1932 — Coda (1)

This next is from a… well, I won’t call it a debate because for a debate to occur both sides must be using facts and the other side wasn’t… Let’s call it a conversation I was having on facebook. — GT

The victory of FOX NEWS is not that they added a needed conservative viewpoint to a liberal-dominated news media. That is their marketing spin.

The news media has been entirely corporate-focused since the late 1970s. That view does not sway towards liberalism but towards commerce.

No. The success of FOX NEWS is, by presenting what is actually a one-sided editorial viewpoint as fact, as “news,” often in lieu of the facts or in direct opposition to the facts, they have created a climate where ALL news is reduced in the minds of the public to “just someone’s opinion.”

This allows people to ignore the facts they don’t like, not examine the ones they do and generally have whatever they already beleved be re-enforced by an “objective expert” who feeds them happy fictions that are shaped and go down like facts.

This is the climate that allows for Trump. It is precisely why we have no chance to get clear of this disaster, this national suicide.

Too many people do not believe there’s such a thing as a fact.

I used to believe a slim majority of us were basically decent, basically taking a live-and-let-live attitude about life in the USA. I did not factor in the deep and abiding stupidity coupled with the strong (and intentionally fanned by the GOP and others) flames of bigotry that never really went anywhere after 1965.

These poor, terrified people voted their own executioner into the presidency and they can’t see past their fear to understand it yet.

They will. Some of them will just put on the armbands and march in time with the rest of the goose-steppers. SOME, far fewer I think, will be crushed by the regret for what they’ve done.

I can’t find it in my heart to pity them but I do understand their dilemma. It’s not ENTIRELY their fault. Cynical people tricked them by pushing their ugliest buttons in order to maintain power.

But the buttons were there to push and they have to own that.

The United States died on November 8th, 2016.

But, like all dinosaurs, it will take some time for the news to reach its brain.

By then it will be far far too late.