American mass media is not a vehicle for informing The People, it's all about selling people stuff, mostly junk that they don't need, can't afford or which is bad for them. It's very good at doing that.
It's important to remember something when puzzling over why Devin Nunes, Paul Ryan and the Trump regime would have hyped the release of the "Nunes memo" since it not only contains nothing that alleges anything illegal or improper was done by the FBI in looking into the Putin asset who was brought into the Trump campaign as a foreign policy advisor, Carter page, it undermines if not contradicts Nunes and, more importantly the FOX case that the Mueller investigation and the FBI investigation were a. primarily motivated by the Steele dossier and b. that the dossier is poison because it was associated with the Clinton campaign and not telling the FISA judge that was some kind of violation of something. For a start, the Intelligence Committee Democrats, of whom Adam Schiff has seen the classified information that Nunes said he didn't bother to read, says that the FISA application was based on far more information than was contained in the dossier and, as the stupidly constructed memo admits, FBI surveillance of Carter Page had begun in 2013, while Donald Trump was still trying to get an Emmy for his "reality" TV show, not running for president.
What's important to remember is that the Republican-fascists aren't interested in the truth or even a coherent narrative, what they are doing is appealing to their base which consists of a. amoral crooks and racists for whom the truth and logical coherence don't matter, they really figure that a lie is better than the truth if you can make it work for you and b. the rest of Trump's hard core base are those who have been trained into stupidity by fascist hate-talk radio and watching TV such as Rupert Murdoch and most of the rest of TV produce. Trump's hard core base is those trained to suck up lies through cultivated stupidity or through an appeal to the worst in them, greed, racism, cowardly blaming the powerless for their troubles instead of the dangerously powerful billionaires who are the ones who shafted them.
Our elites, especially those in the legal profession, the judiciary and in the media, but others as well, have had a huge role in creating this class of lie-buyers or, rather, swelling their numbers through the corrupt American mass media. It's now big enough that about a third of Americans seem incapable of recognizing the truth from the most obvious of lies or to be so morally corrupted that they don't believe there's anything wrong with even the most transparent lie if you can get people to believe it.
If that sounds familiar, it is exactly the same thing that Putin has done in Russia, corrupting a nation through sensational propaganda that encourages the worst in people, it was something he certainly knew from his time as a Communist Party apparatchik and a cynical student of autocratic politics. It was no secret to other Communist regimes and their kissing cousins among the Nazis and fascists. It is one of the most bitter of ironies that under the guise of secularism and science, the same practice was deemed allowable in the United States, allowing the media to corrupt and degrade a large segment of the population was a glorious expression of freedom when many examples in recent history showed that it produced Nazism, fascism and the red-fascism of Communist rule.
The very least that liberals and the left should do is stop kidding ourselves that the Trump regime and their Murdoch State Media are vulnerable to the truth because the people they've corrupted don't care about that. The idea that any of the Trump hard core are going to be moved by morality or truth is absurd. The only thing you can do is appeal to the minority of that base which might be shaken into reality and a sense of decency and to hope that the margin who vote in 2018 will be enough to defeat the Republican-fascists. You won't find more than you can count on one hand in the House and Senate who will do anything decent, they have the same voting base that Trump depends on. Look at the two-faced "moderate" Susan Collins if you want a good reason to conclude that.
If we don't face that much reality, we're the dupes of the "civil liberties" lines that got us here.
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