• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Stephen Altschuler

thoughts on environment, politics, health, life issues

  • Testimonials For Stephen’s Songs
  • Mindful Nature Connection
  • Mindful Golf
  • All Books

Fox News

Our Age of Disinformation

March 23, 2022 by Stephen Altschuler 2 Comments

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?

***

BTW: Happy Spring, and may peace come soon to Ukraine, restoring its esteemed position among the democratic countries of the world.

Filed Under: 2022 election, 2024 election, democracy, Donald Trump, Human nature, President Joe Biden, Uncategorized Tagged With: fascism, Fox News, Putin, racism, Ukraine, White supremacy

We Should be Thanking Antifa

September 2, 2020 by Stephen Altschuler Leave a Comment

Armaggedon, the prophetic war between the forces of good against the forces of evil has already started in America. It’s been coming to this for a number of years now, the start of which was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This triggered the internal conflicts of the 60s which spawned radical groups on the right and the left. The groups on the left kind of fizzled out over the next few decades, but the groups on the right organized, weaponized, and bided their time recruiting and training until they rejoiced and expanded as a result of something quite unexpected: the internet and the World Wide Web. As a result of the social media phenomenon which took root in the 90s and greatly metastasized up to 2016 when the mainstream population gifted them with the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States, perhaps the most powerful position in the world. This was the green light extreme right wing groups including white supremacists, nationalists, and militias were waiting for in order to fatten their coffers with funds, troops, and more sophisticated weaponry. It also allowed them to infiltrate key elements of society including the military, local police departments, and political institutions.

The extreme left was caught off guard as it watched fascism spill into the viscera of our country like a flash flood. Small groups of dedicated soldiers like Antifa formed and opposed the boisterous rallies of the radical right, but with Trump’s tweets casting aspersions on the group, he’s had some success branding them as villains and white supremacists the victims. But then the battlefield got much more intense and complicated when a police officer in Minneapolis put his knee to George Floyd’s neck, murdering a man they had just handcuffed and arrested. This touched off a firestorm of protest not only in this country but, amazingly, around the world. And the movement Black Lives Matter (BLM) was birthed and trained to walk/protest as quickly as a newborn foal.

This and the coronavirus pandemic caught Trump and the right wing extremists off guard, particularly seeing many white people supporting BLM and joining in their peaceful protests against police brutality targeting Black folk. So, Trump, panicking and seeing his popularity drop in the polls upped the ante and [Read more…] about We Should be Thanking Antifa

Filed Under: democracy, Donald Trump, Events Tagged With: Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Confederacy, Fox News, Hitler, Joe Biden, John F. Kennedy, Kenosha, militias, Nazis, Portland, Revolutionary War, Tucker Carlson, White supremacists

Saving Our Democracy

March 17, 2017 by Stephen Altschuler Leave a Comment

Briefly stated, get involved. The keyword for a strong, active democracy is involvement. When the citizenry becomes lazy and complacent, when it becomes politically silent, when it takes its freedoms and liberties for granted, assuming they are written in stone, that citizenry becomes vulnerable to any strongman/autocrat who comes along spewing lies about how the democracy is working. That strongman first creates fear through false facts and fake news and then purports to fix the false facts that aren’t really facts. It was the stock and trade of snake oil salesmen who roamed the American countryside in previous centuries, bilking people of their hard earned cash while lining their own pockets with the spoils of a gullible public.

So a crucial element of involvement, is to tear open the envelope of fear and false facts, and determine, truly, which are true. This is no easy task. There are numerable purveyors of news out there, all vying for attention with sometime questionable headlines and content. There is the Internet, unfettered and unregulated, with a scant few checking on its so-called facts and assertions and accusations. It’s like entering a casino and trying to figure out which slot machine will deliver the next jackpot. The machines are often rigged to deliver an occasional winner, just to keep the player in his or her seat plugging in quarters and dollars as the casino owners sit smugly in their high lairs smiling the smiles of contented greed and satisfaction at their cleverness.

Of course slot machine analysis is a futile exercise. You will ultimately lose because only luck will determine when that next jackpot will come up. Objective research is futile. But with the lies of politicians, which are paraded unabashedly as truths, you may be able to determine which are valid and which are bloviated bull. Performing that analysis is the challenge of every [Read more…] about Saving Our Democracy

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 1984, Bannon, Barack Obama, BBC, birther, danger to democracy, Dilbert, Fox News, Indivisible guide, Michael Moore, Mitch McConnell, New York Times, Obamacare, PBS, Rush Limbaugh, special prosecutor, Tea Party, Trump, Washington Post

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Make a Donation

A donation, either one-time or monthly, would be greatly appreciated to help keep this blog going. To date, I've accepted no advertising. Thanks so much for your consideration and generosity.

Recent Posts

  • What is actually happening in Gaza and not the distorted bullshit you’re hearing
  • An Upside Down World–Part 2
  • An Upside Down World
  • Deep Anger, Deep Grief
  • Proposing a Global Treaty Organization: A place for the expansion and protection of democracies

Recent Comments

  • Stephen Altschuler on What is actually happening in Gaza and not the distorted bullshit you’re hearing
  • Stan Altschuler on What is actually happening in Gaza and not the distorted bullshit you’re hearing
  • Stephen Altschuler on An Upside Down World–Part 2
  • Pat Freiberg on An Upside Down World–Part 2
  • Stephen Altschuler on Deep Anger, Deep Grief

Copyright © 2023 · Author Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in