Tag Archives: Disinformation

The Inevitable Outcome Of The Deep State Conspiracy Theory.

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As Donald J. Trump began his campaign for the presidency, we began to hear about something called the Deep State. He and his followers claimed that a clandestine network of unelected officials was in control of the US government. The Deep State, as the theory goes, is a shadow government acting on behalf of Democrats and the coastal elites against the interests of ordinary Americans.

The obvious irony is that Trump and his closest friends are, themselves, coastal elites.

Once elected, Trump used the theory to explain away his corruption and his failures. The problems weren’t his fault. His agenda was being undermined by the Deep State!

Yet even though Trump and his henchmen are no longer in office, the theory persists. Whenever a government agency debunks a GOP lie, whenever a federal court rules against Trump and the GOP, whenever a talking point of Fox News and the rest of the GOP propagandists is proven false, their most ardent followers simply refuse to accept the outcome.

They cry cover-up. They argue that the system is irreversibly rigged. They are convinced that every competing fact, every datapoint, every adverse ruling is the result of lies perpetuated by the Deep State. They can’t grasp the reality that, aside from elected officials, our government is still run by hard-working, well-intentioned, and often underpaid civil servants. It’s more enticing to believe in conspiracy theories.

Instead of believing that most Democrats are honest, caring people who have genuine differences in policy matters – whose solutions to issues are worth consideration and debate – it’s more exciting for conspiracy theorists to believe they are cunning and evil. That they are pedophiles, cannibals and satanists who, working in concert with A-list celebrities, operate child sex-trafficking rings.

Instead of accepting that our elections results are reliable. They would rather believe that their candidates lost only as a result of fraudulent and illegal votes. Their excuses are many. And all of them are equally preposterous: Thousands of undocumented immigrants voted. Dead people voted. Democrats hauled fraudulent ballots into the polling places by the boxload. China replaced legal ballots with fraudulent ones. Iran and Venezuela hacked the electronic voting machines.

Instead of believing that scientists created safe, effective vaccines to combat Covid, the conspiracy theorists believe social media posts that claim the vaccines are part of a Deep State plot. That they are a form of mind control. That they will make you sterile. That they will turn you into a magnet. That they will give your children autism and make your testicles swell to the size of basketballs.

In previous decades, all of this would have been rejected as absurd and somewhat hilarious theater. But the Deep State conspiracy theory is a very real and ongoing threat.

When a substantial percentage of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, no longer believe in our government of the people, by the people and for the people. When they no longer believe in science, in evidence, in expertise, in truth. When they no longer believe in fair and free elections. When they are no longer willing to compromise, the only winners will be autocrats, theocrats, and our nation’s foreign enemies.

The New Know Nothings.

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In the mid-1850s, there was a political party referred to as the Know Nothings. Officially called the American Party, its followers feared that the influx of Roman Catholics from Ireland and Europe would push “real Americans” aside and take over the nation, giving control to the Vatican.

But with regard to racism, misogyny, and lack of knowledge, that movement pales in comparison to today’s Trump-led Republican Party fueled by the Gen X and Millennial generations (adults under the age of 56) – those who comprised the majority of the insurrectionists on January 6. Not surprisingly, they are also the largest group of Qanon believers.

Why?

Apparently, it’s tied to a lack of education, a reliance on online sites as their sources for “news,” and a fascination with conspiracy theories. For example, a nationwide survey released on Holocaust Remembrance Day found that 1 in 10 respondents under age 40 did not recall ever hearing the word “Holocaust.” Nearly half could not name a single one of the German death camps. And this alarming lack of knowledge extends far beyond the Holocaust.

Less than half of those surveyed identified Afghanistan as the country that provided al-Qaeda with safe haven prior to 9/11 despite the fact that the war in Afghanistan was our longest war. And only slightly more than half of those surveyed could identify Iraq on a map.

Though it wasn’t part of the survey, I’m sure the same would be true if you asked Americans to pick out Ukraine on a map.

And it’s not just world history and geography that seem to flummox Gen Xers and Millennials. In my own limited survey of people at a county fair in rural Minnesota, I found that almost no one could name the original 13 colonies, the year the Declaration of Independence was signed, or the 3 branches of our federal government.

Few knew that the Bill of Rights was comprised of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. Yet almost every respondent could recite half of the 2nd Amendment. (But, frighteningly, only the second half.)

No one could name who wrote our Declaration of Independence or the reason why we went to war with the British. No one could name our primary ally in the Revolutionary War (the French). No one could name the primary British ally in the Revolutionary War (the Germans). No one could name our opponent in the War of 1812. No one could name more than two of our nation’s founders. And no one knew that the White House was built with slave labor.

And, if you consider that as depressing as I do, it gets worse. A recent survey found that an astounding 54 percent of Americans read below a sixth-grade level! And based on the posts I see on social media, I would venture to guess that most Americans’ writing skills, including grammar and spelling, rank below that.

As a result, they become the perfect targets for disinformation from pathological liars like Trump, and unscrupulous media like Newsmax and Fox “News”.

Since our Constitution has enshrined freedom of speech and freedom of the press, we can’t censor those who take advantage of the gullible, the misinformed, and the poorly educated. If we want to change politics and improve our nation’s future, it becomes obvious that our only really choices are to limit the insane amounts of money used to elect our leaders, and to rebuild our public education system.

Our Greatest Strengths May Also Be Our Greatest Weaknesses.

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Since its inception, the US has been celebrated for its guaranteed freedoms: Most notably the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to own a gun, and the freedom to choose our leaders no matter how flawed and unqualified they may be. But those freedoms come with a cost.

Under our Constitution, profiteers and ideologues such as Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and the mysterious Q are free to distribute a torrent of half truths, mistruths, and outrageous lies intended to divide us and to weaken our nation. As a result, there are no shared truths. Not even the need to deal with the horrors of a pandemic has been able to pull us together. Far too many have been willing to take the word of pundits and politicians over that of caregivers and scientists. Even after nearly 350,000 deaths, they continue to believe the pandemic is a hoax. By refusing to wear a mask, they are making a political statement. And they are convinced that vaccines have been created as a way for the government to track them or, worse, poison them.

White supremacists, white nationalists, and other hatemongers hide behind our freedom of religion to discriminate against those of other religions, colors, cultures, and sexual preferences. They even use their religions to deny women the freedom to control their own bodies.

The gun lobby uses the 2nd Amendment and fear tactics to expand gun ownership. Not for hunting. But for “protection.” This is despite the fact that more gun owners are likely to be shot with their own gun than to use it for self-defense. And despite the overwhelming number of gun deaths enabled by easy access to guns. Further, as hate and division have grown, millions of Americans have assembled arsenals with the expectation of using them against their political “enemies” and their own government!

As for our “free” elections, consider the fact that many American citizens are routinely denied the freedom to vote. Especially those Americans of color and those living in poverty. They have not only been victimized by reduced polling places, reduced voting hours, and the purges of voter registrations. Many have been required to take time away from work and drive long distances in order to obtain necessary voter IDs. And one need look no further than the chaos created by Donald J. Trump to see the consequences of electing greedy, unethical, and unqualified government outsiders.

It’s not hyperbole to state that our freedoms may also lead to our nation’s demise.

The question is: How can we address the weaknesses of our system while maintaining our Constitutional freedoms? How can we prevent the liars, the unethical, the profiteers, and our enemies from using our own Constitution against us, especially now that our Supreme Court has been politicized?

We can end division by, once again, demanding that media report the truth. That could be accomplished by a return to some form of the Fairness Doctrine, which required radio and television channels to operate in the public interest by clearly labeling opinions and separating them from the news. The same rules could be applied to all other media.

We could also take the politics out of religion by enforcing current laws that take away tax exemptions for churches that routinely engage in political activities. We should also tax churches that collect millions in donations, permitting their pastors to live in mansions and travel in private jets.

We can address our gun problem by instituting national gun laws, including universal background checks and red flag laws. We should also end the sales of military-style weapons, such as AR-15s, AK-47s, 50 caliber sniper rifles, and large capacity ammunition clips which add to the killing power of mass shooters. And we should conduct buyback programs to recover those already in our citizens’ hands.

Finally, we should reform our electoral system by eliminating the Electoral College, by instituting universal voter registration, and by standardizing elections from state to state. In addition, we should demand that anyone running for national office submit to extensive background checks and release all financial information, including 10 years of tax returns.

Do I think any of this will happen? No. But if we don’t make any changes, it’s pointless to continue to spend trillions on national defense. Before any external enemy can destroy us, we will likely destroy ourselves.

Why Republicans Should Lose. And Lose Bigly.

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Set aside most Republicans’ embrace of divisiveness, violent militias, Qanon and its wacko conspiracy theories, and their head-in-the-sand approach to the climate crisis. The reason you should spurn the entire Republican Party is its blatant attempts to deny millions of American citizens the right to vote.

For more than 20 years, the party has launched an all-out attack on the voting rights of people of color and the poor. It began by raising questions about the integrity of our election process on the heels of the party stealing the 2000 election in Florida. Yet the GOP had the audacity to claim that there was widespread voter fraud throughout the nation. Acting on that claim, the Bush administration ordered an investigation which found that intentional voter fraud was non-existent.

Nevertheless, many GOP-controlled legislatures began limiting voting rights to only those who had a photo ID. And, rather than make the IDs free and easy to obtain, the legislatures not only set fees for them. They limited access, often forcing poor Americans without drivers licenses to take time off from work and travel many miles to obtain the IDs. The IDs had the effect of denying voting rights millions of Americans.

In 2013, a Republican-driven lawsuit against the federal government (Shelby Co v Holder) led to a US Supreme decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965, claiming that federal oversight of state election rules was no longer necessary. Almost immediately following the decision, GOP-led states dramatically reduced the number of voting centers in areas that are predominately black. At the same time, they reduced early voting periods and voting hours. That caused voters in those areas to wait in lines twice as long as their white counterparts.

In Arizona, Georgia, and other Republican-controlled states, the legislatures have ordered a purge of registered, but infrequent, voters. That act alone almost certainly put a Republican in Georgia’s governor’s mansion, instead of the more popular Democrat.

More recently, Donald Trump his Republican Party, in an attempt to undermine the 2020 election, have argued that the election is rigged and raised concerns about the safety of mail-in ballots, saying that mail-in voting is an opportunity for Democrats and China to commit election fraud. At the same time, Republican-appointed members of the governing board of the United States Postal Service and Trump’s Postmaster General have delayed mail service by removing dozens of mail sorting machines and hundreds of mailboxes. They have called for armed militias and white supremacist supporters of Trump to show up at the polls in large numbers as “poll watchers” – an obvious attempt at voter intimidation.

In Florida, the Republican Secretary of State has defied a voter-approved referendum by refusing to restore voting rights to felons who have served their sentences until they pay all costs associate with their crimes while making it almost impossible to determine what those costs might be. The Republican governor of Texas has ordered that there can be only one voting drop-off box per county, thus making voting even more difficult for those living in large cities.

In Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin and other states, Republicans have resorted to extreme gerrymandering which allows Republican officials to choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives. Administration attempts to rig and cut short the Census are also intended to impact redistricting in order to create more districts that are safe for Republicans.

As if all that isn’t enough, Republicans have continued to bombard voters with disinformation to create fear and confusion. They have embraced Russian interference and disinformation campaigns. And, I believe, Trump’s performance in the first debate was intended to cause numerous voters to become so disgusted with politics that they stay home on Election Day due to the reality that voter suppression always benefits Republican candidates, since the majority of Americans support Democratic policies.

The only solution to such tactics is to vote. Vote as if the future of our democracy depends on it. Because it does.