Gross Racist Image of Obama Used by Wall Street Daily
Breaking News! President Barack Obama ”is more interested in saving the reputation of Islam than he is in saving Christians and Jews from beheadings and mass murder at the hands of ISIS.” Obama has ”allowed ‘lone wolf’ terrorists to penetrate our country” who will “likely attack U.S. military families.” He not only orchestrated “the Benghazi Attacks,” but now “Unleashes Ebola on the U.S.”
It sounds a lot like the work of Floyd Brown, best known for his racist “Willie Horton attack ad” which derailed the Presidential campaign of Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988. Well… Floyd Brown is back! He is now the “Chief Political Analyst” for the Wall Street Daily Web site. In addition to the lurid headlines listed at the top of this article, Brown has produced over 100 dubious articles for Wall Street Daily since March 2013.
Wall Street Daily is part of an extensive right-wing campaign that has cranked up its fear-mongering disinformation engine in the weeks prior to the midterm elections. These conspiracy theories frequently spread Islamophopbia and implicit racism. There is also a whiff of anti-Semitism in stories suggesting the “Illuminati” control America, since in the far right this can be a dog whistle for people who believe in conspiracies controlled by generic “secret elites,” Freemasons, or Jews. (Out past political Pluto, David Icke claims the conspiracy involves shape-shifting Illuminati Zionist reptilians from outer space.)
The more tangible and targeted current anti-Obama propaganda campaign involves an overlapping network of right-wing political operatives, commercial opportunists, and ostensibly nonprofit groups pillorying the President while lambasting liberals and suggesting treacherous and treasonous plots and plans. If this sounds like the “vast right-wing conspiracy” Hillary Clinton complained about in 1998, it should, because some of the same people involved in trying to bring down President Bill Clinton are crafting the anti-Obama campaign that helps mobilize Republican voters.
A memo to the Clinton White House on the right-wing “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce” was dismissed by many at the time as liberal paranoia. The right-wing media ridiculed it. The memo’s thesis, however, reflects a substantial body of research by scholars of social movements and mass communications.
The rest of the article is at the new Dissent NewsWire