… He is Us!”
(Pogo)
First of all, I wish to be very clear that this essay isn’t about lamenting the end of the American Empire but it is a grieving for the unnecessary pain & suffering that has gone before & will continue for the millions of innocent victims of the corporate cockroaches.
Moreover, I focus on America because I am an American & therefore, I not only have a right but also a duty to hold my government accountable. And secondly, because America has such a powerful military force & dominates the world economy, we threaten & intimidate the other nations to bend them to our will. Therefore, as American citizens we have the heavy burden of responsibility to do all that we can in terms of harm reduction.
You might attempt to argue that therefore the attempted coup against our democratic form of government on January 6, 2021 was a good thing. And you’d be dead wrong because two wrongs have never made a right. The tens of millions who blindly trust Trump are a combination of ignorant & stupid people. Ignorance can be fixed but stupidity is hopelessly lost. What these MAGA minions don’t grasp is that Trump & all his ass-kissers don’t give a shit about them. They are serving their corporate masters by attacking their fellow citizens.
And these so-called Culture Wars are merely a smokescreen created to keep us divided & therefore weaker and easier to control. Every great now & then, a truth would slip out of the baboon’s mouth i.e. “I like the less-educated.” Of course, Trump’s walking dead interpreted this to mean that he hated the cultural elite and was one of them, an average Joe.
Obviously, Trump’s ability to convince tens of millions of Americans that he & they have far more in common than differences, is one of the most amazing feats of PR (Public Relations) scams in the past half century. Trump envied New York’s cultural elite for decades & tried to join their club repeatedly but was always rejected because of his obvious ignorance, rude, & crude behavior.
I grew up in the poor & working class of America. My mom was mostly single & tried her best to raise four children. Being the eldest, it fell to me to protect & supervise my siblings and I had to physically take on some of my mom’s drunken & cruel husbands and boyfriends. I mention this to prove that I’m not from some privileged background & definitely never received $400 million from daddy like your phony populist, Donny boy.
The working class stiffs that I grew up with & still live amongst are fond of their mantra, “All you need is common sense!” Well it’s clear as a bell to me that tens of millions of Donny’s fan club don’t have common sense or they’d see the elephant in the room. Donald Duck struts the national stage like the Emperor Who Wore No Clothes & Donny is pure, naked greed and his repeated attempts to have conferences & etc. with world leaders at his golf resorts & etc. so he’d collect huge profits, is but one example.
I am getting too far afield by focusing on the creature from the black lagoon because the moral rot has clearly infected the entire GOP and a large percentage of the Democratic party as well. This is why I seriously doubt there will ever be a real stop to campaign financing. Both parties are corrupt & have long ago sold-out the public because they are addicted to all those “perks” the corporate lobbyists give them in exchange for political favors i.e. writing laws that benefit the corporations but harm Americans, especially the poor, the working class, the middle class, & people of color.
I know that this is a very dark & pessimistic picture I’m painting but if we’re ever going to change this picture, we must first see it, recognize it, & then go to work to creating a much fairer picture. You can’t appreciate beauty if you can’t face the ugly reality around us. And with that in mind, here is a picture of the utter insanity & absurdity of a up & coming power broker in the GOP’s upper echelon, Marjorie Taylor Greene:
The following is a guide to Greene’s conspiracy theories and toxic rhetoric.
- Greene is a QAnon conspiracy theorist
- Greene has a history of bigoted comments
- Greene heavily promoted the false claim that Trump actually won the 2020 election
- Greene endorsed the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook school shooting was staged
- Greene on Facebook in 2018: Parkland school shooting was a false flag planned event
- Greene: “I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.”
- Greene heckled Parkland survivor and activist David Hogg, calling him a “coward”
- Greene repeatedly endorsed using violence against Democrats
- Greene agreed that 9/11 “was done by our own gov[ernment]”
- Greene falsely claimed that there’s no evidence a plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11
- Greene pushed conspiracy theory about the 2017 Las Vegas shooting
- Greene visited Congress and tried to get Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who are Muslim, to retake their oaths on the Bible
- Greene shared an anti-Muslim video that portrays Jewish people as trying to destroy Europe through immigration
- Greene penned a conspiracy theory that the deadly 2018 Camp Fire in California was started by a space laser beam run by nefarious entities, including “Rothschild Inc”
- Greene endorsed a deranged conspiracy theory about Democrats and satanic child murder
- Greene in 2019 suggested Ruth Bader Ginsburg was replaced with a body double
- Greene falsely implicated Hillary Clinton in the death of John F. Kennedy Jr.
- Greene liked a meme claiming that Democrats have used the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for human trafficking, pedophilia, and organ harvesting
- Greene said that “the only way you get your freedoms back is it’s earned with the price of blood’”
- Greene called the 2018 pipe bomb packages to members of Congress and others a hoax
- Greene claimed that the Obama administration used MS-13 to assassinate Seth Rich
- Greene falsely claimed that Obama is “a Muslim” and that he “opened up our borders to an invasion by Muslims”
- Greene promoted the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton has killed her political enemies
- Greene pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and speculated that the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville was an “inside job”
- Greene posted a picture of herself holding a gun next to a montage of members of “the Squad”
- Greene praised militia members as people who can protect the country from “a tyrannical government”
- Greene attacked women who are gun safety activists by saying they “need to grow some balls”
- After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Greene called her Democratic colleagues “the enemies to the American people” and vowed they “will be held accountable”
https://www.mediamatters.org/congress/guide-rep-marjorie-taylor-greenes-conspiracy-theories-and
Of course the most pernicious conspiracy theory that she & approximately 250 other members of Congress believe in & are espousing is that the election was stolen by Biden. If this goes on, we will be or perhaps already are on that slippery slope to becoming a fascist nation like those our fathers & grandfathers fought against in WWII. And even though I am 100% against the perpetual wars the corporate cockroaches have manipulated us into over my lifetime, it still nauseates me to see these fascists parading through our public streets with American flags & proclaiming their patriotism.
And at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist myself & of oversimplifying the issue, I believe our public education system is largely responsible for the pathetic & tragic level of ignorance in America. But no, it’s not the result of some grand conspiracy. Rather, it is a confluence of destructive forces. Forces like the “Christian” fundamentalists who fear & hate public education and want us to be a nation of Christians ruled by their authoritarian dictates.
It’s also a result of decades of political whores who only want power for themselves & fear an educated public who can block their grabs for ever more power. Note that most politicians must be millionaires to even run for office but if they win a seat in Congress, that million often grows exponentially because they have the power to write the laws.
Yep! Corporate America’s “Free Market!” Step right up Suckers!
Thirdly & clearly most significantly, our woeful state of a poorly educated public can be laid at the feet of the transnational corporations. Their short-sighted obsession with profits inclines them to run PR campaigns against funding public education & every other public program because it means that much less of the federal treasury that goes into their pockets. This illustrates why Trump’s appointment of Betsy DeVos made perfect sense for the 1% because she was clearly one of the most brazen, anti-public education people they could find.
Moreover, Trump’s entire cabinet wasn’t chosen by him because he can’t think his way out of a paper bag. No, his handlers i.e. the true power behind the throne we like to call the presidency, are actively subverting & destroying every last vestige of our democracy so they can have total control. This is the goal of every fascist or dictatorial government in history.
Again, not a vast conspiracy like the brain-dead MAGA morons love to believe the Democrats are behind like in an oldie but goodie, The Illuminati Conspiracy. But a tragic convergence of greedy forces that will never own enough penthouses, yachts, private jets, etc. like that good, old homeboy Donny whose idea of fine dining is Taco Bell with Twinkies for dessert.
I have been an avid reader and lover of knowledge since kindergarten & part of what has driven me in my 70 years is my hatred for bullies & the elite rich who are responsible for the majority of the degradation, humiliation, suffering, & death of billions of people around the globe. And unlike that detestable braggart Trump, I can back my words up with factual, not make-believe “alternate reality” like the megalomaniac moron, details, footnotes, sources, etc. And I have never been motivated by money. Love and compassion for the suffering is what drives me forward so I hope you believe me but whether you do or not doesn’t matter in the end, I know in my heart & soul it is the truth.
Here is my summation of the clear and present dangers that threaten not only America’s future but the entire planet’s future by extension. The enemies that Walt Kelly was referring to in his parody of a line by a military official with, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” were those who were polluting our environment in the 1960s & the early 1970s. It was the beginning of the Environmental Movement & was mocked & dismissed by many people back then. Of course Walt had no way of knowing just how prescient his words would prove to be & now, climate destruction threatens our very survival as a species. And this is representative of the combined destructive forces we are coexisting with today.
Part of my education over the years has been my seeking out & attending lectures, book signings, conferences, etc. and one gentlemen I met years ago is Chris Hedges. His amazing insights, courage, & experiences are captured in this ten minute video clip.
Returning to my thesis for this essay, a few of our major enemies that are destroying us from within are stupidity, fear, propaganda, & conspiracy theories. Note that in the video clip you just watched, many of those poor souls living in those “Sacrifice Zones,” in the Appalachian mining towns voted for & idolize Trump. Talk about effective propaganda on the part of the phony “conservatives.” My God! Also note that it was Joe Manchin, the Democratic Senator from West Virginia who is a coal mine owner, who practically single-handedly blocked Biden’s “Build Back Better bill.
Are you beginning to see what I mean? The GOP isn’t even bothering to hide or disguise their corruption but with Democratic leaders like Joe Manchin, we are clearly being betrayed even though they still give lip-service to their claim to care about us.
The bill is roughly half of Biden’s original $3.5 trillion plan. It includes hundreds of billions of dollars for clean energy and climate investments, child tax credits, housing and child care. Paid family leave, free community college, raised wealth taxes and lower prices for prescription drugs were among the measures left out. https://www.allsides.com/story/democrats-release-text-bidens-build-back-better-bill
The American Empire is rotting from within & the parasitic forces are feeding off the host that is the American public. If you deny that we are an empire because the powers that be haven’t publicly acknowledged it, you are one of the willfully ignorant. And how do you explain the fact that we have approximately 900 military bases circling the globe & surrounding our so-called enemies like China & Russia.
Yeah Russia, whose leader makes Trump practically cream his pants every time he’s near him. Yet Trump & another serious threat to our national security, General Michael Flynn, claim to be anti-communist? And we continue doing business with China? If not for China’s slave labor, Walmart would be out of business. Open your eyes you MAGA minions.
Perhaps one of the key factors causing the United States to circle the drain so-to-speak, is the grandiose arrogance or hubris of the powers that be. This has led to the collapse of most empires that came before us from the Roman empire to the British empire. You see, “our” leaders (I know, what a farce) think as they relax on their yachts in the south of France, they are so obscenely wealthy because of their superior intelligence. Actually they are wealthy because they lack compassion, empathy, and any sense or respect for morality or ethics like Trump, the temper tantrum toddler who lied, cheated, & stole his way to where he is.
Speaking of the deadly stupid Trump, his willful ignorance & denial of the COVID virus for months after it first struck America is clearly responsible for the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Yet once again, the anti-elite or the anti-intellectual Trumpsters still sing his praises? Are you beginning to understand just how deadly stupidity can be? I say that Trump’s presidency was like the bubonic plague unleashed on the United States & we may never recover from it given the spawn that it has bred.
The source that these parasites feed on is again, multi-faceted but includes the near total genocide of America’s indigenous people who lived here for thousands of years before the white pestilence invaded. The enslavement & degradation of the Black men who created the wealth of this nation with their forced labor.
In addition to the theft & murder of Black Americans & the indigenous peoples land & resources, our government & business elite have invaded, raped, pillaged, & plundered the peoples & the resources of countless other developing nations. Major General Smedley F. Butler lays it out succinctly for all to see.
Furthermore, the knowledge with little to no concern for morality that created the weapons of mass destruction due to the blind belief in technology by the status quo. As a result, we are living with & dying from who knows how many man-made chemicals? Cancer now kills one out of every two men & one out of every three women but who gives a fuck as long as the rich can buy themselves another yacht, an even bigger yacht, a fleet of personal jets, a mansion in all the playgrounds of the rich & famous, etc.
We are being poisoned by the land, the food Monsanto grows on it with their GMO seeds, the air we need to breathe, the water we drink, the sea that gives us so much of the food we need to survive, etc. And the scum-sucking parasites proclaim that what’s good for business is “Good for America!”
But hey, at least we won’t be bored as we lay dying. We are “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” a brilliant book by Neil Postman. You see, there’s a very important lesson that emperors & all rulers of empire learned centuries ago, you must distract the public from its suffering so they are less likely to unite & rise up against their oppressors.
The Roman Emperors & Senators were perhaps the masters of this fine art of the spectacle? And today’s PR industry has also done a dandy job in this regard with the greedy assistance of the corporate-owned media. Note that Trump received perhaps $5 billion dollars worth of free advertising in his snake-oil show that duped tens of millions of America’s most gullible television viewers. His rallies clearly resemble Hitler’s rallies in pre-war, Nazi Germany & Goebel’s insights such as the bigger the lie, the better and the more frequently the lie is repeated, the sooner it becomes accepted as fact by the bewildered herd.
Yep! If we somehow manage to not blow ourselves up with a nuclear exchange—note Trump asked his advisors repeatedly why he couldn’t use our nuclear weapons on countries he didn’t like— or destroy our environment & climate beyond the point of no return, I predict that many, if not most of those American citizens who come after us will be absolutely amazed at how we allowed such a craven cretin as Trump anywhere near the White House.
A rapist, a thief, a racist, a traitor who led an attempted coup against our government & trampled on our Constitution as if it were a floor mat for wiping one’s boots off. A blatant & consistent agenda to purposely neuter or eliminate every federal department established to protect & help the vulnerable among us. “Our” leaders love to pontificate & proclaim to the rest of the world consistently about how America is a nation based on Law & Order & they mock so-called “Banana Republics,” but the U.S. is the biggest banana of all & we, the people, are the ones who keep slipping, falling, & hurting from that banana peel on the floor of our Capitol as revealed on January 6, 2021.
And the alien being with the Cheshire Cat grin who has lead a life of crime too long to list here has never spent a night in jail? And over 74 million “Christians,” adore him like he’s their messiah? Just shows how senile they are & how far they have strayed from Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount,” which laid out very clearly how true Christians were to behave. Our options have never been clearer, either we get busy fighting back against these all too real evils or we get busy dying!
— Rob DeLoss, Gold Beach, Oregon October 26, 2022
P.S. By-the-way, I attended church & Sunday school regularly up until I was around 14 & I no longer consider myself a “Christian,” and I’m proud of it because I am far more Christian than those millions who believe in Trump & turn a blind-eye to all his evil.
Addendum
A little over 20 years ago, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes concocted a profitable way to tap into the white supremacist ideology still bubbling below America’s surface.
They started a “news” network that, instead of providing actual news, gave white, conservative viewers the news they wanted to hear: that they, their families, and their values were under attack by minorities, gays, women, liberals, socialists, Muslims, atheists, the media, etc. — and therefore their biases were justified.
It’s been a lucrative strategy. However, just making a buck wasn’t enough for them. They also wanted to shape the fortunes of the country they were dividing. Here, too, they had tremendous success.
And that is what is getting lost amid the outcry over Donald Trump’s latest round of racist tweets: The US president is often just parroting what he sees on Fox News.* His racism and distorted view of reality are a direct reflection of what this conservative network decides to put on the air.
While regimes throughout history have used propaganda outlets to get the word out and spread their ideology, in the US it is now very much a two-way street. Fox News is both a tool and a puppeteer, manipulating events directly and indirectly. In many cases, the network drives the conservative agenda with its programming. Then, when Trump and his allies pick up on it, Fox News gives them a platform to broadcast that agenda with no fear of criticism or being fact-checked.
Then, with the message already amplified, Trump tweets clips from the network — primarily clips of its many conservative commentators — or tweets promotions for its shows.
The president’s recent racist rants are a perfect illustration of how this works: Trump’s tweets directed at four Democratic Congresswomen in July followed an attack from Fox News host Tucker Carlson on one of them, US Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN).
Last week, the target of another racist Trump tirade was Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). Again, the tweets seemed to have been triggered by a Fox News segment on the lawmaker’s district in Baltimore.
This symbiotic relationship between the president and his favorite TV channel is also reflected in the revolving door between Fox News and the Trump administration.
Former White House communications director Hope Hicks now works as a senior PR executive for the network’s parent company, Fox Corp. Just last month, she was joined by former White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah. In addition, former Trump campaign and administration officials, such as deputy campaign manager David Bossie and acting ICE director Thomas Homan, appear on the network as analysts or contributors.
At the same time, lots of Fox News contributors and staff have found a home in the Trump administration. John Bolton is national security adviser, Ben Carson is secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Morgan Ortagus is the State Department spokesperson. In addition Richard Grenell (Germany), Scott Brown (New Zealand), and Georgette Mosbacher (Poland) now serve as ambassadors. And those are just some of the Fox News alumni currently serving in the US government.
The well-worn path between Fox News and the White House also includes the network’s former co-president Bill Shine, who worked as White House deputy communications director and left to take a job with Trump’s reelection campaign. Right-wing nutjob Sebastian Gorka was a Fox News contributor, then a deputy assistant to the president before going back to Fox News, and then leaving again. Mercedes Schlapp, a former Fox News contributor, first served as White House director of strategic communications and now works for Trump’s reelection campaign.
And all this only scratches the surface, because, through their programming and sometimes in person, the network’s top personalities, such as Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Carlson, or the Fox & Friends crew, are effectively Trump advisers. The only difference between them and official White House staffers is that they are not subject to any transparency and accountability rules — and they are paid better.
The president is not the only political figure getting cues from Fox News. Following the Mueller hearings last week, a clip made the rounds showing that the opening remarks of Rep. Devin Nunes (CA) — the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee — exactly mirrored the rhetoric of Hannity.
For two decades, Fox News operated under the laughably false motto of “fair & balanced” until ending that charade in 2017. That’s like McDonald’s advertising the Big Mac as “the world’s healthiest food.”
In fact, the network has been a subsidiary of — and a driving force behind — the GOP and the alt-right for some time. Its viewers are presented with an alternative reality, and it’s no surprise that they vote accordingly. They don’t live in a land of facts but rather in a country of conservative make-believe in which Trump is a messiah.
Not surprisingly, the network’s right-wing propaganda is having an impact. A 2017 study published in the peer-reviewed American Economic Review estimates that if Fox News had not existed in 2000, the overall Republican presidential vote would have been 0.46 percentage points lower. Just as a reminder, George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes. It’s not a stretch to argue that the network put a Republican in the White House that year — for the first time.
In 2004, this “Fox effect” had jumped to 3.59 percentage points and in 2008 it was 6.34 percentage points.
It’s only gotten worse since then. A study in 2012 by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind showed that people who did not follow the news at all were more informed than people who watched Fox News.
Since then, the network’s misinformation campaign has reached new heights, culminating in the election of Trump.
And after his inauguration, Fox News basically became a part of the White House communications department. Its coverage now is every bit as partisan and deceptive as that of Pravda and TASS in the old Soviet Union.
While Fox News likes to cloak itself in a mantle of patriotism, it actually does Americans a great disservice. Its coverage is often blatantly racist, it hypes an anti-immigrant agenda, and it exploits other divisions in society.
For example, in 2018, when a group of asylum seekers made its way toward the border ahead of the midterm election, Fox News covered the “caravan” as though it were a harbinger of the end of days. When an immigrant commits a crime, Fox News covers it endlessly, but the threat of radical white supremacists is hardly discussed.
The ad nauseam coverage of the danger immigrants supposedly pose stands in stark contrast to the coverage of an actual threat to the US: the interference in its election by Russia. Since such interference was done on behalf of Trump, you won’t hear much about it on the network. Instead, its top host peddles conspiracy theories to deflect from what Russia did.
Here is the bottom line: People getting their information from Fox News and Trump’s Twitter account are increasingly detached from reality and facts. In turn, this is leading to their ideological radicalization, which is not only troublesome, but also potentially dangerous, for example if Trump loses the 2020 election and refuses to leave — claiming that his victory was stolen.
*Fox News, simply put, is a right-wing propaganda tool, not a serious media outlet that deserves to have the name “news” in its name. However, for reasons of clarity, we refer to it as a news organization and use the name Fox News, however misleading it may be, in this editorial. It should also be noted that a handful of people and a small share of the programming is dedicated to something that could even remotely be referred to as “objective.” And when that happens, Trump is quick to call them out over it.