalf of Tea Party, the radical right wing of the Republican party at the time, hired Frank Luntz, considered by many to be a genius of a wordsmith. For example, he persuaded Republicans to refer to estate tax as death tax. It sounded more ominous.  One thing is clear, Frank Luntz is sharp. Luntz professionalized framing language to get a desired message across.

 

Thanks to work like Luntz’s, and others with his skills, conservatives talked about “energy exploration” rather than “drilling for oil.” Instead of talking about poor people they talk about “the takers.” Or even “parasites.” Or “enhanced interrogation techniques” instead of “torture.” Instead of “rich people” say “the job creators.”

 

Words are important. So is spin. And of course, both the left and the right do this. There is no monopoly on shenanigans.

 

George Orwell, that brilliant political thinker and writer said, in his book 1984, “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”  I think he was being ironical, for who would say that? Another brilliant and more modern writer, Robert Macfarlane said that words are critically important to our ability to understand the world. No words, no thinking. Macfarlane feared that if we no longer knew the exact words for plants or animals we would not be able to find spaces for them in our imaginations. As Carol Off recounted in her wonderful book At a Loss for Words, he told her in an interview that “to name something is to know it a little more clearly. And maybe to care for it a little more.”

 

As a life long seeker for truth about things in the natural world, particularly wild flowers and wild birds, I must say I disagree entirely.  Therefore, I don’t really like spin doctors like Luntz. Political operatives like him, whether of the left or the right, are trying to mesmerize us in order to manipulate us into supporting those who are paying him for that manipulation.

 

Off said in politics “we keep the word, but the idea it represents is lost.” I think the best current example of that is the word “freedom.”  I think people like truckers in the Convoy movement of Canada have lost the meaning of the word completely.  They mean the freedom of themselves to do anything they want, no matter what effect that has on others. That means freedom all right, for them, and misery for the rest of us. Freedom for wolves; not so much for sheep.

 

As Orwell might have said, abuse of language is the beginning of fascism.

 

Brand and Label

Death of Truth, Right-wing Extremism

 

Jen Senko in the film the Brainwashing of My Dad, described another technique used by conservatives to promulgate their propaganda. She called it “Brand and Label.” As she explained,

 

 “Branding is about creating an image that will stick in the mind. Whether that image is accurate or not doesn’t matter. Democrats, liberals, and progressives are branded as big government spenders, dishonest American hating elitists, who are all atheists who hate Christmas and are soft on crime and weak on defence.”     

 

More modern propaganda adds that those nasty liberals love “they/them and hate you” and are allowing America to be overrun by rapists and criminals at the southern border.  This is not to deny that liberals don’t sell stereotypes either but of late have been much less effective at it.

 

Another catch phrase that is commonly used on the right is the expression “liberal media.”  Or even the “lying liberal media.” According to Jeff Cohen a professor journalism, who spoke in the film  said,

 

“If you analyze news coverage, as Fair (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) has done, you will find that media tilts a little to the right. It’s sort of centre right. Republicans usually outnumber democrats it’s just pure math. And then people say why do so many people believe the liberal media myth? If you keep handing opinion shaping power to right-wingers who don’t have evidence to yell about all the liberals, the liberals, the liberals, it’s going to have some traction.”

 

Now Cohen who was interviewed for the documentary almost 10 years ago and I don’t know if the data would as clearly support that claim today. I just don’t know. I realize there is a lot of so-called left-wing media.  I would like to point out that much of this so-called left-wing media if it was in Canada would be called right-wing media or at least centrist media. However, the fact is that most American conservatives don’t get their news or opinions from media anyway, except with the one very large exception of Fox News, most of them get their information or disinformation online from social media which seems to me to be largely right-wing. So I think Cohen’s point still holds.

 

Many people—such as Senkow’s father, believe that Fox News supplies he stories the liberal media don’t want to show. Other like me say, perhaps, but at least the liberal media does not make stuff up like Fox News has admittedly done. They admitted this is what they did after the 2020 presidential election which Donald Trump lost because they were scared of losing viewers to more firmly Trump media. They admitted this by agreeing to settle lawsuits against them by election workers and others that added up to hundreds of millions of dollars.

 

Fox News does more than make mistakes. Fox News lies.

 

Tactics of Brain-washing

Right-wing Extremism

 

Jen Senko, the director and producer and narrator of the film The Brain Washing of my Dad, which I have been blogging about, some might say, interminably,  told the story of her father who had been led from being “a good guy” to a fanatic right-winger filled with many hatreds, largely on the basis of Fox News.  She found some scientists and doctors who identified some of the tactics of the right-wing  that could result in profound changes in people.

 

One tactic she called “Lie and Skew.” This is based on an insight of the German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels who said, “If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” this is what Timothy Snyder called “The Big Lie.”  Hitler also adopted such lies. So did Donald Trump. It seems counter intuitive but the bigger the lie the better it worked.  Well, her father, that good guy believed those lies and got angry as a result.  He hate the people who he believed had cheated.

 

Another example was the claim by George W. Bush and his cronies that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when they invaded in 2003. Such weapons were never found no matter how many years they occupied Iraq. Many conservatives so strongly believed this lie that many years later they still believed, entirely without evidence of course, that Saddam Hussein just kept moving the weapons to keep them out of sight of the occupying American army. George W. Bush, to his credit eventually admitted that they never found them. Though he didn’t admit they lied about it.

 

More recently, Donald Trump has claimed the 2020 presidential election in the US was stolen fraudulently by the Democrats. He has never stopped spreading this lie because it is useful to him. He can use this to discredit the electoral system in case he is not elected. He has never provided evidence to support that claim, but always claims to be looking for it. He just repeats it over and over again as if that is enough.  And many Republicans believe it even though they don’t have any credible evidence for it either.

 

In the film The Brain Washing of my Dad, Jonathan Schroeder professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology, pointed out that often news media will claim a statistic that they cite out of thin air without saying who said it or where it came from. You have to know these things so you can tell if the statistic  is independent, created by recognized experts in the field, and has been peer reviewed. If you don’t know the source you should not trust the claim.

 

Fairleigh Dickenson University’s Public Minds survey asked 1,185 people nation wide what their news services were and then asked them about events in the US and abroad. Those news services were then evaluated on the basis of how many of the viewers of various sources got the right answer. The result were incredibly interesting: Here is the order of news sources  from good to bad of those news services’ viewers:

 

“NPR

CBS Sunday Morning News Show,

The Daily Show,

CNN,

MSNBC,

No News,

Fox News”

 

You got it. Fox News viewers came last even behind viewers who watched no news at all!

 

I more or less would rank the news services in the same order though Comedy News is a comedy show.

 

Of course, to many on the right in America the only source they trust is Fox News and, of course, their own independent “research” on the Internet. I have watched it too, but find their opinions usually far-fetched. But I admit I don’t watch it often. I am referring particularly to  be a fair judge. Fox News that includes their pundits like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Trump seems to believe everything he hears there and has in fact appointed a number of their pundits to his Cabinet or advisors.

 

I know that others disagree, but Fox News, in my opinion, based admittedly on very limited experience,  is addicted to the Big lie because it sells. It gets people angry. That’s why they had to pay nearly a billion dollars win damages when they were sued for slander. And anger is the basis of their widespread support among the American right-wing. They like anger. They get off on it.

 

For what it’s worth that is my opinion.

 

Blame and Divide

Polarization, Right-wing Extremism

 

As Jen Senko the producer of the film The Brainwashing of my Dad, said in that film:

 

“The goal is to get people so mad at each other that, (a) they don’t notice who is really causing their problem and (b) they won’t join together to oust the truly guilty parties and (c) they are then capable of feeling nothing towards the group that’s blamed.”

 

Much earlier, back in the sixties Bob Haldeman, Chief of Staff to Richard Nixon went on the Today Show and said, “all politics is the politics of division.”  That may be an overstatement but it sure has a strong dash of truth to it. Haldeman was shrewd.

 

It is a brilliant strategy and American companies with their professional advisors, including, media firms, lawyers, public relations firms, and others have proved adept at using this strategy over and over again. It has been astoundingly successful. Many liberals in America were unable to understand how Americans could vote for Trump who seemed to manifestly unqualified for the job of the presidency.  The liberals failed to understand how the strategy of blame and divide worked.

 

Rick Perlstein summed it up well: “The team that manages to divide the country and ends up with the bigger side wins.”

 

Senko’s father who was originally a liberal, and a “nice guy”, soaked up right wing propaganda for many years and concluded that American people, particularly of course, black Americans, were getting so much on the dole and social assistance that they were no longer interested in working. It didn’t matter that this was simply not true. It didn’t even matter that this was absurd. It could rile their side and divide them from their foes.

 

Manitoba learned this in the 1970s with their experiments with a guaranteed basic income in Dauphin under the Schreyer government. That study found that most people kept working except people like single moms who took the opportunity to improve their circumstances and get better job. Not no jobs as Conservatives constantly and wrongly allege.

 

As Bill O’Reilly said on Fox, “one side, president Obama and the Democratic Party want America to become an entitlement state versus a self-reliant one.” That of course is a convenient point of view for American business interests who don’t want to pay taxes for government programs to help needy people.  Because of the divide and blame tactics practiced so well by American conservatives, people who are poor, such as Senko’s dad, uncritically accept such claims as that made by O’Reilly and his cronies.

 

Please note I do not say liberals never use such tactics.  I just say the right proved very adept at using them.

 

John Williams, a professor of Sociology said this is in the film: “With African Americans the assumption is that we’re all on welfare and that we can’t get there without taking from somebody else, and that’s simply not true.” So white American working men and women are taught to hate African American workers. This strategy of painting African Americans as lazy people who don’t really want to work and prefer being on welfare has been very effective at convincing Americans that they are out to game the system. The strategy has been so effective that people like Senko’s father won’t vote for Democrats who would bring in Obama care, even if it would greatly benefit themselves, because they just don’t want black welfare queens to get the benefits too.

 

Instead of looking at the facts, Americans prefer to believe lies on Fox News such as that of Bill O’Reilly and Stuart Varney from Fox News who tells them that “welfare is very, very, generous.” Or Bill Reilly again who said, “you are not motivated to succeed because you are getting free stuff from the government. You are surrounded by goodies that are put onto you.”

 

Senkow’s father bought this line—hook, line and sinker. This is what he told her,

 

“As long as the government is supplying him the money that he needs to live on, he’s not interested in getting a job so he’ll go on year after year on the government dole and not bother getting a job.”

 

This ignores the fact that in America, as in Canada, people’s self-esteemed is based on their jobs, not on the dole they receive. I don’t believe people would take the dole and lose their self-esteem. They take the dole because they need it.

 

Blame and Divide Works! That’s why politicians do it.

 

The Noise Machine: Create Confusion, Doubt, and Anger

Extremism, Right-wing Extremism

 

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America pointed, in the film The Brain-Washing of my Dad, that  out often The Noise Machine, as he called it, tries to create confusion, fear, and misinformation. This is a common tactic used by those political leaders that want to be kings or modern equivalents. By the Noise Machine he meant the Republican Noise Machine that works in conjunction with Fox News. He said “It is designed to attack people and smear people…in order to confuse viewers and news consumers and get them all riled up.” There is not much better than fear or anger to get people engaged. That is its goal and it is very effective. It helped Trump win 2 presidential election. In the world of social media there is nothing more important than engagement.

 

Senko, the producer of the film,  asked  Boehlert for some examples of deliberate spreading of misinformation.  One he gave was the 2008 American presidential election where a lot of right-wingers were unable or unwilling to believe that Obama won the election and claimed  voter fraud and faulty voter registration. Sort of like Trump does too.

 

There was very little voter fraud meaning someone shows up to vote and pretends to be someone else. That did not stop American conservatives from  alleging voter fraud in the election and then again and again. Lies have a long life span it seems, on the right.  Of course, this same tactic was used by Trump in the election he won in 2016, as crazy as that sounds, and once more in 2020 in the election he lost, and he was even trying to set up his supporters once more in 2024, but did not need to do that. The claims were bogus, but they got their own based riled up so effectively that they thought the Democrats had tried to steal all of those 3 elections.

 

Political theorist Noam Chomsky said this was similar to the massive attempts to create climate change denial. Again, these were very effective campaigns by corporations who benefitted massively from delaying action on climate change. They tried to convince Americans that humans have nothing to do with climate change even though they had a lot scientific information from their own scientists that this was not true.

 

This was also a fantastic success for the oil and gas industry which gained decades of American inaction on climate change when the science had already made it clear that climate change was real and was caused by human activities. A lot of this information has come out in litigation where courts have required these corporations to reveal their tactics. In law suits this is called discovery. Participants in a trial must disclose a lot of information to the other side. As Chomsky said, “you gotta make profits tomorrow and if the species goes down the tube that is somebody else’s problem.”

 

Decades earlier tobacco companies used the same approach to convince Americans that tobacco smoking did not cause serious harms to smokers even though they had massive scientific data showing that this was not the case. They ended up paying billions in those law suits. The oil and gas sector used the same public relations firms to sell those falsehood to Americans, again giving those corporations decades of extra profits as Americans were getting sick and dying.

 

In each of these cases the corporations used tactics of sowing confusion through disinformation designed to make people angry at the liberals who were interfering with their life style choices. In each of these cases the corporate predators that organized the campaigns showed callous indifference to the harms caused by their disinformation campaigns to the American people. Profits are all that mattered.

 

As Brown and Williamson a former tobacco company said in a memo it was forced to disclose, “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”

There is a lot of hate out there

Extremism, Hate, Polarization

At least one thing is clear in this topsy-turvy insecure world. That is that there is a lot of hate out there. Really there is more than enough to feed a dozen worlds.

 

This is how Mark Edmondson put in the New York Times awhile back:

 

“I find hate to be virtually omnipresent in the current culture. Libs hate conservatives, and conservatives hate ’em right back. People hate politicians, the elite, MAGA hats (and their wearers), social media (though they cannot stay away from it). Some hate the rich. Some despise immigrants. People hate the media. They hate corporations. They hate capitalism. They hate woke and cancel culture. They hate globalism and globalists. They hate this president. There is love out there to be sure — for Beyoncé, for Pedro Pascal and, yes, even for this president, but hate trumps love by a mile now, or so it seems to me.”

 

 

I am a college basketball fan. I prefer it to professional basketball. My favorite teams are the University of Manitoba Bisons and North Carolina Tarheels. In North Carolina they take their basketball very seriously. The fans basically get insane about their times and even more their rivals. The hated rival of North Carolina is Duke University only 8 miles away. Those teams, and particularly their fans, hate each other with extreme passion. I remember once on a trip through the deep south of the US, in North Carolina where both of those Universities are located and we stopped somewhere and I started chatting with a woman who was a rabid basketball fan. Like me she was a Tarheels fan. I mentioned to her that it was too bad North Carolina had bad season last year. She was outraged at this comment. How could I say that?  It was true that by their standards they had not won many games, but they had beat Duke. Nothing else mattered. It was a great season because of that one win.  Her fandom was defined by her hatred of Duke.

 

Edmondson mentioned something similar in his article:

 

“One may define oneself — one may define the self — through hate. One day you are a blank slate, a void. But you can become yourself simply through hatred. You define yourself through your antipathies. I hate the church. I hate my school. I hate my parents, hate the administration, hate the president, hate the fascists, hate the communists. And maybe you begin to hate the Red Sox, too. I know any number of people who define themselves at least in part by hating a sports team. Take a bow, Duke University basketball.

Suddenly, you have stabilized the self. Do you want to be somebody? Well, now you are. You are the person with a stunning palette of hatreds. You don’t need to have positive allegiances to define yourself: The negative ones will do. Suddenly, ambiguity and nuance disappear, and you become Someone, with all of whose energies flowing in the same direction.”

 

 

Rene Descartes a famous French philosopher wanted to find certainty in the world.  That was tough to do.  He had an interesting way of doing it. He decided he would not take anything for granted. He would doubt absolutely everything he possibly could.  The one thing he found that really must be true and could not be doubted was that he existed.  Even if a malicious super-being was trying to fool him he must exist because he was being fooled. He was thinking, so he existed.   As a result, he concluded, I think therefore I am.

 

Edmundson suggested that perhaps there was something just as certain in the modern age and that was that hate existed. I Hate, therefor I am.

All if know is that I don’t want to be such a person. I don’t want to be defined by hate. Even hatred of Duke. Or Trumpism. There is much more to life than that.

Tactics of Brain-washing

Death of Truth, Extremism, Right-wing Extremism, Sacred Ignorance

For many years I never watched the TV news. I thought I was better off just reading a newspaper or magazine.  Now there is evidence that in some cases at least that is true!

Jen Senko, the director and producer and narrator of the film The Brain Washing of my Dad, which I had watched blogged about earlier, told the story of her father who had been led from being a good guy to a fanatic right-winger largely on the basis of Fox News.  She felt he had been brain-washed by Fox News. She found some scientists and doctors who identified some of the tactics of the right-wing  that could result in profound changes in people.

 

One tactic she called “Lie and Skew.” This is based on an insight of the German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels who said, “If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” this is what Timothy Snyder called “The Big Lie.”  Hitler told such lies too. So did Donald Trump. It seems counter intuitive but the bigger the lie the better it worked.

 

Another example was the claim by George W. Bush and his cronies that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when they invaded in 2003. Such weapons were never found no matter how many years they occupied Iraq. Many conservatives so strongly believed this lie that many years later they still believed, entirely without evidence of course, that Saddam Hussein just kept moving the weapons to keep them out of sight of the occupying American army. George W. Bush, to his credit eventually admitted that they never found them. Though he didn’t admit they lied about it. More recently, Donald Trump has claimed the 2020 presidential election in the US was stolen fraudulently by the Democrats. He has never stopped spreading this lie because it is useful to him. He can use this to discredit the electoral system in case he is not elected. He has never provided evidence to support that claim. He just repeats it over and over again as if that is enough.  And many Republicans believe it even though they don’t have any credible evidence for it either.

 

In the film The Brain Washing of my Dad, Jonathan Schroeder professor of Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology  pointed out that often news media will claim a statistic that they cite out of thin air without saying who said it or where it came from. You have to know these things so you can tell if the statistic  is independent, created by recognized experts in the field and has been peer reviewed. If you don’t know the source you should not trust.

 

Fairleigh Dickenson University’s Public Minds survey asked 1,185 people nation wide what their news services were and then asked them about events in the US and abroad. Those news services were then evaluated on the basis of how many of the viewers of various sources got the right answer. The result were incredibly interesting: Here is the order from good to bad of those news services’ viewers:

 

NPR

Sunday Show,

Daily Show,

CNN,

MSNBC,

No News,

Fox News

 

You got it. Fox News viewers came last even behind viewers who watched no news at all! In other words, people got more reliable news without watching the news than they did watching Fox News!

 

I more or less would rank the news services in the same order though Comedy News is a comedy show.

 

Of course, to many on the right in America the only source they trust is Fox News and, of course, their own independent “research” on the Internet. I have watched it too, but find their opinions usually far-fetched. But I admit I don’t watch it often. I am referring particularly to the version of Fox News that includes their pundits like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Trump seems to believe everything he hears there and has in fact appointed a number of their pundits to his Cabinet or panel of advisors.

 

I know that others disagree, but Fox News, in my opinion, based admittedly on very limited experience,  is addicted to the Big lie because it sells. It gets people angry. And anger is the basis of their widespread support among the American right-wing. For what it’s worth that is my opinion.