Good riddance, Confederate flag. Now here’s five more toxic symbols America can do without

Notes & Errata by Mark Morford


Good riddance, Confederate flag. Now here’s five more toxic symbols America can do without

America’s leading merchants have spoken: The Confederate flag is coming off the shelves. Walmart, Amazon, eBay and Sears all announced bans on the sale of Confederate flag merchandise, amid an intensifying national debate over the use of the controversial flag. –CNN







Fox News. Representing: Dumb fear
There’s a reason Fox News, more than any other media entity in modern history, has been the foremost and favoritest target of intelligent media critics and savvy satirists like Jon Stewart for going on two decades: No other news outlet has done more to mock, cheapen and furiously dumb down the American conversation than Roger Ailes’ unstoppable vomitorium of right-wing propaganda.

Fox News’ greatest achievement is also its most despicable: it pioneered modern fear-mongering, leveraging bloviation, false equivalencies, reverse-spin, and plain ol’ lying to Keep America Stupid and scared of everything from gays to Muslims, feminism to gun control, a black president to improved women’s rights. It’s the ‘Sharknado’ of media, the shiv in the gut of intellectual curiosity. Its demise would raise the national IQ 50 points, instantly.



The NRA. Representing: Consecrated violence
A true marvel of despicable messaging. No other group, not even Fox News, can claim the same furiously bleak, anti-human success as Wayne LaPierre and his army of terrified white males in creating/perpetuating what is easily the most destructive, bloodstained lie ever foisted upon a civilized nation.

It is this: The answer to American’s brutal gun problem? The “solution” to more than 30,000 gun deaths per year, ongoing mass shootings almost exclusively at the hands of white males, hundreds of dead children, black congregants massacred in church, dead students, military personnel, wives and congresspersons and moviegoers, on and on, in the only “advanced” country where such a problem exists? The best way to solve America’s lethal gun obsession, according to the NRA?

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http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2015/06/26/five-more-toxic-symbols-america-can-do-without/