Wednesday, September 07, 2022

The First Extremely Dangerous, Super-Secret, Eyes-Only Document Trump Stole Was...

...the Elite Conservative playbook for getting the reprogrammable GOP base to vote against their own interests over and over again.

You see, Modern Conservatism was built on creating a reliable herd of base voters that Elite Conservatives could reboot and reprogram over and over again using racism, misogyny and various hot-button culture war issues to achieve their policy objectives. 

Then Trump stole their code book and began pushing all the same buttons GOP leadership had been pushing for decades.  

But instead of doing it the respectable, Elite Conservative way -- keeping their hands clean by jobbing out the appeals to rage, racism and paranoia to dirt-for-hire mercenaries like Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, and relying on a complicit mainstream media to help them maintain a facade of principled respectability -- Trump bypassed all of that and made his pitch directly to the base in the crude, loud, swaggering, "Fuck yeah racism!" language they had been programmed by decades of Hate Radio and Fox News repetition to respond to.

And among the meatheads there was great rejoicing.

 This was the extremely dangerous, super-secret, eyes-only GOP playbook that everyone knew they used in every election...even as everyone agreed to pretend otherwise.  

What shook the media to its core wasn't that Trump's incessant lying and open, unabashed appeals to rage, racism and paranoia drew the GOP base to him, it was that he refused to use the approved set of dog-whistle encryption keys that elites in the GOP and in the media had all agreed to.

The shock wasn't that the GOP base was actually, really, truly, exactly what Liberal had always said it was.  Hell, even a nobody blogger like me, living off a tip jar in the middle of a cornfield, could see that.  This is me less than three days after Trump oozed down the escalator and into the hearts of the GOP base:

As I wrote a few years ago,the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.

In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

The shock was that Trump when ripped the fig leaf off of the GOP -- a fig leaf the party elites had been skulking behind for decades -- it exposed the media's own culpability.  It's own massive and ongoing complicity in helping the GOP maintain the Big Lie that the GOP base wasn't what it manifestly was.  

And speaking of the corrupt, complicit and unaccountable Beltway media, here is the opening paragraph of that post of the June, 2015 post of mine:

In case you missed it, Squint and the Meat Puppet [Joe Scarborough and Mika] handed the MSNBC camera over to Donald Trump this morning for a relaxing, 30-minute handjob. While Trump rambled lazily from one pinnacle of bullshit and narcissism to the next, Morning Joe crack house regulars Mark Halperin (Glenn Beck's favorite mainstream media enabler) and the pickled remains of Mike Barnacle looked on, smirking and giggling. All that it lacked to complete the creepy, peep-show effect were trench-coats and bad lighting.

So if you were ever moved to wonder why "Liberal" MSNBC never seems to have room for actual Liberals who were actually right about the Right all along...but has never had any problem finding enough money in the Morning Joe green room sofa cushions to hire on half the Lincoln Project and seemingly the entire staff of the Bulwark, well, now you know the rest of the story.

 


I Am The Liberal Media



3 comments:

Robt said...

If another American can impose his deeply held personal religious (cultish) beliefs on me from his position of pretending to be a judge. Then how can I impose my personal deeply held religious beliefs on them>

How about the religious zealot baker who gets SCOTUS ruling he ca discriminate from his bakery cake business on who he wishes.

Now if there was only one bakery supply company in the entire state and that baker needed those bakery supplies to remain in business.

If the bakery supply company owner hates the Bakery owner and his blasphemes ways. Will the Court rule the Bakery supply company has a religious right not to sell to the Bigoted Bakery even if it means the Baker without those supplies will have to close his business?

Want to bet on the outcome of that SCOTUS case?

Ian said...

Shouldn't that herding racists for dummies book be upside-down?

BitterHarvest said...

Dead on, Dg. A better characterization of the MAGA movement than I ever have done. Kudos.