Like the entertainment media that absorbs the attention span of most Americans and which is the substitute of everything from education to moral formation - through that same media - Republican-fascism has flourished by appealing to our most destructive weaknesses, appetites and moral defects. That is what Trump and his his henchmen are doing now, William Barr, certainly, an old hand at facilitating that for the Bush crime family starting with George H.W. and then his son during the Bush II regime.
Trump is making one of the balder appeals to racism right now, to white privilege, white fear of People of Color but his only follows on to a stream of that back through the Bushes, Reagan, Nixon all of whom used it and prospered by doing that, along with the neo-Confederate nihilists, Newt Gingrich being the central figure in that on the state level and in the legislative branch, but many others as well. And they have certainly been helped in that by the media, not only the right wing media of FOX and Sinclair but in the op-ed sections of the print media from lowest to the New York Times and Washington Post, not to mention those more influential but largely ignored parts of the media, "features" and entertainment. That the two central figures in that Republican fascism, Reagan and Trump, as well as not a few of those in Congress, including Pence, come from that area of the media is no coincidence at all, it is a rationally expected phenomenon of how the media participates in producing fascism and other varietal flavors of gangster governance. That the media are so comfortable with producing as well as promoting them is exactly the same phenomenon as their making their money from advertising and entertainment programming that appeals to our worst defects.
In the present crises, environmental, medical, economic, etc. we are meeting head on a problem with the concept of freedom and liberty and rights in a morally nihilistic world, one which has, in fact, been brought to a wider world through the entertainment industry, a popularization of the elite form of nihilism that became popular in academia much earlier through the ideology of materialism and the promotion of anti-religious atheism.
I will break into this to answer the, no doubt, thought of point that Trumpian nihilism is OK with the "evangelicals" and the kind of Catholics who get their religious formation through the putrid EWTN and its like by by pointing out that that those are a part of the same thing and have nothing to do with the morality advocated in the Bible, as is proved, beyond question, by their championing of today's Herod on steroids, our Pharaoh on amphetamines, Trump. They are, as mentioned, largely a TV and media fed entity, they, a somewhat calmer and sedate form of the variety show-game-show "prosperity gospel" come on, appealing to the same moral failures and weaknesses with an added silk screen of religious imagery on top.
The freedom of libertarianism is freedom for those who have money and power at the expense of not only the freedom of those they exploit and destroy, but their very lives,too. And our system does not make that distinction between that kind of freedom and that which leads to equality and democracy on anything like an effective basis. The laws, the Constitution, the legal system, the legal profession, the articulation of "freedom, liberty and rights" in the media mostly favor that libertarian view of those things when those two meanings of each of those words mean exactly different things. Either those mean limited freedom so as to produce a better life for everyone or they mean complete freedom limited to those who have power and money and misery for everyone else.
And most of all, the biggest chumps of the whole thing are the college credentialed ersatz left that they can depend on to champion their "right" their "freedom" their "liberty" to keep on doing that even in the face of what it has gotten us in the last forty years and right on down through the disastrous at-least-for-now worst of that in Trump. If the white "evangelicals" are chumps who sell out their claimed faith for it, the "civil libertarians" the "freedom of speech-press" lovers of liberty - SEEING ITS DISASTER IN THE WORST IN THE WORLD COVID-19 PANDEMIC RESPONSE IN THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD - can't see that they as much as FOX or Sinclair, Facebook and Twitter, Murdoch and Putin brought us here. Not least of which those lefties in the media who live off of advertising pandering to our strongest weaknesses and worst inclinations which is the real freedom that the media wants to protect. They are as invested in it as the Trumps and others who hope to appeal to the worst in us to win just as they have been doing since the colonial period.
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