By Robert Reich
Demagogues rarely commit violence
directly. Instead, they use blame, ridicule, fear and hate – and then leave the
violence to others. That way, they can always claim “it wasn’t me. I don’t have blood on my hands.”
Of the tens of millions of Americans
that the Trump-Fox News regime has made fearful, only a small percentage – say,
a hundred thousand – have been moved to hate the objects of that fear.
And of those hundred thousand, only
a relative handful – say, a few thousand – have been motivated to act on that
hate, posting loathsome messages online, sending death threats, spray-painting
swastikas.
And of that few thousand, a tiny
subset, perhaps no more than a hundred or so, have been moved to violence.
But make no mistake: This lineage of
cause and effect begins with Trump and his Fox News propaganda machine.
Politicians and media moguls have long understood that fear and hate sell better than hope and compassion, no matter how much we might wish it otherwise.
But before Trump, no president had based his office on it. And before Fox News, no major media outlet had based its ratings on it.
Ronald Reagan stoked racism by
bashing “welfare queens” and George W. Bush by airing campaign ads featuring
“Willie Horton,” but fear and hate weren’t the centerpieces of either
presidency.
The two political operatives behind
these campaigns bear mention, though: Lee Atwater, who had also been chairman
of the Republican National Committee and a senior partner at the political consulting firm
of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly (yes, that Manafort and that Stone);
and Roger Ailes, who went on to create and run Fox News.
Atwater and Ailes premised their
careers on fear and hate. Ailes’s Fox News monetized fear and hate through
phantom menaces like a “terror mosque” near Ground Zero, Barack Obama’s alleged
connections to black nationalists and Muslims, and Sarah Palin’s fictitious
“death panels.”
Trump took Atwater and Ailes to
their logical extremes – building a political base by suggesting Obama wasn’t
born in America; launching his presidential campaign by warning of “criminals”
and “rapists” streaming across the Mexican border; and ending his campaign with
an ad suggesting that prominent Jews — billionaire philanthropist George Soros,
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Fed Chair Janet L. Yellen — were in
league with Hillary Clinton to control the world.
Since taking office, Trump has
ramped up fear and hatred – towards immigrants, journalists, black athletes who
won’t stand for the anthem, major media, and prominent Democrats.
In recent weeks he suggested that
criminals and terrorists from the Middle East had joined a caravan of
immigrants heading toward the border, and even floated a conspiracy theory that Soros helped fund the caravan.
Fox News has magnified the fear and
hate exactly as its founder would have wanted.
A guest on Lou Dobbs’ show claimed the caravan was being funded by the “Soros-occupied State Department.”
A guest on Lou Dobbs’ show claimed the caravan was being funded by the “Soros-occupied State Department.”
That same week, Soros was among the
targets of pipe bombs sent to prominent Democrats and members of the media. A
Florida man who identifies himself as a Trump supporter was arrested in
connection with the attempted bombings.
Hours before a gunman entered a
synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven worshipers, he reportedly wrote that
a Jewish organization for refugees “likes to bring invaders in that kill our
people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics,
I’m going in.”
Bombs mailed to political leaders.
Threats against the media. A shooting in a place of worship. None were directly
ordered by Trump or his propaganda affiliate. They didn’t have to be.
Trump’s demagoguery inspired it. Fox
News magnified it.
The hatefulness is unconstrained.
Having fired the few “adults” in his Cabinet, Trump is now loose in the White
House, except for a few advisors who reportedly are trying to protect the
nation from him.
House and Senate Republicans are not holding him back. To the contrary, they have morphed into his sycophants. An increasing number are sounding just like him.
Atwater and Ailes are gone from this
world, but their descendants – Fox News’s Sean Hannity and Bill Shine, formerly
Roger Ailes’s deputy – have direct pipelines to Trump (Shine is now formally
installed in the West Wing).
The upcoming election is not really
a choice between Republicans and Democrats. Those traditional labels have lost
most of their meaning, if not much of their value.
It is really a choice about the
moral compass of America.
Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at
the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center
for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton
administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective
cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books,
including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of
Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "The
Common Good," which is available in bookstores now. He is also a founding
editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning
documentary, "Inequality For All." He's co-creator of the Netflix
original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming
now.
