Friday, September 4, 2020

Ask The Experts

 

Anyone who pays the slightest amount of attention to political discourse these days would quickly learn authoritarian white conservatives have assumed the authority to be the only authorities on almost everything. They alone are the experts. Just ask one. He’ll set you straight.

White conservatives have become the self-appointed experts on a large range of issues, from history, politics, economics, law, journalism, science, and theology. And let’s not forget patriotism. Only white conservatives are true patriots. This is because, as expert historians, they alone know exactly what “the Founders Believed”.

Similarly only white conservatives know journalists are in service to the “liberal media”. This is because they report facts that white conservatives would rather not see, especially facts about consequences ensuing from their politicians and policies. Their game of working the refs is decades old, and it has paid off handsomely.

If journalists are “liberal media”, then they cannot be trusted. Only their conservative politicians and their conservative media are telling the truth.

The same goes for those universities with their “Marxist professors”. You just KNOW they cannot be trusted to teach our young people. They’re filling their heads with radical notions like questioning authority and old social mores and assumptions.

You know their radical agenda. They promote a scientific method of inquiry, research, examination of evidence, hypothesis, experimentation and data analysis.

These are dangerous concepts to the authoritarian mind. Questions have no place in a system of beliefs over facts.

Yes, that’s how a cult works.

They alone assumed authority to define terms. The estate tax for millionaires became the “death tax”. Taking a knee to protest racist police brutality became, “disrespecting the troops”.

Those of us with the inferior understanding of history recall the “Big Lie” propaganda technique of Nazis. Hitler projected the technique on Jews and Marxists, but it became the standard of Nazi propaganda. 

“Liberal media” is the “Big Lie” of our time, of course. There is little evidence of corporate media betraying their corporate advertisers, or their Republican Party, by avidly promoting liberal or socialist policies. Never mind facts and objective reality are what journalists attempt to provide. The fact that any news organization doesn’t parrot the Right’s propaganda is proof enough they are “liberal”.

But as with all authoritarian regimes and ideologies, they needed to expand on the Big Lie. The free press has been further demonized as “fake news” by the radical Right.

This is almost exactly what Hitler’s Nazis did with their term, “Lügenpresse”, or lying press, in their campaign to destroy journalism.

And onward they marched, as stepping geese do. They alone assumed authority to define their opponents. “Tax and spend liberals” became “radical Leftists” and “America-hating commies”. The Democratic Party became a “far-Left socialist party”. How can you argue with those who make up their own definitions?

Working the refs and moving the goal posts has been their game plan for decades. They needed to undermine voter rights and suppress turnout. Democracy itself must be restrained if conservatism is to triumph.

Republicans have been at war with democracy since Heritage Foundation founder and Reagan adviser Paul Weyrich said, “We don’t want everybody to vote. When everybody votes we lose.”

It’s not surprising that those who unilaterally redefine terms are always going to be right, at least in their self-inflated ideological bubble. 

The experts have alerted America to the horrors of the rampant "BLM riots". They scorn any Democrat for suggesting the vast majority of demonstrations against police brutality have been peaceful. 

Pay no attention to the evidence that indicates it is "an overwhelmingly peaceful movement". Just believe white conservatives. After all, they are the experts,

This "expertise" of absurdity inevitably produced a white nationalist Trump Presidency. There’s nothing like a pathological liar and conman to assure a cult’s indoctrinated beliefs and blind loyalty to the leader.

If only there was an acronym for our Nationalist American Zealots for Inequality...

Not to worry. The point is our white nationalists know better than the rest of us.

There’s another example of what many of us who are not white conservatives might be surprised to learn.

Black people know less about racism than white conservatives.

This is surprising only to those us not familiar with the white conservative tribe. I am blessed to have been lectured on “real racism” by a white conservative or two.

For some reason they prefer to enlighten us by only telling us what ISN”T real racism. But, hey, we get what we pay for.

Now we have an Attorney General educating us. You see, it’s not racism when police treat Black people differently than white people.

Last Wednesday Trump’s Attorney General Barr declared, “I think there are some situations where statistics would suggest that they (Blacks) are treated differently, but I don’t think that that’s necessarily racism.”

In July Barr said, “I do think it is a widespread phenomenon that African American males, in particular, are treated with extra suspicion and maybe not given the benefit of the doubt.”

But you see, there is no such thing as systemic racism. Nope. Old Toady Will Barr insists this cannot be true. “No. To me, the word systemic means that it’s built into the institution.”

Did you notice how he deflected to narrowly defining systemic, while ignoring the racism part? Those of us not in the white conservative club understand systemic means “common to the system”, and “fundamental to a predominant social, economic, or political practice”.

Those of us not in the white conservative club also understand racism means treating Black people differently from white people, as in “treated with extra suspicion and maybe not given the benefit of the doubt”.

But only loony libs could think that constitutes systemic racism. The experts tell us otherwise.

After hearing all the white conservatives lecturing us on what is, or more precisely, isn’t racism, I can only conclude one of two statements must be true.

1. Only white conservatives know what “real racism” is.

Or...

2. Racism isn’t racism to racists.

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