You Aren't My Moms and Where's All This Liberty?
Observing politics on the nightly news or daily paper is a fairly common practice in the country. Some people prefer newscasts with consistent rightwing news (like Fox) or MSNBC (which is a blend of right/left/center, but has a handful of very articulate newsdesk anchors whose views lean liberal).
Choosing news that fits your existing political views is called confirmation bias. Beyond the basics, the disturbing trend in the past three decades is for conservatives to denounce all news that isn’t rooted in conservative opinion to be leftwing, socialist, radical and woke. So network news from CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN, long defined as middle-of-the-road now gets miscast by conservative politicians as extreme, dangerous and under the influence of Karl Marx.
Pushing this polarizing agenda is extremism at its most visible. A majority of American voters is moderate, which is being reflected more and more by the fastest growing bloc of voters, independents. Some are tired of party politics. Some simply want to keep their mailbox free of party flyers during election years.
And ever since the 2010 Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United vs the FEC there’s been a growing number of groups whose funders remain secret. Though large amounts of money flow into these groups from different spots on the political spectrum, the majority of the cash is coming from very wealthy rightwing donors pushing three major agendas: winning every election from dogcatcher to President, getting tax cuts for the top 2% of the wealthiest (even though the one they already got in 2017 added one trillion dollars of debt to the US budget.), and eliminating regulations that their businesses have to bend to.
Quite a few dark money groups aim for social and cultural issues that trigger voters, even though the group members don’t really give a damn about the issues they trumpet. They’re in it for the tax breaks and any policies that help fulfill their obsessive and excessive greed. It’s common for many of the groups to create misleading names for themselves.
In George Orwell’s classic, 1984, we’re introduced to the concept of newspeak.
It’s become an almost mandatory deception used by dark money groups who don’t want the public to know who’s funding scam groups with ulterior motives. Some examples from recent years are instructive.
For hundreds of years, Black people complained they were being unfairly targeted by police and were being physically assaulted and murdered by cops. Young black males fared the worst. The awareness of it as a legit complaint grew as more people bought smartphones and social media sites provided a place with an audience where pictures and videos could be displayed. In the wake of a series of murders and manslaughters done by police - and others - over several years provided so much proof of the racial violence being inflicted that the blatant murder of one more provoked the well known Black Lives Matter movement as pissed off citizens of every race began marching and protesting.
A racist backlash followed. Some white people countered with ‘All Lives Matter’ which completely ignored what BLM meant. The far bigger group was saying ‘Black Lives Should Matter AS Much As White Lives Do.’ It wasn’t exclusionary; it was insisting on being included. Nobody was saying ‘All Lives Don’t Matter As Much As Black Lives.’
But conservatives and racists seized on the name as part of a culture war that had to be won to keep Blacks away from all the rights and privileges white Americans enjoy.
In the mid-1980s, one Black university professor advanced the idea that along with racism individuals were subject to, there was institutionalized racism endured by entire groups. That professor was seeking ways that laws could lessen or eliminate that type of racism. And it largely went unnoticed by the general public. Discussion of it was limited to law classes in a few colleges.
It was in the wake of the BLM protests that some conservative politicians and their media minions seized on that idea as a way to create a fake threat to every white person in the country. They claimed that critical race theory was wrong and public schools across the nation were pushing an anti-white agenda on our kids.
The reaction was swift and the desired result occurred: racist Americans would stick with the Republican Party through thick and thin. There was no evidence of it being taught in public schools. It was bullshit that caused racist and even non-racist parents to fear that something really bad was gonna hurt their kids.
Ex-president Trump played further fears by bullying equal human rights groups with abbreviations and concocted fake objectives of the groups. Bullying mens’ groups who existed to provoke street fights with non conservatives (such as the Proud Boys) went to known progressive cities to pick fights with BLM activists. A few of the younger activists viewed these violence promoters as fascism promoters. They called themselves ‘anti-fascists’. Trump shortened that to antifa and claimed that everyone taking part in the BLM protests were antifa and they were the ones provoking all the street fights. Standard Trump bullshit, but the puppydog moderate media wagged their tails and reported it as if it was credible.
Some rightwing groups not previously involved began responding to online rumors that this antifa group was gonna show up and commit violent acts in very Republican cities and towns.
With only a couple exceptions, there wasn’t any evidence of any anti-fascist starting violence. Some occasional random act of vandalism was inflated to make it sound like entire cities were under assault. And antifa became a monster group though there was no core, no conspiracy, no leaders coordinating anything regional or national in scope.
The mainstream media helped promote it, especially in protests that occurred in Seattle and Portland. In reality it was usually a couple of dozen young hotheads lighting sidewalk fires or throwing sticks and stones at 1 or 2 buildings in those two cities. They amplified the fake messaging, provoking greater fear. As far as I can tell, there was only one death in the country caused by anyone who called himself ‘anti-fascist’.
Flooding the media with fake threats, promoting multiple events as dangers to keep everyone confused by all the noise and pursuing hidden agendas are key components of the bully & bullshit approach.
And much of the mainstream media still refuses to define it that way as they go through the pretense that ‘balance’ can only be achieved by repeating the false claims and fake threats of paid propagandists.
That’s a pretty long lead-in to the group that deserves our full attention, Moms For Liberty. They claim to be protecting our kids from a conspiracy by educators trying to sexualize or groom public schoolkids to become gay or transgender or anti-white-people. There’s likely a few places where a local MFL group thinks its purpose is to limit the dangers of harmful curriculums. But the real goal of the large national group has nothing to do with books or curriculums.
It looks like these dark-money-funded MFL groups are specifically targeting swing districts in swing states to provoke people to become more conservative and carry that through to impact state and national elections.
But rather than quote passages of explanation, I strongly encourage you to read Amanda Marcotte’s article about the goings on of the MFL group in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
Provoking fear and paranoia for larger political agendas is their real aim. No real Liberty is being obtained by anyone. And they really want to keep the book banning as the central topic so the mainstream media doesn’t catch on.
Go ahead; read all about it. And kudos to Amanda for the great journalism that resulted in this big reveal.
Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria provide some fresh material on one of the biggest dark money rightwingers in US history, Charles Koch. At Legum’s Popular Information newsletter, they explain how Koch created one of the biggest tax loopholes ever so billions can be poured into buying Congressional seats and state seats while shielding the identities of the buyers.
After Trump’s first term, Koch proclaimed he’d made matters worse and would now fund Republicans & Democrats that would work together to create better legislation.
”Hello”, he lied. It’s like the only consistent position that every billionaire supports: whatever they say is a lie. The mainstream media goes through the pretense that they don’t do what they always do. Koch has since poured zero dollars into any Democratic campaign.
It became a sad truism for the past four decades that the ultra wealthy needed more tax cuts so they could afford 5 super yachts instead of only one, but their aim is even higher now.
They need the tax cuts and dark money loopholes so they can buy five Supreme Court judges instead of two. That’s no longer satire or hyperbole. Good journalists are digging out plenty of evidence that it’s true, even when they can’t ascertain exact amounts that each American billionaire has invested - or always identify who spent what - to control the IRS, the justice system and the legislative branches of government across the country.
And the mainstream media isn’t reporting it partly because huge chunks of it has been bought by billionaires too. It’s become obvious, for example, that Elon Musk has taken a huge financial hit to buy and destroy Twitter or to turn it into a Disneyland for hate groups. But Musk is just the latest billionaire to do that, following the lead of the Hearst, Newhouse, Murdoch, Bloomberg and Ochs-Sulzberger families. More recent examples beyond Musk include sports magnates John Henry buying the Boston Globe and Glen Taylor buying the Minneapolis Star Tribune, biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong buying the Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union-Tribune and others, the late Sheldon Adelson’s secret purchase of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Joe Mansueto who bought Inc. and Fast Company magazines, Laurene Powell Jobs’ purchase of The Atlantic after her husband Steve Jobs died, Marc and Lynne Benioff’s purchase of Time magazine, Thai guy Chatchaval Jiaravanon’s purchase of Fortune, and Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post.
My interest in ‘balance’ is to report as accurately as I can without concern for what left or right activists and critics think of me. And towards that end, yes, it’s true that some of these billionaires do not try to control what their reporters do. And not all billionaires lie in pursuit of more profit. There are well motivated philanthropists like Bill Gates who was pretty ruthless as a businessman but has used that massive wealth for positive things like eradicating diseases in Africa. There are guys like Iranian-American Pierre Morad Omidyar whose initial efforts to create e-commerce sites made him a millionaire just before he turned 29. A year before that, he’d also begun a small startup called AuctionWeb that quickly surprised him. Less than 4 years later, the sales on that site made him a billionaire as AuctionWeb came to be known as eBay.
Omidyar has since invested in numerous progressive and civic minded ventures including an effort by three journalists to create an investigative reporting site known as The Intercept. The Intercept won a number of prestigious media wards but also has been embroiled in controversies that led to the departure of 2 of its 3 founders and cost one whistleblower - Reality Winner- 5 years in prison. However the big funder Pierre Omidyar - a follower of the Dalai Lama - and his wife Pam have an extremely impressive array of investments and charitable contributions that sets them apart from most other billionaires.
But back to my original point about billionaires buying up media outlets with some clearly providing editorial control designed to change government for their own advantage, highly visible ones like Rupert Murdoch, the late Sheldon Adelson and Elon Musk are being joined by others whose motives are now coming into question. Just this week it’s been reported that Jeff Bezos hasn’t handled the Washington Post very well in recent years
It was reported Tuesday that The Washington Post's employee buyout program is intended to cut 240 staffers (nearly 10% of its staff). And it exposed some surprising stats since 2021: Their audience has gone down down 28%. Subscriptions dropped 15% and are now around 2.5 million. Print revenue has seen a 10% decrease while digital ads took a 30% dive. And it will reportably lose $100 million this year. Though $100 million is a drop in the bucket for Bezos, who has been the world’s richest man at times, it’s reasonable and important to ask what Bezos’ motive has been since he purchased it a decade ago.
Once among the top half dozen best read newspapers in the country, this effort to buy voluntary resignations of its staff drew a scathing rebuke by the Washington Post Guild that has overseen the interests of its staff since 1934:
"We cannot comprehend how The Post, owned by one of the richest people in the world, has decided to foist the consequences of its incoherent business plan and irresponsibly rapid expansion onto the hardworking people who make this company run," the Guild wrote. "We cannot fathom how The Post plans to continue to remain competitive in this industry without investing in its staff."
Bezos was lauded in the early years of owning the paper for expanding its traffic and increasing revenue. What caused this rapid two year decline? Many suspect the content will suffer with this big downsize, accelerating its decline.
And in the meantime, overall, the mainstream media is failing its critical role as the watchdog of our government at a time when bad actors like Trump, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, a broad array of influential insurrectionists and election deniers is busily trying to burn it all down.
Tens of millions of anxious Americans are correct to be worried whether the American experiment will be completely destroyed before the decade is out.
Listen to a concerned parent in Bucks County, PA about the bookbanning by the dark money funded Moms For Liberty