But Hollywood is what sold us America's Hitler.
STILL ILL so here is another video I watched which was enlightening in a totally different way from the last one posted. Of all the Youtube Legal AF programs, I prefer the one with Sean Wilentz and Sidney Blumenthal. It didn't occur to me till this morning that that could be because of all of them, they're not lawyers.
This discussion with Jonathan Mahler about how New York City in the 70s to today produced Donald Trump is full of reminders and the kind of insights that come from the honest study of history. It was, in fact, the tabloid culture of New York, which I would say has to include the New York Times as well as the little papers, is what taught the crafty but vapid, sly but stupid and, most of all privileged straight, white, affluent Trump how to turn his criminal sleaze, his real-estate wealth, into the kind of celebrity and power that became the stock in trade of not only that city but the national media which followed it into the cesspool that America has become largely due to the mass media.
I do think that concentrating on the moribund ink on cheap paper media -which was admittedly important in the period and was the spear point in dragging us into the sewer - is a mistake because if that was important electronic media, hate-talk radio and cabloid news - which were also getting going in the biggest way at the same time - has been far far more important.
The time period that they concentrate on, from about 1980 on, is notably the exact same period that produced several phenomena, most notably the Hollywood B list actor Ronald Reagan's presidency. It should not be forgotten that his presidency, following on the Nixon-Ford presidency with the relatively clean Jimmy Carter presidency as a brief intermission produced what was, till Bush II and Trump the most criminal administration in American history with the most members of it convicted of felonies while in office. Like Trump as a politician, Trump is a product of the American free press, certainly the entertainment division of it but also the "news" division of it. Trump is a media phenomenon far more so than he is a product of the organized-crime saturated NYC real estate world. And as such he is a direct product of the libertarian Supreme Court rulings flowing from the Warren Court's disastrous interpretation of the First Amendment.
I think the location of the media that produced Trump as a political figure being located in New York City is largely incidental to his national presence, though it's certain that a figure like Trump in most other cities would never have gotten the attention from that media as he got as a product of that stupendously corrupt, celebrity and pop-kulcha infested city. Trump as a national figure is far, far more due to Hollywood than he is New York. And most of all he is a product of the fact that our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, was also ascendant at the same time.
Stacey Abrams, in that last video I posted, mentioned the role that "white evangelicals" played in the destruction of Jimmy Carter's administration, certainly meaning the Arlington Virginia based Jerry Falwell and the other racially motivated TV hallelujah peddlers who the media also started promoting as "Christianity" largely through cable TV in the same period. And, I will say as a positive fact, for largely the same reason, that they were a useful weapon to destroy a Democratic president and attack any Democrats who endangered their owners wealth. That was certainly something taken up by the NYC based media but it didn't start there. They used "reborn Christians" to bring down probably the most Christian president in American history in favor of the adulterous, divorced, remarried, and corrupt Reagan. The combination has given us today what would once have been considered a bizarre phenomenon of "white evangelicals" supporting the very thing that they were alleged to oppose the most, a sex criminal, Antichrist, given to serial blasphemy and self-worship, a crook and cheat, someone who has repeatedly and publicly broken every single commandment, including murder, now. And someone who has done in the most extreme possible way what the very same white-supremacist "evangelicals" railed about for generations, sending federal troops in to take over against the objections of state and local governments. In every way Trump exposes both the "trad-Catholics" (I won't go into that here) and the Protestant "white-evangelicals" as pseudo-Christianity, but what the media has promoted as being "Christianity" for the past half century - I say due largely to the real thing being no more congenial to their wealth than the presidency of the moderate Democrat Jimmy Carter was.
I think the areligious media culture of the US, many of its major figures certainly hostile to Christianity has made common cause with "evangelical" Antichristianity and it was certainly helped along in the effects that has had in American life and politics by those on the alleged left who shared the media figures' disdain for religion with an overt hatred of Christianity. The role that the American "left" has played in the rise of Republican-fascists - never forget the role the Green Party and Ralph Nader played in the election of Bush II and Trump I and others in the sandbagging of Biden - is a minor but important part in this. The American left - largely college credentialed in its most public face - has been incredibly stupid, that is if what they claim to want in government is what they actually find most important. And I doubt that they do, certainly not as compared to their self-satisfying conceit They've got more in common with Trump than they'd ever want to contemplate of have a thought criminal bring up.
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Someone asked what I was sick with. It's allergy season, goldenrod and ragweed, etc. I always get a bad cold during allergy season and I don't work as well through it as I used to. So, sorry, nothing fatal except being over 70. Which is fatal enough to be getting on with.
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