This age of disinformation certainly hasn’t started with Trump and the Republican Party, although they’ve done yeoman’s work to perpetuate it. When Jesus was crucified, his followers had to blame someone so they first took it out on Judas Iscariot, then extended it to all Jews. Only thing was that Jesus himself was Jewish, as was Judas, and, with the exception of Romans, so was everyone else in Jerusalem at the time. I’m puzzled why the Romans aren’t now blamed for the death of Jesus, since, well, they tried, sentenced, and put him to death on the cross. Then came the Middle Ages and the Crusades, when word was that Jews along the route were killing Christian babies and drinking their blood. This of course was not true, but, the Crusaders believed it and murdered as many Jews along the way to the Holy Land as they could find. So far, those two myths, along with the Aryan crap advanced by Hitler and his Nazis, persist today with the help of Neo Nazis and, well, many Republican white nationalists. Then in the mid 19th century, white slaveholders in the American South contended that people were unequal with the White race entitled to enslave the Black race and do with “their property”, i.e. their slaves, (including breeding them as they would with any animal!), as they wished. They even fought a Civil War over this disinformation and sacrificed the lives of over 800,000 people over it. We, i.e. the Republican Party, are still, in effect, fighting that war, with disinformation today whitewashed and scrubbed as something other than the racist tropes of 1861.
All was relatively quiet on this Western Front until Donald Trump took power in 2016 when the engines of disinformation really got going via social media and particularly Twitter. QAnon, White Supremacist groups, and other fringe far right radio and TV networks, all got the go-aheads they were looking for in a president that openly supported such disinformation, and gladly retweeted it and even cooked up quite a bit of his own brazen lies, culminating in his biggest whopper that the election of 2020 was stolen from him via election fraud. Of course when you think about it, how could there have been fraud when he was defeated but many Republicans down ballot were elected in the disputed battleground states. Of course, cult members don’t think for themselves so they wholeheartedly swallowed the lies, culminating in the the most virulent attack on democracy since the Civil War: the attack on our very way of government on January 6, 2021 by Trump supporters who even carried Confederate flags into the breached Capitol building with the entire roster of Congressional officeholders present at the time gathered to verify the election of the legitimate elected president, Joseph R. Biden.
Now, after a year and a half of Trump continuing to peddle his rubbish, he is threatening to run again in 2024, something that is looking like a continuation of the coup he started on 1/6/21. Remember, Hitler was jailed after his failed putsch, only to come back in a few years to assume the chancellorship of Germany. As with Hitler (and now Putin, I might add), Trump never ceased spewing his vile and incendiary oratory to a duped and dispirited populace with the intent of casting aside democracy in favor of autocracy and the Fascism that usually follows. He just can’t resist himself, as his father’s voice echos in his head like a blast of tankfire. Of course he also has the support of Fox “News” with their chief morons Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham leading a battalion of conservative disinformationalists, all in line behind their chief marketer of greed, Rupert Murdock; and the leadership and frontline of the Republican Party speaking in lockstep with their “dear Leader”, as they do in North Korea.
In that regard, it’s not much different here as it is in Russia right now with Putin duping his people into believing in his inhumane massacre in Ukraine. Thankfully we do have a sane leader in Joe Biden to help unify the world against the lies of Putin, and encourage the material and moral support of Zalensky and his Ukraine. Biden is the world’s champion of liberal Democracy while Putin and China’s Xi are its foe.
Am I too harsh? Am I just a rabble-rouser, a fearmonger, a liberal, a proud democratic Democrat, or some hysterical bigmouth? I will not defend against any label you wish to put upon me. I am who I am: an American citizen who is alarmed to see our nation slip into the jaws of fascism.
What about you? Where do you stand? What do you think?
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BTW: Happy Spring, and may peace come soon to Ukraine, restoring its esteemed position among the democratic countries of the world.
