Abstract: Frankly, the dark side of our nation has
achieved great momentum in seizing the initiative, in military terms. We are in a war—a cultural war. According to the public narrative, the left
is successfully isolating President Trump, attempting to make him completely
impotent politically. No need for
impeachment. The left is essentially
diminishing him in a similar fashion that Stalin and his propaganda machine
diminished his relatively more liberal nemesis, Trotsky, of the Menshevik
socialist faction. Diminishment was not
enough—Trotsky was ultimately assassinated.
And now we see elements of our history being assassinated. It would be one thing for the media to
objectively point out abuses of power or other forms of corruption. During the previous eight years, Americans
were aware of abuses of power and forms of corruption; yet, the leftist press
showed little to no interest. On the
other hand, we have yet to see any objective reporting; rather the left
deceives the public with propaganda, as this new Gadfly article argues in a
conversation between Old Gadfly, an American citizen with and inquiring mind
(IM), and a seasoned combat aviator with an inquiring mind (AM).
Old
Gadfly: Gentlemen, it’s
been a week since the Charlottesville spectacle. Your take?
AM: We’re witnessing emergent propaganda in full
bloom. I say propaganda because the
messaging represents the full meaning of propaganda: “information
that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and
further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a
particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational
response to the information that is presented.”
I say emergent because there is no single, central
organizing agent; yet, the messaging is concerted and consistent because of a
central, self-organizing ideology called socialism.
IM: The propagandists create and perpetuate
folklore. They want the public to
believe Charlottesville was a contest between groups that are far right and
left of the political center, suggesting the so called “white supremacists” and
the KKK are far right-wing extremists. Before
we dig deeper, we should first examine how the stage was set. The individual who organized the “unite the
right” assembly, supposedly on behalf of the groups protesting the city’s plan
to take down the General Robert E. Lee memorial, was Jason
Kessler. Kessler is an experienced
agitator. According to the Southern
Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Kessler has experience in matters such as this,
to include working with Occupy Wall Street, a left of center movement; and he apparently
voted for Obama. The SPLC is a
well-left-of-center group. They classify
other groups that have different value systems as “hate groups.”
AM: One other question to ask: why did the Charlottesville police, first
responders, and national guardsmen—over 1,000—do
nothing to squelch the anarchy?
Would a life have been saved had they intervened? For the left, letting the clashes unfold was
good for the optics—they make news cycles easier and so much more visceral in
advancing their propaganda. Given how
these groups are generally characterized by the left and understood by the “nice”
public, Charlottesville was a setup to further demonize President Trump. They insist he is a racist (because they
cannot call him the N-word) and that white supremacists represent his
base. Although it is factual that Trump
has said things used against him, they generally related to concerns about
violations of the law (such as illegal aliens associated with sex and drug
trafficking) and conflicts of interest (a judge refusing to recuse himself from
a Trump lawsuit despite
known ties to La
Raza—“The
term expresses ethnic or racial pride”). The
left has developed these kinds of tactics for decades.
IM: Let me describe another example. The media has even drudged up comments made by
President Trump about General Pershing related to suppressing a Muslim insurgency
in the Philippines (click
here
for a good history). Although Trump’s
description used during the Presidential campaign represented some enduring
folklore about bullets dipped in pig’s blood, his
recent tweets merely referenced General Pershing. Here is what Trump actually said in his recent
tweets within the context of terroristic assaults on our culture: “study
what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. . . .
There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!” Notice the difference. Being caught is not the same thing as being
shot. The historical reference is to the
Moro
rebellion in the Philippines (an interesting history involving presidential
politics demonstrating similar parallels to our most recent experience in the
Middle East). Here is a quote
from Pershing’s own autobiography:
These
juramentado were materially reduced in number by a practice the army had
already adopted, one that the Mohammedans held in abhorrence. The bodies were publicly buried in the same
grave with a dead pig. It was not
pleasant to take such measures but the prospect of going to hell instead of
heaven sometimes deterred the would-be assassins.
AM:
Since there is ample evidence of propaganda, let me offer one more
example. I was alerted to this example from
a recent Facebook entry where the author spoke about how our military leaders
were even rebuking Commander-in Chief Trump for his insensitive Charlottesville
remarks. Unaware of this, I searched for
evidence to confirm this allegation.
Sure enough, major newspapers were advancing this meme (incidentally, recall
a conversation we had five years ago on memetics
and politics). Here is a quote from
the Los
Angeles Times:
America's
top-ranking military officers spoke out forcefully against racial bigotry and
extremism, a rare public foray into domestic politics that revealed growing
unease at the Pentagon with some of President Trump's policies and views.
The members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- the senior
uniformed brass of the Navy, Marine Corps, Army and Air Force -- all
posted messages on their official Twitter accounts to denounce the
far-right extremists behind Saturday's violence in Charlottesville, Va.
The messages did not mention Trump, who is the commander in chief, by
name. But the rebuke seemed clear in several posts given the bipartisan
furor over Trump's insistence Tuesday that "both sides" were at fault
for the violence.
“The Army doesn't tolerate racism, extremism, or hatred in our ranks,”
Gen. Mark Milley, chief of staff of the Army, tweeted Wednesday. “It's against
our Values and everything we've stood for since 1775.”
To the undiscerning eye, the Times
author wants you to believe the military leaders are rebuking the President,
not the extremism. The President rebuked
racism, extremism, bigotry, and hatred. The
military leaders’ statements are completely congruent with the President’s. Notice General Milley never used the term “far-right”
in his statement. Nor did any other
military leader.
Old Gadfly: For so many “nice”
Americans, they are at the mercy of a leftist media, relying upon their
reporting as settled truth. We know the
KKK spawned as a domestic terrorist group on behalf of the Democrat Party
during the post-Civil War reconstruction era.
According to the left, white supremacists are supposed to represent
fascists, Nazis, and neo-Nazis because historical revisionists and progressives
deny that these groups spawned from socialism, which is a left of center
ideology. The left sets the rules for
the creation of truth, and they define or characterize the political right. They do this by distorting history and
creating labels (racist, xenophobe, misogynist, homophobe, etc.) reminiscent of
the N-word. The hateful left wants “nice”
people to think the right is hateful. Unfortunately,
the right lacks a deeper understanding of these concepts and how they actually
manifested in history; thus, they silently acquiesce to the deception. This is not new in history. Hayek observed and documented similar
developments in his seminal book, The
Road to Serfdom, initially published in 1944 for a Western European
audience. Here is an excerpt from
Chapter 11, “The End of Truth”:
The
most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward
which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends. To make a totalitarian system
function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody
should be forced to work for the same ends.
It is essential that the people should
come to regard them as their own ends. Although the beliefs must be
chosen for the people and imposed upon them, they
must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which makes the
individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the
planner wants (bold italics added for emphasis; p. 171).
Predictably, Hayek’s
book was roundly rebuked by the progressive left in academic, media, Hollywood,
and political circles. So, he
essentially went into hiding for a few years to collect his bearings. He resurfaced with some lectures at the University
of Cairo to vet his ideas about the concept called liberty. These lectures provided the inspiration and
logic for his next seminal work, The
Constitution of Liberty. Ironically,
Hayek revised the Foreword to The Road to
Serfdom in 1956 for an American audience.
A year later, speaking at America’s National Press Club, Soviet communist
leader Nikita Khruschev taunted Americans with this statement: “. . . I can
prophesy that your grandchildren in America will live under socialism.
And please do not be afraid of that. Your grandchildren will not
understand how their grandparents did not understand the progressive nature of
a socialist society.”
This brings
me back to the dynamics of Charlottesville.
Good classical liberals mostly represent the Republican Party based on
the principles of individual liberty, limited government (via a Constitutional
Republic) and the rule of law, private property, a free market, and the
Judeo-Christian tradition. Pathetically,
a growing number of so called Republicans betray these principles and their
corruption weakens any resolve to combat the forces intent on destroying the
idea of America. See for example Ken
Buck’s excellent book, Drain the
Swamp: How Washington Corruption Is
Worse than You Think. Classical
liberalism is the form of liberalism that socialists in Europe, especially
Germany, and the Soviet Union attacked.
Socialism is a left of center ideology.
This can and should be understood as a political axiom. Communism is a left-wing manifestation of
socialism. Fascism and Nazism are a
right-wing manifestation of socialism.
Both manifestations are left of center on the broader political
spectrum. Both are illiberal. Yet, the left has been very successful in
convincing too many “nice” people, whether American or European, that fascism
and Nazism are an extreme right of center phenomenon. This makes it easy then to appropriately demonize Nazi,
neo-Nazi, and white supremacist groups and then to associate them with the Republican
Party and conservatives. Since the left
claimed the liberal label, even though their concept did not even come close to
representing the classical liberal principles, classic liberals then took on
the label of conservative. People forget
or do not even recall what the Reagan conservative movement was all about. He championed the conservation of classical
liberal principles.
Too
many “nice” Americans live in their comfort zones while being programmed to “act
spontaneously” based on leftist propaganda.
Even some of my closest friends have lamented Trump’s tweets. But when I asked if they receive them
directly, they admitted they did not, which means they only know about the
tweets based on how the leftist media portray them. The left now attacks our history (whether good
or bad). It won’t be long before they
attack “nice” people in their comfort zones when the left crosses the threshold
of (a) realizing taxation is not enough to meet the demands of a large central
government and welfare state and begin confiscating private property (like your
retirement accounts that you built based on your own labor); and (b) prosecuting
those who question their deceptions and actions as hate speech.
We must
warn our family and friends. There is no
straddling the fence here. One cannot
claim political independence and hope others solve our problem. The idea of America is under full
assault. The left controls the public
narrative. Americans must break out of
their “nice” trance. Become
discerning. Be outraged at “the end of
truth” tactics of the left. Be
courageous. Pick the right side: either a truly liberal America or a socialist
tyranny. Fight for truth and justice.
