Katha Pollitt has an article up which is worth thinking about, complaining about the growing venue of media dedicated to brow-beating college educated, liberals from the two coasts over them alienating blue collar voters from the South and Mid-West. I agree entirely with that much of Pollitt's complaint, that stuff is annoying, demanding that we sympathize and try to understand the poor-whites who feel looked down on by the coastal elites and that we drop things like civil rights, women's rights to the ownership of their bodies and lives, LGBT rights, the science around global warming.... you name it those tireless media tutters and tiskers will tell us we've got to give it up to attract their stereotypical white, blue collar voter - an insulting stereotype in itself.
Pollitt asks why none of them nag the Trump voters to try to understand us and what we think, especially as such people as are always the focus of this discussion, poor-white, blue collar people without advanced educational credentials and, often, without jobs and too often when they have them don't earn a living wage ... THOSE ARE SOME OF THE VERY PEOPLE WE EXIST TO BENEFIT.
That is, of course, a great point. And that it is a legitimate point is a dead giveaway of what the real motives of the media naggers of Northern, coastal liberals are, they are a demand by well placed columnists and others that we give up what makes liberalism, liberalism for a neo-liberal, conservative program. That program which the media has been selling to such people, the working poor, the underclass, 24-7-365 x decades with the slickest sales techniques that the social sciences can dream up for them. .
The reason that the white underclass votes against their interest is that they have been successfully propagandized by the free press, especially television and hate-talk radio and in movies out of the allegedly liberal Hollywood and, increasingly, on the internet. And the reason that broadcast media has gotten away with doing that is that free-press, free-speech liberals have not only allowed them to lie with total impunity, THEY HAVE FAVORED THE VERY COURT RULINGS AND GOVERNMENT POLICIES THAT HAVE ALLOWED FOX AND CNN AND ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, AND, YES, EVEN THE PART-TIME LIBERAL MSNBC TO LIE US INTO TRUMP.
I have gone over this before, liberal media figures, people like Norman Lear, have also presented condescending views of the white working class, figures like Archie Bunker and so many others - many Southern and Mid-Western, most often rural identities as figures of ridicule only occasionally injected with a generally soppy, sentimental and all too temporary view of their humanity which doesn't fool the people who are alienated by that condescension.
You want to know why people voted for Trump or Ronald Reagan, for that matter, look at the media who created them, the media, that all-powerful source which is the foremost venue of attitude transmission in the United States.
That media is not in the hands of real liberals but it does what it does because real liberals were suckered into ignoring the power of the media to lie on behalf of the billionaire-millionaire class and that it was entirely enthusiastic about using every scheme that the clever men and women hired to manipulate information for the highest bidder.
The American media, under the First Amendment as interpreted, BY LIBERALS, since 1964 has been 100% dedicated to manipulating people into first tuning in, second to think in ways that would benefit the wealthy using whatever tools of class and regional antagonism and resentment they could find and applying those to really rigging the vote. Putin, with plenty of his own clever men and women to study our system merely did the same things to his own ends. And, now that we know how seriously treasonous the Trump machine was in colluding with a foreign despot, the media is covering up for them as fast as it is exposing their treason. Lying their heads off to do so, lying to the very people who they sold Trump to, in the beginning.
Katha Pollitt, as a professional writer, probably has entirely too much of a personal and financial interest against taking a really hard, really honest, look at how Trump really was elected in the United States, into how we could have gone, within a lifetime, from a country where such a person in the presidency was unthinkable to one who is there and who will be kept there by the de facto fascist Republican Party as they destroy the things that stand between them and absolute power. I have never, yet read and certainly not heard anyone in the media take a really hard look at how things really did start turning with the 1964 Sullivan Decision and the rest of the lauded First Amendment decisions that let us read dirty books and let the media lie us into the New York Real-Estate Tycoon Satyricon we are living through.
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