The White House/Media "Spin" About A GOP Split Is An Attempt To Boost Democrats Morale With Hype--
The White House/Media "Spin" About A GOP Split Is An Attempt To Boost Democrats Morale With Hype--
By Lance Rosen
April 28, 2022
Much is being made of the McCarthy/McConnell tapes published by the New York Times book authors, to exploit what some hope is a split in the GOP between Trump loyalists and those who privately revile him. This has been played as a conflict between the "business Republicans" and the White "Christian nationalists". This is the epitome of wishful thinking, denial and delusion, and reflects a catastrophic failure in strategy and approach by the White House and Democratic leadership.
The "American Legislative Exchange Council" is the interface between the GOP Billionaires club (Koch, Mercers, DeVos etal) and the extreme right white Christian nationalists. ALEC is the corporate funded very powerful lobby organization behind everything we see the GOP doing in both their racist/sexist culture wars, and their drive to destroy the legacy of the FDR New Deal. The Rick Scott "11 point plan" for fascism represents the fusion between the "business Republicans" and the Christian Right's Insurrection, such that they are now one and the same.
I'm afraid that the assessment of a "GOP split" and Trump's "weakening" is spin doctoring coming from some of Biden's political team, trying to boost Democrat's morale as we head into the mid-terms. They see the same wipeout coming that those of us living in the real world see, so they are jumping on these McCarthy/McConnell/Scalise tapes to try and widen a GOP division which no longer exists or has no tangible influence. It's the equivalent of the US media's wishful thinking that Hitler still had meaningful opposition and that there was a split in the Nazi Party AFTER the Night of the Long Knives. Trump's personal campaign of blackmail, coordinated terror threats and bribery have succeeded in purging the GOP of any significant opposition, with those remaining rendered silent, compliant, and utterly broken.
The unfortunate reality is that today's Democratic Party is having difficulty mobilizing their base, so they are trying to compensate by jumping on these "gotcha moments" and hyping them, hoping to create election year momentum. However, rank and file Democrats are tired of hearing about scandal. They want to see combativeness against Trump, his fascist cult, and the GOP anti-government Billionaires whose economic policies are intended to loot the American people.
Likewise, tossing about "happy stats" on the economy and jobs at the end of each fiscal quarter is not going to mobilize or empower citizens to stop a violence prone, racist, klepto-theocratic Coup and insurgent dictatorship. We need a new Civil Rights Movement, a revived alliance between youth, labor and Progressives, and new leadership which has the guts to take on Trumpism in the streets, instead of just in courtrooms.
The term "moderate Republicans" is increasingly an oxymoron, as the GOP leadership has been overrun and seized by "toxic-morons". Look at the GOP poll numbers on the Big Lie, January 6th, and the belief that "violence may be necessary" by Republicans to defend themselves from being "cancelled". I'm afraid that some media outlets have so adapted to playing the spin game within their worlds of denial that they are a net negative in their reporting.
The news outlets which engage in this type of spin, who attempt to "fact check" a violent and cultlike political lynch mob, who try to one-up each other with cynical and inane snarky humor, to make themselves the story, are not simply failing the American people at the worst possible time. They are misleading people. The question is, why?
For the most part, today's media commentariat are children of privilege. They've not done any real political organizing, run for office, or recruited people into activity. They've not risked themselves in any meaningful way that might compare to those who risked everything to fight segregation in the South, like the veterans of SNCC or SCLC for example. They are academics, and engage in academic foppery, hiding behind their keyboards, and fighting for nothing other than clicks and likes. With some exceptions, there are too damned many of them.
Of course there are notable writers and reporters with a real personal history of courage, who have "real balls." (not to be confused with those with fake tan balls of Trump following cultists like the rich frat boy Tucker Carlson. There's something weird about these white supremacists who hate people of color, yet spend their leisure time tanning or spraying to make themselves "darker" and appear more virile, no?)
There are civil rights veterans, ex-military and intelligence people, war correspondents, writers who have gone to jail to protect sources, people who muckrake with a real passion for the truth for whom I have nothing but respect. Then there are people who want to be noticed, who follow opinion polls and write what people want to hear about. And that is our problem.
In times like these, what people most need to read about are those things they really don't like to think about. This is why we are so susceptible as a people to lies and disinformation. We do not trust our own judgment, so instead of pursuing the necessary truths of our day which are central to reasserting our Constitutional system, we look for "credible information" (meaning popularly accepted and fact checked), even when that information is virtually useless in addressing the root causes of our national crisis.
The most useless and pervasive of this supposed credible information of course is scandal. Scandal has become the cultural equivalent of "Meth" in the 21st Century for a generation of reality TV addicted Americans. We search for it, luxuriate in it, and we live vicariously through those who expose it. We covertly browse the Tabloids as we are waiting in line at the grocery store, and we are more outraged about the mistreatment of Meghan and Harry than the fact that Black people in Florida are losing their right to vote.
We have accommodated for the most part to a media which defines for us a comfort zone of the superficial, in a personal universe of false positivity and "feel good" moments, or conversely, phoney moral outrage. We have lost much of our capacity to discern between the very real concept of hope, versus wishful thinking. And unfortunately our desire to avoid the big picture to retreat into our little personal spaces is reinforced by a media which tailors its coverage to accommodate our own sense of littleness. That is one of the luxuries of having a privileged life, in which we are not Ukrainians facing Russian clusterbombs, or a Jew in Nazi Germany, or a Black leader trying to register people to vote in Mississipi in 1962, or a Chinese woman waiting for a New York subway in the era of coronavirus.
No, our mainstream media purveyors of positive spin are preoccupied not so much with justice, and education. They are fighting their own personal wars for ads, clicks, and the approval of editorial boards who are appointed by technocrats, hired by conglomerates, who on one hand are publicly anti-Trump, but will be perfectly happy to benefit from his newsworthiness when he returns to power. "Well, yeah, he's evil but he sells." That is, until the full meaning of the concept of dictatorship reaches into their own little fiefdoms and snatches away the things which they thought they had. And their expertise is in figuring out what we want, then writing it, instead of what we need.
So, in a sense, what is wrong with the media is the same as that which is wrong with us. They are the reflection of what we have become. This is why attempts to combat the current threat of fascism must shift their focus to changing the way people think, as opposed to trying to appeal to what we already think. There is nothing wrong with this, if it's done in the spirit of sharing a scientific discovery which serves to overthrow an existing body of opinion to our benefit. You are not "dictating" people's beliefs, you are improving their understanding of the universe around them, and the people who live in it.
Challenging people's beliefs does not get a lot of "likes." Yet it is the most indispensable function of a free and independent press to do so, because it is the wellspring of public debate and dialogue which generates progress in every area. A population which questions its own assumptions and thinks critically can anticipate and solve problems in a way that a dogmatic religious fundamentalist or ideologue cannot. Anyone who believes that everything we ever needed to know has already been discovered, and written down in one book, is someone who has intolerance, bigotry and ignorance wired in as an identity. Political and social formations rooted in this outlook will always be autocratic, feel threatened by science, and will need to spill blood to hold power.
Hopefully, these considerations will add to a larger discussion. We have a crisis for which we are not prepared because of the failure of our leadership to guard against it, or adequately prepare us for it. Simply, that means we need to develop new leadership from within the ranks. That is the hard part, the thing we wish to avoid which cannot be pushed aside much longer.
(Photo, front page of the British Tabloid, London Daily Express, September 1938, declaring "Peace" with Adolf Hitler. "There will be no European war this year or next!" The Daily Express was owned and published by Lord Beaverbrook, the personal mentor and most important person in the life of Rupert Murdoch)
