Driver to Child: 'Go Ahead, Get In, I'll Give You a Lift Home'
Trump makes up incredibly dangerous s****, and right-wing and Elon Musk bring the misinformed 'home.' Is this really freedom of speech?
If you give bad information to a child and that child, in his ignorance, uses it to harm others or himself, then in my opinion, you should be punished. Meet Paul C. Pauley. He is not a child but a grown man, and he has been swayed by the constant drip of right-wing lies and misinformation. Do we pity Mr. Pauley or chastise him?
“Dude, pull your head out of your ass. The conspiracies they are pushing can all be easily proven false. Wake up.”
This seems to be the reaction that most of us would have given one opportunity to speak to this man, who was featured in an article by the New York Times on Sunday. Mr. Pauley is confused but doesn’t know it because he can’t. Having spent years being manipulated and subconsciously groomed thanks to the countless hours by Fox News marketing teams, the “information” now dripping into his IV no longer fills him with the thrill of the new and the endless sense that a discovery has been made. Instead, it just keeps him balanced. In the MAGA world, the sense that the whoosh of the approaching fire will incinerate everything any second is the expectation of doomsday that keeps them frenzied but perversely happy.
Paul C. Pauley views himself as a middle-of-the-road Republican — who also just happens to believe in one of the most pernicious far-right conspiracy theories about illegal border crossings: that Democrats are bringing undocumented immigrants into the country to vote for their party.
“I don’t think they’re going to get that vote this year,” said Mr. Pauley, who sells evergreens on a family farm near Warren, Ohio. “But four years from now? Eight years from now?”
Former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, are pushing the idea to mobilize supporters based on fear of what they call a foreign “invasion.” But demographers and population studies experts say that there is no evidence for the claim. It also strains even the imagination, envisioning Democrats in Washington circumventing border rules, officials and infrastructure to allow undocumented immigrants into the country, help them settle and then cast ballots, legally or not (Conspiracy Theories Abound).
There is no need to run through the list of conspiracy theories. The list is endless and ever-evolving. None of the wildest, let alone most banal, lunacies have ever come true. Hillary Clinton still, for some deep, dark reason, is supposed to be on death row for her “involvement” in the Ben Ghazi fiasco, and Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats are harvesting children to be used as sex slaves. Joe Biden is an illegitimate president because Trump’s victory was stolen, and COVID was invented so a vaccine could implant people with chips.
It would be easy to ignore all of this inane insanity if this lunacy hadn’t become an essential strategy for making lots of money for people like Elon Musk, Fox News, and the entire right-wing media machine. Feeding the Paul Pauleys of the world and harvesting their support for criminals like Donald Trump has become “ying” to our “yang.” There is reality and reactions to it, and then there is the right wing’s reshaping of everything to support the narrative they sell to over a hundred million Americans, turning them into a potent and dangerous voting bloc.
A road trip through Mr. Vance’s backyard in a stretch of northern Ohio offers a glimpse into how their claims about immigrant voting, long amplified by the right-wing media and Trump allies, have taken hold with a swath of voters. Even as Republicans have sought to downplay some of the most extreme voices propagating 2020 election denialism, distrust in the election system has festered.
The claim that Democrats are helping migrants enter the country illegally in hopes that they will vote for the party found wide support in interviews with dozens of voters across Ohio, one of several states that have purged hundreds, if not thousands, of people from voter rolls and passed laws prohibiting undocumented immigrants from voting. From a once-booming steel producing region in the northeastern part of the state to urban areas where the Latino population has boomed in recent years, the theory found purchase among not only Mr. Trump’s ardent supporters, but also right-leaning independents (Conspiracy Theories Abound).
When Fox News was sued for defamation, the world became privy to private messages from many of the Fox News hosts. We saw how much Tucker Carlson hates Donald Trump. We learned how ridiculous the anchors thought Trump’s cries of voter fraud were. The moment the cameras switched on, though, and tens of millions of addicted, Foxified Americans were settled into their loungers with bowls of ice cream propped up on their bellies, the mockery of Trump’s claims vanished. They reported the “theft” in breathy, anticipation-festering ways.
“More evidence that President Trump should still be our president has been uncovered.” Earnings from advertising skyrocketed, and then when Fox was sued, they admitted that maybe they had been manipulating the truth. The damage, however, was done. Despite 2020 having been one of the secure elections with the lowest incidence of voter fraud in our history, more Americans today think our voting system is broken than did before Donald Trump’s accession on the escalator in 2015.
All kinds of lawyers and others will challenge my suggestion that this kind of reporting should be outlawed, but there was a reason the Fairness Doctrine existed — and there was a reason why Robert Ailes, together with Dick Cheney, pushed to get Ronald Reagan to cut the act in 1987.
In 1987, the FCC announced that it would no longer enforce the Fairness Doctrine. The commission deemed that the expansion of cable television technology made old arguments about the “scarcity” of airtime irrelevant and that the doctrine inhibited broadcasters from tackling controversial issues. Reagan’s FCC promptly killed it. The Democratic Congress tried to restore the doctrine, but Reagan vetoed the bill.
Almost overnight, the media landscape was transformed. The driving force was talk radio. In 1960, there were only two all-talk radio stations in America; by 1995, there were 1,130. While television news on the old networks and the cable upstart CNN still adhered to the standard of objectivity, radio emerged as a wide-open landscape (Spawned Today’s Hyperpolarized Media).
The leader of the pack of racist rabblerousing at the time was Bob Grant. His radio show at the time was brutal to Democrats, Blacks, and immigrants, but today, it would be considered a pleasant walk in the park. After the 1987 law and Reagan’s veto, Rush Limbaugh became nationally syndicated, and eventually, Fox News rose from the ashes of American comity.
The results of the upcoming election either save democracy for at least until the next election cycle, or we lose our democracy and become an authoritarian, fascist state. If Trump loses, we can at least be rest assured that his life on earth will likely end before the next presidential election; nonetheless, his influence is going nowhere for now at least. JD Vance, as disgusting as he is, is smart enough to know that he has an excellent chance to become the next generation’s Trump. His one problem is his “off-color” wife. If he really wants to be elected by the cult, then he needs to lose the Indian wife.
Musk, Fox, and the rest of the right-wing media are not concerned with the health of America’s democracy. They are upset by the rhetoric being tossed around about civil war. That rhetoric enhances their bottom line. When do we accept that what Musk, Fox, and others are manufacturing is not a glorious interpretation of the 1st Amendment but a noxious product whose run-off is poisoning the groundwater for tens of millions of our fellow citizens?
When do we accept that there should be consequences for blatantly lying to “children?”
“When do we accept that there should be consequences for blatantly lying to “children?””
Given the results of over fifty years of the neoliberal transformation of our society, it’s going to take a long time to peacefully reverse the damage that has been done. From Paul Weyrich (per Wikipedia, “he co-founded The Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and coined the term "moral majority," the name of the political action group Moral Majority that he co-founded in 1979 with Jerry Falwell.”), to Ronald Reagan to Roger Ailes to Leonard Leo and countless other conservatives, the deed has been done over two generations. Between ownership of the supreme court and gerrymandered electoral districts, nothing can break the spell until the aftermath of the next national or international transformational calamity. Such restructuring won’t come easily. Those in favor of neoliberalism have proven themselves to be patient and relentless. The fact that their principle grievances (right to impose religious beliefs, right to continue despoiling the environment, right to continue to operate as an oligarchy, to name a few) are not generally issues that must be addressed immediately, unless reasons are fabricated to make these top priorities. The moderate center-leaning liberals who inhabit the Democratic side, plus particularly the progressive base, are not patient, at all. The reason for the disparity in the patience factor is clear. The more progressive the viewpoint, the more concern for actual life or death raw issues grows. Poverty, disease, healthcare for the masses, genocide, anti-racism, human trafficking, fair distribution of resources and mass migration are critical problems that absolutely seem to be top priorities if the interests of the many are considered. Premature deaths, morbidity, poverty and despair drive the left, and it’s hard to be patient if one is desperately suffering.
The older I get, the more I understand the value of patience. It tends to be an element of the wealthy life, really. Among the relatives of patience are time and compound earnings, the great engine of capitalism and wealth creation.
Outside of those who have inherited their wealth, exactly who are the financially stable retirees of today? It is people who paid off their homes, limited the cost of their children’s education to amounts saved plus a decade or more of scrimping to pay tuition, food, housing, books and transportation, thereby avoiding debt. Add to that a systematic, tax efficient savings/investment plan (starting early and quite small, even) executed over 30-50 years and you can accurately quantify the value of patience in the ultimate enjoyment of an easy retired life with work or gainful employment being totally optional.
Can desperate people afford patience? I suggest not. Their needs are immediate and they have been waiting forever. Thus, the patient, secure segment of the world population will pit the spoils of their patience, allied with those lucky enough to inherit a grand stash of generational wealth, against the immediate survival instincts of the desperate. The spoils accumulated by the patient working class and the inheritors of wealth include ownership of the media. Where are the lies disseminated? The media, owned by the patient wealthy oligarch class! They won’t stop lying to the “children,” ever.