Category Archives: Right-wing Extremism

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.”

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.

A Peak at the Darkness

Extremism, Left-wing Extremism, Right-wing Extremism

 

Our instructor Will Braun, whom I mentioned in my most recent post, is  the editor of the Canadian Mennonite. The class I also mentioned  was an  on-line virtual class facilitated by Canadian Mennonite University.  The invitation from them  had said it would “an upside down look at polarization.”  That title intrigued me. What did it mean? What could I expect? Is there a better more fruitful way of looking at this issue?

 

A lot of people have been talking about polarization for a couple of years now, and virtually everyone says they hate it, but no one seems to be able to do anything about it. Some of us hate it but actually contribute to refinforcing it. Could we do something about that  with Will Braun’s help?  I was hoping so. I knew I could use some help.

 

First, he said, he wanted us to take a deep breath, because the issue of polarization requires us to look at our own inner lives. That requires our attention, so the first thing we need to do is slow down.

 

Braun started with a thought experiment, as he called it. He asked us to

 

“think about a person with whom we disagree with quite sharply. That person calls us up and acknowledges we have butted heads over the years and I know there is some underlying tension between us. I want to understand you better and how you got to where you are and to how you think. Can we get together to talk about this?”

 

 

This assumes of course that we would be willing to participate in such a discussion. What would motivate a person to do that? What would I think about that? How would I feel about this?

 

We will come back to this later.

 

The word “polarization” denotes two poles. As a result, we need some way to define those poles whether we like to do that or not.  For example, the poles could be left-wing or right-wing. Or conservative or liberal (or progressive). All such categories are insufficient. He said he assume most of us are left or progressive, but says he has become disenchanted with the left though that has been his team. “The camp I was once in does not feel as comfortable any more as it once did.” I would like to suggest that this is part of a common shift to the right. Not a complete shift but a widespread partial shift in that direction. Perhaps the left has gone off the rails and it has become a little too overheated or too extreme or too polarized.  Or perhaps the right is just fatigued with the issues the left keeps bringing up.

 

I think many feel this way. The most famous person I think who has said something like this was  Bill Maher. He seems to me to like the left less and less. In fact he has admitted that. He claims they have changed not him. I too come from this perspective too but perhaps am still more or less on that side.

 

What we have to do to have discussions about issues like this is that we must banish bashing. And sneering too. No mocking.  Will used an expression that he likes more than I like and that is this: “we must remember that we are all beloved of God.” I agree with the tone of this comment if not all of the specific contents of it. To discuss such issues, I would suggest we must hold our polarized views in check. If we are sliding towards hate, we have certainly gone too far. None of us are worthless. I think that sums up Braun’s view which aligns closely with my own.

 

Will is like me in that he lives in a very derisive community where most of the people I talk to are much more conservative than I am. Yet I know that most of them are good people, even though they are different from me. I don’t want to sneer at them or mock them. I want to understand them better and either move closer to their views or nudge them in my direction. As Braun said, “I don’t want to throw such people under the bus.” I don’t want to dismiss them. I won’t put them all into “a basket of deplorables” like Hillary Clinton did so disastrously. Nothing good would come of that, I am certain.

 

Some people who engage in discussion about polarization quickly assume that this will be a good opportunity to bash the other side. The bad guys, of course are wrong, for they disagree with me and I am right. I think that is a fairly normal attitude.

 

In such discussions there is often some tension. The blood pressure might go up. We will have to accept that. This is an issue about what people feel strongly about.

 

Then Braun used an expression I have trouble with. I have trouble with it because to me it does not seem that clear. He says, he wanted us always, “to tend to the heart.” He calls this a grounding point.  Braun said, “when I engage in such questions my goal is not to change minds, but to change my heart.”  Again, I have a little trouble getting this? It sounds attractive but what does it actually mean? Yet I think there is something to this notion.  I feel like if I am concentrating on that task I have a better chance of finding common ground with the other. Perhaps that might ease the tension. Frankly, I have recently experienced exactly the tension Braun mentions with good friends and I would like to ease that tension. Is it possible? Can I do it?

 

Conflict Entrepreneurs”

Extremism, Left-wing Extremism, Political Violence, Right-wing Extremism, The Sleep of Reason

 

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

Extremism, Left-wing Extremism, Political Violence, Right-wing Extremism

 

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

Extremism, Left-wing Extremism, Political Violence, Right-wing Extremism

 

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

Extremism, Left-wing Extremism, Political Violence, Right-wing Extremism

 

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.

 

 

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