What remains free is propaganda

This week’s Michigan COVID data shows the week before this past week dropped from a peak of 7900 new cases per day to just over 5600. This past week’s peak is about 4300, but it will likely be revised. Deaths per day for the middle two weeks of April have been adjusted upward and hit 71 deaths four times. I read through and took notes on the latest episode of Gaslit Nation by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled GOP Death Wish. Kendzior said:

This is a hard time. This is a vulnerable time. This is a time of deep insecurity. Everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop while trying to ignore the boot that's stomping on her neck, which is the threat of autocracy barely defeated in January and that is barely gone underground. We're struggling to end the pandemic while seeing an almost total lack of accountability for some of the most serious crimes in our country's history.

Those include the Capitol attack, election interference, obstruction of justice, abuse of migrants, attempted (and ongoing) destruction of the Postal Service, and worst, the mishandling of and profiteering off the COVID pandemic. There is some flickering that Biden will take these crimes seriously. This lack of accountability is made worse my recent changes in publishing. The nasty guy was bad for America, but great for news media. Now that he is underground, how do these media companies make money? The answer is paywalls. A lot of news sources have added them. One can’t see more than the headline (usually provocative, many times misleading), or worse, a tweet, before paying. Sometimes a screenshot is passed around, but that is taken out of context. That leads to a disinformation crisis. Not just for today’s news, but of our past.

There's that Orwell quote about, "Whoever controls the past controls the future." Well, we're losing access to the past. We have said over and over that Trump and his cohorts' long history of criminality is in the public domain, but that is no longer true. Had we had the current situation with paywalls and so forth in 2016, I'm not sure that Andrea and I would have solved these crimes—which is unfortunately what we've been doing for five years—or been able to predict a lot of Trump's actions, because the context is blocked. You need to pony up for it, you need a lot of money to get it. We do not have that much money.

Because of the state of corporate news many journalists are going independent. But they’re locked out of reading their colleague’s journalism. They can’t afford it. In addition, local news has been gutted. People trusted local news because they knew it. They could examine the news over time to see how it holds up. The pandemic would have played out differently with robust local news. These sources are vital to maintaining democracy. To fight autocracy we need more than information. We need to understand how the media manipulates information so we can decide who to trust. But that’s now unaffordable and inaccessible. An important question is: What remains free?

Well, you've got Fox News, you've got cable TV, you've got all the local stations that have been hijacked by right-wing media corporations. You have Breitbart, you have other right-wing websites, you have White supremacist sites, you have Facebook memes, you have tweets from paid operatives, from paid trolls, you have social media gossip, you have decontextualized pieces of text with no date, no author, just floating all over the place. Disinformation is free and it's filling in the gaps while nearly every other source of information has been paywalled or put out of business.

Chalupa talked about America’s decline, starting with Reagan, his war on the poor, the exploding inequality gap, the gaslighting of trickle down economics.

And now we have all of these billionaires who are trying to out-billionaire each other because money is power, money is information. Money is buying up newspapers and TV networks so you can satisfy your ego. And you don't have to run for office, you don't have to deal with the messiness. You don't have to earn people's votes. You don't have to knock on doors and earn people's trust. You don't have to do community building. You don't have to care about somebody's sick child. You can commit genocide against people you don't like, including the poor because you think their lives mean less than yours. You don't need to do that if you're a billionaire. So that's why we're in a very dangerous situation here in the United States. The poison is homegrown and the poison has been made more potent by hostile actors abroad.

Kendzior said it is incredibly rare for a country to vote out an aspiring autocrat, which we did in November.

And I kind of wonder what went on behind the scenes those last two weeks that actually got him out of office, because that was truly one of the few things to surprise me. However, we're still dealing with the aftermath because this was not about one man. This was about the corrupted institutions who enabled Trump to stay in power, who bended to his will, and who he purged and packed with White supremacists and extremists, and mafiosos, and supplicants, and all horrible people.

About those flickerings of accountability ... The Treasury Department will be implementing sanctions against Russia, even though Treasury has been infiltrated by Russia (happened in 2015, revealed in 2018). But has Treasury been cleansed? Alejandro Mayorkas, Sec. of the Department of Homeland Security (parent to Border Patrol and ICE), has acknowledged domestic violent extremism within DHS. But DHS has always been horrible. It will take time to root it out – committees need to study it first. There have been calls to abolish DHS. But this is only one federal department. And some of their supremacist actions, and some of the infiltration by Russia happened years ago, before the nasty guy era. They’ve been acting with impunity for years. Biden needs to cleanse every federal department and it will take a while – once he gets started. Police (military too) have been infiltrated by white supremacists. Police murders – casual assassinations – happen because there’s no leadership to make it stop. There is a culture of supremacy. There’s no leadership because those in power, such as Christopher Wray at FBI, are also supremacists. Kendzior turned to gun rights and the Supreme Court. For a while, the Court hasn’t accepted gun rights cases because they weren’t sure of five votes. Now they’re sure of six. The case is out of New York, where it is difficult for a person to carry a concealed weapon. They have to demonstrate a need beyond self protection. Kendzior lives in St. Louis, the most violent city in the country. Gun violence is an every day occurrence. She knows she may not make it home alive. Add to the gun volence laws that give immunity to drivers who hit protesters and injure or kill them (I mentioned this yesterday). Kendzior said:

It's a death wish and they want White people to be able to kill with impunity. ... They are trying to legalize and normalize right-wing political murder, and they're trying to make that murder as easy as possible, which is one of the reasons that they want this country so heavily armed. And we’re already heavily armed. Already in 2021, gun sales are through the roof.

Chalupa added that it is frightening that progressive New York can be overruled by justices installed by a Russian mafia asset. Kendzior said the GOP candidate for 2024 doesn’t really matter because the GOP is trying to ensure their guy wins through voter suppression and laws, like in Georgia, that allow them to throw out ballots. So Tucker Carlson of Fox News as the candidate makes sense. Carlson recently said that people should attack children wearing masks. They should call Child Protective Services to take the children away. Carlson’s show is so vile companies won’t advertise during it, so it loses money. Perhaps the show is just a platform to keep him before the base and keep the base riled up. Chalupa added:

Anybody that's studied authoritarianism sees him for what he is: he's a propagandist, he's there for a reason, he's extremely important to the far-right winning back political power in 2022 and 2024. That is Tucker Carlson’s sole purpose. They all know it. They all love him.

Kendzior said:

I'm worried we're about to relive is the Red Summer of 1919. That was the summer after the Spanish flu had finally ended in America and people were allowed to go outside and congregate and be with each other again. And so what happened? Massive, massive White mob violence, targeting Black Americans, targeting immigrants, and this turned into growing anti-immigrant and racist legislation that was passed throughout the 1920s.

For marginalized people this was a deeply traumatic time. Republican voters have been made fearful of Democrats. Can we reestablish trust? One way to do that is to be honest about government failures, such as what the Sackler family did to America through the marketing and sale of opioids. If we aren’t honest about the manipulative vicious elements, we’ll take it out on each other. We are more powerful than we realize. Though we are exhausted and things are tough, we must stay grounded in our own power. Flood the system with empathy. Kendzior had tweeted about what she said about media behind paywalls. Emily Bell, a professor of digital journalism at Columbia, responded:

A long time ago I used to say that paywalls were an ideological issue. I stopped saying it because well, journalism has few alternatives. Collectively tho, we will experience what it means to move to a personalized news environment, the quality of which depends on ability to $$. As we head into a world where free information will be increasingly underwritten and overwritten by commercial and political interests, and the more independent sources will be paid for, this will become a dominant issue.