Things have been a bit irregular the last 2-3 days; my new CPAP machine acted up, and then, when I wanted to try it out (after APRIA looked at it), I fell asleep before putting it on.
Anyway......
Today (Saturday night) I just finished listening to a Thom Hartmann podcast titled How the GOP has become America's Ministry of Propaganda. He lists several ways, and I would like to transcribe the podcast (about 16 minutes long), internalize his points, and then share them with my family & friends who are declared GOP/Republican/Conservatives/Trumpists. So here goes:
"Donald Trump has been lying to us ever since he came down that escalator. He just never stops lying, because as a life-long con man, it's basically all he knows how to do. He's still insisting he won the 2020 election, despite having lost by about 7 million votes, and being wiped out in the Electoral College.
"He lied in the State of the Union about having a mandate to cut Medicaid, as Congressman Al Green pointed out, along with a hundred other lies he told that day. And now he's lying about his trade deals with the UK, and other governments. Every single day he's adding to the pile of lies he's inflicting on the American people, and the world.
"Science, it turns out, explains why this works for him. Not the science of elections, but the science of Propaganda. New findings by some psychologists at universities in California and Georgia, published in the Journal of Cognitive Research, point out that the more often a statement, regardless of its truthfulness, is repeated, the more emphatically it's believed. Researchers noted,
Repeated information is often perceived as more truthful than new information. This finding is known as the Illusory Truth Effect, and is typically thought to occur because repetition increases processing fluency. And because fluency and truth are frequently correlated in the real world, people learn to use processing fluency as a marker for truthfulness.
While modern science is affirming this truism, it's been in use for a long time. In the past century, for example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called out in his days Republicans for using what we today call "the big lie" around several issues. Running for re-election in 1944, he said,
The opposition in this year has already imported in this campaign a very interesting thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique, invented by the dictators abroad. Remember a number of years ago there was a book "Mein Kampf" written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler's book, and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan. According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for it's very fantastic nature would make it more credible, if only you keep repeating it over, and over, and over again.
Back then, Republicans were lying that Democrats had caused the Republican Great Depression, as it was called until the 1950s, and that FDR had failed to adequately prepare America for war with Germany or Japan, while Republican after Republican took to the floor of Congress to tell us before the war that "we can do business with Hitler."
Now Trump's lies, like about the election, immigrants, and what Musk is up to, are parroted daily by Republican politicians, and usually echoed in the media without push-back. After all, Trump reportedly slept with a collection of Hitler's speeches by his bedside. He would be fluent in Hitler's big lie strategy.
Besides the addition of Trump's lies, Republican's lies haven't changed a lot since FDR's era, although they're more focused and now repeated daily by thousands of right-wing websites, bloggers, podcasts, Fox so-called news, and talk radio shows.
Over the past 40 years, Republican billionaires have built an extraordinary nationwide media propaganda machine. Their goal was directed toward justifying tax cuts for the morbidly rich and the de-regulation of polluting industries. But now it's been taken over by Trump acolytes, promoting among other lies, the idea that Democrats torture children and drink their blood. The useful idiots in this scheme have been the American corporate billionaire-owned media who dutifully echo and leave unchallenged the GOP's regular lies.
One of the Republican's most egregious lies, that America is evenly split, 50-50, between Republicans and Democrats, and on the issues of the day, is constantly repeated on the political Sunday shows, always without a single word of push-back from the show's host.
While the Senate may be split more or less 50-50, Democrats in the Senate represent over 40 million more Americans than do Republicans. And on issues like tax cuts for billionaires, the right to unionize, access to medicare or medicaid, climate change, the right to abortion, privatizing social security, drug prices, medicaid expansion, and the minimum wage, Americans are overwhelmingly on the side of the Democrats.
So how did so many Americans end up believing the many lies that are daily pushed by the GOP? In a word: REPETITION, just like the science shows works. Here are a few of their greatest hits, with each followed by my rebuttal:
- Tax cuts produce prosperity. In a remarkable study published by the London School of Economics, looking at 18 wealthy OECD (?) countries over 50 years, the researchers discovered unambiguously, "We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality, as measured by the top 1% of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment." In other words, tax cuts for the rich make the rich richer, and throw the nation into debt, but otherwise have no measurable effect on the economy. Ever since Reagan, the Republicans have been assuring us that if we'd just give more money to the job creators, they'll use it to open new factories and raise wages. In fact, the morbidly rich simply put that extra money into their off-shore accounts and money bins. In fact, in the 44 years since Reagan first started the practice of massive Republican tax cuts for the richest Americans, there's been a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from America's working class into the money bins of our morbidly rich. The idea that tax cuts for the rich and corporations would produce prosperity was a lie from the beginning, and still is. The Republicans are still repeating it after nearly 50 years of disastrous experience with neo-liberal Reaganomics.
- Here's another one: Immigrants bring crime. In fact, immigrants, legal and undocumented, are less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. After all, who wants to be deported or blow up their chances of becoming a citizen of the country they've taken such huge, and often deadly, chances to reach? And the statistics aren't even close. In a massive study, funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Justice, published by the University of Wisconsin at Madison, scientists discovered American citizens are 200%-400% more likely to commit violent felonies against persons, drug crimes, and felony property crimes than immigrants, regardless of their immigration status. But that won't stop right-wing media from hyping every exception to the rule when an immigrant is caught committing a crime. After all, lies are the chlorine (?) of their realm.
- Here's another one: Increasing the minimum wage worsens inflation. Minimum wage was established in 1938, and has been raised 22 times. If there had ever been, in all that time, even one single year when inflation increases could be tied to increases in the minimum wage, every Republican in America would have the year memorized. "You don't want to happen what happened in 1958 to ever happen again!" they'd warn us while wagging fingers in our faces. Except that there's not even one single example of an increase in minimum wage causing an increase in inflation, which is why they never cite a single statistic or a year. When researchers tried to seriously dig into the topic, they found that a massive 10% increase in the minimum wage, may have as much as a 1/10th of 1% (or 10 cents on a $100 product) impact on inflation. But that's never been recorded in American history. Wages simply aren't that large a part of the price of most goods and even most services.
- Here's another lie: Union bosses are bleeding workers dry. This is a favorite of the multi-billion dollar union-busting industry to roll out their mandatory re-education sessions of captive workers who are considering voting for unionization. And it's a complete lie. Unlike workers' actual bosses, whose compensation typically goes up with profits, union bosses are simply employees of heavily regulated non-profit organizations
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