Agreed! I read that and came away in a better mood. Sometimes when one feels strongly about something, at least I myself feel hesitant about going with that too vehemently. And I do feel awfully strongly about this. I find I hold that contingent responsible for a lot of the badness that's metastasizing throughout our country.
It's these low-information voters, these willfully ignorant voters - who've been encouraged, conditioned, and reinforced in refusing to believe facts, science, reality, and truth. Some 30+ years of indoctrination starting during the reagan era, when the broadcasting industry started being deregulated, and ownership was allowed to expand, so corporations greedily gobbled up every radio and TV property they could somehow leverage to purchase, to assemble astounding media empires. Then they found the perfect mouthpiece who was trying something different to make a name for himself after a lackluster DJ career, by blathering CON crap at a little station in Sacramento. And they made rush limbaugh a star. And as he gained more success, he was cloned by others wanting in on that action.
He gave A VOICE to the miscreants and Bronze-Age thinkers and racists and others who had been forced to keep their shit locked up in the closet away from polite company, because you really couldn't say stuff like that out in the open, much less be proud of it. He brought all that shit out of the closet and put it on the air from coast-to-coast, so you finally COULD be out and proud about it, and you didn't have to mumble it to yourself in the shadows or keep it to yourself at family get-togethers. Now, it was okay. Now it was respectable. Now it had acceptability. Now it COULD be stated out loud, in public. And you didn't have to hide it or make excuses for it or pretend you didn't believe that stuff. Now you could. And it was okay. And you could share it with others who were emerging from the underbelly because THEY could be out an proud of it, too. And you found that you had many champions - who were not only on the radio and on this terrific cable network called Fox "News" that repeated and further reinforced YOUR views. but also running for office. You had your own world, for Pete's sake!
I think that's how it all started. The OBGYN was Lewis Powell (who would eventually wind up on the Supreme Court - thank you Richard Nixon) who wrote a blueprint for the US Chamber of Commerce for combating what they saw as a serious social, cultural, economic, and policy threat from the Left.
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
The midwife was Ronald Reagan - the actor-turned-corporate-spokesman-turned-politician who rose to the highest height of all and could start implementing the plans - because of his unique ability AS a spokesman, how he could turn a phrase and deliver lines and make it all sound SOOOOOOOOOOO appealing and all-American and apple pie and all that.
And if you can get rid of all the regulations and government restrictions - you can build an infrastructure that delivers and reinforces the message, with impunity, a free open road to drive the rest of us through the unfettered free market greed-jungle straight to Hell.
I'm angry about that. I'm angry about how many patsies they found and exploited. How many of the low-info voters out there are just patsies - used to advance the "greater objective" because by now they're conditioned by this house of mirrors that the far right was able to build, that tells them this shit they've embraced in the closet, but polite society has always discouraged and regarded as something bad, is actually good. And okay. And within YOUR RIGHTS! That's how we got the teabaggers. That's how we got a guy like Donald Trump who says out loud that political correctness is bad and wrong and it's okay to be out 'n' proud against THAT, too. It's OKAY for you to say those nasty racist misogynist jingoistic things because it's okay to think and believe those things. Because those things are actually RIGHT.
That's where we are now. And the voters on the far right and the alt right now have their champion who tells them their anger - and resentment and racism and sexism and hatred and resentment of everybody who doesn't look like them, and their fear that those "Others" are multiplying and taking over "their" America - is okay and understandable and good and right. And justified. And he says he alone can fix all that.
This is where it's led. And this is where these assholes have ALLOWED THEMSELVES to be led. They WANT to believe the lies, because those lies reinforce the bullshit and lies and cockeyed world-view they've believed all along. And I have no respect or sympathy for these assholes. When you WANT to be ill-informed. When you WANT to reject truth because it defies the bubble-world lies you've lived with so comfortably and from which you've been able to remain so well-insulated.
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Note to the people causing the polls to fluctuate: What the fuck is wrong with you? I gotta meet the five percent of people who saw Hillary come down with pneumonia and were like, “Forget her, gimme the dictator with dryer lint hair.”)"
