Heather Cox Richardson interviewing President Joe Biden
Heather Cox Richardson, America’s most popular historian, had the following to say about the election of Donald Trump. I am encouraged whenever someone of her stature highlights the propaganda that is creating an ill-informed American electorate. In my view the first order of business for the resistance should be to find an antidote for the invisible (to us) virus that has taken over the country at this time in history. Blog for Iowa has posted extensively about Iowa’s particular problems with right wing media and the limitations of our statewide press. I hope you will read Richardson’s entire article today on Substack. She also posts her daily articles on Facebook. Additional links to her other platforms are below the article.
Richardson begins by describing the global trend toward dictatorships and away from democracy and cites Biden’s efforts to shore up democracy during his time in office. She goes on to mention China’s leader Xi Jinping saying democracy is “obsolete” and cites Russia’s undermining of NATO. She spends the most ink on Hungarian dictator Victor Orban who Trump spoke with after the election.
She also mentions the racist and misogynistic elements of what Trump is offering and explains what voters thought they were voting for. She mentions Project 2025 as well.
I believe the non-Trump voters understand this danger. What I believe most have not taken a deep dive into, is the incidious nature of propaganda, its pervasiveness and power, and how it has taken over the minds and cultures of regular people and communities in America. Richardson addresses this in the following excerpt. [Bolding is mine].
HCR:
“But my own conclusion is that both of those things were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.”
X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged.
This evening, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán posted on social media that he had just spoken with Trump, and said: “We have big plans for the future!”
How to follow Heather Cox Richardson:
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When folks talk about media, the subject is generally “news media” or “information media.” I think the analysis should go deeper and consider the role of entertainment media’s role in shaping attitudes that lead to unhealthy fantasies, both personal and societal, that are manifested in, among other things, voting preferences. Ubiquitous commercially sponsored TV demonstrates that crassness and violence captures eyeballs for corporate underwriters. For examples, audiences reliably cheer and applaud when a host (or political candidate) uses an obscenity; basketball is no longer a “non-contact” sport, but an increasingly violent one; not just programming but show promos are full of gun play in an age of mass shootings. We live in and are being groomed by what I call a “commercial propaganda soup” that foments a degraded self-image in a society in which a majority hails a self-avowed authoritarian and has contempt for expertise as “elitist.” Our father is Rambo and our mother is Roseanne Barr.
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