Tag: FOX Americana

FOX News: We Have Seen The Enemy & They Are Us


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about how fucked up FOX News is — we really only have ourselves to blame. There’s a market for batshit Right wing propaganda and so it exists. If they weren’t making money, they wouldn’t exist. We live in a free society with free speech and a market-based economy: it’s not really FOX News’ fault.

In fact, my case is strengthened by the growing popularity of OANN and NewsMax. A huge swath of the viewing audience wants lies. Negative polarization is so intense now in the United States that if you’re not lying to a certain group of people then they will find someone who will lie to them.

That’s why media outlet that purports to be “objective” about the news — like WGN’s NewsNation — leave me very weary. How can you legitimately tell news straight down the middle when a huge group of people willfully want to believe the sky is green. If you don’t hold that lie up as equal to the sky being blue, then they think you’re just another liberal media outlet.

Anyway, the point is conservatives are growing every-more willfully detached from reality and they wrap themselves in lies to the point that their is no longer any shared reality.

And that, my gentle reader, is how we’re going to end up with an autocracy. Or a civil war. Take your pick. The United States is so politically unstable at the moment that this is a situation that can’t continue indefinitely. At some point, we’re either going to become consumed by the lie or we’re going to end it.

The United States Is Careening Towards ‘The Big Ugly’ of Civil War or Revolution


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It definitely seems as though the Republican Party is going to be the dog that finally caught the car. A lot of anti-democratic trends that have been heading towards each other for the last 50 years are finally beginning to pay dividends for the Republican Party.

They’ve corrupted the judiciary. They will stop at nothing to delegitimize any election they don’t win. The list goes on.

As such, it definitely seems as though Trump could very well “win” because of Biden losses from a death of a thousand cuts. A 100,000 already cast votes here. Another 100,000 legitimate votes there. Add to this the Russians never allowing Trump to lose and a Federal judiciary full of young, hack MAGA judges eager to throw the election to Trump, and well, lulz.

The problem for Republicans is while they will “win’ their victory won’t happen in a political vacuum. While there’s a decent chance that any theft of the 2020 election will be just another 2000 — there’s also a good chance we could experience The Big Ugly. There could be significant political violence if Republicans get what they want.

And, yet, that political violence would have to get pretty severe for Republicans not to just lulz the whole thing. They are so completely by their craven desire to have power that Trump probably would see any political violence — even if it was started by his own followers — as an opportunity to invoke the Insurrection Act and take “total control.”

The point is — we’ve officially entered the danger zone. America’s political system is so taunt now because of the pressures of the 2020 Election that virtually anything could set off The Big Ugly.

I still think we need to keep looking at New York City. If Trump obviously steals the election, then before dawn breaks places like Trump Tower and FOX New’s HQ may have been gutted. I’m not advocating that, but just giving you a heads up as to how you might have some sense of how bad things may be about to get.

The Day Trump Shrugged: FOX Americana & The Paris Accord

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

In yet another example of liberal outrage, the Rose Garden announcement by Donald Trump to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord has evoked much gnashing of teeth. Now, I consider myself a moderate liberal, but I’m really growing tired of such behavior.

In an extremely well written piece, Esquire writer Charles Pierce summed up liberal outrage stating:

I didn’t think he could top his ghastly American Carnage inaugural address for sheer fact-free and paranoiac mendacity, but he managed to do it on Thursday. By announcing that the United States was withdrawing from the groundbreaking Paris Accords regarding the world climate crisis, the president* wallowed in rank, xenophobic victimhood while basking in the scattered applause of the otherwise unemployable yahoos whose self-respect is sufficiently low that they still work for him. Any doubt that Steve Bannon is running this White House now, either personally or through his finger-puppet, obvious anagram Reince Priebus, now has evaporated. The transformation of the American government into a Breitbart comments thread is complete.

But it’s time to stop getting upset about how Trump is causing America to go to hell in a bucket, and it’s time to start thinking about how you can, on a personal level, do something about it. Just getting upset at yet another horrible thing Trump has done doesn’t help anybody or anything.

I know why this keeps happening. It keeps happening because liberals after eight years of “No Drama Obama” assumed that progress was a given and that it was a fundamental tenet of reality that the liberal worldview was simply to be accepted. Meanwhile, of course, on FOX News’ Bullshit Mountain the residents grew more and more thirsty for blood.

Hence, once someone like Trump was given to them as an option in the primaries, they didn’t really care what he believed as long as he could win. And once he bested 15 other professional politicians, and the choice came down between him and someone they absolutely despised, Hillary Clinton, the decision was easy. And, so the land of Trumplandia with its FOX Americana agenda was born.

FOX Americana as articulated by Trump seems to be completely indifferent to the broader needs of the international community. It’s Darwinian and America First and simply horrible to anyone such as myself who would like there to be some order in the world. If nothing else won’t get you to slip some whisky into your coffee in the morning, let this sink in: pretty much not sense the period between World Wars has there been this chaotic a power vacuum caused by America pulling an Atlas Shrugged and deciding to ignore its responsibility as a world leader.

While I doubt we’ll have any nuclear exchanges anytime soon — though the Indian subcontinent could always flair up — it’s more likely that Russia will simply find it impossible not to make some sort of land grab in Ukraine or the Baltic. Should Putin attack a Baltic nation and one of those nations cry out for help from NATO, invoking Article 5…and the United States just shrugs, that would be significantly more profound than pulling out of the Paris Accord.

That would be the nightmare scenario. Allowing the Russians to take a Baltic nation would completely, fundamentally scramble the post World War II global liberal order. That would be something we could all point to and say that is definitely something Hillary Clinton would not have done. That is why I kept saying during the campaign that while Hillary Clinton was a horrible candidate, at least she wasn’t an existential threat to the Republic like Donald Trump.

And all of this wouldn’t happen in a vacuum. If NATO no longer had American teeth to back it up, any number of other hot spots across the globe would flare up, most notably Korea. I still think it’s likely that Trump would wag the dog with the DPRK and while that happened, Putin would, in turn, attack Ukraine or NATO.

So, in a sense, leaving the Paris Accord is just the tip of the ice burg when it comes to the irrecoverable damage that the Trump Administration can inflict on both the Republic and the globe. But, as I keep saying, we have to stop laughing at stupid tweets, or being outraged at this or that horrible thing Trump does.

If you consider yourself a member of The Resistance, you have to pause for a moment and think how you, on a personal level, can engage. You have to think how you can make a difference, however small, and stymie the seemingly unstoppable progress of the slow moving autocratic “managed-democracy” drive that Trumplandia represents.

I continue to believe that the American spirit is simply too strong. I continue to believe that Americans won’t stand for a Russian-style “managed-democracy” no matter how hard the forces of Trumplandia may attempt to impose it. We have to believe. We have to engage, engage, engage. Our future, and the future of the Republic depends on it.

Shelton Bumgarner is the Editor and Publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Dystopia Watch: We’ve Gone From Pax Americana To FOX Americana

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I am not the person who thought the phrase found in the title of this post up — that inspired word choice goes to someone on Twitter — but it does seem to sum up where we are right now. Not only is FOX News state media, the president seems to be the editorial vision of FOX News squeezed out of a TV in an old folks home and turned into a living, breathing, pussy-grabbing person.

It seems as though the United States has decided to end its moral leadership in the for the sake of, what, ratings? Pandering to a few thousand coal miners in West Virginia? It is all rather staggering. It is enough to knock the wind out of you if you give it too much thought.

Of course, what I’m noticing is the power of Baby Boomers. They are so wrapped up saving for the Apocalypse that FOX News says is about to come, so fearful that the first black president might take their guns, that they are totally cool with a racist, misogynist, bigot being president and ruining the country in the name of MAGA.

This, of course, begs the question — what happened? What happened to all those hippies 50 years ago who wanted to save the world? How is it that the very generation that thought they could levitate the Pentagon with chill vibes, now are hell bent on using the Pentagon to destroy peace and inflict as much damage on the global order as possible

I know that everyone grows more conservative as they grow older, but the bizarre transformation of Baby Boomers into red cap wearing MAGA supporters is pushing it. It does seem as though the late Roger Ailes saw all this coming and realized he could make money and weld enormous power along the way. It does make you wonder who is zooming whom, though. How much of what we’re seeing with FOX Americana is Ailes’ fault and how much of was inevitable given demographic trends.

It’s all very puzzling. There don’t seem to be any answers.

If ever there was a sign of FOX Americana, it’s the fact that Trump allegedly called a FOX News on-air talent to discuss his decision to pull out of the agreement. It seems to be every old codgers wish come true, to be able to talk to the hotties on the teevee about scary things like that damgum Paris Accord.

It’s way too easy to get depressed. It’s way too easy to just want to hide. But we can’t do that. Only by staying engaged can we possible make the difference we need to make to get rid of Trump, even though even if we try with all our might, there is still a decent chance Trump simply isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

But we have to believe, we have to hope. To do otherwise is madness.