Analyzing Right-Wing Propaganda (I)

A friend of mine sent me a link to the right-wing propaganda film Agenda: Grinding America Down and asked for my thoughts on it. Talk about opening the floodgates. Below you will find live-blogging of my experience watching the film in its entirety.

- Ronald Reagan appears onscreen and I already know this is going to be good. Given the black and white picture and his relative youth, I imagine this is a clip from his classic 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech in which he claims Medicare represents the beginning of communism in America and the end of freedom as we know it. I pour my first drink.
- Bunch of people talk and it’s clear this movie is going to be all about culture. Culture is the trump card for the right-wing propaganda machine, because it removes economics completely from the picture. Instead of being the inevitable byproduct of profit-oriented media eager to boost the bottom line, the increasing amount of sex and violence in media is blamed on a nefarious, conspiratorial “liberal elite” and therefore represents one of the first steps on the path to communism.
- So liberals are not actually communists, just the “useful idiots” which the communists use as pawns in their grand scheme to eliminate everything good and decent about America. Nothing paranoid about this!
- Less than 3 minutes in and they’ve brought out the Nazi footage! Even as the talking heads conflate liberalism and communism, it looks like this movie will follow Glenn Beck’s example by conflating communists and fascists (aka the most fervent opponents of communism).
- Why would the left continue to push communist policies? “They’re either ignorant, or they’re evil.” Simple!
- I love how while talking about the left’s evil schemes, they show a book burning in which one of the books being burned was written by Lenin. Doublethink – gotta love it.
- Interesting how Curtis Bowers describes his experiences meeting with the CPUSA. This is a superb example of framing: if you support feminism or gay rights, what you’re really supporting is the destruction of morality and the family.
- Flash-forward to 2008, and Bowers can’t believe how successful their agenda has been! The disintegration of the family, the massive power supposedly wielded by the environmental movement, hate crimes legislation that calls bigotry what it is – all this reveals the utter narrowness and backwardness of Bowers’ views.
- The Naked Communist by Cleon Skousen was also one of the books most instrumental in the development of Glenn Beck’s warped worldview. Birds of a feather...
- As I look at all the goals of Communist infiltrators outlined by Skousen, I wonder why I’m supposed to take seriously the paranoid ramblings of a former FBI agent and right-wing Mormon crank as definitive proof of leftist goals in the United States.
- “Goal #27: Discredit the Bible”. You mean like Thomas Jefferson, who ripped out every page in his Bible he believed to be false and was left with a few measly pages clinging to the spine?
- John Stormer cites J. Edgar Hoover calling communists “masters of deceit.” Well, if there’s one figure in American history who was a paragon of honesty and virtue, it’s a guy who blackmailed public figures for their sexuality while wearing dresses in his spare time.
- Hearing these guys talk about Latin America and China and lumping them together as “communist” says much about the lack of nuance in their worldview. Liberals, social democrats, socialists, communists, opportunist capitalists calling themselves communists – whatever, it’s all the same thing!
- Jim Simpson acknowledges that most of the people supposedly spreading communism are not communists, instead calling them mere “useful idiots”. So basically, he’s admitting that any social cause with the merest whiff of progressivism is identical to communism as far as he’s concerned. If anything, all he’s doing is identifying himself as an enemy of human progress! I’m sure if Bowers was alive back in the 1850s, he would have said the same thing about those nefarious abolitionists trying to destroy the Southern way of life.
- Great job, Bowers. With your political spectrum, you’ve once more revealed your utter idiocy and lack of historical knowledge. Even though he tries to lump together liberals, socialists, communists and fascists by saying they all worshipped the state, Bowers seems totally unaware that the Nazis were the declared arch-enemies of the communists, that they beat up communists before they came to power, jailed and murdered them after they did come to power, and – oh yeah, invaded the Soviet Union in the largest act of military aggression in world history. But forget all that – Nazis were basically the same as communists.
- Ah, I see – the entire American political spectrum has moved to the left, not the right. Is that why Obama is cutting Social Security while starting new wars and claiming the right to execute American citizens without charges or trial?
- And there is no opposition to any of this – except, of course, for the entire American right-wing blathering on endlessly about the socialist threat as if it actually existed.
- “What’s So Bad About Communism?” Again, these conservative talking heads have only the most simplistic and base view of what “communism” is. They can’t grasp that there could be severe disagreements and criticisms within the communist movement. They have no apparent awareness of Trotsky’s struggle against the bureaucratic degeneration in the USSR and how he was outright murdered by Stalin’s goons, as were so many of the old Bolsheviks. And they’re so very concerned about how many people were murdered under “communism” – I wonder what their thoughts are on U.S. imperial wars or the current policy of assassination-by-drone-strike based on presidential fiat?
- How many people have died due to capitalism? Funny how nobody ever compiles those figures.
- What a fucking warped view of history these people have. So America’s public schools are teaching how to carry out genocide? Funny, they always seemed to mostly ignore what happened to the Native Americans...
- I was about to praise the narrator for explaining the difference between socialism and communism – until he said that socialism can be summed up as “Big Government”. HELP! I’m trapped in a sea of right-wing talking points!
- The central fallacy – liberalism/socialism/communism are evil because of “wealth redistribution”, because they take money people earned through hard work and give it to the undeserving. You know what that reminds me of? CAPITALISM, which is based on not paying people the full value of their labour while the capitalist pockets more than his fair share. That’s where profit comes from. But you’re never going to hear the right complaining about those lazy capitalists mooching off the workers.
- Why use an atomic bomb to illustrate how socialism destroys everything in its path? I checked the social system of the only country ever to actually use nuclear weapons in war, and it wasn’t socialist.
- You know, I wish there were as many people on the left who believed that the final victory of socialism was at hand as there seem to be on the right.
- Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but right after David Noebel talked about how Venezuela was “hard-core Marxist”, I swear I heard him refer to Nicaragua as “N*gger-agua”.
- The “red plague”. Are you kidding me?
- Watching them talk about how Karl Marx begat the Fabian Socialists who begat the Students for a Democratic Society who begat the Weather Underground, and how many of them are still in positions of power, such as Rev. Jim Wallis. Oh yeah, Rev. Jim Wallis – there’s a figure who will send shivers down the spine of the ruling elite. Amazing how right-wing propaganda manages to make the oppressed look like the oppressors and vice versa.
- Sympathizing with the Viet Cong, how dare he! It’s not like they were morally in the right, fighting for national liberation against a military superpower attempting to protect its puppet government, or anything like that.
- Jim Simpson is correct – throughout my impressionable years in elementary school, all I ever heard from my teachers was how great it would be if I grew up to become an atheist alcoholic homosexual.
- Have to laugh out loud at the juxtaposition of July 4, baseball and apple pie with a group of intellectuals plotting behind the scenes to “make America so corrupt it stinks.”
- There is no middle ground: either the father is the breadwinner, disciplinarian and protector of his family, or the government is. Nice to know there is no alternative possibility to the mother being a domestic slave without her becoming married to “Big Government”.
- “Cultural Marxism” was also one of the obsessions of mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who accused young members of the Labour Party of such when he gunned them down in 2011.
- “Most people will give over to the [government], because they don’t want the chaos.” Kind of like how so many people on the right wet their pants and asked Big Bad Government to protect them after 9/11 with the Patriot Act? And how they continue to demand government take away their rights to protect them from the omnipresent threat of “terrorism”? I pour my third drink.
- Thanks to Saul Alinsky, we now know that everyone on the left worships Satan as a matter of course.
- Saul Alinksy defines the modern American left? Funny, I thought lesser-of-two-evillism did.
- The Piven plan to “overload the welfare system” – how exactly did they encourage this? Was there an organized strategy to overload the welfare system? I’d love to see some proof of that, but that would overwhelm the paranoid fantasy.
- That section on Betty Friedan is almost painfully stupid. But then, so is the rest of the film.
- Society is falling apart - I’ll grant you that, Bowers. But your proposed solutions have no relevance to existing power relations.
- “My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.” Awesome Karl Marx quote!
- The Progressive Caucus of the Democrats – truly, a life-and-death threat to the government of capitalist America which trembles before its 20% representation in Congress.
- I know, Christianity gets so much flak in America, more than any other religion. This is especially unfair when we consider how Christianity has traditionally faced persecution in U.S. society to a degree unmatched by any other religion.
- As the narrator says, those who believe in the sanctity of human life have always been the biggest challenge to those totalitarian regimes who would impose “Big Government” on all of us. Just ask Pope Pius XII.
- Why is it that, unlike Aristotle, we now know slavery to be wrong? Because we have the Bible. ("You may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way." - Leviticus 25:44-46)
- Whether we know it or not, “the Left is at war with God.” Such a thoughtful, nuanced interpretation of events.
- “Anti-God” is the same thing as “Anti-free enterprise”. Perhaps an unintentionally revealing analogy...
- If we tell people about problems with the environment, racism, etc., we are stunting their critical thinking skills. If we tell them that the whole world was created by God and all the proof you will ever need is in the Bible, we are creating free-spirited independent thinkers. Gotcha.
- Movie is promoting the idea that it’s all about self-reliance. How many huge corporations got that way without government assistance? Just want to know.
- Global warming is nothing but a hoax! Well, there’s a reasonable and well-considered idea.
- Jim Simpson says socialism will lead to extreme hardship for most Americans. I suppose that makes sense, if you don’t consider the fact that 1% of Americans own 40% of the national wealth.