The U.S. will mark the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection on Saturday, a milestone that will confer upon the reality-dwelling citizenry a grim reminder of the potency of propaganda and how quickly it can warp perception when introduced into the public square.
Just three years ago, most of the country watched with dismay and horror as a violent MAGA mob beat back authorities and stormed the country’s citadel of democracy. The Donald Trump-incited crush of disillusioned rioters, fueled by a stream of fantastical lies, believed that the 2020 election had been stolen by sinister forces working to undermine the democratic election.
Of course, not only was their belief flatly incorrect, but evidence later emerged indicating that it was Trump who, in fact, had tried to subvert democracy.
Facts, however, have little bearing on the sentiment inside the Republican Party, which has been fed a steady diet of lies and half-truths by Fox News and the rest of the sprawling right-wing media machine. To wit, the false notion that Joe Biden nefariously stole the 2020 election is now widely shared inside the GOP. A CNN poll conducted over the summer found that nearly 70% of Republicans believe Biden’s win was not legitimate, a number that has continued to tick up.
The article correctly identifies Fox News and right-wing media as spreading propaganda about Jan. 6th. However, we’ve known Fox News is not a legitimate news source since at least 2000 or earlier. For every article like this, I am internally screaming: ok, but how do we do to fix this?
The biggest problems seem to be:
Fox News and related right-wing media inoculates viewers against non-extremist sources. They explicitly and implicitly, constantly, tell viewers that other news sources are lying to them and cannot be trusted. When the audience is exposed to actual facts by actual objective reporting, the inoculation kicks in and they immediately reject those facts as liberal lies and conspiracy. Right-wing media frequently also accuses democrats of doing what the GOP is in fact doing in bad faith. Even without evidence, that further undermines legitimate complaints about the GOP’s tactics.
Politicians exploit the audience this propaganda has created, to scapegoat and harden voting habits. The same propaganda outlets constantly find liberal boogeymen - immigrant criminals, “woke” nonsense stories, minor issues with liberal programs in America that they amplify and distort, international stories of left-wing failures of governance. A combination of 1984-style 2-minutes-of-hate, and “but for the grace of God and the GOP go we” fear-mongering.
The GOP has successfully tied itself to religion for a huge voting population, and religion for most people is non-negotiable. “Gods, guns and Trump” signs are not just an anecdotal type of supporter - that marriage is the core of the GOP. Religion awards value based on faith, and that actually means the less these voters question Trump and accept him as part of their faith, the better they feel about him. That’s a huge problem.
There is no required critical thinking training or teaching in schools to help kids understand how to form their own opinions in the midst of essentially information warfare. Schools can’t appear partisan, but to call a spade a spade: Kids are growing up bombarded by propaganda, and by the time they have the facilities to decide for themselves what they think, that environment usually has decided for them.
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My best thoughts for fixing:
In fact the whole “parents choice” movement is very openly and explicitly about making sure that children are not taught critical thinking or exposed to ideological diversity in school.
I enjoyed reading your take on this.
As for point #3, is there not already a separation of church and law in the US?
To continue upon others threads. In theory, on paper. You are correct. In practice, that was left behind decades ago. Back in the 1940s the Christian Right began to coalesce. In the 70s it became a prominent voting bloc. Cut to present day and you have preachers telling their congregation who to vote for because they have a wink and a smile contract. Hurt the people we hate and we will give you power.
It’s more than that - you have none other than the Church of Scientology to blame, partially. Thanks to their Operation Snow White back in the 70s, where Scientologists obtained key positions within the IRS and effectively doxxed thousands of IRS members (with the implicit threat of violence), they managed to maintain tax-free status despite operating as a political entity, and killed an entire investigation into their organization in one fell swoop. This spooked the IRS so goddamn much that it changed their entire approach to dealing with religious organizations entirely, and led to the hands-off approach that got us the Moral Majority in the 80s, and the marriage of the GOP to the American religious right.
Unfortunately, “separation of church and state” is a nice goal but leaves a lot to be desired.
The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing a particular religion (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”). However, even that relatively narrow prohibition has been interpreted even more narrowly by conservative Supreme Court justices who only thinly veil, if at all, their favoritism to their particular religion.
Additionally, non-profit orgs are technically prohibited from endorsing candidates and campaigning. However, conservative churches and their pastors frequently give (again) thinly-veiled instructions to vote for Trump or the GOP, without repercussions.
There is, but that only prevents the government from acting as a religious organization. It doesn’t prevent a group of private citizens from deciding to vote only for religious extremists, thereby filling all the lower offices with theocrats who slowly work their way up the chain until until they control the federal government. All the way they pay lip service to religious freedom until they have the numbers and authority to do away with it.
For point 1, that’s absolutely not getting past the 1st amendment, and it really doesn’t matter that it’s called news. People treat their crazy uncle’s conspiracy Facebook posts as “news” and labeling doesn’t really do much if anything to discourage this behavior.
For the idea of critical thinking and education, this is something that democrats should be campaigning on and promising, although obliquely. It should probably come in the form of increasing funding for schools (MASSIVELY) and then add in media literacy courses and such to the curriculum. Although, that said, there are already schools that do this in some form or fashion, but the problem is that far too many school boards are overrun with nuts, and this ties into point 3…
Religion being tied to governance is a real, real problem. Teaching kids critical thinking is going to teach a lot of them, especially Republicans and Evangelicals, that they are being fed a steady stream of bullshit. We still have enough religious association that even getting this across to Democrats and left leaning in a major way is going to be tricky.
On a hopeful note, the most zealous of this population is dying out. Levels of religion have been steadily dropping for a while now. I think as more of this magical thinking dies out, we’re more likely to see positive improvement. Of course, we have to not become a fascist state in the meantime.