General Discussion

But the media is just a delivery vehicle. Without a message, the media would not be effective.

What we have is the convergence of many efforts that have spanned decades. It is the racism. It is the jingoism. It is the religious extremism, the Christian nationalism. It is the anti-vax thing. It is the climate denial. It is the destruction of public schools. It is the gun culture. And hang with me here, it is cryptocurrency/NFTs etc.

What do all of these have in common? What is the central element in all of these?

It is selfishness. It is the attitude, "Nobody tells me what to do." That was Limbaugh's central theme. It is what Fox pushes every day. Of course, the reality is the opposite. Those who push that selfishness are working tirelessly to grab the wealth of the nation and push the 99% into poverty. But the message works.

And notice how these various battlefronts amplify one another. Those who say "You'll pry the gun from my cold, dead hands" say the same thing about masks and public health. And when their offspring are unable to do much better than a minimum wage job, they blame the schools, and so on.

This didn't just happen. In the past 18 months, we have seen just how organized these forces are, having corrupted our Supreme Court beyond repair with millions of dollars worth of bribes. "Bribe" isn't really the right word. Bribe implies paying something of value to get somebody to do what they otherwise would not do. But in this case, people like Alito and Thomas have been part of the team that has planned this over the decades. The money is just the spoils from their decades of corruption. They didn't have to be paid to be corrupt. They were corrupt from the start. Corruption was the whole point.

What can be done? I don't know. This moment of convergence has been heading our way for decades, and many of us have been trying to sound the alarms. But far too many, including many who were supposedly on our side, maintained that "we have a resilient system. It will take care of itself." They were wrong, and here we are. We are left hoping that there are enough Republican Senators who won't take the final steps into full fascism. I wouldn't take that bet.