Propaganda from conservative autocratic editorial pages

Standard misleading autocratic Republican motivated reasoning

This is a Jan. 6, 2022 example of routine radical right propaganda from the editorial page of the autocratic-plutocratic Wall Street Journal. It is a good but routine example of crackpot partisan motivated reasoning and deflection tactics. The WSJ autocrats ignore the reality of America’s situation as exemplified by this article, Campaigning to Oversee Elections, While Denying the Last One, from the New York Times[1]. The pro-autocracy WSJ editorial page published this deceit-riddled, hyper-partisan motivated reasoning as recently reported by The Week magazine, which wrote:

Democracy isn't dying, said the Wall Street Journal. Jan.6 was a national disgrace but the mob and Trump’s “‘war room’ of motley characters” never came close to overturning the election. The fact is that “America’s democratic institutions held up under pressure” -- thanks in large part to Republican officials who held firm and certified electoral votes and Republican-appointed judges who rejected “flimsy” election challenges. Not that you’d know that from listening to Democrats who “seem intent on exploiting that day to retain power.”

What the WSJ’s propaganda intentionally ignored are the facts that (i) the challenges to the 2020 election came in the form of a coordinated attack on the election from a sitting Republican US president and his close allies (the “motley characters”), (ii) most Republican Party elites and T****, the GOP’s leader, to this day still claim the 2020 election was stolen despite what the WSJ calls “flimsy” election challenges, (iii) Republicans who want the 1/6 coup attempt investigated or who stand for honest elections are being RINO hunted out of the party by the rest of the extremist authoritarian GOP elites, and (iv) as the NYT reported in the linked article above, Republicans are trying to take control of elections in red states to prevent a repeat of the non-existent massive election fraud in 2020, i.e., they want the power to overturn election results that Republican autocrats dislike.  

About those four omitted inconvenient facts. They are lies of omission. That is standard Republican propaganda tactics. Ignoring important, relevant facts like this is central to Republican propaganda. The WSJ editorial page exemplifies it quite well. Those ignored facts contradict the WSJ’s autocrat asserted opinion that 1/6 never came close to overturning the election. Despite the WSJ’s lies of omission, reasonable people can see 1/6 as having come close to succeeding. Both the ex-president and most congressional Republicans were and still are attacking the 2020 election as fraudulent. There was and still is major political power that drives the stolen election propaganda movement and responsive public opinion about it.

Also note the the WSJ autocrats’ cheap shot deflection about Democrats exploiting the 1/6 coup attempt to try to retain power. There is nothing wrong with pointing to 1/6 as evidence the Republican Party and its elite leadership are anti-democratic authoritarians who wanted to overthrow the government by guile and force. What is wrong with rationally and honestly exploiting a legitimate political issue for political gain? Nothing is wrong.

In my opinion, the Democrats would look a lot worse if they were not making a big deal of 1/6. Defense of democracy, the rule of law and truth demands no less than a strong, urgent, sustained response. Arguably, the Democrats are not making a big enough deal of it. In essence, what the WSJ autocrats and plutocrats are arguing is that (i) 1/6 was no big deal because not close to success in their opinion, and (ii) therefore it should be ignored and Americans should just move on. The Republican hope is that Americans will forget that Republicans anti-democratic extremists had everything to do with 1/6. It was not a matter of innocent tourists being confused or Antifa infiltrators causing confusion or any other crackpot lie the GOP has made up to deflect from its direct responsibility for what happened.

Hard questions: Does The Week magazine make the mistake called false balance or bothsidesism when reporting what is intentionally deceptive and flawed commentary from the WSJ? Do facts and sound reasoning in current American politics inherently favor the Democrats or the Republicans in their rhetoric and propaganda?

Footnotes: 

1. The NYT wrote this on Jan. 30, 2022:

Nearly two dozen Republicans who have publicly questioned or disputed the results of the 2020 election are running for secretary of state across the country, in some cases after being directly encouraged by allies of former President Donald J. Trump.

Their candidacies are alarming watchdog groups, Democrats and some fellow Republicans, who worry that these Trump supporters, if elected to posts that exist largely to safeguard and administer the democratic process, would weaponize those offices to undermine it — whether by subverting an election outright or by sowing doubts about any local, state or federal elections their party loses.

Party affiliation shifts: Business as usual

Gallup polling throughout 2021 indicates that there was a large shift in preference from Democrats to Republicans, apparently related to popularity shifts of Biden and the ex-president. Gallup comments:

On average, Americans' political party preferences in 2021 looked similar to prior years, with slightly more U.S. adults identifying as Democrats or leaning Democratic (46%) than identified as Republicans or leaned Republican (43%).

However, the general stability for the full-year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter.  

Both the nine-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter and the five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter are among the largest Gallup has measured for each party in any quarter since it began regularly measuring party identification and leaning in 1991.  

Shifting party preferences in 2021 are likely tied to changes in popularity of the two men who served as president during the year. Republican Donald Trump finished out his single term in January, after being defeated in the 2020 election, with a 34% job approval rating, the lowest of his term. His popularity fell more than 10 points from Election Day 2020 as the country's COVID-19 infections and deaths reached then-record highs, he refused to acknowledge the result of the election, and his supporters rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to prevent Congress from counting the 2020 Electoral College votes.

Fortune magazine commented on that data: “That’s a swing of 14 points in just one year, the largest shift Gallup has seen in its 30 years of polling.” Gallup also reported this, which omits data about people who lean  to one party or the other:

Fortune also wrote this:

Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Ohio, told The New York Times that “it seems like the Democrats can’t get out of their own way. The Democrats have got to do a better job of being clear on what they’re trying to do.”

Steadfast supporters of the Democrats are also showing their frustration. Members of some civil rights groups boycotted Bidens’ voting rights speech in Atlanta last week because they were disappointed with his inability to push the issue. Six of Biden’s former public health advisers also aired their criticisms of his handling of the pandemic.

“How do you plan to win back moderates and independents who cast a ballot for you in 2020, but polls indicate they are unhappy with the way you’re doing your job now?” a reporter asked [of Biden in a press conference].

The president simply answered, “I don’t believe the polls.”

What does this mean?

Unless something changes, Democrats are probably going to lose control of the House in the 2022 elections and maybe also the Senate. If the comments by Bien and Ryan are good evidence, Democrats are befuddled about how to get their messages out to the public. In the information vacuum, more than enough Americans are willing to give power back to the Republicans. Those Americans act like they do not see much threat to democracy, elections or anything else from the GOP to not consider voting for its candidates. Typical thinking and behavior still appear to be the norm. 

Many Americans do not see through the deceit, mendacity, emotional manipulation, and crude but effective partisan motivated reasoning that dominates GOP rhetoric and propaganda. They cannot see that the GOP has become seriously anti-democratic and seriously autocratic-theocratic.

Making matters worse, America's significantly neutered professional news media is doing a dismal job of explaining the authoritarian GOP threat. On this issue the MSM deserves a grade of F in my opinion. F- if there was such a thing. On the other hand, radical right sources, like the GOP's main propaganda organ Fox News, are doing a great job. Radical right deceit, blame shifting, responsibility avoidance, emotional manipulation, reality denial by silence, crackpot partisan reasoning, etc., is top notch stuff. 

Millions of Americans falsely believe that Fox speaks truth and sound reasoning. Those people cannot see the Republican threat. Their minds are trapped in an alt-reality based on alt-facts, an emotional train wreck and crackpottery that passes for serious political discourse.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to Snowflake for mentioning the Gallup poll and the Fortune magazine article.

Pussyfootin' Around with Putin

 How to address the pending invasion of Ukraine?

The U.S. and NATO way: remove your citizens from Ukraine, wag your finger at Putin, and impose sanctions. I am sure Putin is running scared.

Snowflake's way: have the U.S. and NATO build up massive number of troops and heavy military hardware all along the Belarus border, and let Putin know if he invades Ukraine, the West will invade Belarus.

Send Ukraine massive deadly weapons. Arm them to the teeth. Make the cost of invasion too costly.

Impose those sanctions NOW, not after the fact. Offer to remove them if Putin withdraws all forces from the border to Ukraine, and leaves Crimea.

Cancel the pipeline NOW, offer to reinstate it only after Putin withdraws.

ALL OF NATO AND THE US immediately withdraw ALL of it's citizens from Russia and ban travel there. This aught to crush their tourism industry. 

BUT, my way might force Putin to react in anger, right? Wasn't that the same argument Europeans, the Brits, and Americans made prior to World War 2. Ask Hitler to play nice but don't ruffle his feathers? And how did THAT work out?

Thoughts?

A GOP alliance to oppose Trumpism

The New York Times reports on a GOP effort to keep Trumpism from fully consuming the party, making the ex-president a full-blown dictator in control. This effort has been going on quietly for months. This is surprising news to me. More surprising is the NYT’s disclosure that Mitch McConnell is leading the effort to stop Trumpism and he is aided by former president George Bush.

The circumstances here are bizarre. In public, McConnell has supported essentially all of what the ex-president wanted and did, including protecting him from impeachment on transparently crackpot hyper-partisan logic. 

What the hell is going on here? What effect, if any, will the reporting of this story have on internal GOP politics and the party's corrupt authoritarian, ideology? What about the critically important issues? Specifically, where do defense of or opposition to democracy, the rule of law, inconvenient facts, inconvenient truths, sound reasoning, secularism and civil liberties stand with each side in this quiet internal Republican war among GOP elites? 

It is the fight among the elites that count here. Rank and file Republicans are just as clueless as I, and probably most of the rest of the American public, were. In the end, rank and file Republicans and with the rest of us, will be lied to, spun, manipulated, distracted and deceived, no matter how this war plays out.

There are three basic ways to see this, roughly mostly good, mostly bad and mostly mixed-ambiguous.

The NYT writes:

As Mr. Trump works to retain his hold on the Republican Party, elevating a slate of friendly candidates in midterm elections, Mr. McConnell and his allies are quietly, desperately maneuvering to try to thwart him. The loose alliance, which was once thought of as the G.O.P. establishment, for months has been engaged in a high-stakes candidate recruitment campaign, full of phone calls, meetings, polling memos and promises of millions of dollars. It’s all aimed at recapturing the Senate majority, but the election also represents what could be Republicans’ last chance to reverse the spread of Trumpism before it fully consumes their party.

Mr. McConnell for years pushed Mr. Trump’s agenda and only rarely opposed him in public. But the message that he delivers privately now is unsparing, if debatable: Mr. Trump is losing political altitude and need not be feared in a primary, he has told Mr. Ducey in repeated phone calls, as the Senate leader’s lieutenants share polling data they argue proves it.

In conversations with senators and would-be senators, Mr. McConnell is blunt about the damage he believes Mr. Trump has done to the G.O.P., according to those who have spoken to him. Privately, he has declared he won’t let unelectable “goofballs” win Republican primaries.

History doesn’t bode well for such behind-the-scene efforts to challenge Mr. Trump, and Mr. McConnell’s hard sell is so far yielding mixed results. The former president has rallied behind fewer far-right candidates than initially feared by the party’s old guard. Yet a handful of formidable contenders have spurned Mr. McConnell’s entreaties, declining to subject themselves to Mr. Trump’s wrath all for the chance to head to a bitterly divided Washington.

Mr. Trump, however, has also had setbacks. He’s made a handful of endorsements in contentious races, but his choices have not cleared the Republican field, and one has dropped out. 

If Mr. Trump muscles his preferred candidates through primaries and the general election this year, it will leave little doubt of his control of the Republican Party, build momentum for another White House bid and entrench his brand of politics in another generation of Republican leaders.

If he loses in a series of races after an attempt to play kingmaker, however, it would deflate Mr. Trump’s standing, luring other ambitious Republicans into the White House contest and providing a path for the party to move on.

But while there is some evidence that Mr. Trump’s grip on Republican voters has eased, polls show the former president remains overwhelmingly popular in the party. Among politicians trying to win primaries, no other figure’s support is more ardently sought.

Mr. Trump is backing primary opponents to incumbent governors in Georgia and Idaho, encouraged an ally to take on the Alabama governor and helped drive Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts into retirement by supporting a rival. The Republican Governors Association, which Mr. Ducey leads, this week began pushing back, airing a television commercial defending the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, against his opponent, former Senator David Perdue. It was the first time in the group’s history they’ve financed ads for an incumbent battling a primary.

Mr. McConnell has been loath to discuss his recruitment campaign and even less forthcoming about his rivalry with Mr. Trump. In an interview last week, he warded off questions about their conflict, avoiding mentioning Mr. Trump’s name even when it was obvious to whom he was referring.

The Senate Republican leader has been worried that Mr. Trump will tap candidates too weak to win in the general election, the sort of nominees who cost the party control of the Senate in 2010 and 2012.

“We changed the business model in 2014, and have not had one of these goofballs nominated since,” he told a group of donors on a private conference call last year, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times.

Analysis

On the one hand, McConnell dislikes goofballs and tries to get reasonable-sounding Republicans like Maryland governor Larry Hogan to run for office. On the other hand, nearly the entire GOP leadership went along with open attacks on or rejection of democracy, inconvenient truth, the rule of law, civil liberties, etc. Before T**** came on the scene, corrupt authoritarianism and incompetence was the direction the GOP had been moving toward for decades. T**** accelerated the moral rot in already anti-democratic, anti-truth, anti-civil liberties GOP. McConnell cannot undo anything he did, e.g., saving T**** from impeachment twice.  

Assume that McConnell succeeds in neutering T**** and the goofballs. So what? What will be left to run the party? When it comes to the important issues, how far apart is the T**** goofball wing of the GOP and the McConnell-Bush radical Christian right, laissez-faire capitalist wing? Christian nationalists and their grip on the party are not going to go away. Neither are laissez-faire capitalists with their hundreds of millions in cash needed to run party operations and campaigns. None of that will change. Both have shown their acceptance or tolerance of T**** and the goofballs. What about Kevin McCarthy? he is a hard core T**** supporter and likely to become House speaker in less than one year. He is not going to go away or change his mendacious authoritarian brand of politics.

Given the intense threat that democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties are under from hyper-toxic T**** wing of the Republican Party, it probably makes sense to hope that McConnell triumphs and what is left of the GOP can be more effectively opposed.

So, much as I dislike the self-serving, sleazy, corrupt McConnell (and his corrupt wife Elaine Chao), I hope he succeeds and democracy remains more or less intact.

The Democratic Party better wake up. There isn't much time left, assuming there is still enough left to effectively defend democracy.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for pointing this NYT article out.