Dear Group,
Each Monday morning I look forward to reading The Weekly Sift written by Doug Muder. His Monday emails (two of them nearly every Monday) is a marvelously rational roundup of news from the past week. The article from the Weekly Sift from which I lifted the title of the Indivisible email today can be found here. I urge you to click on that link, read his article, and then add your email address in the left hand column under “Subscribe by email.” Then click “Sign me up!” You will not regret it. [You will likely receive a confirmation email to which you must respond to complete the loop. That’s to prevent someone else from signing up your email address.]
This last Monday’s Weekly Sift’s “featured post” email is a summary of a new book, “Network Propaganda.” I have not yet read the book, but Mr. Muder’s summary and the quotes he offers strike me as essential to understanding the gravity of our current situation. For me the single most chilling thing about Trump is his denigration and demonization of all media with which he does not agree. Having put all mainstream media and the entire fact base in which the mainstream media work into a box, he proceeds to belittle and demean. “Don’t listen to them. They are fake news. They represent the agenda of the ‘deep state,’ the grand conspiracy against me and against you, MY people.”
Once he has his chanting followers in thrall, isolated from any and all opposing views, he can take them anywhere. Fox News and others who are part of this far right media ecosystem laid the groundwork before Trump was even part of the picture, but he, in synergy with those media, has assembled a core group worthy of a Jim Jones, people subscribing to an ideology divorced from any reality many of us even recognize.
There are core crazinesses of this ecosystem, like the conspiracies of Infowars with pedophile operations run out of pizza parlors near D.C., but not so far from that are ideas taken up by McMorris Rodgers and Sue Lani Madsen when they solemnly cite George Soros as the liberal bogeyman, the evil name that lights up a whole construct in the minds of the faithful.
But enough of my rambling. Click on this link here (or the one above–they go to the same place), read Doug Muder’s article and sign up for his email. I will try to get back to a more local focus.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry