Tag Archives: Moral Majority

One Of The World’s Greatest Propaganda Machines.

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As a former writer, creative director and owner of ad agencies, I could be considered somewhat of an expert on propaganda. So, despite being appalled by the Republican Party’s policies and utter cruelty, I have long been impressed by its mastery of propaganda.

In advertising and marketing, we are taught that the best way to attack competitors who have failed to articulate and promote a clear and positive brand is to simply rebrand them. To portray the brand as too expensive, too weak, too out of step with the times.

In essence, that is what the Republican Party and its propaganda outlets have done to Democrats. And the Democratic Party made it easy. For much too long, Democrats have embraced the Will Rogers quote: “I’m not a member of an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” That may have been humorous and harmless when the party was at its peak in the days following FDR’s New Deal. But it’s toxic today.

Sure, the Democratic Party offers a big tent with room for lots of disparate groups and minorities. That’s good. But for decades, the Party has failed to articulate its core beliefs of equality and fairness; of establishing a government that serves all Americans, especially workers.

That made things easy for Republicans, their billionaire benefactors, and their propaganda machine.

For example, by embracing the Moral Majority and rebranding anti-abortionists as pro-life, Republicans were able to successfully portray Ronald Reagan, a Hollywood actor, as morally superior and more religious than President Jimmy Carter, a Baptist preacher. Republicans also took advantage of Reagan’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which freed electronic media to conflate opinion with news, by embracing Rush Limbaugh and his golden microphone. Recognizing that emotions – particularly anger, hatred and fear – are good for ratings, Limbaugh and his Republican sponsors began hammering Democrats with a continuous stream of propaganda that would have made Nazi Germany’s Goebbels envious.

A seemingly endless stream of Rush imitators followed suit. And they were soon joined by Fox News Channel, which hired Republican media consultant, Roger Ailes, as CEO. While operating under the ironic slogan “Fair and Balanced”, Fox became the nation’s most powerful megaphone praising Republican ideologies and spreading disinformation.

More recently, websites, social media, and podcasts have caused the viewers, readers, and listeners to be further separated into ideological silos where unbiased reporters and factcheckers are unwelcome.

For decades, the ratings and readership of these propaganda outlets have soared as they have blamed gays, immigrants, transexuals and Democrats for all of our nation’s ills. The attacks on minorities, taxes, an over-reaching federal government, the courts, and education are particularly effective in rural areas where the population is mostly comprised of straight, white Christians…all of it is aided by our nation’s abysmal literacy record. (21 percent of U.S. adults are illiterate and 54 percent of U.S. adults are literate at a 6th grade level or below.)

The propaganda’s impact on rural areas has led to Republican control of the South and much of the Midwest as well as the U.S. Senate. It also greatly impacts presidential races as a result of the Electoral College.

Republican propaganda in the form of disinformation and misinformation has given us Q-anon, Pizzagate, and the January 6 insurrection. It has convinced a majority to believe that vaccines are more dangerous than guns, that politicians know more about healthcare than doctors, that the climate crisis is a hoax, and that white people are the victims of racism. More worrisome, it has given us a second Trump administration headed by a thrice-married, twice-impeached charlatan who should be serving time for 34 felonies, for trying to rig an election, for inspiring an insurrection and for mishandling highly classified national intelligence.

Now all of that hatred and cruelty has been unleashed to detain, arrest, deport and brutalize ordinary people whose only crime is to seek safety, a job, and a better life for their children. And they’re not the only victims. We all are.

If our ever-so-fragile democracy survives this moment, the Republican propaganda machine will be a case study in mass media, marketing, and political science classes for decades to come. Hopefully, those studying it will also find a way to better implement the antidote for propaganda – truth.

The GOP And Traditional Churches Have Suffered The Same Fate.

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Both devoured from within by Bible-thumping, government-hating, election-denying Americans who are gleefully leading the attack on democracy and civility.

Traditional community churches have been overwhelmed by mega churches led by demagogues spewing prosperity gospel (the notion that sanctimonious zealots will receive riches beyond their imaginations through blind devotion to their version of the gospel). Despite its obvious contradictions to the teaching of Jesus, this is a compelling argument for those who reject critical thinking and believe in the infallibility of their leaders. Worse, this warped interpretation of the gospel is often accompanied by large doses of hate for non-believers, immigrants, and the poor.

Over the same period, the GOP has fallen prey to a conman who has embraced white supremacists and gun-toting, treasonous militias – his way paved by Lee Atwater’s southern strategy which, following passage of the Voting Rights Act, reached out to the southern proponents of Jim Crow-style segregation; by James M. Buchanan’s libertarian economics; and by Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the ironically named Moral Majority led by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and other power-hungry televangelists.

These two groups have merged to create the MAGA movement that threatens our nation today. Their shared grievances of seeing their white Christian majority diminished by immigrants of color, their disdain for expertise and education, their lack of compassion for the poor and the weak, their hatred of progressives has led them to embrace a would-be autocrat who they believe will restore power to the white Christian majority.

This new Republican coalition has even separated itself from GOP icons like Ronald Reagan, John McCain, Dwight Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, dismissing them as weak and misguided, unwilling to take the steps necessary to maintain power and destroy the libs. Add to this toxic mix the millions of followers of Q-Anon with their wild conspiracy theories and you have a recipe for the destruction of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy.

Without serious opposition and intervention, the destruction is not only likely. It’s almost inevitable whether by acceptance, inaction, or by violence.

To stop it, Democrats, liberals, and progressives must vote in numbers never seen before. Longtime conservatives must reject the current iteration of their party and vote for candidates of the only political party – the Democratic party – that still believes in democracy. To save our nation, they must eviscerate their party before they can restore it. They must ignore the threats from MAGAts and join with other longtime conservatives who have left the GOP, including former party leaders, candidates, strategists, and government officials, to build the party anew.

The US needs a political party to compete with Democrats. It needs a Republican party. Just not this one.

Healing Our Political Divide Must Begin With The Church.

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On a local level, the traditional neighborhood church can be quite useful in helping individuals and families cope with crises in their lives. But, on a national and international level, the church has too often engaged in self-serving politics as a means of increasing its power and diminishing or demeaning people of other faiths. Indeed, unscrupulous pastors – most especially greedy televangelists – have used their positions of authority to help elect those candidates who will be most supportive of their beliefs. This has never been more clear than in today’s political environment.

If you study polling data as I have, you will find that we are not as divided as you might expect – at least not with regard to issues. If you remove the political labels, there is substantial agreement on many issues such as wealth inequality, climate change, common sense gun safety, immigration, health care, safety nets and government spending.

To a great degree, the chasm between us is the result of the church having been co-opted for personal gain and political purposes.

It began in the 1970s when, following President Nixon’s fall from grace, Paul Weyrich saw an opportunity to rebuild the Republican Party by pandering to evangelical fundamentalist Christians. He reached out to them by partnering with Jerry Falwell to found the so-called “Moral Majority.” Their message, which was quickly embraced by other fundamentalist Christian pastors such as Pat Robertson and James Dobson, was that all of the terrible events which plague our nation – mass shootings, drug abuse, even hurricanes and natural disasters – could all be traced to our supposed abandonment of Christian beliefs. The events were God’s punishment for our acceptance of homosexuality and abortion. The result of moral decay enabled by the secularist political elite.

Only by following conservative Christian doctrine, they said, could we return America to its former glory which had been ordained by God.

At Weyrich’s urging, Republican candidates began to embrace fundamentalist Christian issues labeling themselves “family values” candidates. At the same time, they began fomenting fear of the “other” – gays, immigrants, transgenders, and non-Christians. As a result, the Republican Party, which had long been the party of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism, turned its focus to various forms of discrimination. At the same time, the party pushed for states’ rights which would enable it to circumvent the restrictions of federal government. The party became staunchly anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-evolution, anti-science, anti-transgender, and anti-socialist. The more extreme party members began supporting dominionism (the belief that the nation should be governed only by Christians according to biblical law).

As a result of Weyrich’s efforts, many of our churches today are more political than spiritual. Instead of preaching love and compassion, many pastors subtly foment discrimination and hate against those who don’t believe as they do. Some tell their followers that they will go to hell if they vote for a pro-choice candidate. They use selected passages from the Bible to portray their political enemies and people of other faiths as evil. They use the Bible to justify racism and misogyny. They label as baby-killers those women who have made the heart-wrenching decision to end a pregnancy (usually for health reasons).

Today’s evangelicals and many of the “family values” Republicans have become the ultimate hypocrites – the ends-justify-the-means crowd – willing to overlook the adultery, corruption and predatory behavior of Donald Trump as long as he appoints conservative judges who will rule against legal access to abortion and base their decisions on biblical law. They are obsessed with forcing others to accept their beliefs and practices. They claim piety. But, in reality, their actions are less about religion than control.

That should surprise no one. For millennia, religions competing for control over the minds of people have engaged in wars and destroyed nations to further their interests. We must now acknowledge that that could happen here. As long as one of our two major political parties continues to blend a specific brand of religion with politics; as long as its elected officials continue to view issues through the lens of an unwavering religious belief; as long as they assume their political opponents are evil; there will never be room for compromise. (Would God compromise with Satan?) And the political chasm between us will continue to grow.

If we truly want to heal our nation – to remove the vitriol from politics – we must first acknowledge that the Constitution calls for separation of church and state. And we must be willing to focus on issues that will benefit the nation as a whole. Not any particular belief system.