acptulsa
Member
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2008
- Messages
- 75,406
The campaign to demonize and discredit conservative thought is no secret. It has been going on for more than half a century, and is well-documented. This is but a small sample:
http://spectator.org/36457_demonizing-conservatives/
http://archive.mrc.org/specialreports/uploads/RealRadioHatemongers.pdf
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2012/05/demonizing_conservative_thought.html
http://archive.mrc.org/specialreports/2010/RealRadioHatemongers/Introduction.aspx
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/carolp...rats-prefer-namecalling-to-solutions-n1784230
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4857
http://factn.org/why-demonizing-conservatives-is-important/
But the program has reached a new level today. No longer content to demonize actual conservatives, the liberals have employed an ancient strategy. They have sent one of their own to work undercover, pretending to be conservative so he can go over the top, souring the milk of conservatism, dividing it against itself, and turning it into a laughing stock.
Trump's lifetime of liberalism is well documented. He has flip flopped on more issues than can be conveniently listed here, in order to run as a Republican. This curious situation is explained as some kind of change of heart, though there is plenty of evidence that it runs as shallow as a puddle. He continues, for example, to assert that the Federal Reserve performs some kind of 'important function'. And while conservatism insists that it is the people of a nation who make it great, he insists that he must be elected so that he can do that single-handed.
Trump has to date run a campaign long on platitudes and devoid of specifics. His primary selling point and the overwhelming bulk of his time and effort have been spent flamboyantly rejecting political correctness. Since the PC movement has obviously jumped the shark, and any number of polls can inform anyone who cares to look that the movement for politically correct speech is generating backlash, this is an excellent choice for inflaming people. A wide and diverse swath of the population has had quite enough of it. It is a fine way to garner support in the current climate, and specifics are not required. Speaking frankly is a tailor-made recipe for getting attention in a crowded race and in an era when every statement made by a candidate is recorded and scrutinized.
It also serves as a convenient blind. One needs no policies or specific plans. It does not require erudition. It serves as a substitute for vision. One need merely say things none of the other candidates will say, and one instantly stands out, elicits reactions, and gets the attention of people who have long since tuned out the political process. One becomes a laughing stock in the process, but most people like to laugh more than they like to think--especially when the topic of the day is the current state of the nation and society, which is an incredibly depressing subject.
George W. Bush ran a very neocon administration, and there was nothing truly conservative about it. Spending grew and grew. Government grew and grew. Intervention in every aspect of commerce grew and grew, to the point where the economy crashed about our ears. But even though there was nothing conservative about the policies that led to these disasters, conservatism got the blame for them because Bush had that capital R next to his name. In short, he was a ringer. He could implement any number of liberal policies, and see any number of those policies fail spectacularly, without liberalism being blamed because the media used his party to assert that he was something he was not--conservative.
He also proved that rank and file Republican voters would stand behind a liberal if the media said often enough that he was not a liberal. He proved that Republicans would consolidate behind their team no matter how far their quarterback moved the football toward the opponents' goal line.
A child could see the possibilities.
This latest campaign saw an unprecedented crowd of seventeen Republican candidates. To those ears capable of discerning actual policy and understanding it, there was only one adult in the room--Rand Paul. He drew a variety of reactions. Some of his fathers' supporters turned on him for not going far enough, and for trying to make sensible policies palatable to more mainstream voters. And the criticism is not without merit. He got lost in a crowded field to no small degree. For those mainstream voters, a group generally afraid to shake things up too much, he sounded like the same thing only more reckless. These people had a great wealth of candidates to choose from, and these candidates--over a dozen in number--split the mainstream Republican vote very effectively, for any number of real or superficial reasons. But to those who have no clue what is going on, and have trouble understanding it even when it is spelled out to them, only one candidate stood out--the one who sounded different. To these people, the sea of candidates speaking in a manner designed to sound sensible all sounded the same, but Trump sounded different.
That was enough. People wanted different, and one candidate said different things--things that weren't all that different if one actually listened to it and compared it to other candidates' statements, but which sounded different. One candidate proceeded with an obvious disregard for all that had been learned about how to put ideas across without offending people and leaving oneself open to misinterpretation. One candidate seemed to want to be misinterpreted. One seemed to relish in offending people. It was and is refreshing to this small but not insignificant percentage of the population.
And the liberal media gave him coverage. Billions of dollars worth of 24/7 continual coverage. The spin was negative, but two things characterize the media today, as any number of polls prove--its credibility is at an all-time low, but its viewership is at an all-time high. So, about five percent of the population gave him the nomination of one of the major parties for the presidency of the United States.
And since that time, this allegedly converted liberal Democrat has been doubling down on his outrgeousness. But an interesting twist has crept into his performance. Now that the nomination seems assured--now that he has the requisite number of RNC delegates bound to vote for him--he is no longer limiting his efforts to alienate people to those groups that rank and file Republicans don't like. After famously stating that he could shoot people on a New York street and his fans would rally behind him, he has begun to insult even Republican Sacred Cows. He has intimated that U.S. soldiers, not defense contractors and subcontractors, got rich in Iraq.
And all the while, the untrusted media has carefully maintained the pretense of despising him even as they continue the billions of dollars worth of publicity. They criticize him, but they are careful to criticize him for the wrong things. They criticize him for not being PC in his speech, but fail to criticize him for advocating policies that are anything but conservative. They criticise him for being colorful, but fail to criticise him for not making sense.
And Trump continues to insult and alienate Americans. He has progressed to the point where he is insulting and alienating his own base. And meanwhile, the press paints him as some kind of spokesman for all American conservatives--except, of course, the now unpopular neocons. They falsely push the narrative that he and the neocons are at odds, while he fills his world with neocons. And they more the Republicans reluctantly do what Republicans always do--consolidate behind him in the interests of Team Red--the more the media insists that he speaks for all conservatives (except for the unpopular neocons who, after all, aren't conservatives anyway).
And while this has been going on, something curious has been happening on this forum. The majority of this forum, as several polls have shown, do not want to have a thing to do with Trump. Yet since this thing began there has continually been about half a dozen posters continually posting support for Trump. Mostly these have been older accounts which have been unused for years. Many have used confusing names. For example, for a time there was a respected poster here with the name AuH2O--the proper chemical formulas for gold and water, complete with a capital letter o at the end--and a troll (now banned for trolling) popped up with the handle AuH20, or 'gold hydrogen twenty'. Nice camoflage, there. The tendency to use old accounts which had been unused for a time is curious and interesting.
The tactics of these half dozen posters are unremarkable. They spammed articles that showed Trump in a favorable light. That was stopped. They advocated Trump as someone who could smash the establishment, and reinforced the media narrative that this character who hosted the Clintons at his wedding was somehow an outsider. That has been so discredited in these forums that they have laid off that campaign to some degree. Now they seem intent on pushing the age old 'a lesser evil than Clinton' formula.
But the purpose of this treatise is not to debate the merits of these tired arguments, or to comment on the effect they have had on the site's traffic. The purpose of this continual irritant is not to win us over. The powers that be, and Trump himself, have expressed their complete contempt for our scanty numbers. It is not to drive traffic away, though I'm sure they consider that a nice side effect. The purpose is to tie us in to the Trump Phenomenon, and to make us look like we, too, are on board with this bizarre bastardization of conservatism.
Trump is by his own admission an old friend of Clinton, and has praised her often. He may well be in this to throw the race to her. But there is more to this thing. Whether it was intended all along, or whether an opportunity is being seized, one thing is clear. Trump is making a laughing stock not only of himself, but of conservatism itself, and he is actively dividing the conservative movement against itself. The fact that he is not conservative is completely irrelevant to this. He has put the capital R next to his name, and he is throwing bones to conservatives here and there, and that is quite sufficient. They care nothing about the reality of the thing, provided they can drive the perception, and the perception they are driving is he is conservative. It doesn't even matter if the most genuinely conservative Americans--the libertarians--want nothing from him but for him to go away, so long as they can drive the perception away from reality by, among other things, spamming his name in places like this forum.
And Trump, like the troll he is, gets continually more crude, makes progressively less and less sense, daily finds new constituencies and demographics to offend, and is conspicuously now attacking conservatives themselves.
Trump is, in short, a Democrat gone undercover for the purpose of disrupting, isolating and dividing Republicans, Libertarians, and any other conservatives. He started by exploiting the existing backlash against political correctness, moved on to exploiting the existing backlash against the media, and continues to exploit the Republican tendency to value Team Play and winning elections above either principles or actual legislative results. And when he is through alienating every American under the sun--even our troops--he will do whatever else he can to divide us, discredit us and demonize conservatives in the eyes of our fellow Americans, and the whole world. If he is not discrediting anti-globalists by ostensibly being anti-globalist, he will ratchet up his own goofiness until his is discrediting anti-globalists by ostensibly being anti-globalist. If he is not discrediting those who are anti-immigration he will be ever more ridiculous until he is discrediting them by pretending to be one of them. If he is not making conservatives look gullible enough by flipping and flopping on them, then he will flip more and flop more, and all the while find more people to alienate and insult. He has no upper limit. He no longer has any reason to hold back.
Bank on it.
http://spectator.org/36457_demonizing-conservatives/
http://archive.mrc.org/specialreports/uploads/RealRadioHatemongers.pdf
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2012/05/demonizing_conservative_thought.html
http://archive.mrc.org/specialreports/2010/RealRadioHatemongers/Introduction.aspx
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/carolp...rats-prefer-namecalling-to-solutions-n1784230
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4857
http://factn.org/why-demonizing-conservatives-is-important/
But the program has reached a new level today. No longer content to demonize actual conservatives, the liberals have employed an ancient strategy. They have sent one of their own to work undercover, pretending to be conservative so he can go over the top, souring the milk of conservatism, dividing it against itself, and turning it into a laughing stock.
Trump's lifetime of liberalism is well documented. He has flip flopped on more issues than can be conveniently listed here, in order to run as a Republican. This curious situation is explained as some kind of change of heart, though there is plenty of evidence that it runs as shallow as a puddle. He continues, for example, to assert that the Federal Reserve performs some kind of 'important function'. And while conservatism insists that it is the people of a nation who make it great, he insists that he must be elected so that he can do that single-handed.
Trump has to date run a campaign long on platitudes and devoid of specifics. His primary selling point and the overwhelming bulk of his time and effort have been spent flamboyantly rejecting political correctness. Since the PC movement has obviously jumped the shark, and any number of polls can inform anyone who cares to look that the movement for politically correct speech is generating backlash, this is an excellent choice for inflaming people. A wide and diverse swath of the population has had quite enough of it. It is a fine way to garner support in the current climate, and specifics are not required. Speaking frankly is a tailor-made recipe for getting attention in a crowded race and in an era when every statement made by a candidate is recorded and scrutinized.
It also serves as a convenient blind. One needs no policies or specific plans. It does not require erudition. It serves as a substitute for vision. One need merely say things none of the other candidates will say, and one instantly stands out, elicits reactions, and gets the attention of people who have long since tuned out the political process. One becomes a laughing stock in the process, but most people like to laugh more than they like to think--especially when the topic of the day is the current state of the nation and society, which is an incredibly depressing subject.
George W. Bush ran a very neocon administration, and there was nothing truly conservative about it. Spending grew and grew. Government grew and grew. Intervention in every aspect of commerce grew and grew, to the point where the economy crashed about our ears. But even though there was nothing conservative about the policies that led to these disasters, conservatism got the blame for them because Bush had that capital R next to his name. In short, he was a ringer. He could implement any number of liberal policies, and see any number of those policies fail spectacularly, without liberalism being blamed because the media used his party to assert that he was something he was not--conservative.
He also proved that rank and file Republican voters would stand behind a liberal if the media said often enough that he was not a liberal. He proved that Republicans would consolidate behind their team no matter how far their quarterback moved the football toward the opponents' goal line.
A child could see the possibilities.
This latest campaign saw an unprecedented crowd of seventeen Republican candidates. To those ears capable of discerning actual policy and understanding it, there was only one adult in the room--Rand Paul. He drew a variety of reactions. Some of his fathers' supporters turned on him for not going far enough, and for trying to make sensible policies palatable to more mainstream voters. And the criticism is not without merit. He got lost in a crowded field to no small degree. For those mainstream voters, a group generally afraid to shake things up too much, he sounded like the same thing only more reckless. These people had a great wealth of candidates to choose from, and these candidates--over a dozen in number--split the mainstream Republican vote very effectively, for any number of real or superficial reasons. But to those who have no clue what is going on, and have trouble understanding it even when it is spelled out to them, only one candidate stood out--the one who sounded different. To these people, the sea of candidates speaking in a manner designed to sound sensible all sounded the same, but Trump sounded different.
That was enough. People wanted different, and one candidate said different things--things that weren't all that different if one actually listened to it and compared it to other candidates' statements, but which sounded different. One candidate proceeded with an obvious disregard for all that had been learned about how to put ideas across without offending people and leaving oneself open to misinterpretation. One candidate seemed to want to be misinterpreted. One seemed to relish in offending people. It was and is refreshing to this small but not insignificant percentage of the population.
And the liberal media gave him coverage. Billions of dollars worth of 24/7 continual coverage. The spin was negative, but two things characterize the media today, as any number of polls prove--its credibility is at an all-time low, but its viewership is at an all-time high. So, about five percent of the population gave him the nomination of one of the major parties for the presidency of the United States.
And since that time, this allegedly converted liberal Democrat has been doubling down on his outrgeousness. But an interesting twist has crept into his performance. Now that the nomination seems assured--now that he has the requisite number of RNC delegates bound to vote for him--he is no longer limiting his efforts to alienate people to those groups that rank and file Republicans don't like. After famously stating that he could shoot people on a New York street and his fans would rally behind him, he has begun to insult even Republican Sacred Cows. He has intimated that U.S. soldiers, not defense contractors and subcontractors, got rich in Iraq.
And all the while, the untrusted media has carefully maintained the pretense of despising him even as they continue the billions of dollars worth of publicity. They criticize him, but they are careful to criticize him for the wrong things. They criticize him for not being PC in his speech, but fail to criticize him for advocating policies that are anything but conservative. They criticise him for being colorful, but fail to criticise him for not making sense.
And Trump continues to insult and alienate Americans. He has progressed to the point where he is insulting and alienating his own base. And meanwhile, the press paints him as some kind of spokesman for all American conservatives--except, of course, the now unpopular neocons. They falsely push the narrative that he and the neocons are at odds, while he fills his world with neocons. And they more the Republicans reluctantly do what Republicans always do--consolidate behind him in the interests of Team Red--the more the media insists that he speaks for all conservatives (except for the unpopular neocons who, after all, aren't conservatives anyway).
And while this has been going on, something curious has been happening on this forum. The majority of this forum, as several polls have shown, do not want to have a thing to do with Trump. Yet since this thing began there has continually been about half a dozen posters continually posting support for Trump. Mostly these have been older accounts which have been unused for years. Many have used confusing names. For example, for a time there was a respected poster here with the name AuH2O--the proper chemical formulas for gold and water, complete with a capital letter o at the end--and a troll (now banned for trolling) popped up with the handle AuH20, or 'gold hydrogen twenty'. Nice camoflage, there. The tendency to use old accounts which had been unused for a time is curious and interesting.
The tactics of these half dozen posters are unremarkable. They spammed articles that showed Trump in a favorable light. That was stopped. They advocated Trump as someone who could smash the establishment, and reinforced the media narrative that this character who hosted the Clintons at his wedding was somehow an outsider. That has been so discredited in these forums that they have laid off that campaign to some degree. Now they seem intent on pushing the age old 'a lesser evil than Clinton' formula.
But the purpose of this treatise is not to debate the merits of these tired arguments, or to comment on the effect they have had on the site's traffic. The purpose of this continual irritant is not to win us over. The powers that be, and Trump himself, have expressed their complete contempt for our scanty numbers. It is not to drive traffic away, though I'm sure they consider that a nice side effect. The purpose is to tie us in to the Trump Phenomenon, and to make us look like we, too, are on board with this bizarre bastardization of conservatism.
Trump is by his own admission an old friend of Clinton, and has praised her often. He may well be in this to throw the race to her. But there is more to this thing. Whether it was intended all along, or whether an opportunity is being seized, one thing is clear. Trump is making a laughing stock not only of himself, but of conservatism itself, and he is actively dividing the conservative movement against itself. The fact that he is not conservative is completely irrelevant to this. He has put the capital R next to his name, and he is throwing bones to conservatives here and there, and that is quite sufficient. They care nothing about the reality of the thing, provided they can drive the perception, and the perception they are driving is he is conservative. It doesn't even matter if the most genuinely conservative Americans--the libertarians--want nothing from him but for him to go away, so long as they can drive the perception away from reality by, among other things, spamming his name in places like this forum.
And Trump, like the troll he is, gets continually more crude, makes progressively less and less sense, daily finds new constituencies and demographics to offend, and is conspicuously now attacking conservatives themselves.
Trump is, in short, a Democrat gone undercover for the purpose of disrupting, isolating and dividing Republicans, Libertarians, and any other conservatives. He started by exploiting the existing backlash against political correctness, moved on to exploiting the existing backlash against the media, and continues to exploit the Republican tendency to value Team Play and winning elections above either principles or actual legislative results. And when he is through alienating every American under the sun--even our troops--he will do whatever else he can to divide us, discredit us and demonize conservatives in the eyes of our fellow Americans, and the whole world. If he is not discrediting anti-globalists by ostensibly being anti-globalist, he will ratchet up his own goofiness until his is discrediting anti-globalists by ostensibly being anti-globalist. If he is not discrediting those who are anti-immigration he will be ever more ridiculous until he is discrediting them by pretending to be one of them. If he is not making conservatives look gullible enough by flipping and flopping on them, then he will flip more and flop more, and all the while find more people to alienate and insult. He has no upper limit. He no longer has any reason to hold back.
Bank on it.
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