Chapter review: The New Right and Racism

The New Right and Racism is chapter 6 of Sarah Posner's 2020 book, Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. This chapter summarizes the recent, frightening history of the intense racism, racist propaganda and revisionist history that is a major driver of the modern New Right political movement, now sometimes called the alt-right. The movement is firmly grounded in lies and sophisticated emotional manipulation that is arguably second to none in human history. In large part, this chapter is about the stunning power of dark free speech and its ability to create faux realities in people’s minds based on lies, emotional appeals to base instincts (especially racism) and crackpot conspiracies.

At the end of the chapter, Posner briefly touches on the influence of the ex-president. She argues that he and his rhetoric saved the alt-right from a slow march into oblivion. He did that by normalizing white nationalism and making its alleged but false grievances appear to be real and, importantly, applicable to tens of millions of average Americans:

“From Bob Whitaker to Sam Francis to William Lind to Donald Trump, the mythic ‘middle American radical’ was honed not only as a political mascot, but as a locus for voter resentment, a rallying cry for cultivating voters who believed that liberalism, pluralism  and civil rights had ripped their heritage and culture right out from under them. The history of the New Right--and its deep and pervasive opposition to civil rights, desegregation and other efforts at ending race discrimination--has been largely forgotten or erased. .... Over the years, the [pro-Trump] coalition yielded to societal pressure to reel in its overt racism and opposition to civil rights advances for black Americans. 

But once Trump brought white nationalism out of the closet, the opposition to civil rights and multiculturalism as elitist ideas tyrannically imposed on white Americans were familiar not only to the hard core white supremacists of the alt-right but to conservatives and paleoconservatives steeped in the same grievances. These voters still harbored resentments that their rights and standing in American society had been somehow diminished by the civil rights movement--and that the ‘mainstream’ conservatism of the two Bush presidencies had not represented their interests, either. Trump didn’t make an entirely new movement out of whole cloth. With his own televangelist gloss, he reactivated the fundamental driving force of the conservative movement of the second half of the twentieth century.”

The propaganda on this point is superb. Before Trump, the alt-right movement had already learned to shift its rhetoric from overt racism to grievance about lost white status and privilege at the hands of hostile outsiders and foreigners. Based on the history, the core New Right grievance was and still is racist. Probably no more than about 2-3% of people who supported the ex-president are aware of most of the real history, instead relying on the deceit, lies and revisionism that the New Right movement routinely relied on in its messaging. Nearly all of those people sincerely believe that they are not racist and that the people they support are not racist. The con job here is breathtaking.

The elites of this movement, reasonably called Christian nationalism, are all aware of what they are doing and why. They are intractably racist but they know how to make it appear that they are not. They work quietly and persistently. In the federal government, they constitute a group of people who can accurately be called the deep state.

Although racism is the focus of this chapter, the Christian nationalist movement is fundamentally a decentralized political movement. The core agenda is accumulation of wealth and power for white elite Christians and elimination of secular government, public education and civil liberties. The vehicle used to gain public support is ruthless dark free speech designed to polarize, divide and foment distrust in society. The tactics are always the same, i.e., heavy reliance on lies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation and partisan motivated reasoning. Playing on racism is a core element in the New Right propaganda toolbox.

Some of the racist history 

For the most part, the modern timeline goes back to the 1950s and Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education that ordered public school desegregation. Those decisions, later lower court rulings and government implementation of means to desegregate schools and reduce discrimination fueled the New Right movement starting from the 1950s, and it still does in 2021. In particular, school busing and attempts to make school textbooks less white Christian centric and revisionist were powerful drivers of support for the New Right. Fights over public school textbooks are still important to the alt-right. A core idea of the Brown decision is that separate but equal is unconstitutional. The New Right elites reject that reasoning. The rank and file may mostly support it, but the people in power do not.

The New Right led the attacks on all federal efforts to desegregate public schools. Federal actions were portrayed as subverting parental authority, anti-American, anti-Christian and, as Posner puts it, “subversive to the natural order of things.” At least since the 1970s, the New Right quietly exerted significant power through its presence in the federal government: 

“.... people associated with the alt-right [earlier the New Right] have always been a seamless part of official Washington .... Often their presence, and their impact on policy, has gone unnoticed. .... they represented a potent and enduring strand of the American right, one that seethed with resentment over its exile from mainstream conservatism--making it primed to be activated when Trump came on the scene. .... [Despite occasional purges by conservative Republicans] they, and their odious ideas, never went away.”

One federal employee, Robert Whitaker, played a modest role in the rise of the New Right in the 1970s and 1980s. After the 1980s he was publicly quiet until 2006 when he resurfaced as a white supremacist, writing for the neo-Nazi website National Vanguard that immigration was a horror and white people were the victims: “But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of  genocide against my race, the white race, .... Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews. They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.” In 2015, Whitaker ran for president for the white supremacist American Freedom Party, but he dropped off the ticket after the AFP endorsed the ex-president in 2016. 

A key New Right propaganda goal was to foment distrust in the federal government and public schools. One New Right propagandist, James McKenna, a lawyer working  at the Heritage Foundation, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece in 1975: “Parents are worried that the schools are turning into big impersonal bureaucracies that do not respond to pressure from the grassroots. People no longer automatically trust the government to know what’s best.”

In congressional testimony in 1974, another New Right propagandist, M. Stanton Evans, chairman of the American Conservative Union, attacked school busing and the core reasoning in the 1954 Brown decision. Evans argued that for school segregation, separate was equal and black children were better off in segregated schools. The Brown holding was that separate was not equal. Evans’ reasoning was cynical and ice-cold. He argued that the liberal education establishment “became convinced and apparently convinced some of our federal judges that Negro children must be taken out of their homes and neighborhoods and placed in an ‘artificial environment’ created by the government, where they will be immersed as fully as possible in an altogether different culture.” Evans complained that liberals believed they had “a commission to tinker around with psychic makeup of the human species.” This line of reasoning, fake concern for black children, was a brilliant bit of propaganda that conflicted with the reasoning in Brown.

A related line of propaganda in New Right opposition to public school desegregation was that it was needed to protect white students. Protect them from what? To protect them from the trauma of personally experiencing the truths in all the white racist myths and lies about black people, including their affinity for crime, their lower IQ and their inherent immoral personal character. New Right propagandist Robert Whitaker wrote: “The proposition that busing promotes brotherhood would be hilarious if it were not so cruel. .... In many  schools children raised in the ghetto are a terror. Hence, for impressionable young white minds, the black beast of the most virulent racist literature seems observed reality.” Now that is real racism. 

The New Right is open to getting its way by violence and dictatorship. An influential New Right propagandist, Sam Francis (1923-1994), wrote about white grievance being rooted “in perceived injustices, unrelieved exploitation by anonymous powers that be, a threatened future, and an insulted past. [It is] therefore understandable that some of its adherents sometimes fantasize that the cartridge box is a not unsatisfactory substitute for the ballot box.” Posner describes Francis as the patron saint of the modern alt-right. On dictatorship, or an imperial presidency Francis wrote : “the adoption of Caesarist tactics [would] reflect the historical pattern by which rising classes ally with an executive power to displace the oligarchy that is entrenched in the intermediate bodies. .... only the Presidency has the power and the resources to begin the process and mobilize popular support for it.” 

No wonder Posner calls Francis the patron saint of the modern alt-right. These people are not just racist. They are also fascist and anti-democratic. Just like Francis was. He clearly foresaw the possibility of a monster like Trump rising to power to save the white race from the alleged oppression of religion, civil liberties and a pluralist society. Posner comments on the Francis legacy: “Francis’s books are regularly read and celebrated by the alt-right and paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan.”

Questions: 

1. It is reasonable to believe that most rank and file Republicans are not themselves racist, but nonetheless support an arguably racist movement that they sincerely believe is fighting against oppression of the white race and/or to preserve or advance white social status, e.g., by attacking civil liberties? 

2. It is reasonable to believe that the New Right and now the alt-right has deceived most Christian evangelicals into strong support for a fascist, racist agenda, regardless of how they view the movement?

Racists sabotaged the Afghan federal Special Immigrant Visa program

In an interview with a former staff person, Olivia Troye, working for Mike Pence when he was Vice President said that the racist Steven Miller sabotaged the Afghanistan visa process. Miller and his racist thugs stopped it as long as the racist ex-president was still in office. That is why Afghan allies visa applications were not processed, granted and flown to safety as long as the racists were in power. Troye said that people within the federal government came to her begging to see if Pence, also a racist whether he knows it or not, would help them process desperately needed visa approvals. Federal employees who tried to process visas were threatened with loss of their jobs and pensions. They were frozen in fear and did nothing.  

Instead of being honest and transparent by cancelling the visa program, our racist ex-president and the racist thugs and liars who worked for him sabotaged a federal program in the name of their racism and hostility to non-White immigrants.

Some Steven Miller quotes and context

"Continue to worship at the altar of multiculturalism and we may come to see that we are participating in the sacrifice of the one culture which binds us all."

"No just society can survive which abandons God."

"Every American has the right to support a policy of retreat and capitulation, and, as so many leftists do, they also have right to lie and slander the country and the president to further this agenda."

"The Hollywood crowd feels sympathy for the terrorists, detests Republicans and sees America as an obstacle to a better world."

From NPR, Nov. 26, 2019: 

For almost three decades, Jared Taylor has been publishing his ideas about race at the American Renaissance magazine and now at a website called AmRen, which is considered a mouthpiece for white supremacist ideology.

"The races are not identical and equivalent," says Taylor, who calls himself a "race realist" and rejects the white supremacist label. "There are patterns of difference. But this is now something that's considered a huge, hateful taboo in the United States."

The website is not well-known outside white nationalist circles — but it found an audience in White House adviser Stephen Miller.

Miller has recommended articles on AmRen and another white nationalist site called VDARE. We know this because the Southern Poverty Law Center has uncovered hundreds of emails that Miller wrote to a reporter at Breitbart News before he worked in the White House.  

Civil rights activists and more than 100 members of Congress — all Democrats — have called for Miller's resignation since the publication of the emails. But the White House is standing behind him. And Republicans have been largely silent. Critics say that this suggests the line of what's acceptable in public discourse has shifted.

By 2019, it should have been obvious to everyone that the line of what's acceptable in public discourse had shifted. The fascist, Christian nationalist Republican Party and its fascist leader shifted it. Acceptance of White Supremacism and overt discrimination against non-White had become acceptable and mainstream in the fascist Republican Party.

One can only wonder whether such deep state sabotage operations like what the ex-president, Miller and other racist thugs pulled off is or should be legal.

Questions: When Biden asserted that chaos was baked into the final exit process, was he mostly right in view of the fact that the racist former administration sabotaged any chance of an orderly exist for US allies?

Is Troye lying and the visa program was working as intended, not sabotaged?

By sabotaging the visa program, were racists in the federal government, including the ex-president, who sabotaged the visa program acting in good faith as responsible leaders, or were they conducting an immoral deep state operation to hide the truth of their animosity to non-White immigrants, even ones who risked their lives in service to the US military mission in Afghanistan? 

Is it fair or accurate to call the ex-president and people like Steven Miller racist or liars? 

Is it fair or accurate to see Steven Miller as a radical Christian nationalist bigot working quietly to advance the bigoted Christian nationalist agenda of power and wealth transfer to elite White Christians, advancing White supremacy, and advancing fundamentalist Christianity and Christian rule based on a Biblical worldview and Biblical law, i.e., Christian Sharia law?

Chapter review: The Origin Myths of the Christian Right

The Origins Myths of the Christian Right, is chapter 5 of Sarah Posner's 2020 book Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. It covers a lot more than just the origin lies that Christian nationalism relies on to deceive its followers, the American people, federal courts and the federal government generally. This chapter is more documentation of the lying deceit and hate that American fundamental Christianity needs to survive and grow in power and wealth. This political movement is definitely bottom feeder. Its key goals are (1) legalizing  support for overwhelming power and wealth for White Christians, and (2) ferociously defending and expanding access of anti-secular, anti-civil liberties White Christian fundamentalism to virtually unbounded amounts of tax dollars. 

Power, wealth and intolerant, anti-democratic rule are key goals. The vehicle is sacred Christian religious dogma based on what fundamentalist White Christian nationalist elites tell the rank and file what God's sacred dogma is. All of the key elites are frauds, liars, sexual predators and/or dark ages brutes. From what I can tell, some of them might actually believe they are actual Christians.

Paul Weyrich

Arguably one of the foremost Christian nationalist toxins is Paul Weyrich (1942-2008), a radical far right Catholic and a key architect of the antiestablishment New Right he started in the 1970s. He co-founded the conservative think tanks The Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the Republican Study Committee, a powerful group focused on RINO hunting ideologically impure apostates out of the Republican Party. Tolerance is not part of the Weyrich mindset, just as the case for the modern fascist Republican Party. He coined the term "moral majority," the name of the political action group Moral Majority that he and Jerry Falwell co-founded in 1979. The Weyrich toxin is powerful and heavily grounded in the White Christian persecution myth. Among a slew of other things that most Americans at least used to support, Weyrich hates elections and majority rule. 

Posner writes about deceitful and divisive propaganda and rhetorical techniques of the New Right: “From his early days in Washington, Weyrich was well-versed in propagating the rhetoric of White grievance. .... ‘Opposition to busing does not mean opposition to civil rights’ .... ‘Forced bussing is a step backwards in the whole civil rights picture.’”

In other words, Weyrich and his associates posited that civil liberties laws were misguided because ending racism was entirely a matter of individuals and government had no role in it. Of course, that left government, society and commerce completely free to be racist, sexist and bigoted in any ways it choose. That, along with crippling democracy and the rule of law, is a core goal of the current Christian nationalist movement.

Posner commented that the New Right strongly objected to the old, now deposed, conservative Republican elites who were too focused on free markets and foreign policy. New Right Christian nationalism was focused on moral, cultural and religious issues, prominently including the family structure, and male and White dominance. Weyrich wrote in a 1982 essay that “culturally destructive policies” such as “racial hiring quotas and busing” because “the damage they can do is enormous and practically irremediable.”  

For Weyrich, vehement opposition to abortion what mostly drove him early on. After the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, Weyrich advised Catholic bishops to “adopt a program that will make the abortion a hot enough political question that is it viewed as a key issue by nearly every congressman.” He wanted a constitutional amendment banning abortion. In there early days, Evangelicals had no strong consensus about abortion. By the 1980's Weyrich and his adherents managed to change that. 

Christian propaganda myth 1: Abortion

To help drag previously reluctant Evangelicals into radical Christian nationalism, master liars like Weyrich concocted and spread a myth that Jerry Falwell was politicized into supporting the New Right by the Roe decision and the abortion issue. That was a lie that even the MSM was duped into believing and repeating in print and on the air. Falwell’s grievance was not abortion, it was civil rights. But no matter, it was important in nudging more and more Evangelicals into radical right, anti-secular Christian fundamentalism. On civil rights Falwell’s beliefs were well known. He saw the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “a terrible violation of human and private property rights.” That reflected at least as much a commitment to segregation and laisse-faire capitalism as to fundamentalist White Christian nationalism.

Over time, the wily lying propagandist minnow Weyrich trapped and swallowed the whale Falwell by his skill at deceit and guile. Most of the rest of American Evangelical Christianity eventually fell in line and remains there to this day.

Christian propaganda myth 2: Deadly Christian persecution by a secular federal government

This lie was the real deal clincher for a lot rabid, haters of civil liberties and seccular government.  The lie was that the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) was going to close Christian schools using the excuse that some discriminated against accepting racial minorities as students. In a speech Weyrich stated that this was the issue that pushed Evangelicals “into a final awareness.” Awareness of what? The evil of secular government, pluralism, public education, civil liberties, segregation and the like.

The truth is that the IRS never had any such plan. Instead the IRS sent letters to some private Christian schools warning them that if they discriminated on the basis of race, they faced possible loss of their tax exempt status, not closure of the school. All the schools had to do was sign a form stating that the school would not discriminate on the basis of race. A few, 110 out of about 3,500, refused and they lost their tax exempt status. The IRS policy was in line with court decisions holding that tax exemptions were not compatible with racial discrimination. Despite that truth, liars like Weyrich claimed this was an all out assault on Christianity by the federal government and secular civil liberties. Christians were taught and learned to hate and distrust the federal government, civil liberties, public education, secularism and inconvenient facts and truths. Christians also learned that they were under severe oppression and attack by the federal government, liberals, public education, secularism, and Godless immorality.

Rev. Bob Billings; Rev. Jack Hyles

Billings: Two other colorful but sleazy characters merit some mention. Billings was a key driver of private Christian education. He firmly believed in and advocated for teaching of creationism and Biblican corporal punishment, using the “rod of correction” to drive “foolishness” out of naughty children. Over time Billings rose to power as a federal bureaucrat in the Reagan administration. He fought hard and dirty, i.e., lies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation, etc., against segregation of tax-subsidized private schools. Billings was astute enough to avoid racist appeals. Instead, his propaganda and lies turned to vilifying the political left.

As an educator in private religious schools, Billings taught that the White majority was besieged and oppressed by minority rights. He complained in writing about minorities that were demanding their rights. He railed against “false philosophies” being taught in classrooms while “old fashioned Americanism and Christianity” were excluded.

Billing’s Christian love manifested itself as strictly limiting student admission to Christian schools. Students with an IQ under 90 were unacceptable. Ones with a “Christian indoctrination” were required, while those who “show by their clothes, language, actions and hair-dos that they have left the way of righteousness, humility and righteousness” were unacceptable. Children who were “emotionally disturbed .... should never be admitted to the Christian classroom unless the teacher has faith to believe that the disturbing emotions and their influences will quickly be nullified.” 

Billings was a fraud. He claimed to have a PhD from the Clarksville School of Theology in Tennessee. While he was in Reagan’s Department of Education, someone figured out that Clarksville Tennessee state authorities had shut the school down because it was a diploma mill. The state of Tennessee determined that the faux school issued “false and misleading educational credentials.” The modern Republican Party and Evangelical contempt for real education and actual expertise predates T**** by decades. That is a core faith of both the modern Christian nationalism and the heavily overlapping fascist Republican Party.

Hyles: Hyles was a Baptist educator who taught at religious schools. He founded Hyles-Anderson college in 1972. He was a hard core racist and rejected civil rights: “You can no more legislate people to love Negroes than you can cut the moon in pieces and have it for lunch. .... [he saw public schools as] cesspools .... [of] sordid, wicked communist [infiltration].” Hyles urged people to attend his school even if they needed to get second jobs to pay the tuition for his school where “clean-cut, dedicated kids sit at the feet of cultured, fine, educated Godly people who believe the Bible.” He preferred that his son go to Vietnam because “I’d rather him die for freedom than be taught filth and rot by folks [at Indiana University] trying to destroy freedom.” 

Questions: So, what do you think -- is that mostly hyperbole and/or lies or mostly not, or is it mostly unclear? 

Can a determined minority of radical religious fundamentalist ideologues working diligently and ruthlessly for decades eventually take control of the US government and bend the law to accord with its ideology and vision for American society? 

Given the open contempt and hate that Christian nationalism holds for out groups such as atheists (including me), and the LGBQT community in, is it reasonable to be nice with them, start playing hard ball, or take another approach?

Should intolerant or bigoted Christian schools, or any Christian schools, be accorded the gracious privilege of the generous tax subsidies they now enjoy at everyone’s expense?

How Afghanistan fell and why chaos ensued

A stream of articles is coming out that explains how the Taliban caused the army and government to collapse. The New York Times writes: 

In early May, a Taliban commander telephoned Muhammad Jallal, a tribal elder in Baghlan Province in northern Afghanistan, and asked him to deliver a message to Afghan government troops at several bases in his district.

“If they do not surrender, we will kill them,” Mr. Jallal said he was told.

He and other tribal elders complied. After several rounds of negotiations, two government bases and three outposts surrendered without a fight. More than 100 security forces handed over weapons and equipment and were sent home unharmed.

The Taliban’s strategy of coercion and persuasion was repeated across the country, unfolding for months as a focal point of the insurgents’ new offensive this year. The militants cut multiple surrender deals that handed them bases and ultimately entire provincial command centers, culminating in a stunning military blitz this summer that put the militants back in power two decades after they were defeated by the United States and its allies.

The negotiated surrenders were just one element of a broader Taliban strategy that captured heavily defended provincial capitals with lightning speed, and saw the insurgents walk into the capital, Kabul, on Sunday with barely a shot fired. It was a campaign defined by both collapse and conquest, executed by patient opportunists.

Each surrender, small or large, handed the Taliban more weapons and vehicles — and, vitally, more control over roads and highways, giving insurgents freedom to move rapidly and collect the next surrenders as the security forces were progressively cut off from ammunition, fuel, food and salaries.

The Taliban also received money, supplies and support from Pakistan, Russia and Iran, analysts said. That included 10,000 to 20,000 Afghan volunteers sent from Pakistan, a Taliban safe haven, and thousands more Afghan villagers who joined the militants when it became clear they were winning, said Antonio Giustozzi, a London-based analyst who has written several books about Afghanistan.

The volunteers swelled Taliban ranks to more than 100,000 fighters from most analysts’ estimates of 60,000 to 70,000, Mr. Giustozzi said. That was more than enough to crush a government force listed at 300,000 on paper but hollowed out by corruption, desertion and a staggering casualty rate — U.S. officials have said that perhaps only a sixth of that total was in the fight this year.

Regarding the chaos of the final days, Biden argues it was inevitable. The NYT writes:

Even before Mr. Biden announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops, his administration rejected frantic calls from lawmakers and activists to evacuate Afghans, who now find themselves in jeopardy.

Then this summer, Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, implored Mr. Biden to hold off on evacuations until U.S. forces were gone for good, fearing that the image would undermine confidence in his government.

The president on Wednesday defended the U.S. withdrawal and said he did not see a way to leave Afghanistan without “chaos ensuing.” In an interview with ABC News, he was asked whether the exit could have been handled better.

“No, I don’t think it could have been handled in a way that we’re going to go back in hindsight and look — but the idea that somehow, there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens,” Mr. Biden said. “I don’t know how that happened.”

But critics said the administration was squarely to blame.

Some lawmakers, such as Representative Matt Rosendale, Republican of Montana, have expressed concerns about expediting the vetting process.

“Now we’re going to develop a procedure with which we can vet thousands of individuals and just relocate them to the United States?” he said in an interview. “Once they’re settled here, they can bring additional family members here. One kind deed does not make an ally.”

So, if T**** had been re-elected, there would have been at least as much chaos, probably significantly more. The Afghan government opposed evacuations, which make matters worse. US intelligence estimates were badly wrong. Biden relied on relied on intelligence showing a Taliban takeover was 18 months away.

And, it may be the case that a fair number of Afghan allies had hoped there was a lot more time to get out, so they didn't act sooner. If that is true, that could leave thousands of allies now stranded and unable to get to Kabul for evacuation assuming they don't get blocked for merely offering just one kind deed.

Failure on top of failure seems to have got us here.

So, was chaos in Kabul inevitable? Was the end result inevitable once T**** signed the agreement to withdraw in February of 2020, which was the start point for the Taliban's plan to get opposition to surrender and eventually collapse?

Here comes the Taliban's alt-reality and social media propaganda war

We all knew this was happening. But here's some evidence. The Washington Post writes:

For a group that espouses ancient moral codes, the Afghan Taliban has used strikingly sophisticated social media tactics to build political momentum and, now that they’re in power, to make a public case that they’re ready to lead a modern nation state after nearly 20 years of war.

In accounts swelling across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — and in group chats on apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram — the messaging from Taliban supporters typically challenges the West’s dominant image of the group as intolerant, vicious and bent on revenge, while staying within the evolving boundaries of taste and content that tech companies use to police user behavior.

The tactics overall show such a high degree of skill that analysts believe at least one public relations firm is advising the Taliban on how to push key themes, amplify messages across platforms and create potentially viral images and video snippets — much like corporate and political campaigns do across the world.

One image from a video circulated online in Afghanistan shows Taliban fighters dressed in camouflage and brandishing machines guns while posing unmolested in an eastern province, not far from Kabul, under a gorgeous pink and blue sky. The text below, in Pashto and English, reads, “IN AN ATMOSPHERE OF FREEDOM.”

Wide distribution of such propaganda imagery would have been almost impossible for an insurgent movement there a generation ago, before the arrival of smartphones, Internet connections and free social media services brought unprecedented online reach to Afghanistan. The nation lags the world in Internet connectivity but it has grown sharply over the past decade amid a gush of international investment.  

Recent months have seen an uptick in online messages offering a gentler, more reassuring face of the Taliban, whose brutality during its previous reign over the nation was notorious, featuring mass executions, repressive moral codes and the exclusion of women from schools and workplaces.

It's not just the Taliban doing this. Every hate-driven and extremist group on the planet with half an ounce of brains has figured out by now that social media is it's most potent soft power weapon. Most or nearly all extremist groups are autocratic or authoritarian. Social media is unparalleled for a small group or presence to (i) deceive by creating alt-realities based on lies, deceit, emotional manipulation and motivated reasoning, (ii) build public support, (iii) find recruits, and (iv) raise money. 

Social media propaganda power works even better if the authoritarians hires an "amoral" public relations firm to create the lies and deceit and show the rot online in effective ways. There's no apparent shortage of PR firms willing to take any tyrant's money. After all, public relations companies, like all other businesses, are amoral and therefore free to advance the agenda and lies of anyone who can afford to hire their services and expertise. All businesses are free to ignore truth and morality to the limits of the law, or sometimes (often?) beyond that. 

For context: The Taliban took over Afghanistan by first offering villages two choices. Surrender and submit, or face death. The central government was powerless to stop that. After local villages capitulated, the Taliban went to towns and made the same offer. The central government was powerless to stop that. Then the Taliban went to cities and make the same offer and the central government was powerless to stop that too. The Taliban hunted down and murdered village, town and city leaders and prominent elders who resisted. Organized local resistance was impossible.

Questions: 

1. Is the Taliban gentler, or is that just a routine propaganda lie to make those dark ages thugs, sadists and theocrats look less vicious? 

2. Is social media a net benefit or net detriment to (1) democracy or non-tyrant governments, and (2) authoritarian or tyrant governments? 

3. Is business amoral, or because it is a human activity, inherently moralistic regardless of what economic ideologies have to say about morality or truth? 

Worker productivity, spending and the Democrat's big infrastructure bill

The Washington Post published an interesting article this morning and a possible sustained increase in worker productivity. That might sound boring to some, but it really isn't.  When productivity increases, wages tend to increase and the overall economic situation tends to be solidly good. One of the key points is that the second infrastructure bill the Democrats have advocated and, not surprisingly the fascist Republican Party (FRP) opposes, increases funding for R&D. Economists point to that as a good indicator of increased productivity. 

Evidence of the increase is in recent data. Second quarter worker productivity grew by 2.3% and 4.3% in the first quarter, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Productivity gain in the decade after the financial crisis averaged 1.2%.

WaPo writes:

Rapid adoption of robots and artificial intelligence during the pandemic combined with a rebound in government investment is making some economists optimistic about a return of a 1990s economy with widespread benefits.

As companies and customers embrace new technologies, making it easier for Americans to produce more with fewer workers, a growing number of economists say this is not a blip and could turn into a boom — or, at least, a “mini boom” ― with wide-ranging benefits for years to come.

Higher productivity typically leads to more goods and services available at a lower cost and increases in wages. Without it, economic growth is sluggish.

“America used to do a lot more public investment and it used to grow faster. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It seems like we are reentering an era of public investment,” said professor Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab. He forecasts “a productivity surge that will match or surpass the boom times of the 1990s.”

The other key dynamic is increased government investment in the economy. The $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that recently passed the Senate has received widespread praise among business leaders and economists. The decision to stimulate the economy has also created a lot more demand than normal coming out of a recession, which is helping drive continued productivity and business investment.

“Infrastructure investment certainly has the potential to improve our productivity,” said Julia Coronado, founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives and a former Federal Reserve economist.

The nation hasn’t seen this kind of public investment in years. Improvements in roads and bridges are much needed, but economists are most excited about the money in the bill to expand and enhance broadband, and research and development. Democrats are also working on a $3.5 trillion spending package that is more controversial, though some economists praise parts of that bill that would expand child care and paid leave to make it easier for more U.S. parents, especially mothers, to work.

“It won’t be a game changer to just fix roads and bridges. It will help at the margin, but it’s not transformational,” Coronado said. Instead, she noted that “creating more child-care infrastructure could cause the labor market to be more dynamic and drive stronger workforce participation from women.”

Higher productivity could also alleviate many of the nation’s top economic concerns. Inflation is currently running at a 13-year high, with many Americans citing it as a big worry. As prices for so many goods and services rise, workers can’t afford to buy as much. Productivity gains typically lead to lower prices since factories and offices can produce more, and it tends to bring higher pay as workers are seen as more valuable and effective.  

“We are going to be short of young people. So all the tasks that were being done with the prior amount of the labor will have to be automated quite a bit,” said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University. “There won’t be that many drivers available for Uber and garbage trucks and all that. It’s very clear. Something will have to give.”

This is some rationale to think that the broader infrastructure spending the Democrats want could have good economic effects. Despite that, the FRP constantly attacks it because it believes that things like daycare and expanded broadband access aren't infrastructure. The FRP's fascist ideology considers (1) that infrastructure is roads, bridges, railroads and not much more, and (2) government and domestic spending is unconstitutional, evil, socialist and ineffective at everything other than (i) running a huge military-industrial complex, and (ii) courts to defend and advance the the dominant interests of the FRP and its wealthy donor class, namely power, wealth and non-democratic government. 

It's not clear why some of the FRP in congress voted for the first, narrower bill. After all, the spending is still evil, socialist and something Democrats want. The FRP vehemently opposes all of that. If the FRP had its way, all infrastructure, like 100% of public schools, would be privatized and run by the always better free markets. Probably fear of the 2022 elections mostly explains it. Re-election first, ideological coherence second.

Questions: If the productivity boom does sustain itself for a while, say at least the next six months, would that justify spending on the Democrat's broader vision of what constitutes infrastructure these days, or does one need to wait a couple of years to assess the cost-benefit? Is one or both infrastructure bills and their spending socialist, unconstitutional and/or evil as the FRP and its ideology sees it? Should all infrastructure and all public schools be privatized as the FRP wants, or is it exaggerated and inaccurate to say that is what the FRP wants? Is it exaggerated and inaccurate to say that the Republican Party, including its rank and file, is fascist?