There's No Mystery Here. Donald Trump Was Created By The American Free Press, He Is Sustained By It, His Deluded Cultists Are Formed Through It, There's Nothing Hard About That

Listening to the segment from Majority Report the other day featuring Trump's  Deluded in Duluth fans, I wondered if you polled them if you would find that close to 100% of them listened to FOX and/or Sinclair stations.  My guess is that the Trump-fascist phenomenon is pretty much a completely media created, media sustained mental illness and that it is obvious where it comes from.  And it does meet the classical definitions of a mental illness or  mental incapacity as imagined in the right-wing paranoia campaigns of the 1950s and 60s.   A refusal to distinguish truth from unreality, to even acknowledge that there is a meaningful difference, the insistence that what is obviously false is the truth, the propensity to do evil, etc.  What the American fascists convinced their willing idiots would come with fluoridation came from ingestion of lies in the commercial media.

I am convinced that now that they've learned how to do this the future of democracy is seriously endangered by the media more so than it is from traditional culture because the people who produce hate-talk propaganda use the vestiges of hatred and paranoia in traditional culture, building on and enhancing that where it exists, though it is quite able to create that where it is absent from the upbringing of people.   The force of traditional culture always gives way to mass media.  I am certain that if the media hadn't started promoting racism (anti-PC) crap in the 1970s, this would not be happening now, no matter how much racism and bigotry there had been.  But, freed from public service and decency requirements starting with the election of Reagan (under whose administration Rupert Murdoch was allowed to become a citizen so he could buy FOX and do here what he'd done for Maggie Thatcher in Britland) the slide into fascism accelerated.

As it is in so much else, the American left is hardly helping.  It is more likely to exonerate the obvious source of Trumpian-fascism, the media, while blaming where it does not come from, religion, rural poverty, the underclass, etc.  They have to ignore things like the fact that the hard-core Trumpians have to willfully exempt him from their professed religious beliefs, they have to deny those to support his depraved policies.  They have to pretend that his primary support comes from middle-class, suburban voters many of whom have been to college and many have graduated from college.

That is because to face this TV-media created phenomenon,  Trumpism, would force them to reconsider some of their own, most cherished delusions, some of their foremost faith holdings.

The old faith of secular liberalism that, by magic, all you had to do was let all points of view be aired on the basis of an even field that, somehow, the right one would win out no matter what inequality of resources behind the wrong ones to advantage them over the right one were present was a stupid idea from the start but it is the generalized faith of many millions.   It was a faith created by the very media that I just asserted can have that effect in culture.  It came about in the 20th century through a series of promotions claiming it was a properly American, what with those ringing words of Jefferson (the slave-raping, slave holder) and Madison (well, we don't know that he raped any but he is the foremost reason that the vestiges of slavery still reside in the Constitution and the law derived from it, some of which put Trump in office) and the other 18th century man-gods of American secular would-be liberalism. 

It turns out that the media, Jefferson's conception of that free press he put his faith in far more than even democratic government can be not on a danger to democracy but the foremost transmitter of fascism that destroys it and even with all the more "more speech" that we can muster will not defeat it.

With the Trumpian fascist era, we need to finally face the fact that Holmes, Brandeis, perhaps stupidest of all, William O. Douglas, and the free-speech industry theories that, by magic, the truth, the moral decency -  that is, after all, the only legitimate goal of democratic government - would win out on a totally make-believe level playing field was bound to happen if only all were allowed to say anything they wanted will. That predictably and obviously, ends up favoring whatever those with the most money and the fewest morals want in the end who will harm many people and end democracy.   It was such a stupid idea to think that the same forces that made media advertising successful wouldn't work malevolently in politics and social life that I have to conclude that the Supreme Court justices, the judges, the lawyers, the law-professors and theorists, the social theorists, etc. who came up with the idea didn't much want the truth and a decent life on the basis of equality.

Certainly by the time of Holmes and Brandeis that much was known about the possibility of the media selling depravity and wars of dubious morality or justification.*  I know that by the time Douglas was active doing the same that it was not only known but of obvious danger through witnessing the use of propaganda by Nazi, fascist and communist governments.

And, now, with the 100% media created, media sustained, media promoted phenomenon of Trump, we are still denying that is where the danger starts and how it starts.

This is a piece motivated by me looking at Duncan  Black's tiny essay of this morning, what passes as a long-form piece for him, these days.   If he really doesn't understand where it comes from, he should go back to writing about things he understands like sidewalk curbs.   But he's hardly the only one who should do that.  Maybe he'd find it less hard to understand if he didn't spend so much time believing the "free press" because, out of their own financial interest, they are hardly likely to come clean on this phenomenon.

*  Given Holmes' cynical, aristocratic, snobbish disdain for the minds of what I'm sure he thought of as the common people, his free speech dogmas are a recipe for them being swayed by demagogues and the methods of advertising.   In the past several years of looking more into Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. I am coming to see him more and more of one of the architects of what has brought us to Trumpian fascism and I'm not at all sure he didn't desire that.  There  is a vicious, callous, hatred of those he regarded as inferior in his thinking that should have always made real liberals suspicious of him and skeptical of his rulings, no  matter who temporarily seemed advantaged by them.  I would say the same about the rulings of Douglas who I am just beginning to look at more critically.   I think we are living through the consequences of a lot of what they said to the cheers of secular liberals and others who should have been more skeptical then.