I have had this idea about the value of accusing someone of being a paid shill for a while now, and Markos’ post on the topic seems like a good time to share it with you.
Short version:
We can fight the messages of Money Talking without attacking the messengers.
Money Talks. Money has bought and controls our media, and is talking to us constantly, whether we are listening or not. Money Talking has learned the lesson of Goebbels:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it…”
It finds a thousand ways to be heard. Money Talking never gets tired, it never gets hoarse. Money shouts. It wants to drown out all other voices. It is hard to follow the thread of honest discussion against the constant din of Money Talking.
It takes a sustained effort to continue to hear the voice of money talking behind all the information we consume. We don’t always succeed. We can’t help unconsciously internalizing the accepted wisdom that Money wants us to believe to be the truth.
For us who call ourselves progressives, this phenomenon is easy to see on the right: We are very conscious of how Fox News, the Koch Brothers etc. brainwash people with ideas we on the left clearly perceive as false. We have antibodies against theocracy, climate change denial, homophobia, the war on women, and other Right ideas.
But Money has messages tailored for us, my friends. Money also feeds us ideas meant to keep our system of inequality intact, to accept the world order. Money talks to us, and it sounds so very reasonable. All of us carry around unexamined viewpoints that Money Talking has told us are true.
Let me give a personal example. I was listening to a news broadcast about the political crisis in Brazil on NPR. I heard about Dilma Roussef’s corruption with having public funds used to remodel her house and her attempt to elevate her predecessor to a ministerial position to shield him from prosecution. Brazil’s congress was moving against a corrupt prime minister. For a few days I accepted this at face value, thinking, oh that’s nice, democracy in action in Brazil. Yay democracy. Boo, corruption.
Then I did some more reading. It turned out that all the politicians wanting to impeach Roussef were at least as corrupt, and that Lula’s and Roussef’s administrations were left-leaning and not making Brazil’s elites or Wall Street happy. Now it made more sense to me.
But for those few days, I had bought unquestioningly into the narrative I had heard on NPR. I would have defended it in discussion. Why shouldn’t I? I don’t know much about Brazil, it was NPR after all and not Fox, and the narrative of democracy vs. corruption was familiar and comforting.
This happens to us all the time. There’s no shame in it. We tend to believe what we hear because it would be too fatiguing to always question everything.
It can go further. We may, through confirmation bias or our own allegiances, passionately believe repeated lies. We may be moved to disseminate these lies as part of our search for affirmation and self-worth. We may be moved to spend time online on this site and elsewhere correcting everyone we consider to be “wrong on the internet” peddling what Money Talking has planted in our brains.
On a deeper level it does not matter one iota whether someone repeating what the 1% want us all to think is a paid shill or not. Accusations of shilling here on DKos are meaningless. What matters is whether someone is repeating the propaganda that the rich and powerful have crafted for the little people’s consumption.
Kos is sensitive to people accusing others of being shills on this site. Fine. It strikes a nerve with him. We don’t need to call people shills to push back against Big Money talking points here. Rather than say, “You’re a paid shill for…(fiil in the blank), we can call out the corporate-promoted lies by saying something like, “You’re saying what (fill in the blank interest) wants us to believe.”
Here is an example: The nuclear power industry would like us to believe that building new nuclear plants is essential to combating global warming. Suppose user CesiumIsYummy comes on DKos and quotes all sorts of “definitive studies” –paid for by nuclear industry groups—trying to show that a carbon-free electrical grid is impossible without more new nuclear power plants. Suppose I happen to passionately believe this is wrong-headed. I can respond by saying “You are saying the same thing as nuclear energy lobby is saying”. I don’t have to say, “The nuclear energy industry must have paid you to say that.” CesiumIsYummy may well be defending nuclear power because she believes in it, or her favorite uncle was a nuclear engineer.
We can fight the messages of Money Talking without attacking the messengers.
Comment Anticipation Section
Anticipated Comment #1: But isn’t saying someone is repeating talking points just another sly way of insinuating they are a shill?
No, it is tracing their beliefs back to their source. It doesn’t matter how people arrived at them or why they are propagating them. It may be insinuating that folks are either duped or brainwashed, which may be a bigger blow to their egos.
Anticipated Comment #2: But what if there really have been paid operatives here on DKos?
Not the topic of this post. This is about how to respond to 1% messaging moving forward. I personally think the possible presence of paid posters on this website, the perception of same, and how it’s been handled is a worthwhile topic, but not one I’d like to get into now, because it will generate more heat than light. Please go ahead and start a separate post and thread to discuss that.
Anticipated Comment #3: But Nuclear.
Nuclear power is an example, not the point of this post. Don’t threadjack please.
Anticipated Comment #4: But Brazil. See #3.
