Category Archives: Extremism

Conflict Entrepreneurs”

 

A lot of people in America, and elsewhere, are going crazy over the shooting of Charlie Kirk. The killing of Charlie Kirk because the killer disagreed with him was completely despicable. At the same time, from what little I have learned about Kirk, in my he is not saint.  But he has generated a lot of controversy, and because he is now dead, a lot of hero worship.

 

The Utah governor, in talking about Kirk referred to “conflict entrepreneurs” that drown out the voice of the moderates, whose voices represent the majority. Most people don’t want to go to the far left or far right, as they see it. They want the temperatures to go down on debate, but they are stymied by these entrepreneurs. The social media algo rhythms amplify the voices of the extremists. There is no economic benefit to the social media corporations to look at the moderate’s views when people are so attracted to the views of the extremists. Social media rewards the views of the extremes because that is what engages the attention of people, so the social media gives people what they want, not what they need.

 

As CNN’s David Irvine said, “there is a market for crazy in America.” That is a bitter understatement  I think he is bang on right. There is no market for reasonable. There is no market for sane. At least, not in social media.

 

A lot of people are ignorant about political violence against the right.  A lot people are ignorant about political violence on the left. In both cases because their sources of news are very limited. A result there is plenty of ignorance to go around. As Alyssa Griffin, a conservative CNN commentator, said, “They are getting information from these rage entrepreneurs and are not getting the cold hard facts.” That applies to many people.

 

And that is unfortunate for all of us. We all suffer the consequences of ignorance.

The Soul of America

 

I enjoyed listening to American historian Jon Meacham, the author of The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels, on CBS Sunday Morning. Robert Costa interviewed Meachum, asked him right off the bat, “What is the state of the American Soul?”  Meachum’s answer was appropriately blunt: “We are in a dangerous place. There was no ‘once upon a time’ in America. There is not going to be a happily ever after.” No those are for fairy tales.

 

Meachum did say that these are times where history is very important. History is always important, in my opinion. Hiding the truth as Donald Trump urges is not the answer.  Ugly truths must be confronted; not swept under the carpet. Meachum acknowledged to Costa: “there are times when you and I can agree what can be replicated. This is not one of those times”.

 

The television show included an outrageous claim by Charlie Kirk when he was alive: “Donald Trump is the guardian of western civilization.”  Even though Kirk has now been lionized by the right, that is a statement from a man who did not appreciate history. He also said, “the entire Democratic project [referring I will give him the benefit of the doubt that he was referring to the Party, not the system] is how quickly can we turn America into a hell hole.”  I know people in America who would drink up such stuff. Stuff like that is very popular on the right, though it is patent nonsense.

 

Costa asked Meachum why America reacted with such violence so often. To this Meachum said,

 

“Political violence erupts in America when there is an existential question—who is an American? Who deserves to be included in ‘We the people,’ or ‘All men being created equal’? When that is in tension, when we don’t have common agreement about that, then, if you look at it historically, violence erupts.”

 

Meachum said, instead, much more wisely, “We don’t want to end up in the situation where because you do not agree with someone you pick up a gun.” If America reaches such a stage—and it certainly looks like it might—the American project is bankrupt.”

 

Meachum asked a very good question of Costa: “Are we going to be able to see each other neighbors?”

 

Or will they only be able to see each other as enemies? If the latter, that country is dead.

 

Meachum put it this way:

 

“When we lose the capacity to engage in argument and dissent and debate peaceably, we are breaking faith with the American covenant. And the American covenant is that we live in contention with each other, but we’re not at each other’s throats.”

 

I wonder though if Meachum is right. It seems to me he is being a bit of a Pollyanna.  Meachum said, “this is why history is important.  There is not much in the current moment that we want. The country is about dissent, and respecting each other; it is not about hunting each other down.”

 

More and more, I see Americans as hunting each other down. More and more I see anything else as fairy tales.

 

 

Recurring American political Violence

 

As we all know, America has been inundated with violence, including, of course, political violence. It is everywhere and it keeps coming back.  The left blames the right; the right blames the left. But they are both responsible.

 

Here are a few incidents that stand out, but there are many. Usually more than one every day.

 

An assassin with a rifle tried to kill the candidate for the American presidential election, narrowly missing his head and nicking instead his ear. Some think God changed the direction of the bullet so that the bystander behind him was shot instead.  The American left is lucky Trump was not killed.  Had Trump been killed he would have been revered as a political hero for a century.  When Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in 1968, he was not liked by 83% of the population. He has been a hero ever since.

 

Some acts of political violence have been incredibly violent. For example, the man who walked into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house and assaulted him with hammer. His wife had an armed detail, but that night she was in Washington, so he had no protection.   Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump made jokes about it. Another man walked up at the home of Representative Gerry Connolly in Virginian with a baseball bat looking for him and his staff members. Someone lit the door of Bernie Sanders’ house on fire. An obviously unwell man came to the house of Supreme Justice Kavanagh looking to harm him but was talked out of it. The list goes on and on. It will go on and on. Because Americans don’t want to do anything about it.  Except pour more guns into the fray to protect their leaders.

 

Americans are largely content with this. That is the only thing that surprises me.

 

Wisdom from Comedy News

 

I know I have commented a lot on right-wing extremism.  But that is not to deny that left-wing violence is real as well. Recently, America experienced some and it was ugly. It was the shooting of young right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk by distant rifleman.

 

On the day after the shooting The Daily Show hosted by Michael Kosta had some interesting things to say. Some of it was even wise. Imagine that, wisdom from Comedy News.

 

First, they pointed out that presidents from both parties made good comments about what had happened. I particularly liked what president George W. Bush had to say:

 

“Today, a young man was murdered in cold blood while expressing his political views. It happened on a college campus, where the open exchange of opposing views should be sacrosanct. Violence and vitriol must be purged from the public square.  Members of other political parties are not our enemies; they are our fellow citizens.”

 

But what did the current president have to say:

 

“For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we are seeing in our country today.”

 

Not as impressive as Bush. He was quick to blame the other side.

Kosta suggested that this was like saying, “My fellow Americans we must come together to destroy each other.” He carefully added, “I am not singling this guy out. This is how our society behaves now. A tragedy occurs instead of digesting and trying to understand everyone sets their feet and starts throwing punches immediately.”  Both sides immediately blame the other side except for the wiser ones like George W. Bush.

 

Kosta was reluctant to blame rhetoric, as bad as it is. It might be something complex that actually requires thinking.   He said, “Political is not going to go away if the people on the other side say exactly the right words from now on.” Of course, there was a lot of unhelpful rhetoric from both sides. Some on the left suggested Kirk was asking for it by his rhetoric. Some on the right said “they” were asking for it. Who do they mean by “they?”

 

Fox News host Jesse Watters,

 

“It’s happening. You got trans shooters. You got riots and L.A. They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us.  Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. Trump gets hit in the ear. Charlie gets shot dead. They came after Kavanaugh with a rifle to his neighborhood. They went after Musk’s cars.”

 

I am always surprised that people on right often completely forget about violence  on their own side. Same, of course, goes for people on the left. After all there has also been plenty of violence on the right and even, many like me, suggest, much more violence comes from the political right.

 

To this Kosta had a pretty good response: “I’m sure people in the media would like to talk about how they are responsible for what they’ve done and how they had better watch out, or else they’ll get what’s coming to them. But I think it would be better if we as a country understood that we have a problem with political violence. And we need to start thinking less about what they should do and more in terms of what we have to do.

 

I wish I were better, but I know I have been as guilty as anyone in blaming others. Them in other words, rather than us. I must do better. We must do better. Turning such tragedies into a game of us against them is not very helpful. We have to get together and work together without turning them into the enemy. If we can’t do that we are done.

It would be nice though if our political leaders, like George W. bush got on side, rather than pouring fuel on the flame.

 

 

Israeli Barbarism

 

Israel attacked Hamas today inside Qatar, which is not only the staunch ally of the United States, but the mediator in the war between Hamas and Israel. Israel attacked Hamas just as its leaders were staying in Dohar to consider the settlement proposed by Israel and the United States.

 

But the Israeli strike in Qatar targeted the very Hamas political leaders who could have helped end the war diplomatically. They were considering a new U.S.-Israeli backed cease-fire plan for Gaza that President Trump had called, ominously,  a “warning”. If members of Hamas can’t go to Qatar to consider a peace proposal where can they go? Then peace is impossible. And this is exactly the point. Israel did not want Hamas to consider the proposal.

 

Hardliners in Israel cheered when they heard the result.  They don’t want a peace either. Those same hardliners have been pushing Netanyahu to abandon peace talks and achieve total victory over Hamas. By that they mean the death and destruction of every single member of Hamas. This shows how extreme the forces that support Netanyahu so vigorously are. They want total victory and see this as an opportunity to get exactly that.

 

This is war without limits.

 

This is barbarism.

 

 

It shows Netanyahu is actually opposed to peace. It wants war so it can destroy every last member of Hamas. This is a hopeless goal. Mona Yacoubian, Mona Yacoubian, director and senior adviser of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank on PBS News Hour, said, “For every leader killed another 6 appear on the scene.”

 

Qatar is the one and only country in the region that is respected as a mediator by both sides. It is a tiny little country between the large countries of Iran and Saudi Arabia. It had not choice but to become a mediator to survive.

 

As Yacoubian, said,

 

“Let’s note this is now the second time in just a few months that Israel has undertaken military strikes in the midst of negotiations, whether it was the U.S. and Iran or now the Qataris seeking to negotiate between Hamas and Israel.”

 

And is this an accident?  Here is what Yacoubian added, “I think the negotiations have been set extremely far back. Any hope for a cease-fire now is just a distant prospect, at best.”  There is little doubt that this has killed all hope for the hostages either.

 

Is there any doubt that Netanyahu has no interest in a peace settlement? And why would that be?  He wants instead to obliterate Hamas. He, together with his extremist partners want to kill every last one of Hamas members no matter what. And that is the problem with this strategy? It is born out of extremism.

 

As Canadian expert Janet Stein said today on CBC’s The National: “This kills the peace process.”  I would say that is what Netanyahu wanted. He and his extremist partners heard too many say they wanted to see negotiation and a two-state solution.  No, Israel wants it all. I think I am just connecting the dots.

 

 

Addicted to Anger

 

Jen Senko said her father “seemed to be addicted to these strong emotions. It seemed as if he just couldn’t wait to shut himself off and  listen to Rush Limbaugh for 3 hours and get all pissed off.”  Anger was his drug, as it is to so much of the American right. It is an irrational but intoxicating anger off of which they get high. And the adherents, like Senko’s father, Frank Senko, were truly addicted to the anger. Addicted to fury.  Sometime are not happy unless they are angry.

As John Montgomery a professor of Psychology at SUNY said,

“If you watch something that makes you very angry, you can get addicted to that because as you get angry that drives stress response, and endorphin is the main pleasure chemical in the brain. The tricky thing is its mostly unconscious. People get tricked like in the case of your (Jen Senko’s) father.”

 

So Senko was onto something here. The addiction is real. Senko understood that the media has a profound effect on us, particularly of course, those who watch it a lot because they are addicted to it. Like her father, Frank.

 

Senko was interested in studying whether or not there are specific techniques right-wing media uses to get people to change their belief systems as her father had done. How did they do it?

 

In his case he was turned “against the very core” of who he was. He was turned so much that he voted against his own interest. This is a phenomenon that others have notice noticed. Like the Appalachian White American I read about  who was in the hospital and so sick he was going to die because he could not afford the treatment just because he didn’t want African Americans to get the benefits! He didn’t want free medical care if it meant African Americans would get it too. He was willing to die instead.

 

 

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.

 

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.