Top Five Big Lies from the Right
I would say it’s been a long hot summer already, as I write during early August, only that’s the kind of statement that makes someone declare, “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” followed by bitter laughter. Speaking of bitter laughter, as the midterm election approaches, it’s time to reckon the TOP FIVE BIG LIES at the heart of the Republican Party message today.
1. The election of 2020 was stolen.
ANY Trump-MAGAmerica accusation is in fact a confession, of intention or deed. In fact, the only stolen US presidential election of my time on earth so far was Bush v. Gore. How quickly we forget.
Bush Senior, remembered by some today as a gentlemanly old school Commander in Chief, was in fact Director of the CIA at the height of so-called Dirty Tricks. This man had a LOT of experience stealing elections in banana republics–third world countries saddled with exploitative colonial capitalism and therefore of strategic interest to the USA.
That any GOP accusation is in reality a confession is being scientifically proved as the January 6 hearings unpack the plan by Trump and company to steal the 2020 election, with malice aforethought in spades. Sociopath Trump–fake billionaire and media creation who believes his own hype–rallied supporters from around the country, whipped them into a mob which he knew to be armed, then told them to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” He WOULD have joined them, it’s clear, if he could have done, and that he didn’t actually hang his own vice-president for treason, we have the sanity and patriotism of a few Secret Service folks to thank.
HARD TRUTH: Trump did not win landslides in 2016 and 2020. In 2016, Hilary Clinton won the popular vote and in 2020, Joe Biden won. Full stop.
2. Joe Biden botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Following a week of victories for Democrats (AND for Democracy)--passage of long overdue climate mitigation and tax reform legislation, passage of life-saving legislation for veterans and others poisoned by burn pits in the line of duty, and the FBI raid on Trump’s home to secure boxes of documents which may implicate the former president on multiple felonies, the Right met last Sunday morning’s TV audience with a scathing denunciation of the chaos and suffering of hundreds of thousands of Afghans left behind in the US pull-out from that long, preposterous war.
HARD TRUTH: The withdrawal was much wished for by a majority of Americans and negotiated by Trump. Joe Biden ripped off the blood-stiffened bandage.
The Right has a lot of damned gall trying to blame the decades of war in the Middle East on Democrats. The war ITSELF was the response of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to the September 11, 2001, attack on the US by a group led by Osama Bin Laden, likely financed by Saudi Arabia (which as strategic partner in Big Oil got a pass), after Afghanistan refused to hand Bin Laden over so that “justice” might be done and Americans have someone to punish.
Some estimates indicate that as many as half a million people died, more than a million people were internally dis¬placed and the 20 year Afghan adventure has cost US taxpayers more than $2 trillion to date.
3. The government is the enemy.
The government takes your money, spends it on activities that work against your beliefs and is otherwise useless or worse.
HARD TRUTH: Railing against the bosses is probably as old as language. Maybe older. When the ruling class will not or cannot provide the people with good wages or other conditions which ACTUALLY make their lives better (health care, safe comfortable housing, good public schools, farm programs and environmental stewardship–in short a future for the generations to come), job one is creating fervor against any target but themselves.
Back in the infancy of shock jock radio, the evil precursor of the Balrog that is social media, Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 at the urging of President Reagan, declared in 2001: ‘I don’t want to abolish govern-ment. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.’ Of course “shrinking government” was really code for giving corporations more tax cuts, tax breaks and the power to run government agencies via the revolving door between corporations and Republican government appointees.
Trump advocated for shrinking the government as early as 2000.
https://theconversation.com/the-shutdown-drowning-government-in-the-bathtub-111333
Blaming those easily identifiable as OTHER through external markers like ethnicity, skin color, language, gender identity and class has been and continues to be very effective historically. Trump, FOX and the Republican party carry water for the ruling class which has three agendas: Own everything. Pay little to no taxes. Keep the people distracted with trinkets, fearful and fighting among one another, so they will not see their commonality, join forces and turn against the ruling class.
Blaming government has the added advantage–for the corporations and the hyper rich families who own them–of weakening the only force on Earth, the democratic governments of NATO and others, with the power and scale of operation to bring corrupt capitalism to heel.
4. Knowledge is dangerous, poisonous and/or fake.
Trump’s early popularity was fueled without doubt by his glee at getting up the noses of the urban elite. Think Diane and Frazier from popular eighties American sitcom Cheers. Education and cultural sophistication were lampooned as pretension and snobbishness, against the working-class normalcy which always won out over eleven highly successful seasons.
Intellect is now cast by the GOP as the enemy. In the Republican narrative knowledge must never come to children by anyone other than parents and their churches. Interpersonal relations education (including sexuality, gender & emotional intelligence as well as mindfulness and nonmedical wellness practice like meditation) is how the Left “grooms” children for sexual abuse and/or recruits people to raise LGBTQ numbers.
HARD TRUTH: The real “elites” are Republicans. Think Harvard and Yale Law School grads like Senators Ted Cruz and January 6 fist pump insurrectionist Josh Hawley as well as Congresswoman Stefanik, who all pretend to be ‘oh so rural and just one of us common folk’ “taking back our country”...they’re all frauds and fakes.
Trump, who knows how to sucker and “grift” voters and some of us common folks into thinking “we’re together” and “we” have to fight the “deep state”...unless of course WE occupy the White House. Then WE are the deep state and that’s just fine, because OUR “Deep State” works for us.
Fueling the culture war is how to keep The Many fighting one another instead of the REAL enemy--corrupt, exploitative corporations which are just soulless piles of money with one goal--becoming larger piles of money.
The democratic government of the US must be weakened and denatured because it is the only force on Earth strong enough to actually reign in corrupt, winner-takes-all capitalism, which is really just piracy. Citizens United hardly matters any more because of the ungovernability of social media which has evolved into the perfect vehicle to unleash the perfect storm.
5. Individualism is the ground of American history and values
This idea is deeply embraced in MAGA country–the states of the Old South and the West. The plantation culture of the South was the expression of colonialism at its worst, slave-trade-based (talk about piracy!) and the root of the racism that still afflicts us today.
HARD TRUTH: Indigenous cultures, early settlers (Plymouth and other colonists), and the great cooperative movement of the early 20th century that drove so much of modern agricultural prosperity, pre-Dust Bowl/Depression, were intensely communal/collective at heart.
This inclination survives in a small town/rural ethos of helping one another and strangers alike, but that kind of collective compassion can be found in urban settings as well. Evidently the ancient memory (at the cellular level, who knows?) of interbeing lingers in social animals everywhere.
1. The election of 2020 was stolen.
ANY Trump-MAGAmerica accusation is in fact a confession, of intention or deed. In fact, the only stolen US presidential election of my time on earth so far was Bush v. Gore. How quickly we forget.
Bush Senior, remembered by some today as a gentlemanly old school Commander in Chief, was in fact Director of the CIA at the height of so-called Dirty Tricks. This man had a LOT of experience stealing elections in banana republics–third world countries saddled with exploitative colonial capitalism and therefore of strategic interest to the USA.
That any GOP accusation is in reality a confession is being scientifically proved as the January 6 hearings unpack the plan by Trump and company to steal the 2020 election, with malice aforethought in spades. Sociopath Trump–fake billionaire and media creation who believes his own hype–rallied supporters from around the country, whipped them into a mob which he knew to be armed, then told them to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” He WOULD have joined them, it’s clear, if he could have done, and that he didn’t actually hang his own vice-president for treason, we have the sanity and patriotism of a few Secret Service folks to thank.
HARD TRUTH: Trump did not win landslides in 2016 and 2020. In 2016, Hilary Clinton won the popular vote and in 2020, Joe Biden won. Full stop.
2. Joe Biden botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Following a week of victories for Democrats (AND for Democracy)--passage of long overdue climate mitigation and tax reform legislation, passage of life-saving legislation for veterans and others poisoned by burn pits in the line of duty, and the FBI raid on Trump’s home to secure boxes of documents which may implicate the former president on multiple felonies, the Right met last Sunday morning’s TV audience with a scathing denunciation of the chaos and suffering of hundreds of thousands of Afghans left behind in the US pull-out from that long, preposterous war.
HARD TRUTH: The withdrawal was much wished for by a majority of Americans and negotiated by Trump. Joe Biden ripped off the blood-stiffened bandage.
The Right has a lot of damned gall trying to blame the decades of war in the Middle East on Democrats. The war ITSELF was the response of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to the September 11, 2001, attack on the US by a group led by Osama Bin Laden, likely financed by Saudi Arabia (which as strategic partner in Big Oil got a pass), after Afghanistan refused to hand Bin Laden over so that “justice” might be done and Americans have someone to punish.
Some estimates indicate that as many as half a million people died, more than a million people were internally dis¬placed and the 20 year Afghan adventure has cost US taxpayers more than $2 trillion to date.
3. The government is the enemy.
The government takes your money, spends it on activities that work against your beliefs and is otherwise useless or worse.
HARD TRUTH: Railing against the bosses is probably as old as language. Maybe older. When the ruling class will not or cannot provide the people with good wages or other conditions which ACTUALLY make their lives better (health care, safe comfortable housing, good public schools, farm programs and environmental stewardship–in short a future for the generations to come), job one is creating fervor against any target but themselves.
Back in the infancy of shock jock radio, the evil precursor of the Balrog that is social media, Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 at the urging of President Reagan, declared in 2001: ‘I don’t want to abolish govern-ment. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.’ Of course “shrinking government” was really code for giving corporations more tax cuts, tax breaks and the power to run government agencies via the revolving door between corporations and Republican government appointees.
Trump advocated for shrinking the government as early as 2000.
https://theconversation.com/the-shutdown-drowning-government-in-the-bathtub-111333
Blaming those easily identifiable as OTHER through external markers like ethnicity, skin color, language, gender identity and class has been and continues to be very effective historically. Trump, FOX and the Republican party carry water for the ruling class which has three agendas: Own everything. Pay little to no taxes. Keep the people distracted with trinkets, fearful and fighting among one another, so they will not see their commonality, join forces and turn against the ruling class.
Blaming government has the added advantage–for the corporations and the hyper rich families who own them–of weakening the only force on Earth, the democratic governments of NATO and others, with the power and scale of operation to bring corrupt capitalism to heel.
4. Knowledge is dangerous, poisonous and/or fake.
Trump’s early popularity was fueled without doubt by his glee at getting up the noses of the urban elite. Think Diane and Frazier from popular eighties American sitcom Cheers. Education and cultural sophistication were lampooned as pretension and snobbishness, against the working-class normalcy which always won out over eleven highly successful seasons.
Intellect is now cast by the GOP as the enemy. In the Republican narrative knowledge must never come to children by anyone other than parents and their churches. Interpersonal relations education (including sexuality, gender & emotional intelligence as well as mindfulness and nonmedical wellness practice like meditation) is how the Left “grooms” children for sexual abuse and/or recruits people to raise LGBTQ numbers.
HARD TRUTH: The real “elites” are Republicans. Think Harvard and Yale Law School grads like Senators Ted Cruz and January 6 fist pump insurrectionist Josh Hawley as well as Congresswoman Stefanik, who all pretend to be ‘oh so rural and just one of us common folk’ “taking back our country”...they’re all frauds and fakes.
Trump, who knows how to sucker and “grift” voters and some of us common folks into thinking “we’re together” and “we” have to fight the “deep state”...unless of course WE occupy the White House. Then WE are the deep state and that’s just fine, because OUR “Deep State” works for us.
Fueling the culture war is how to keep The Many fighting one another instead of the REAL enemy--corrupt, exploitative corporations which are just soulless piles of money with one goal--becoming larger piles of money.
The democratic government of the US must be weakened and denatured because it is the only force on Earth strong enough to actually reign in corrupt, winner-takes-all capitalism, which is really just piracy. Citizens United hardly matters any more because of the ungovernability of social media which has evolved into the perfect vehicle to unleash the perfect storm.
5. Individualism is the ground of American history and values
This idea is deeply embraced in MAGA country–the states of the Old South and the West. The plantation culture of the South was the expression of colonialism at its worst, slave-trade-based (talk about piracy!) and the root of the racism that still afflicts us today.
HARD TRUTH: Indigenous cultures, early settlers (Plymouth and other colonists), and the great cooperative movement of the early 20th century that drove so much of modern agricultural prosperity, pre-Dust Bowl/Depression, were intensely communal/collective at heart.
This inclination survives in a small town/rural ethos of helping one another and strangers alike, but that kind of collective compassion can be found in urban settings as well. Evidently the ancient memory (at the cellular level, who knows?) of interbeing lingers in social animals everywhere.
