Active Measures

Editor's Note: unfortunately I've spent the past couple of days laboring under some sort of cold and fever combination that has greatly restricted my ability to get any real work done. As a result I'm going to keep this loose and informal; in the meantime please forgive me if I'm not at my best for the next couple of days. 

A few months ago on my Patreon Blog, I wrote an essay entitled "Lying Without Lying: the Manipulation of Framing, Context & Depth in Corporate Media" that likely would have appeared here on Media Madness instead, if this blog had existed at the time I wrote it.

In that essay I discussed three of the most common techniques used by propagandists in the mainstream, corporate media to sculpt public opinion surrounding ongoing stories, issues or events - the third of which was depth or repetition. At the time I really didn't spend a lot of time covering the media's use of depth to manipulate opinions because the concept in and of itself is simple to the point of obviousness; namely that the public is naturally going to remember and be more cognizant of or more concerned about, the stories the media covers most often and over the longest period of time.

Although there is clearly some nuance involved when it comes to determining depth of coverage, the easiest way to quantify this depth is to measure minutes of discussion on mainstream networks and the number of articles printed in the corporate press - as was famously done in "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" by Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Herman. Sometimes however, when the mass media coverage of an issue is so clearly blown out of proportion, no stopwatch is necessary - examples might include endless reactionary prattle about the fight against "political correctness" or thousands of hours worth of coverage promoting the "evidence" that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction" and thus the 2003 US invasion of Iraq was justified. 

This of course calls to mind the mother of all modern "over-saturated" news events, Russiagate; or more specifically the Doctor Strangelove-esque theory that Bolshevik Twitter trolls and Russian Facebook memes of dubious quality somehow altered the results of the 2016 US Election in favor of (now) swine emperor Trump. Please note that I'm not particularly interested in getting bogged down in the minutiae of the Russiagate scandal at this moment (my opinions on the whole situation haven't changed much since I wrote this article in December 2017) - what's important to acknowledge here is simply the sheer volume of media coverage about the supposed threat to American democracy presented by Russian "active measures" that apparently consist of shitposting on Twitter, Facebook memes and possibly publishing/reporting on unaltered emails. I don't think I exaggerating in the slightest when I say that literally thousands upon thousands of hours worth of coverage has been devoted to an event that nobody can prove changed a single vote in either the 2016, or the 2018 US elections.

As you may have gathered, I'm rather skeptical of the threat Russia actually posses to Pig Empire democracy (such as it is) - but even if I weren't, the truly mind-numbing proportions of the mainstream media's endless "Russiagate" coverage would naturally lead me to believe that at the very least, our corporate media cares about perceived threats to American democracy, right? Not so fast sparky; let's look at a breaking story that absolutely should be all over your TV screen right now but almost certainly isn't:

Republicans Plan to Rig Elections for a Decade

The above article is a lengthy, nuanced and extremely informative piece of analysis and in light of the generally sparse, vapidly sensationalist and out of context coverage this incredibly important story is getting, I think it's only fair to give The New Republic some credit for printing Alex Shephard's piece as is. Let's summarize the most important parts of this story:

"The New York Times reported on Thursday that the estranged daughter of Thomas Hofeller, the GOP operative who had “achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering,” had discovered some hard drives. Those hard drives—left in storage when Thomas died last year—revealed that Hofeller played a central role in the Trump administration’s decision to push for the citizenship question on the census. Why? No need to guess—Hofeller recorded it for posterity (or some other reason he took to the grave): Doing so “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.” 

This is quite frankly, mind-blowing stuff. As someone who has written about racialized voter suppression in the past, I doubt most informed observers will find it surprising that the GOP is purposely attacking minority voting rights to ensure election victories - but it is truly rare indeed to catch a Republican operative straight up admitting it. Rare however, is not unheard of and astute readers may recall North Carolina based GOP consultant Carter Wrenn letting the cat out of the bag in 2016 when he attempted to defend voter suppression techniques that disproportionately targeted African Americans in the Tar Heel State:

“Of course it’s political. Why else would you do it?” he said, explaining that Republicans, like any political party, want to protect their majority. While GOP lawmakers might have passed the law to suppress some voters, Wrenn said, that does not mean it was racist.

“Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was,” Wrenn said. “It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.”

Returning to the Shephard article, the piece goes on to explain how these revelations may (or may not) impact the already rotten legal case to ram through the (as we can now confirm) objectively racist "citizenship question" in the upcoming US census - the added emphasis is mine: 

"As the Times and others have revealed, the DOJ’s demonstrably false contention that a citizenship question is necessary to defend the integrity of the Voting Rights Act is first diagrammed in Hofeller’s files. In some places, the arguments that were made by the Department of Commerce (the agency that oversees the Census) are lifted, almost verbatim, from Hofeller’s writings.

The implications are profound even beyond the Commerce case and the citizenship question, which many fear is all but certain to appear on the 2020 census. If there had been any doubt, the Hofeller bombshell rips away any veneer of respectability from conservative arguments, revealing, once and for all, the partisan, racist underpinnings of GOP assaults on voting rights. 

Of course, it had been abundantly clear the Trump administration was lying about its justification to include the citizenship question for some time. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Congress that he included the question at the behest of the Department of Justice. But Ross’s own emails later revealed it to be the other way around—the Commerce Secretary was pushing for the citizenship questions nearly a year before DOJ took it up. It was Ross and his allies in Commerce that directed the Department of Justice on the question. The administration also argued before the Supreme Court that the citizenship question would help protect Hispanic voters; Hofeller’s emails reveal that the citizenship question was designed to disenfranchise them.

There is nothing to the contention that the added census question was inserted to help more minorities vote—the intention is and always was to suppress their ability to participate. Republicans have long feared a “demographic time bomb,” one that would outpace their traditional white constituencies. Rather than find ways to entice those growing populations—with, for example, attractive policy positions—the GOP has doubled down on excluding them from the electorate. Lowering the number of Latinx people counted by the census would aid Republican efforts to gerrymander away just representation for this growing population. That would allow for another decade of over-representation of non-Hispanic whites, who are, presumably, mostly by Republicans. This isn’t a post-facto analysis—Hofeller wrote it all down in advance."

While I unfortunately also share Shephard's pessimism that any of this information will influence a right wing extremist Supreme Court's decision in Department of Commerce v. New York it's still safe to say that the Hofeller leaks have the potential to create a catastrophic political (and potentially legal) scandal for the Trump Administration, corrupt shit-gremlin Wilbur Ross Jr. and the North Carolina GOP; if the story is given the proper level of attention and context:

"But even if it doesn’t influence the outcome in Commerce, the trove from Hofeller’s storage locker is still crucial evidence in the case against racist gerrymandering and other efforts aimed at explicitly reducing minority representation and participation. And in the case against Republican lies used in those efforts’ defense. When the GOP rails about “election integrity” and “voter fraud,” what they’re really talking about is suppressing votes—the absurd, process-driven arguments used to defend gerrymandered districts in states like Ohio, North Carolina, and Michigan, notwithstanding. Republicans might win on the citizenship question and other court challenges—and so they will continue to claim that their maps pass constitutional muster—but Hofeller was the cartographer on many of these maps, and the architect of many of the strategies used to make and defend them. And it is the materials found in Hofeller’s locker that now show everyone what’s really going on."

It's important to understand that while the ongoing process of stacking the American judiciary with reactionary candidates hand-picked by the Federalist Society makes this a political struggle by necessity, this story goes far beyond mere politics. This is ultimately a story about civil rights, racial discrimination that should be illegal and the fundamental democratic rights of every non-Republican in America. As numerous studies and recent election results have so aptly demonstrated, racialized voter suppression works - we're talking about blatantly rigging elections all across the United States; this is a very real threat to American democracy. 

And therein of course lies the rub; as anyone who has been clicking on the links I've provided in this story can see, I'm hardly suggesting that US corporate media hasn't covered the Hofeller leak story. The underlying problem however is that the press has treated the issue as a largely Trump-based political contest to be decided by the Supreme Court, instead of what it really is - a slow-moving fascist takeover of the nation's political process that demands vigorous opposition from every level of our society. Racialized GOP voter suppression represents an existential threat to American democracy, while Russian social media activity does not - and yet, if you were to judge these two stories based solely on the depth and context provided by corporate media coverage of each issue, you'd be forced to assume the exact opposite.   

Sadly, once you peel back the illusion of Amerikkka's two party system and examine the motivations of a mainstream media at once dominated by capital and actively interested in promoting highly-profitable (for some) Pig Empire imperialism, it's not all that hard to guess why. As I and many others have written in the past, the Russia part of "Russiagate" has been a smashing success for the elite "liberal" establishment in America. From manufacturing consent for a lucrative New Cold War, to suppressing an a growing left wing insurgency and most importantly, ensuring that nobody who punted a winnable election to a reality TV show rapist suffered any real consequences for gift-wrapping the White House for a fascist - the new Red Scare has definitely delivered.

Conversely, while racialized (and economic) voter suppression hurts the Democratic Party as a whole, it is a wound disproportionately borne by grassroots, left wing and minority candidates as opposed to the elite neoliberal leadership of the party. Indeed, corporate-friendly establishment Democrats have even been known to engage in a little targeted voter suppression of their own, to ensure the continued success of "moderate liberals" favored by the party's donor class. Of course, it would be absurd to suggest the entire Democratic Party is a monolith; there are many party members in Congress that recognize the vital importance of fighting GOP voter suppression, but with only lukewarm support from the mainstream media, a stacked reactionary Supreme Court, an obstructionist Republican Senate and the quiet opposition of the party's elite donors, prospects for success remain dim.

What (if anything) is To Be Done?

 

Before we can plot a course to the future, it is important to be completely honest with ourselves about where we stand today across the Pig Empire. We are observing the terrifying global rise of an Americanized brand of modern fascism that has been facilitated by decades, if not centuries of reactionary ideas, policies and abuses promoted by elite capital, the mainstream media establishment and the Western ruling class.

In the United States, this movement has taken the form of an unholy alliance between reactionary billionaire families, Wall Street criminals, lobbyists, the fossil fuel industry, wealthy Christian fundamentalists, the Republican Party, right wing media, opportunistic political grifters, hatemongers and various nationalist street gang style organizations. U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration are at once both a natural byproduct of this reactionary fascist movement and also a catalyst for a transformative shift from poorly concealed hyper-capitalist police states posing as liberal democracies, to overt fascist oligarchies here in the West.

Our society has largely stood by as our corrupt institutions, unenforceable political norms and compromised regulatory bodies have fallen to the reactionary right one by one, in country after country throughout the entire Pig Empire. Finally, even as you read this significant if not overwhelming portions of our ruling aristocracy, mainstream media and corporate class are happily punching left and silencing dissent while openly collaborating with and normalizing fascists for personal gain.

In other words, our time to react has grown short and the situation is alarmingly bleak. 

When do we as a society say that this has gone on long enough? How far into delusion, depravity and death must we descend before it becomes reasonable to demand coordinated opposition from our leaders, elitist media intellectuals and those who claim to defend democracy?

What was it that finally made you decide that you could tolerate no more of this naked malice, greed and inhumanity? Was it the criminality, corruption and contempt for the law? Was it the bald-faced racism? Was it the creation of a white nationalist government, the swine emperor's open embrace of violent reactionary thugs or the growing number of innocent people murdered by neo-nazis the Amerikkkan Injustice Department no longer bothers to monitor? Was it trading arms sales for support of a genocidal client-state dictatorship lead by a man who we know ordered the murder of a Washington Post journalist in cold blood? Was it the Republican Party's war on women, the LGBT community and non-white minorities? Was it the Klepto Kaiser's scorched earth assault on freedom of the press, the DoJ's unlawful crackdown on political dissent or the Supreme Court's blessing for authorities to harass activists and protesters? Was it when you realized the president is probably a rapist? Was it the way the system bent over backwards to protect billionaire pre-teen rapist Jeff Epstein? Was it when you noticed that these cracker reactionaries were trying to get a couple of Muslim freshmen Congresswomen murdered? Was it the habitual lying, the virulent Islamophobia or perhaps the open nepotism? Was it when the Trump administration decided to help Israel starve Palestinian refugees out of existence? Was it the concentration camps, the stolen brown babies and the growing number of imprisoned migrants our government has murdered? Was it the potential destruction of all life on this planet? Was it when Trump's imperialist cronies started maneuvering America towards up to three wars all at once? Was it halfway through this article when you realized voting the fascists out might soon be impossible? Or was it some other monstrous atrocity the people around you have already forgotten as we all fall further under the yoke of reactionary tyranny? 

With injustice manufactured by a corrupt executive branch and sanctified by a partisan judiciary, what is clearly needed now is a broad-based protest movement to occupy the places of government, to take the battle to the court of public opinion, and if necessary the streets. Politicians, the judiciary and the pro-corporate American establishment must be pressured at all times to help fight the reactionary far-right takeover, and if they will not do so then they must be replaced with those who will. We must create a unity of action, not one of feckless civility and meek acquiescence to the rising tide of overt fascism. It is time to start forcing those who would collaborate with white supremacists, mass murderers and thieves to suffer material consequences for their monstrous betrayal of the public trust; for far too long, inaction from those who should be opposing Downmarket Mussolini and the Buckley Bunch with every fiber of their being, has served to provide legitimacy for this fundie fascist regime. It is time to name the revanchist, elitist beast that dwells inside the both the American "right" and significant portions of the elite "liberal" establishment; it is time to publicly disown, disempower and destroy those who would lay down with fascism for personal gain.
  
The fight against the fascist creep must be undertaken on all levels; in the legislature with impeachment proceedings and contempt referrals, in the courts by lawyers or judges who still believe in civil rights and the supremacy of law, and in the streets by everyday people who do not intend to slip quietly into the Pork Reich simply because five respectable crypto-fascists in funny robes say so. The forces that were assembled to fight Herr Donald's travel ban, oppose the GOP's plans to cancel the Affordable Care Act and the combined Trump inauguration protests, must be reformed and set to the task of fighting not Russian collusion and dank memes, but instead the reactionary Republican (and neoliberal) assault on what few precious democratic rights we have remaining. 

In short, we need a real resistance - not just against swine emperor Trump, but also this entire Pig Empire-wide modernized fascist movement and the mainstream establishment elements of our society who collaborate with and provide succor to the fascist cause, for prestige, profit and power. It is time to accept that the cavalry is not coming to save us. We the people are the resistance against reactionary ethno-nationalism and if our ruling classes, media establishment and elected officials won't help us fight literal goddamn fascists, then they have abdicated the mantle of leadership and they too must go.

I don't know about you gentle reader, but I for one have no desire to explain to my grandchildren that we let fanatical fascists murder the planet primarily to preserve the bipartisan sanctity of Manhattan Island dinner parties and Beltway working brunches.

Which side are you on my friends?


- Nina Illingworth


 
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

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