How I Think We Got Here.

For anyone who has ever never seen the movie "Saving Private Ryan" towards the end as he's dying, Tom Hank's character tells Private Ryan to "Earn This." Well he's not just talking to Ryan, he's talking to the audience too. 

Democracy is something that wasn't just handed to us here in the western world It comes under assault and threat time and time again. The threats we face today might come in different forms than the men who fought in WW2 had but that's just how lucky we've been. 

The world we live in is built off of the previous generations work and like house cats after they get fixed, we got fat.  If there comes a time where we have to face the same challenges they did in WW2 I'm not sure American's on the whole are up to the task, whether it's in Europe or closer.

I believe the internet is partly too blame for this (there are many many many cogs in the wheel of politics that I'm sure also play their part.)

The early examples of Fascism we have to look at are examples where it took great suffering of the people to be willing to surrender governmental power to one figure to set things right. Desperate times calls for desperate measures, if you will. 

The internet has changed that. The internet, like any other source of media can be used for propaganda.

 In the United States any time a new form of media has popped up it helps unite people into civil unrest, our own revolution being sparked by the books now free flowing through the New World. With radio came people like "Charles Coughlin" who led antisemitism here in the USA with support from prominent Nazi's in Germany. 

Then came the (second) red scare and the perpetuation of propaganda by members of our own government such as McCarthy, by using radio and TV, of which continues to this even this day with the best case I can describe is in the post 9/11 Era. The unilateral support across media networks for the war in Iraq despite the war's unpopularity at home and abroad and the subsequential firing that took place for anti-war sentiment. 

The internet, where everyone has voice and some have theirs amplified louder and louder until they're bigger than everyone around them. A place and bastion of free-speech. A place where if you live from money you make with your speech, and if you have no network, you aren't accountable to anybody or anything.

With media giants like Fox, CNN, The NYT, etc... the individual reporters are accountable to their companies who make decisions all the time to remove people if they think they can make more money, or lose less money without them. We saw it with Tucker Carlson on Fox and others in the left wing media sphere.

When you're your own boss online, you can come back from some socially debilitating stuff with an example being Dr Disrespect, a streamer who inappropriate texted with a minor then admitted to it, but then came back months later like nothing happened and he still maintains a viewership to this day. 

A lot of right wing media hosts have taken that message to heart, they know they can spit lies after lie and even when they get caught they can just spin another one or ignore it altogether and they don't lose their viewership. Alex Jones is the best example for this. He committed some pretty atrocious slander of victims of school shooting victims and got away with lie after lie for so many years until he lost in a court case. 

Because these individuals are private people, don't operate as mega media, and have little to no accountability, this allows them to receive funds and be influenced from malicious sources much more incognito than CNN would. Tim Pool was a part of this example. He was caught receiving money from Russia propagandists overseas through Tenant Media. He claims he "didn't know what the source was." Which if you ask me, is total horse dookie but I digress. 

To bring this all back to my original points, right wing media online has been able to manufacture "great suffering of the people" like I mentioned earlier. If you can make people think things around them are a lot worse than they are, your chances of goading them into fascism become much easier. It's truly cult-like behavior and I'm not using that word lightly. The ramifications all are real.

The forces we are seeing now are a culmination of the internet, covid, inflation, and timing. 

Let me explain.

Covid hit, Trump was bad enough at responding he got voted out. Biden took over, inflation because of covid was still on the way and no matter what Biden did there was going to be price hikes but since it happened while he was in office his party got the brunt of the blame. The right wing media which has been building for years then used every weapons in their misinformation arsenal to jump at the chance to reelect Trump. Their ability to gaslight their audience nonstop, boosting fake stories in order to bring light to issues that don't exist, and rewriting events as if they were nothing, (January 6th). All allowed Trump to get elected.

Of course that's not the whole story, many other things played together to get us to where we are now. The Democratic campaign was far from without faults. If there is any hope to come back from this it's with learning to operate in this new modern world on their level but with integrity. 

One day at a time.