If you go through the exercise of thinking one of the biggest issues facing the United States today, the "hacking" of our elections to its origins, its roots, and what it will mean to really, truly end the danger to democracy here and elsewhere, it exposes exactly those problems with the media lying, distorting and propagandizing We The People on the one hand and ignoring what they wanted to make disappear from consciousness on the other hand.
What I've been campaigning against with increasing effort since witnessing the election of Nixon in 1968. If you haven't thought it through to the bottom yet, don't feel that bad, it took me decades to cut through the pious slogans learned in my early adulthood to see reality, too. And to do it you have to be willing to critique some of the piously and scrupulously held substitutes for morality that I am coming to believe are an inherent danger of secularism.*
We now know that the Putin regime used social media to ratfuck the 2016 election to put Donald Trump in the presidency and, I wouldn't be surprised, Republican-fascists in the Congress. We know that such efforts continued into the 2018 election.
As even the mentally deficient son-in-law Jared Kushner has admitted, one of the ways they did that was through using Facebook, to spread propaganda and influence people targeted with the use of Facebook's ad-selling data collection as being especially vulnerable. And they also did that in concert with Wikileaks and RT and other media venues.
I've heard hours and hours of chatter in the media and read countless articles on this but none of them seem to understand that what Putin did was exactly the same thing that Republicans have been doing since Richard Viguerie pioneered the use of demographics and other means of targeting people with mass mailings on behalf of the kind of Republicans who morphed into Trumpian fascists. And he was copying the methods pioneered by the advertising agency and its off-shoot, the American broadcast and cabloid media. They have all done that, THE AMERICAN MEDIA, CORPORATE MEDIA HAS BEEN RATFUCKING OUR ELECTIONS WITH MODERN METHODS FAR LONGER THAN PUTIN HAS.
That ability to do that was expanded enormously as the American media first was relieved of any real expectation of having to face a lawsuit if they lied about liberals by the "liberal" Warren Court in 1964 - I believe the pivotal event in getting us where we are today - through subsequent court rulings dealing with "free speech - free press" and through the opportunities that such rulings gave those who wanted to sway government to enrich them through buying media time, through pressuring network executives and station owners (as if they had to be pressured very hard) into promoting their interests, socially and politically, and with effectively unregulated cable and hate talk radio, things started going farther to hell at an ever increasing rate. Adding in computers to make the paperwork and distribution easier and cheaper and faster only made things go to hell faster.
The social-media that was ratfucked by a foreign despot to give us Trump was just the next step in a process of destroying democracy that began right here, through the "free-speech-free-press" piety of the mid-20th century.
As an aside, it is remarkable how many people have that as their one and only sacred thing, how people who are as profane as the most degenerate pervert, the most "nothing sacred" irreligious, mocker, the most ironically cynical hater of humanity and anti-democrat, the most libertine and libertarian, most nihilistic of nihilists will, despite all that, hold as sacred the shibboleths of "free speech - free press" and piously defend it against any critical assessment of it as an absolute holding of the law. That so many of them are in the media, in the writing for money racket, what passes as "art" in this time when "art" is so often indistinguishable from any other salable commodity is certainly no coincidence.
Even if every foreign despot, every foreigner of any kind were prevented from perverting out election through selling lies, those who want to do so while holding U.S. citizenship would still destroy our country. The Supreme Court members who adopted the Sullivan Decision, Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United, etc. were all Americans, all of them sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, all of them pious intoners of the words of the Constitution, twisting them as served their purposes. The rightly despised twisting of the Constitutional system by Mitch McConnell is not really any different than anyone else twisting it to malignant purposes. But he didn't get to where he is without people being sold lies through the media, through the movies and TV shows, entertainment far more effective for that purpose than the "news," through campaign ads, the diseased transfusion that has infected our democracy more directly than anything else. PUTIN'S FAKE POLITICAL ADS PRETENDING TO COME FROM AMERICANS IS JUST HIM TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THAT AVENUE OF INFECTION THAT THE "CIVIL LIBERTIES" LANGUAGE OF 20TH CENTURY LIBERALS** OPENED UP WHEN IT PREVENTED PEOPLE LIED ABOUT FROM SUING THE AMERICAN MEDIA.
* Don't feel so bad, there are, yes, inherent dangers in religiosity as well. Those are not only fully exposed, they are so habitually thought of in the West that we habitually invent nonexistent ones to add to that list.
The naive faith of the 18th century "enlightenment" that secularism was going to remove all such inherent dangers scientifically, logically, turns out to have been as stupid as believing that a culture of religiosity was going to be immune from generating such dangers due to the inherent limitations of human wisdom, knowledge, good-will, individually and collectively. Oddly enough, the source that I find where such critiques are most exigently made is in nothing less than the Jewish scriptures, written by so many inspired critics and witnesses to the disastrous history of the Hebrews as they lived out just about every definable variation in human folly, religious, political, social, individual, through corrupt religious and civil officials and priests. We gave up a huge resource when
a. the enlightenment rejected it,
b. the enlightenment, also, read those scriptures without understanding the purposes of their composition,
c. the folly of literal interpretation, mistaking them, anachronistically, as being readable as modern history or science are. It is one of the supreme ironies of organized Fundamentalism that their quite unbliblical modern habits of thought were imposed on writings that were never intended to be read that way.
The American "founders" the ones who wrote the Constitution, believing that 18th century science and mathematics had the possibility of rendering people immune from some of the more obvious vicissitudes of being human beings in bloody human history were just as stupid as those who thought that piously belonging to this or that Church made them immune. Believe me, I remember enough of neo-medieval 1950s Catholicism to understand it when I see it.
** I have to point out, again, that the central figure of that "free speech" language, Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. being mistaken as a "liberal" due to that proves what a bunch of dishonest, ignorant, fools the semi-pro and professionals of the "free speech" industry are and what a bunch of total chumps so many even real liberals have been for being suckered by that crap. Holmes was a cynical, degenerate, aristocratic hater of humanity and democracy with a real malevolent streak in him. His late usefulness to FDR in the very last years of his life is something I've come to see as the cynical old asshole hedging his bets in case he was wrong about an afterlife with consequences when he was too old to enjoy the fruits of his degeneracy. I really have to say, the more I've come to know about Holmes the worse it's obvious that he was.
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