For me, the biggest shocker of the election was to see just how thoroughly the biggest and wildest MAGA lies have permeated the culture. Large parts of the electorate truly believe Democrats are the spawn of Satan.
I mean that literally. There is a rabid religious component to this demonization that is both sickening and frightening. We’re witnessing utterly heinous acts being billed as what God wants, and there are few things scarier than zealots with power.
And now they’ve got what they’ve wanted for half a century. This is the return on the right’s massive investment, first in dumbing down the American electorate, then in filling it with multiple layers of elaborate lies, pumped out through a closed media ecosystem that serves their audience a steady dose of alternative reality.
Much money and thought has gone into those lies, many of which were repeated so often they replaced the truth. This long-term investment has been far more effective than I, for one, could see. And I thought I was looking closely.
The right learned long ago that there was no reason to worry about public opinion if you could successfully bend it to your will. If you can lie often enough, and strategically enough, you can teach your voters to think exactly what you tell them to think on any given day, and to think exactly the opposite tomorrow, if that’s what’s called for. Driftglass calls them “reprogrammable meatbags.”
They’ve been carefully taught about all the things they need to fear, all the threats to their “values,” all the things “those people” want to do to their wives and daughters. They’ve been taught what to hate, who not to listen to, and to automatically assume that if they didn’t hear it on Fox, it was “fake news.”
They’re also taught, incessantly, that Democrats are to blame for all their troubles. Democrats want to give their jobs to dark-skinned foreigners who eat household pets. Democrats lie, cheat, and steal. Democrats are why their lives suck.
And it’s not just the MAGA base believing it. It’s the outsized number of “independents” — a catch-all word meaning apathetic, gullible, and likely to vote Republican — who are taken in by such nonsense. These dim bulbs truly believe that Democrats are out to kill their babies and change the sex of their school children. Literally, this is what they’ve been told, time and again. Is it shocking that they really believe it?
It's a given that Democrats are child molesters. To this day, it’s common knowledge that Hillary Clinton ran a pedophilia ring in the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor that didn’t have a basement. Never mind that all the actual pedophiles are overwhelmingly Republican, and that an alarming number of those are Baptist preachers, which seems a particularly mysterious way for God to work in.
So they know all about kiddie porn and “groomers,” but they know nothing of the Jan 6 Committee. They know nothing of Trump’s criminal actions beyond the received wisdom of Fox News.
They’ve been taught that the Jan 6 insurrectionists are patriots, a conclusion they were steered to once they passed through a series of lies that didn’t hold together: that it was a false flag operation by Antifa, that it was an FBI set-up, that Nancy Pelosi was behind the whole thing, that the violence was just a few troublemakers. Finally, with Trump’s help, they’ve arrived at the “patriot” angle, the fantasy that the thugs who raided the Capitol were the best this country has to offer.
It seems we’ll be putting objective reality on hold for a while. We’re now living in the looking-glass world we only sampled in the last Congress, with the antics of James Comer and the House Oversight Committee. Remember how they tried to get any little piece of dirt to stick to Joe Biden? Or at least to his son Hunter?
It was laughable, but I didn’t laugh. I knew Comer’s transparently wacko accusations were not for my consumption — that they’d be deftly edited into misleading soundbites and spewed out to the Fox audience — but I was having trouble believing that anyone could believe them. My mistake.
The truth about that ridiculous committee is that it managed to construct an elaborate narrative, fiction from end to end, which was a lead story on Fox for more than a year, and which taught the Fox audience, with a totally straight face, all about the “Biden Crime Family.”
As a result, a sizeable chunk of voters are now absolutely convinced that Hunter Biden was the point person for this nefarious family business, and that he made millions through his machinations with Burisma. They know for fact that Joe Biden took bribes from China. They take at face value all the fake dirt that Rudy Giuliani “uncovered” in Ukraine, which Bill Barr then laundered in the DOJ, and which Comer’s committee presented as heinous crimes, the utter lack of evidence notwithstanding.
In rube circles, the Bidens’ crimes are, to this day, gospel truth. Even the fact that there was no evidence was, in itself, evidence — of how clever Democrats were at covering it up. Just like they covered up their theft of the 2020 election. Which is also believed far and wide, still.
Then there’s immigration, another manufactured issue — years in the making — which Trump leaned into from the day he walked down the escalator. It became the one issue they could come back to again and again, and ultimately convince large numbers of voters that Democrats are letting immigrant rapists and murderers run rampant through the country. Again, Fox has been hammering this idea into the heads of their viewers for at least a decade.
But the one thing they’ve been careful not to do about the “immigration problem” is solve it. It works too well as a way of bludgeoning Democrats. Which is why, if you recall, they even tanked their own border security deal — the best they’d ever made — because the last thing Trump wanted was a solution.
The demonization of Democrats has long been a winner for the insurgent right, and they’ve stuck to the strategy for generations. It has brought us to a place where “alternative facts” have replaced the real ones, and intelligent discourse is no longer possible.
Yes, we all understand that this is bonkers stuff, but every day brings new evidence that we haven’t taken bonkers seriously enough. We’ve assumed people knew what was bonkers and what wasn’t, when clearly they didn’t. Now we just have to figure out what to do about it.
Given how easy it is to manipulate humans, just imagine what a superintelligent AI with volition will do. Republicans are the least of our worries. The race is on to create our next overlord. Maybe we already did. That might explain the madness.
ReplyDelete