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.

Mr. Jones and Me

Alex Jones has always struck me as something of a conundrum. The Austin, Texas-based radio host is generally derided by mainstream media as a "conspiracy theorist" - an ironic accusation given those same corporate propaganda outlets' penchant for uncritically amplifying any and all claims made by the government, especially concerning official foreign "enemies". It should be acknowledged that there are few better ways for the powerful to stigmatize an idea than to label it a "conspiracy theory". Still, once you get past Jones' dire warnings of a New World Order that will usher in a tyrannical one-world government, his "strong" 9/11 truth stance and his supposition that global warming is a vast hoax designed to enslave the human race via carbon tax, eliminate American sovereignty and depopulate the Earth in the interests of a rapacious global elite, you'll find a solid foundation of facts and basic truths that usually go completely ignored by the MSM.


Unfortunately, those are some very difficult issues to get past, and they help explain much of my continuing ambivalence towards Jones. On balance, I have more admiration for him than almost any servile establishment bootlicker in the MSM, and my reasoning here is almost incidental to Jones' actual worldview, lying more in his spirit and philosophy. As official mythology would have it, journalists serve as a Fourth Estate, aggressively questioning government claims to protect citizens' rights to accurate information. And yet how many popular media figures today actually fulfill this criteria? Very, very few if we're talking about establishment American media. MSNBC has offered up some important exceptions, such as Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Dylan Ratigan and Ed Schultz, but the same network is largely a bastion of Village groupthink and conservative framing from the likes of Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough. When not devoting countless hours of coverage to the latest tabloid celebrity garbage, CNN offers the ultimate stenographer journalists, who posit a false balance on every issue by always moderating between a conservative (meaning Republican) guest and "liberal" (meaning Democratic) guest.

Finally, there is an important wild card - the right-wing noise machine of talk radio and Faux News (or "The Lie Factory"). Although journalists should aggressively question government claims, this is not the same thing as using lies, smears, exaggerations and distortions to attack a government on all fronts simply for having a president with a (D) instead of an (R) after his name. Hannity, Beck and their ilk are not "entertainers", but rather poisonous propagandists who sadly manage to convince millions of followers that they are sincere truth-seekers rather than cynical careerists.

By contrast, I feel Alex Jones falls into the former category. He appears to truly believe what he says, and has consistently risked his neck to expose the truth behind secretive elitist organizations such as the Bohemian Grove, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, which are unknown to most of the general public but may have massive impacts on their lives. Although Noam Chomsky has dismissed the likes of the CFR as "nothing organizations", the indisputable truth is that almost every U.S. president of the 20th century was either a member of the CFR or had a cabinet dominated by its members. Regarding the Bilderberg Group, something important is being discussed when the most high-profile members of the world elite convene under secretive circumstances, if only because those guests play such an important role in the enactment of global policy. Alex Jones has a natural skepticism towards all government officials, foreign and domestic, and that quality puts him head and shoulders above most self-proclaimed "journalists" as an earnest seeker of truth.

I must note, however, that I do have some misgivings about Jones' approach. For example, there sometimes seems to be a slight element of self-serving commercialism, as his radio show continually drops the names of his websites while flogging DVDs and other Jones-related merchandise such as his "TyrannyCrusher 1" bullhorn (which, admittedly, I would like to own). However, I can easily look past this element; after all, Jones does not command the vast financial resources of his "mainstream" counterparts, and may require these alternate sources of revenue. In addition, Jones is a libertarian and has conservative leanings; he is an unabashed capitalist and so never claims to be above making an extra buck by selling merchandise.

Yet those same conservative leanings are ultimately the source of much more serious weaknesses in Jones' worldview - his belief that global warming is a hoax; his opposition to single-payer health care or even Obama's weak public option based on the talking point that it would constitute a government takeover of health care; and his America-centric take on everything, constantly invoking the Constitution and the Founding Fathers in a manner that idealizes the early United States while completely overlooking the fact that it was an actual slave society (ironic for such a firm opponent of feared modern slavery under the New World Order).

If I were more cynical than I already am, I might imagine that Alex Jones is carving out his own media niche by appealing to the "conspiracy-minded" on both the right and the left, thereby expanding his audience and creating an aura that he alone knows what's really going on, that he and his followers are above the "left-right paradigm" which everyone else so slavishly follows. Leave aside for a moment the false equivalency of this perspective. From a pure standpoint of audience appeal, in this way Jones can attract both "left-wing" listeners who believe that 9/11 was an inside job as well as "right-wing" listeners who hold that global warming is a hoax to destroy American sovereignty. Ultimately, I give Jones the benefit of the doubt because he does seem to truly believe what he's saying, but I still allow for the possibility of that more commercial perspective.

All these thoughts went through my head as I sat down to watch Fall of the Republic, Jones' latest film. As always, it's a mixed bag, one that gave me more cause for disagreement than his last work, The Obama Deception. At times it was frustrating, as Jones veered from moments of total brilliance to moments of forehead-slapping incredulity. His film was, at different times, both supremely informative and shockingly misinformative. Most of the factual discussion on the financial crisis, the Wall Street bailouts, and the flaws of the American two-party system was interesting and well-told. The interviews were highly enjoyable, particularly when the always-brilliant Max Keiser discusses the illusion of choice in the American political system by comparing the two corporate political parties, Democrats and Republicans, to other corporate duopolies such as Coke vs. Pepsi and McDonald's vs. Burger King.

There was other food for thought. Trends forecaster Gerald Celente gave a chilling preview of the dark prospects for America in the years ahead. Jones provides needed analysis of how the Obama "brand" (referencing an article by Chris Hedges) was marketed to an America desperate for change. There is an intriguing dissection of the media's role in infantilizing the masses, such as the construction of false tribal identities in males via professional sports - though Jones seems to be forgetting that bread and circuses have been used to distract the people since the gladiatorial bloodsport of Roman times. Finally, there is some discussion of the increasing powers of the American national-security complex, the rapid militarization of the state and the further curtailment of civil liberties under the Obama administration. These are absolutely vital issues that have been mostly ignored by mainstream media in both Canada and the United States, and illustrate why Jones has more legitimate claim to the title of journalist than most of his well-paid, well-coiffed "mainstream" counterparts.

Unfortunately, the film is derailed by the more unsavoury, paranoid aspects of Jones' worldview. Specifically, I refer to the film's discussion of global warming. Jones presents climate change deniers as heroes of free speech who are being categorically shushed through the elite's dominance of government and media. Most repellingly, Webster Tarpley, who has done some great research but has the same unfortunate tendency as Jones to embellish his accounts with dubious conspiratorial nonsense, equates scientists who hold that human activity is mainly responsible for global climate change with the pseudo-scientific garbage of Nazi race theorists.

Aside from his belief that 9/11 was an inside job, I have no more fundamental disagreement with Jones than his suggestion that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the elite, and the reason is simple: his argument makes no sense. If the global elite, which controls the government, Big Business and the media, is so gung-ho about battling climate change - if they've specifically invented this fake scientific consensus to use hysteria over global warming to impose massive carbon taxes and threaten citizens' individual rights - then why have those same governments been so slow on coming forward with any climate legislation at all, when they're not denying the problem's very existence (as Jones does)? Why does the corporate media - which, according to Chomsky's propaganda model, restricts debate to within the elite's own terms - consistently give airtime to those who deny climate change?

The simple fact is that governments are barely doing anything to address global warming, notwithstanding Obama's tepid cap-and-trade bill which calls for lowering greenhouse gas emissions only 4% over the next ten years. This doesn't exactly gel with Jones' theory that they've deliberately manufactured a hoax to enslave the human race and end American sovereignty. Here is the most serious factual error in Jones' whole film, originating in the right-wing elements of his ideology. It certainly doesn't help that he bolsters his case by incorporating footage of Republican members of Congress (including certified lunatic Michelle Bachmann) whose denial of climate change is roughly proportional to their level of campaign contributions from Big Oil.

The reason Jones' climate change denial grates on me so much is that he's correct on most other issues, particularly his characterization of the elite's corporate nature and his ultimately populist stance. But in this case, his own ideology prevents him from accepting the legitimacy of things like the UN report on climate change. After all, if something comes from the UN, it must be a fraud designed to serve the interests of the impending one-world government, right? That may prove to be a tragically misguided belief, because if the scientific consensus that global warming is caused primarily by human activity is sound, Jones is helping us doom the planet and its future generations to ecological catastrophe, the consequences of which we can't even begin to fully grasp. If you want to see someone who truly understands the importance and reality of this issue, and presents constructive ideas on how to cope with it, please read Naomi Klein's new article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. It actually makes me believe we might summon the collective willpower to deal with such an unprecedented global threat, if we weren't so lazy and our governments weren't so greedy and corrupt.

So the climate change stuff kind of sinks Alex Jones' latest film. Nevertheless, I can't deny there's a lot of worthwhile stuff in there, and that's usually how it works with AJ. Because there's always a fair degree of truth in whatever he says, and because his heart is in the right place - i.e. because he legitimately challenges those in authority and awakens citizens to the need to question people in power - I will remain an Alex Jones fan. The fact that he's wrong on some issues merely reinforces the lesson that you can't trust any public personality completely, but must do your own research and make up your own mind. Jones has always encouraged this in his listeners, and whatever you may think of his particular brand of politics, that is some indisputably good advice.