The attempt to force-feed us this presumption has gone on since this particular campaign first started. But an attempt to rewrite reality has been underway for FAR longer.
HAH! It's nice to see that we were right, and the presumption was bullshit.
This "chose to create their own facts" shit has been going on for decades. ACTIVELY and AGGRESSIVELY so since the rise of limbaugh & clones, AND Pox Noise - in the 1990s, making way for bush/cheney/rove in the following decade, who refined it to a high art.
From an extended essay by Ron Suskind, October 17th, 2004, with the nauseating title of "Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of george w. bush":
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html?_r=0
The bold parts (emphasis is mine) are of a quote widely attributed to kkkarl rove - referred to here as "a senior advisor to bush."
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And while we're at it, let's connect the dots from that recent past to right now.
Thank you, Charlie Sykes, CONservative talk show host, who has finally done that, himself, and recognized the Frankenstein monster for which his own hate-radio medium had served as midwife:
“We’ve basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers. There’s nobody. Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, ‘By the way, you know it’s false.’ And they’ll say, Why? ‘I saw it on Allen B. West.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I saw it on a Facebook page.’ And I’ll say, ‘The New York Times did a fact check.’ And And they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bullshit.’ There’s nobody – you can’t go to anybody and say, ‘Look, here are the facts.’ And I have to say that’s one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there’s no way to break through it. And I swim upstream because if I don’t say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they’ll ask what’s wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true.
When this is all over, we have to go back. There’s got to be a reckoning on this. We’ve created this monster. And look, I’m a conservative talk show host. All conservative hosts have basically established their brand as being contrasted to the mainstream media. So we have spent 20 years demonizing the liberal mainstream media. And by the way, a lot of it has been justifiable. There is real bias. But, at a certain point you wake up and you realize you have destroyed the credibility of any credible outlet out there. And I am feeling, to a certain extent, that we are reaping the whirlwind at that. And I have to look in the mirror and ask myself, ‘To what extent did I contribute?’ I’ll be honest, the bias of the mainstream media has been a staple for every conservative talk show host, every conservative pundit for as long as I can remember. Going way back into the 1960s with William F. Buckley Jr.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/charlie-sykes-conservative-media-created-trump-monster
But here again, even Charlie Sykes here is falling back on the old canard that the hated "mainstream media" is liberally biased. I happen to think that means the mainstream media HAS indeed been "biased" toward REALITY as it REALLY EXISTS. As far as I can personally remember, I believe it started with people like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. It's long been reported and referred to: the day LBJ supposedly knew Vietnam was lost - because he'd lost the public. And he knew he'd lost the public BECAUSE HE'D LOST WALTER CRONKITE. Cronkite was the anchorman and managing editor of the "CBS Evening News" for many years. He was widely respected and hailed as "the most trusted man in America." And he WAS! His correspondents were in Vietnam covering the war and how frankly badly it was going, and they were reporting this.
I've seen this recalled and analyzed as a media/journalism myth, and maybe that presumed "exact moment" on that "exact day" did actually happen exactly this way. But as I recall, a lot of the coverage of Vietnam back then started turning negative, well, as the facts did. You couldn't whitewash it. You kept seeing it on the cover of "Life" magazine and all the network newscasts, and the front pages of newspapers across the country. Any reason why, decades later, the CONS knew what to do? bush/cheney FORBADE the taking of any photos or the publishing of any photos that showed the flag-draped coffins of dead American troops returning to America. Anybody who tried wound up losing his or her job. No funerals were to be covered or telecast. There was a total media blackout of ANY returning coffins to Dover Air Force Base. Because bush/cheney/rove understood that this all had to be "managed" so the American people wouldn't see the carnage and the bodies and the blood and the dead and the destruction, and turn against Iraq the way they'd turned against Vietnam. They SAW what was going on in Vietnam every night at their dinner tables.
That, I think, is what led to the hatred and eventual distrust of the mainstream media. Engineered by the CONS who saw LBJ basically driven from office because the public had so angrily turned against him and his war. They saw THEIR guy, Richard Nixon, LITERALLY driven from office because of Watergate, which was driven by such heavy press coverage. They've been nursing grudges ever since. Even the attempt to drive Bill Clinton from office via impeachment mechanisms was referred to here and there as "payback for Nixon."
This all led eventually to the fiendish Roger Ailes, back in the day, who dreamed of and then helped design the monster that became Pox Noise. "OUR 'news' network! That spews out OUR worldview. With OUR reporters spinning the story OUR way. So the public gets the country and the world the way WE think it is (or should be), and then WE can control everything and monopolize all the power bases and run the country OUR way." This is not one of their quotes, it's mine. But it sums up the underlying psychology behind the "plot" to take over America.
The infrastructure Roger build was enabled by ronald reagan, in the last year or so of his Presidency, when the ownership restrictions on media were lifted. Suddenly you were no longer limited as to how much media you could own. Used to be a corporation or owner could only own THREE media properties in any single market. Like one AM, one FM, and one TV outlet, for example. That was all eventually done away with, along with the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time provisions, and regulations (oh, we HATE regulations! Big government and all that. BAAAAD!!!!! Get the gummnnt off our backs!). So suddenly there was a rush of mergers and acquisitions and corporations moving in on the little local Ma & Pa stations, buying them up, building huge networks, and then devising THEIR preferred programming to fill the airwaves on all those stations. How easy would it then be to spread the "Gospel of CONservatism"?
And they did it, and took over the media and thereby took over much of the American mindset. And that eventually led us to the empowerment of the Tea Party and Donald Trump and the destruction of "political correctness." They thought THEIR version was better and was being ignored, so they set about force-feeding it to America by way of a whole new infrastructure they could build because their candidates got elected and got rid of all the regulations that safeguarded the media and prevented this shit from happening. It's kinda like the "restrictions" that super delegates provided. The GOP of course doesn't have any in their primary structure. They hate those damn limitations and restrictions and regulations and crap. They hate being told what to do. So there are no "better angels" or "wiser party elders" or other kinds of "grown ups" who can vote and temper the fevers of the brainwashed masses. No wonder Donald Trump was able to take over! It's like letting the kindergarten class run the whole school from K-12. The spoiled, undisciplined brats who stamp their little feet and yell "NOBODY is the BOSS of ME!" And that's what we've got now, with the CONservative movement. Delivered by the GOP. With hate radio and Pox Noise as the "meat 'n' potatoes," and Donald Trump for "dessert."
Btw - the whole blueprint for all this was written long ago by Lewis Powell, eventually named to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, who wrote what's now known as "The Powell Memo." Aimed at instructing corporate America and other assorted CONservative entities on how to take over the country from the damn liberals and their damn liberal media. Ironically, we're coming up to its 45th anniversary. August 23, 1971.
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
Sorry this is long, but seems to me it's important to connect the dots.
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