Frightened by Donald Trump? You dont know the half of it

[babylonsister]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/30/donald-trump-george-monbiot-misinformation?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it
George Monbiot
Wednesday 30 November 2016 01.00 EST


Yes, Donald Trump’s politics are incoherent. But those who surround him know just what they want, and his lack of clarity enhances their power. To understand what is coming, we need to understand who they are. I know all too well, because I have spent the past 15 years fighting them.

Over this time, I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the government.

I first encountered the machine when writing about climate change. The fury and loathing directed at climate scientists and campaigners seemed incomprehensible until I realised they were fake: the hatred had been paid for. The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal companies.

snip//

As usual, the left and centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong. There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of magnitude. A few billion dollars spent on persuasion buys you all the politics you want. Genuine campaigners, working in their free time, simply cannot match a professional network staffed by thousands of well-paid, unscrupulous people.

You cannot confront a power until you know what it is. Our first task in this struggle is to understand what we face. Only then can we work out what to do.

[2naSalit]

1. What we face is clearly recognizable

and we had better stop it in its tracks now or just sit back and kiss the world and everything we hold dear with it, good-bye.

[global1]

3. We Just Blew Our Best Chance To Stop It In It's Tracks....

and we gave the Party of the Rich the trifecta that will have an effect on this country for decades.

[2naSalit]

6. The chance we are blowing

now that the election debacle has taken place, is that we are barely challenging the greatest threat, election fraud. We have looked the other way too many times now and we have allowed this to happen. If we don't stand up and claim our rights by using them, they will be taken from us for the rest of the foreseeable future.

[Liberal In Red State]

17. Touch

[Liberal In Red State]

16. Yes . . . The ambivalence of the left to not just support Hillary . . . But to support 3rd Party

Candidates made Hillary look even weaker. Sorry but the message should have been come together after the convention . . . The GOP did just that with the religious right effectively abdicating its position of perceived "moral superiority" . . . They swallowed and voted for the Orange Ass. I saw Rick Santorum on Bill Mahr say he would vote for Trump . . . why? Three words . . . THE SUPREME COURT. The message was simple and clear by the GOP . . . Win at all cost! They now control the future for the next 20 years. All because the Liberals big tent could not come together and look beyond the candidate to what could be achieved and what progress could be maintained by holding on to the Presidency. I feel things are as desparate if not more so than when Gore lost.

[mdbl]

2. Been saying this for years

They recognized what Mush Lumpballs was able to do and have been replicating it eveywhere. No one seems to think it but the propagandists have won.

[Tumbulu]

19. I have been saying this for decades

And they have won and I see no way out, the urban people have no idea how these lies have become foundational truth for so many people.

[mountain grammy]

4. The rich have been hard at work since the early 70's

Buying the hearts and minds of the working class, mainly though religion and right wing media. I saw it happening but chose to believe honest, working Americans would never fall for this nonsense that was so against their own self interests. That was me, living in my own propaganda bubble..
Of course these people are the minority of Americans, we saw that this year. But there are enough of them, and add in voter suppression and apathy, and we have a minority elected fuhrer, oops, president.

[AJT]

5. 1st....control education

An educated public is the enemy of authoritarianism. Trump and his gang are now referring to public schools as "government schools". A term that has been used by the hard right for quite awhile, mainly by religious home schoolers, in reference to the "indoctrination" of children in public schools to "liberal anti-christian values".

[world wide wally]

7. I was kind of tipped off to this when trailer park Teabaggers created a movement that equated

Regulating insurance companies to burning the flag.

[Martin Eden]

8. Helps explain why so many vote against their own interests

The fake populism this generates gets combined with religiosity and "patriotism" to create the conservative ideology that so many have been manipulated into embracing.

[WiffenPoof]

20. Well Stated!

Concise and on the mark.

[lonestarnot]

9. And even here I've been criticized for railing against richie rich. Not without a fight of course.

[Amimnoch]

10. There's only one simple answer: Better education.

How much power does money, or lobbies, or shadow thinktanks/bloggers/fake citizens have when you have people who think critically?
None.

This is both the information age AND the misinformation age. You can try to cut the money out of politics, but really how much effect will that have when the citizenry is still basically stupid? Right now, courses in Humanities and thinking critically aren't even touched on until people get to a university level. How to think critically, how to assess information and separate fact from speculation.. these need to be taught at the early high school level imo.

If people would just start thinking critically instead of taking every damn dripping of stupid news, and advertising at face value, then the power of the money just goes away naturally.

[hfojvt]

11. We got outspent

that is probably true, but I am often not impressed by the messaging we use with the money we have.

The other part, of course, is that all the incumbents get to campaign with taxpayer dollars too, under the guise of "serving their constituents".

[vlyons]

12. We live in degenerate times

Call it karma, or call it rotten luck. But we have allowed this to happen to us. Or rather, stupid, gullible people, who bought the lies and promises of the 1% have allowed it to happen to us.

[ronnie624]

13. Plus one thousand.

Understandably, there has been plenty of coverage of the racists and white supremacists empowered by Trump’s victory. But, gruesome as they are, they’re peripheral to the policies his team will develop. It’s almost comforting, though, to focus on them, for at least we know who they are and what they stand for. By contrast, to penetrate the corporate misinformation machine is to enter a world of mirrors. Spend too long trying to understand it, and the hyporeality vortex will inflict serious damage on your state of mind.

[center]********[/center]
The fake news we should be worried about is not stories invented by Macedonian teenagers about Hillary Clinton selling arms to Islamic State, but the constant feed of confected scares about unions, tax and regulation drummed up by groups that won’t reveal their interests.

[lindysalsagal]

22. It's all a lie: We have to find a way to deflate the lies.

I have no idea how.

[niyad]

14. k and r

[Mr.Bill]

15. I'm just sitting here wondering,

who is really putting this administration together? It isn't Trump. Weeks or certainly months ago, he didn't even know who many of these people were. Is it Pence? Romney? or some unknown (to most of us) money people handing out jobs to people who have performed for them? Time will tell.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

18. People said Hitler would be restrained by his advisers when they voted for him in 1933. . nt

[lindysalsagal]

21. We're playing checkers. They're playing chess.

We have to get as good at business as they are.