Category Archives: Death of Truth

The Big Lie: One of the Tactics of Brain-washing

Death of Truth, Right-wing Extremism, Trust and Distrust

 

Jen Senko, the director and producer and narrator of the film The Brain Washing of my Dad,  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 the history scholar, now in Canada, Timothy Snyder, called “The Big Lie.”  Hitler told such lies. So did Donald Trump. 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. More recently, Donald Trump has claimed the 2020 presidential election in the US was stolen fraudulently by the Democrats. 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.

 

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 it is independent, created by recognized experts in the field and has been peer reviewed

 

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!

 

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

 

 

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

Death of Truth, Right-wing Extremism

 

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.

The Biggest Megaphone in the World:  Fox News

Critical thinking, Death of Truth, Extremism, Right-wing Extremism

 

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

Death of Truth, Hate, Right-wing Extremism

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

Death of Truth, Right-wing Extremism, Trump

 

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.

 

The Birth of Fox News and the Dividing of America

Death of Truth, Extremism, Right-wing Extremism

 

One of the things I found fascinating about the film The Brain Washing of My Dad was the importance of Fox News to the American right-wing extremist movement.

 

The John Birch society was a cauldron of right-wing extremism in America. As Claire Conner, author of a book called, Wrapped in the Flag: What I learned growing up in America’s Radical Right, How I Escaped and Why My Story Matters, said, “the John Birch Society was built on the theory that Communism was right around the corner.”

 

The Society believed that the bad communists were not just in Russia, or China, or Cuba, they were right here in America and in particular in our government. The John Birchers were considered nutty and extreme, which they were, so they resisted these attacks. In the election of 1964 where Barry Goldwater got hammered by Lyndon Johnson, partly because he had so many supporters in the John Birch Society, that many thought he must be as nutty as the Birchers. At the time, the American right was considered nutty or worse.

 

David Brock wrote a book called The Conservative Noise Machine in which he explained  how one of the first things conservatives did after the humbling defeat in 1964 was to attack the media on the basis of liberal media bias. As he said in the film, “the campaign to discredit the media would lay the groundwork for the vast alternative media that would come later.”

 

A central player in the media take down was Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News. Gabriel Sherman wrote a book about him, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the brilliant bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News and Divided the Country. As Sherman said, “Roger Ailes understood one thing about television. He understood that television is about emotion. And you need to communicate to the audience and hook into them on an emotional level.” Fox News embodied this insight and it did that with heart and soul.

 

Added that, Fox found that in America bombast engages. You can still see that on Fox today. Many Fox commentators are brimming with bombast. They don’t like namby-pamby. They like the extreme.

 

Richard Nixon exemplified how this worked. In the 1960s he debated John F. Kennedy and in the debates he looked slick with sweat and was acknowledged to be very smart and tough but he came off looking badly compared to Kennedy. He lost in a very close election.

 

As we all know Nixon came back. He picked himself off the ground and later became President of the United States. In 1968 when he ran again in a campaign for the presidency with Eugene McCarthy, Nixon knew he needed a media guy in his campaign. Roger Ailes was that man. And Ailes taught Nixon how to play the media.

 

Ailes was the power behind the sound bite. He taught Nixon to keep his sentences short with real bites. Short snappy one-liners that can stick in the audience’s mind. According to Sherman, Ailes told Nixon that America was dumb and would not understand him unless he kept his message simple. He should boil down his message and they would get it.  As a result, Nixon learned to master TV which had become a mass medium in the late 1960s.  And that made all the difference.

 

Years later Donald Trump learned the same message.  Keep it simple stupid. Or perhaps, ‘Stupid, keep it simple, would be more like it.

 

According to Sherman in a memo in 1970, Ailes said “Television had become such an important instrument, because people are lazy and want someone to do their thinking for them. It became the blueprint for Fox News.”  Later Roger Ailes said, “There are simple things the American people believe in. It is the reason that John Wayne is still one of the top 5 actors of all time 40 years after he died. You knew all about him: Don’t touch my woman; don’t draw a gun on me; don’t take my horse.”

When nuance becomes nonsense, truth flies out the door.

 

Reese Schonfeld, the founding President and CEO of CNN said this about TVN the news network for which Ailes worked at the time.  He said they wanted to be like a tiny tugboat pulling the Queen Mary a little farther right, and again further right to get the good ship to move as far right as he could.  He said this about Ailes: “He didn’t know much about news then and I’m not even sure he knows much about news now, but he sure does know television. He knows as much about television in the country as anyone and by the way he’s a great propagandist.”

 

When Ailes moved to Fox News it exploded in popularity and with it the interest in right-wing extremism. It engaged. Like nothing else on cable TV.

 

Raging Hate Machines

Death of Truth, Hate, Right-wing Extremism, The Sleep of Reason

 

In the documentary film The Brain Washing of My Dad Jen Senko’s father started to listen to Rush Limbaugh on a small portable radio with ear buds. He was in business—ready to attack the world. At least the part of the world that was sane.

 

Then, as his daughter Jen Senko said, “it got worse when he discovered Fox News. It was like he had joined a cult or a new religion.” He started sending links to hateful stories to his relatives and acquaintances.

 

Jen Senko wondered if he really was brain-washed. She was determined to figure it out. So she made a film about her father and his changes. She found similar stories from around the country. She realized this issue went far beyond just her father and his wild politics. There were bitter and angry people everywhere.  Loving and caring people from around the country were turning into raging hate machines. What was going on? She wanted to know. So do I.

 

She concluded that ordinary people around the country had become raging hate machines after listening to and watching right-wing media. First it was right-wing talk radio, then it was cable TV, particularly Fox News.

 

Hillary Clinton referred to it as a vast right-wing conspiracy. She, of course, along with her husband, were 2 of its biggest victims.

 

Jen said when Reagan was elected president in 1980 she noticed the country going into what she called a more hardened place. This was also the time when her father started to change from fun loving to hating.