Reposted from My Substack
As I have previously written, America is already in the midst of a New Asymmetric Civil War against a new rising Fascist Maga Confederacy which has implemented hundreds of death threats, assaults, dozens of mass murders and terrorist attacks over the last few decades. They would like to argue that these are merely “isolated cases” but as we saw on January 6 - it’s far more than just an isolated few, and they are nearly all inspired by political, racial and gender hatred.
They are deeply deluded, deadly dangerous, racist and violent. Many of them can not be reasoned with, but worst of all - many of them truly believe they are the heroes trying to “Save America.”
Somehow all Racism is the fault of Former President Obama — because he supposedly did something. And it’s truly Obama who is pulling President Biden’s strings because Biden can’t possibily be smart enough to do anything on his own.
This is how MAGAs talk about the Hamas attack on Israel.
Those are his people, surely he wants to give his people time to resupply and regroup” they proclaim about Obama, pushing Biden into a pause in Gaza because he’s really part of the “Muslim Brotherhood.”
That. is. lunacy.
But it gets even more crazy from there.
The Republican flock has indeed been systematically lied to for decades. From Rush Limbaugh to Fox News, the Dailywire, the Blaze, OAN and Newsmax. Globalist Millionaires and Billionaires have been paying their various media shills to argue against Democracy, to help implement tax cuts which have to be paid for by cutting social services. To argue against corporate regulations and requiring businesses to provide safe products to the public without exploitation of workers or environmental damage. They use culture wars and social triggers to rile up anger and resentment, then they exploit that self-righteous anger for their own financial ends.
But this doesn’t just affect older voters, they’ve also gotten their hooks into the young.
Naturally, the MAGA is this argument is absolutely convinced that the 2020 election was “stolen.” It doesn’t matter to him how many courts rejected those claims. It doesn’t matter that Bill Barr’s DOJ investigated every. single. claim. of fraud and found nothing legitimate, it doesn’t matter that Trump’s own Homeland Security declared that 2020 was the “most secure election in history.” It doesn’t matter that a group of 8 prominent Conservatives has fully documented and debunked each and every fraud allegation from 2020 themselves. MAGAs continue to state “They never looked” even though they certainly did.
The Liberal in this discussion correctly lays out the “ballot suitcases” case involving Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman which recently led to a successful Defamation verdict against Rudy Giuliani. Again, the issue was debated in court and the MAGAs lost.
The MAGA doesn’t care. He doesn’t trust Mike Pence. He doesn’t trust Bill Barr. He doesn’t trust anyone who doesn’t say what he wants to hear. When challenged on this - the MAGA is off to the races.
I would say that the institutions that are “upholding our democracy” aren’t upholding our democracy. What we see is a rise of Communism all over the United States. And so… if you go and look at what the Frankfurt School - in Frankfurt - has said, they have 11 main points that they want to be involved in every facet of society.
What we see — uh, I don’t have all 11 points off the top of my head — an uprising of sexual deviance being taught to children. We see that in schools all over the place. I’ve looked at this, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It’s disgusting. In books.
[…]
What we see right now is the indoctrination of Generation Z all over the place. What the DNC has done has spent Millions and Millions of dollars to put into Tic Tok influencers so they can indoctrinate my generation with their lies.
And President Trump is one of the greatest President’s of all time. If he gets behind this Generation Z movement, if he does something about it and helps us get involved, it’s going to change the trajectory of our country, because if we don’t have Generation Z voting for President Trump we’re going to lose our country.
So much delusion, so little time.
I frankly would absolutely love to be able to collect a DNC check to be an influencer. Sign me up for that. Where can I get some of that sweet sweet George Soros money?
But alas, this is merely more Conservative projection. They imagine that somebody has to be behind the curtain pulling the strings. [Obama? Hillary? The Stay-Puffed Marshmallow Man?] Somebody has to be setting up the game plan [Like the Heritage Foundation] and somebody has to be writing the scripts [Like ALEC]. I’ve been directly involved with Democrats and the Democratic party for years and I can say one thing decisively. Nobody is doing that for them.
The closest thing to that idea by Democrats in recent years was the Indivisible Project, and they were working in the shadows - they were pretty upfront about what they were doing.
Indivisible creates individual groups around that nation that organize and provide training and strategies for grassroots action. They have plans for Campaign Finance support, DEI resources, organizing virtual Town Halls, Fighting Gerrymandering, Phone Banking, Racial Justice Allyship and so on.
They have lots of resources, but really all the work has to be done by individuals. They have to fund themselves, they have to organize themselves, they have to take the situation in their own hands. There isn’t a coordinated strategy using all these combined resources to accomplish a goal. Any goal. Everyone is on their own.
Compare that to Moms For Liberty which seems to have blown up almost instantaneously around the nation, and who are funded by Right-Wing Billionaires and Right-Wing media.
Moms for Liberty (M4L) claims the organization was started by moms.
But it is hard to believe that three mothers in Florida could start up a grassroots group on January 1, 2021, and then, within a matter of weeks and months, wind up on Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson’s show, Glenn Beck, and Fox News. However, there is a shadowy network of money and influence in right-wing political circles that could arrange that easily.
[…]
Moms for Liberty was inaugurated on January 1, 2021, and filed as an Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation—a “social welfare” group structure that allows it substantial leeway to participate in politics, including taking unlimited sums of dark money and dispensing those dollars in support of favored candidates.
Among M4L’s financial supporters and profile boosters are some of the most influential organizations, media operations, and wealthy donors in the vast theater of the right-wing propaganda machine.
M4L was born into a full-scale right-wing media rollout. As Olivia Little of Media Matters reported in July 2022, M4L debuted on The Rush Limbaugh Show in January 2021—right out of the cradle. M4L representatives have since appeared “on Fox News at least 16 times and Steve Bannon’s War Room at least 14 times,” according to Little. As her reporting and my own investigation in April 2021 indicated, M4L initially had practically no members or state infrastructure. But appearances on Fox and fawning treatment in right-wing outlets like Breitbart News and Glenn Beck propelled its growth.
By June 11, 2021, M4L threw a fundraiser called “Fearless: An Evening with Megyn Kelly,” the former Fox News celebrity. The highest-priced ticket of $20,000 for the “presenting sponsor” included 20 tickets to a meet-and-greet along with a photo with Megyn Kelly and came with many other benefits. There were other offers that included lesser benefits for donors making contributions of $15,000 or $10,000 and the general admission was $50.
And then you have hate influencers like Libs of TikTok which is sponsored by a Juno Beach Billionaire.
JUNO BEACH – A Juno Beach millionaire is sponsoring a social-media agitator who lobs pedophilia insinuations against LGBTQ people and their supporters.
Seth Michael Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee "satire" website, said he has a "deal" with Chaya Raichik, owner of a Twitter account who claims gay and transgender people “groom” children to accept sexual abuse from adults.
Raichik, a real estate saleswoman working in Brooklyn, runs the Twitter account "Libs of TikTok." She shares videos that LGBTQ people or their supporters upload to the social media platform TikTok. Some of Raichik's 1.1 million followers then harass the targets and send them death threats.
The most frequent victims of the ensuing online abuse are teachers who support, advise and counsel LGBTQ students and their clubs. And, sometimes, their employers, too.
Dillon's move comes amid Florida Republicans' crackdown on classroom discussions of LGBTQ issues while some national GOP officials and conservative media personalities across the nation accuse opponents of such policies of being pedophiles or condoning child sexual abuse.
So it’s not the DNC funding influencers on TikTok, it’s a Florida Billionaire funding Chaya Raichik. Just like the Fracking Billionaires who fund the PragerU and the Dailywire.
Two billionaire Texas brothers whose fortunes derive from oil and gas fracking have pumped millions of dollars into rightwing media outfits that have promoted climate-crisis denialism and sent more big checks to back an array of evangelical projects and conservative Texas politicians.
The fracking billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks have each doled out millions of dollars through separate foundations over the last decade to a number of high-profile conservative and religious groups including the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.
[…] The Wilks brothers, for instance, have poured millions of dollars into PragerU and the Daily Wire, two rightwing media outlets that have promoted wide-ranging conservative agendas, including climate crisis denialism to school-age kids and adults via short videos, articles and other materials.
The two brothers have given at least $8m to PragerU, which is unaccredited, according to Texas financial records. In July, Florida approved the use of what PragerU has called its “edutainment” videos and other materials for use in its classrooms, and PragerU has said it is trying to get other states, including Texas, to do likewise.
On top of that, there are fracking billionaires like the Wilks brothers pushing their agenda of Christian Nationalism and against Climate Change through the Dailywire — which funds people like Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh and Candace Owens — and PragerU which strategically lies to kids.
It’s not the case that people on the right have come to their particular views entirely on their own. It’s not the case that so many of them just individually decided that they believe the 2020 election was stolen, or they just randomly believe that children are being indoctrinated in sexual deviancy and racial radicalism. They have been handed those ideas by others. Other people are being paid handsomely to push these ideas onto them. Some of it is even Russian propaganda straight from RT and Sputnik being repeated by Right-wing media.
LONDON (Reuters) - The Russian group accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. election has posed as an independent news outlet to target right-wing social media users ahead of this year's vote, two people familiar with an FBI probe into the activity told Reuters.
The latest operation centred around a pseudo media organisation called the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens (NAEBC), which was run by people associated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, the sources said.
U.S. prosecutors say the agency played a key role in Russian efforts to sway the 2016 election in favour of President Donald Trump, and Facebook and Twitter exposed a fake left-wing media outlet in September which they said was run by people connected to the organisation.
NAEBC and its activity, which have not been previously reported, now show that Russian attempts to influence U.S. voters ahead of the 2020 election have targeted both sides of the political divide.
The website predominantly focused on U.S. politics and current events, republishing articles from conservative media and paying real Americans to write about politically-sensitive issues. A network of accounts posing as editors and journalists then promoted the articles on social media sites favoured by right-wing users.
Topics covered by NAEBC ranged from attacks on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement and praise for Wisconsin shooter Kyle Rittenhouse.
It’s reached the point that Trump can now openly talk about eliminating the ‘vermin” that oppose him, and his flock takes that language as being perfectly reasonable. They’ve been slowly strategically indoctrinated to the point that it doesn’t phase them at all.
NBC News correspondent Vaughn Hillyard claimed that the idea of "revenge" has trickled down from Donald Trump to his supporters. When he interviews the MAGA fans, they are all-in on the campaign of vengeance and they love the rage he is throwing toward Democrats.
Propaganda and authoritarian expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained that one thing she and others have said for "a long time is that Trump is superb at propaganda." She said that thus far he has educated Americans on his kind of "leadership" and convinced many that it's positive.
"Now with Sean Hannity, he is a propagandist who asked him the question in the first place about, you know, are you going to be a dictator, that allowed Trump to raise the dictator theme," she said. "And now it's become his thing. I would add that he talks about rooting out the radical left and communists, but many of the leaders he's been pushing and peddling to Americans as the right kind of leader are communists, like Xi Jinping, who he's always talking about how great he is, or the leader of North Korea."
Ben-Ghiat continued, saying that "at the most basic, authoritarianism is when the executive branch overwhelms and politicizes the other sides of the government so the leader is unrestrained. He can do whatever he wants. And this is of course Donald Trump's fantasy."
MAGA is not an honest grassroots movement. It’s a long-term psychological operation implemented by modern-day Robber Barons, modern-day Slavers, intended to protect and burnish their corporate empires. They are strategically proselytizing people to advocate against not just their own self-interest, but the interests of everyone else. They create cultural enemies, they argue that those enemies are out to get them, and they must defend themselves against the onslaught.
They convince them of their victimhood and rile them up to strike back in every way that they can. They don’t have to tell them how - they can figure that out on their own, [death threats, bomb threats, actual violent attacks] and it’s best not to be specific as that can lead to being potentially held accountable and liable for the chaos that will ensue.
The issue — which has challenged me for years now — is how do we respond to all this? How do we fight against it?
Well, there are the strategies used by Indivisible. Organize. Educate. Advocate. That may be a good start, but to me it seems ineffective and unsatisfying. Maybe that’s just me, I rather be more intimately involved in the ideological battle.
I’d rather take the fight right to the source and confront the misinformation directly.
It would be sweet if someone was shoveling buckets of money our way to promote progressive values but that simply isn’t the case, and despite all the whining from the right, the mainstream media is not. in. our. corner.
I did reach out to my friend G2geek, who is the person who originally coined the term “Stochastic Terrorism” so I figure he has some opinion on this issue. He said this:
Realistically everything hinges on the elections. If we win, there will be sporadic violent reaction but it will diminish quickly with successful prosecutions. If we lose, it will be truly apocalyptic.
So the most important thing is to win elections, and the most important steps for almost everyone are election-related activism: anything GOTV, canvassing, new voter registration, phone calls, postcards, recurring donations. For people with relevant skills, intel, media, fundraising, and legal.
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Right now also, in practically every comment I post, I'm urging fellow DKers to a) get into the elections activism and b) also post their own comments urging others to get in the activism. Goal: create a social environment that encourages everyone who spends more than five minutes a day on the site, to sign up to do any sort of GOTV they can do.
My Plan A is, we do everything possible and we win elections. I'm 100% committed to that, and there is no Plan B for losing. Failure is not an option.
That seems to make sense. Elections are where the rubber meets the road. I’ve come to accept that most MAGAs are beyond our reach, but it may not be all of them. We might not be able to convince someone hardcore to vote our way, or even agree with us on anything, but what about someone who leans more independent? Someone undecided? Someone in the middle?
The MAGAs have their strategic narratives in place, all people have to do is rinse and repeat them. Biden is doddering fool. Inflation is bad. The economy is collapsing. Immigration is out of control and the borders are open. Our children are being indoctrinated. Trump was the greatest President ever.
They don’t have to do a lot of work, they have all of Right-wing media behind these narratives and mainstream media doesn’t do much to counter them. Although there are sometimes exceptions such as Chris Hayes.
So I’ve taken some action on my own. I’ve been writing articles that specifically address the claims and myths created by MAGAs. Each one contains specific examples that debunk their false narratives and can be used to potentially sway someone on the edge, someone in the middle. I’ve collected those articles into their own group called “Busting MAGA Myths.”
So far I’ve addressed the following issues:
Within these articles are literally hundreds of fact and evidence-based talking points that can be used to defeat MAGA narratives and talking points. This is a toolkit that can be deployed in conjunction with the tactics of Indivisible or the GOTV that G2geek advocates. These ideas, and more, can be simplified into memes then spread across social media to present a counter-balance to the Right-wing MAGA narratives. None of these are likely to work on a Hardcore MAGA, but they just might be enough to push an independent away from the Trump/GOP message but allowing them to see that their is another legitimate view.
The Southern Border is NOT Open — the Biden Admin has arrested and expelled over 4 Million migrants. High gas prices are not Biden’s fault - Trump blackmailed the Saudis into cutting production and the oil companies have been price gouging ever since. Crime is not out of control in “Democrat cities” — it’s been decreasing and is much worse in Red States. Biden didn’t cut domestic oil production and the U.S. is currently both energy-independent and the greatest oil-producing country in the world. Joe Biden has actually been one of the most effective Presidents since FDR and Donald Trump certainly wasn’t. Trump didn’t distribute the COVID vaccine, Biden did. Trump didn’t have the lowest rate of unemployment ever - Biden did (at 3.4%) and has kept it below 4% for the longest period since 1969. Trump had the worse economic growth since Herbert Hoover. Yes, Trump incited a violent insurrection against his own government as he used fake electors to try and steal the 2020 election. He’s also a liar, a cheat, a thief, a racist and a Nazi. Under Biden and the American Rescue Act, we had the fastest economic recovery in history. Inflation has come down from 9% last year and may be as low as 2% next year - all on Biden’s watch and as a result of Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the Inflation Reduction Act.
[If you'd like to join the Busting Maga Myths group and submit articles to it, just let me know in the comments.]
There have been mistakes and blunders by Biden - we have to be honest enough to admit that, things did go south in Afghanistan, things are pretty dire in Gaza - but on the whole, his administration has accomplished many things that we Democrats didn’t even think were possible.
It’s fairly guaranteed, using his own words, that Trump will implement horrific authoritarian fascist policies that will be beyond belief.
We have to stay focused on that truth, and we have to be convincing as we do it.
These are a few ideas - we need to come up with more. Much more.