A rebuttal to "Who is most at fault for the mess?"

My post yesterday was based on this 11 minute video by Steve Schmidt, a former radical right Republican operative. 

PD strongly criticized the video because of Schmidt's culpability in fostering the rise of the radical right wing in the Republican Party. 

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Comment: This brought to you by a former Republican and former chief of staff for Presidential candidate John McCain. Someone who saw it change from the inside. He knows of what he speaks.

PD's response and criticisms: I also find it difficult, and at times enraging to hear Schmidt's pious history lectures. Though he once admitted the gravity of his role in the problem he's discussing, he has become fabulously wealthy while conveniently revising the real history of Trumpism which begins with Sarah Palin. When the HBO movie Game Changer came out in 2012, Schmidt confided that watching himself (played by Woody Harrelson) on the screen gave him a "little bit of PTSD." He succinctly spoke a very important truth in a TV interview-- one that is simply left out of the history lesson above:

The experience on this[2008] campaign is that there are worse things than losing…. I think the notion of Sarah Palin being president of the United States is something that frightens me, frankly. And I played a part in that.

It's a severe understatement, and he didn't bother to lay out the depth of that "game change" in legitimizing, as he now puts it, "all those [bigoted] forces that William F Buckley had worked hard to expunge from the Republican Party" (paraphrase fr above vid). A few corrections are in order.

1) The extremist group Schmidt credits Buckley with evicting from the party was called the John Birch Society. Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, and Buckley met with soon-to-be presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. Russell Kirk, a Christian "traditionalist" conservative, was adamant about there being no place for the conspiracy theories and proto-fascistic tendencies of The JB Society in the GOP. He said, Buckley later recalled, “The John Birch Society should be renounced by Goldwater and by everyone else — Kirk turned his eyes on me — with any influence on the conservative movement.” 

Goldwater protested (much as Trumpists would do with the poisonous militias, Qanon and others that made JB Society look moderate) that renouncing JB Society would "alienate his base." The Arizona Senator said, "every other person in Phoenix is a member of the John Birch Society." As for the supposedly ethical Buckley, he had accepted donations from the Birch Society's founder/leader, Robert Welch-- a man who had accused Eisenhower (!!) of being a communist puppet. This had not prevented St. Buckley from accepting his donations. 

Now, scared of alienating Welch's followers (the JB Soc itself), Buckley suggested they criticize Welch, suggesting he was not fit to run JB Society. The compromise was designed to NOT alienate JB members, by putting all the emphasis on the leader which in the end would hopefully influence some members to leave the group, while those remaining would become discredited by association. Conservative authors often portray this as high-minded idealism, but it was all about PR and a viable path to the White House for Goldwater who would have preferred it if he could have gotten away with running AND accepting the endorsement of JB Society. Pure calculation; not a sudden burst of ethical insight by those who would fight against civil rights laws and then desegregation in the coming years. 

So, Schmidt's version of history as a Southern Lost Cause takeover (while partly true) is vastly simplified. The powerful New Right forces were not from Jim Crow states, but racist, WF Buckley of Conneticut wealth who wrote God and Man at Yale; Russell Kirk self-professed Christian Conservative philosopher from Michigan with advanced degrees in Literature; Barry Goldwater, senior senator of Arizona, an Episcopalian, self-styled radical Right Libertarian who hated New Deal Liberalism, labor unions and fought against Civil Rights-- the man Martin Luther King declared unfit to become president if the racial divide was to be healed. Oh, and he talked somewhat glibly about using nukes in Vietnam, much as McCain who proudly took his seat in the Senate in the 80s would later talk about "bombing Iran." So, the "conscience of conservativism" opposed civil rights, desegregation, the New Deal and all social programs for the disadvantaged while supporting a vast military industrial complex that would make nukes that should not be limited to deterrence but seriously considered for use against countries like Vietnam. Yeah, I get it now.

2) More serious are Schmidt's own sins of omission above. Did Trump really open the floodgates to all manner of formerly marginal racist, conspiracist, gun-toting, government hating far Right groups and individuals? NO. His approach built very consciously on the inroads of one Sarah Palin who tarred Obama as an American Hating socialist who "pals around with terrorists." She brought gun violence explicitly into election ads while MTG and Boebart were still in High School, with one ad putting House democrats on a map as targets of shootings. One of the targets--Gabrielle Giffords-- was later shot leading to a controversy over the possible role of the ad. The Alaskan, speaking-in-tongues, extremist Christian Nationalist, sharp shooter, who Trump admitted inspired his approach, also threw her support behind Trump's disgusting entry to mass politics as a central proponent of Birtherism. Although she had said that Obama was probably born in Hawaii, she also said cryptically that:

[T]here is something there that the president doesn't want people to see on that birth certificate. [adding that]....I appreciate that The Donald wants to spend his resources on something that so interests him and so many Americans, you know more power to him.

In 2016, Palin's endorsement of Trump was billed by Trump as the "most special of all endorsements." Palin was still wildly popular, a symbol of everything the "alt-right" and Trumpism would soon take to the White House.She was then a darling of such hateful figures as Pat Buchanan and David Duke. Her proudly held adherence to Pentacostal and prosperity gospel (not unlike that of Trump's WH appointee for chair of the evangelical advisory board, Paula White) has since become a staple of the GOP base, and its Christian Nationalist bent. We saw more crosses than American flags on 1/6-- and the flags were used as weapons to injure the police.

I can't read minds, and I don't know with any certainty just how much contrition Schmidt (and for that matter Nicole Wallace who mentored Palin) feel in retrospect. Ironically, they have both built careers as moral "truth-tellers" when it comes to the state of the GOP. 

I hope my comment here has made it clear that there was no "golden age" of enlightened Republicanism in which people like WF Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan, and McCain represented "decent" and "ethical" conservatism. 

I hope its clear that The John Birch crazies were displaced reluctantly and only in order to clear a viable path to the White House for the radical Right Wing ideologue, Barry Goldwater who MLK warned Americans against. There are plenty of good histories of the "New Right" for those who want a more honest and long-term accounting of the nihilism and ironic government bashing Republicans who (while bashing gov't as "the problem and not the solution") captured many of its leading institutions, dragging in to their coalition all manner of religious and ideological crazies. It was new in the late 60s and early 70s and culminated in the merger of Christian Nationalists like Falwell, Cold War hawks, Federalist Society radicals, and et al.  

I hope it is abundantly clear that there's a reason the book and movie on Palin was called "Game Changer," as she was the first nut-case ideologue with no education to be cleared by the GOP as a reliable PRESIDENT should the aging and cancer-striken McCain die in office had he been elected. That means she cleared a bar that otherwise would have remained (at least for a while longer) a barrier for would be inexperienced, ignorant and hateful radical Right Wing candidates.

So, who recommended her in order to help a very flawed candidate (McCain)? Who interviewed her and argued that she was the Hail Mary pass that Team McCain needed? That would be 2 young Republican operatives, both seen widely as paragons of morality today, viz. Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace.

If they had actually admitted the calamitous effects of their choices, rather than rewriting history along the lines of the video above, I might welcome their conversion to sanity and acceptable ethics. But to my knowledge, and based on the above, they are self-righteous (esp. Schmidt) in ways I find disturbing given the roles historians will someday assign them for ushering in right wing populism with a vengeance via Palin. 

Until then, I do think they are useful as anti-Trump/never-Trump propagandists. But their analyses are self-servingly myopic and superficial as far as the roots and causes of our political moment go. Anyway, that's what I believe to be the case, and with much evidence to support such an interpretation. Maybe this should have been an OP rather than a long comment.

(some minor edits are made to increase ease of reading)

Who is most at fault for the mess?

Here's one view of it (11 min. video).

That sounds basically right to me. The radical right no doubt vehemently rejects it. I vehemently reject the radical right's vehement rejection.

There is no room for compromise about facts and little room for bickering about true truths. The democracy-killing bickering commences with reasoning.

News bit: What are the limits of professional, responsible journalism?

A day or two ago, Ron DeSantis sent out a press release. A professional reporter at Axios, Ben Montgomery, called it propaganda. Axios fired Montgomery for being tainted by stating his assessment that the press release was propaganda, not news. My initial reaction was the same as how Esquire describes it:

A point of personal privilege: Ben Montgomery is a friend, a vastly talented reporter and writer, and a member of an informal group of writers to which I am proud to belong. By contrast, Axios stands revealed as a creepy little band of Beltway-drunk dilettantes who, taken together, don't have the courage God gave the average assistant night city editor at a 30,000-circulation daily. If there's one thing I despise most in this business, it's suits who don't stand behind their reporters in the face of unjust, performative outrage and flinch before they're hit.

On Wednesday, Axios fired Ben. From the Washington Post: 

The news release sent Monday afternoon said DeSantis, a potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate, had hosted a roundtable “exposing the diversity equity and inclusion scam in higher education.” It also called for prohibiting state funds from being used to support DEI efforts. “We will expose the scams they are trying to push onto students across the country,” DeSantis said in the statement. Montgomery, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, replied to the email three minutes after getting it. “This is propaganda, not a press release,” he wrote to the Department of Education press office. About an hour after that, the Education Department’s communication officer, Alex Lanfranconi, shared Montgomery’s reply on Twitter, where it has since been viewed more than 1 million times. Montgomery said the news release had “no substance,” adding that he “read the whole thing and it was just a series of quotes about how bad DEI was.”

Here's the news release. If anything, Montgomery understated his case.  

(I have a long-standing hatred for the rules of “objectivity” when they are used as an excuse for timidity and professional ass-covering by said echelons.) But this was a private communication between a reporter and a government official that the official shared in a public forum. Even the most hidebound traditional journalism ethics don't touch this. It's the apparatchik who should be fired for sharing a private communication for, yes, propaganda purposes.

But the official did so in the hope that Axios would prove to behave like the thoroughgoing chickenshits they've proven themselves to be. Presto! A Pulitzer finalist is out of work. The manipulative desk jockey probably will get a raise.

The press release is shown below:

Questions

So, did DeSantis put out propaganda or actual news? What if it is ~50% news and ~50% not news or not truths or sound reasoning? Is it responsible journalism to call out propaganda or not when it exists? Is there such a thing as propaganda? Did Axios goof or not?

Context

In my opinion, this raises a critically important point about dark free speech, modern American politics and the mainstream media. It took the MSM months and months and thousands of of lies before a few in the MSM slowly, tentatively started calling Trump's lies lies. Before then they were usually called false or misleading statements. Lies differs from false because it asserts intent to deceive. It took me about a month in the weeks before before the 2016 election to realize that Trump was not ignorant or sloppy. It was obvious that he was a blatant liar. I had that figured out by May or June of 2016 after it became clear that Trump might win the GOP nomination. It took the MSM another ~18-24 months to figure it out, and some arguably still have not fully figured this out.

In those early days, every time I pointed out a Trump lie at a radical right politics site, I got vicious blowback and plenty of rancid insults. I was accused and vilified for allegedly lying about Trump being a liar. The radical right base rejected it completely, even when I cited and linked to the sources of my information.

Now here we are in 2023. Inconvenient facts, true truths and sound reasoning are now routinely rejected out of hand by an authoritarian radical right political movement. The morally rotted radical right wealth and power movement routinely deploys copious amounts of divisive, polarizing, profoundly mendacious dark free speech, i.e., propaganda. 

As far as I can tell, there really is such a thing as effective propaganda in politics. It does exist. And, it is undeniably enormously damaging to democracy, civil society and respect for inconvenient facts, true truths and sound reasoning.

Questions again

Does that context put this in a different light? Did DeSantis put out propaganda or actual news? Is it responsible journalism to call out propaganda or not when it exists? Is there such a thing as propaganda? Did Axios goof or not? How should things like this be analyzed?

News bits: How Christian nationalism works and what it wants to do to us

Anchorage Daily News writes:

Alaska drops policy banning discrimination against LGBTQ individuals

On the advice of the state’s attorney general, Alaska’s civil rights agency quietly deleted language promising equal protections for LGBTQ Alaskans against most categories of discrimination, and it began refusing to investigate complaints.

That’s just standard radical right Christian Nationalist (CN) bigotry at work poisoning minds with lies, hate and intolerance and ruining innocent lives.

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The courier journal in Kentucky writes:

At 11th hour, Kentucky Republicans resurrect, expand and pass anti-trans bill

Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, now has 10 days to either veto or sign Senate Bill 150 into law. Beshear is widely expected to veto the bill. Kentucky’s Republican-led legislature, though, will be able to override his veto when it returns for the final two days of the legislative session on March 29 and 30.

That’s just standard radical right CN bigotry at work poisoning minds with lies, hate and intolerance and ruining innocent lives.

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A bill sponsored by a Texas legislator advances a cherished CN goal of diverting tax funds to religious purposes:

Texas SJR76

Proposing a constitutional amendment to repeal the constitutional provision that prohibits the appropriation of state money or property for the benefit of any sect, religious society, or theological or religious seminary.

That’s just part of the standard radical right CN effort to sink its morally rotted claws into as many tax dollars as possible. The radical CN theocrat goal is to kill secularism and eliminate tolerance of diversity in American government, society, education and commerce. Part of that goal is the cherished objective of 100% obliterating the doctrine of church-state separation (CSS) and the constitution’s Establishment Clause. No, arguing the goal is 100% obliterating CSS is not hyperbole. It is core CN dogma.

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NLRB case No. 31-RC-312064 exemplifies the legal tactics that the radical right CN power and wealth movement successfully uses by force of law to inject Christian fundamentalism into all aspects of American life and society, in this instance medical care. These are from the complaint a fanatic religious hospital filed against the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board):

1. This is a suit by Loma Linda – Inland Empire Consortium for Healthcare Education d/b/a Loma Linda University Health Education Consortium (“LLUHEC”) seeking a judgment declaring that the National Labor Relations Board (“Board” or “NLRB”) lacks jurisdiction over LLUHEC, ordering the Board to immediately dismiss case numbers 31-RC- 312064 and 31-CA-312278, issuing a preliminary and permanent injunction requiring the Board to desist from further processing case numbers 31-RC-312064 and 31-CA-312728 except as necessary to effectuate their immediate dismissal, ....

20. The Church has a long-standing and well-established doctrine against joining, recognizing or bargaining with labor organizations that is founded on firmly-rooted religious principles.

22. The Supreme Court in NLRB v. Catholic Bishop, 404 U.S. 490 (1979) (“Catholic Bishop”) held that the Board lacks jurisdiction over church-affiliated educational institutions.

36. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act prohibits the federal government from substantially burdening a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability, unless the government demonstrates that the burden is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest and is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling interest. 42 U.S.C. §2000bb-1(a) and (b).

37. The Church has a long-standing and well-established teaching against joining, recognizing or bargaining with labor organizations that is founded on firmly-rooted religious principles, including the interference with free religious exercise and commitment to God resulting from such relationships.

38. If the Church were to be ordered by the Board to recognize and bargain with the Union, it would be forced under the threat of civil sanction to act contrary to its long-standing and well-established religious teachings regarding labor organizations.

39. Being forced to choose between adhering to the tenets of its faith or suffering civil sanctions is coercive and substantially burdens LLUHEC’s exercise of its religion.

Translated into American, the church argues that it can completely ignore labor unions and labor laws because they unduly burden the church's freedom of speech, free exercise of religion and whatever else that radical right theocrat lawyers can dream up and the radical right, CN Supreme Court will accept.

This line of legal reasoning is not limited to labor disputes! Aggressive CN lawyers are applying the same rationale to every issue where the church opposes laws designed to protect out-groups that God hates and demands to be oppressed, discriminated against and brainwashed by shameless CN lies, deceit, slanders, crackpottery and false history narratives.  

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The NCRM writes:

Christian Nationalist Former Lawmaker Wants Right-Wing Evangelicals to 

‘Take Authority’ Over All Levels of Government

Jason Rapert, a former Arkansas state senator and founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, appeared on the “Give Me Liberty” program late last year and laid out his vision for a nation in which every congressional seat is occupied by Christian conservatives.

A longtime religious-right activist and ardent Christian nationalist, Rapert declared on the December 17, 2022 episode of the “Give Me Liberty” show that right-wing Christians must rise up and “take authority” over everything from their local school boards to the federal government.

“When people quote the Bible and say, ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord’—Psalm 33:12—how in the world do you expect to ever have that if you are not electing somebody that would adhere to that worldview?” Rapert asked. “You can’t have a nation whose God is the Lord when you’re electing people that are holding up Sodom and Gomorrah as a goal to be achieved rather than a sin to be shunned.”

That’s just standard radical right CN dogma out there poisoning minds with lies, hate and intolerance, ruining innocent lives and attacking democracy, secularism and inconvenient truth. As far as the CN movement is concerned, bad people like me are just human filth to be shut up by force and oppressed into non-existence. That’s the Old Testament Christian Sharia law goal.