The False Prophets of the Political Right

For years I have decried the "reverse Robinhood" policies of the Republican Party and its use of racism and appelas to other forms of prejudice and bigotry to dupe voters into voting against their own economic interest.  Donald Trump took this agenda to a new level and continues to fleece voters, many of whom can ill aford to be throwing away their money.   In its/their efforts, the GOP and Trump have been aided by many accomplices ranging from scamvangelists - think Franklin Graham, the Falwell family and others - to vulture capitalists and billionaires who want the country rum by an oligarchy and who hold democracy in contempt and see it as an obstacle to reaping ever more obscene profits.  And then there is the right wing media - Fox News in particular - where the truth and facts do not matter and ratings and page views are all that matter.  The lives and welbeing of their viewers are irrelevant as the anti-mask and anti-vaccine drumbeat has underscored.  While the isurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol a year age need to be fully prosecuted for their action, so too do the "false prophets" of the right who spurred them to action as laid out in a column in the Washington Post by a former Republican.  Here are highlights:

My grandmother’s faith in God sustained her as she struggled to raise her family through the Great Depression, said goodbye to her teenage son as he left for World War II and buried her husband a decade later.

The sounds of Billy Graham’s crusades would fill my grandmom’s Georgia home in the 1970s. A decade later, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s “PTL Club” would win her loyalty, as well as her monthly tithes. My parents gently tried warning her that the “PTL” stars were scam artists less interested in her spiritual welfare than in her monthly Social Security checks. Even after being treated rudely by Tammy Faye in a chance encounter, Grandmom kept sending money the Bakkers’ way as they built their empire on the backs of working-class Christians. The dreadful pair’s get-rich schemes leveraged Americans’ love of God for cold, hard cash.

Looking back on the events of Jan. 6, perhaps we should focus more on the false prophets who inspired the violence of that day than the rioters we still highlight on video loops.

Those who beat cops with American flags should serve long jail sentences. But the most important lesson from that tragic day may come from deconstructing how plutocrats and trust-fund babies deployed propaganda campaigns to push that bloodthirsty mob up the Capitol steps.

The “big lie” bloodletting happened at the behest of a slumlord’s son, who inherited more than $400 million and used his presidency to undermine citizens’ faith in their country. His anti-American poison was spread through the arteries of one foreign family’s media empire and soon metastasized across the American heartland.

Just as the Bakkers used the Gospel of Jesus Christ to prey on gullible viewers, these right-wing billionaires and their allies are trying to brainwash millions of Americans into believing the U.S. government is deploying Afghanistan War helicopters to launch domestic attacks against them, that the FBI is purging patriots from society and that the “deep state” staged the Jan. 6 riot as a “false flag” to strip citizens of their constitutional rights.

These hate-filled hysterics spewed against the United States have been punctuated by verbal assaults targeting military heroes, the slandering of the U.S. intelligence community and a barrage of fire against the nation’s democratic voting system that would make Vladimir Putin blush with pride. These are the kind of anti-American screeds that fueled the Capitol riot, and they have been preached with increasing intensity since that tragic day.

They are free to travel the world on their super yachts or private jets while Jan. 6 defendants beg for their freedom in federal court.

What a dichotomy between these plutocrats and the working-class populists they duped into doing their bidding on Jan. 6. The divide between the propaganda they preach and the policies they pursue has become just as stark over the past two decades. Republicans have spent the 21st century embracing a populist brand while tailoring their policies to help the super rich. The result has helped drive perhaps the greatest wealth redistribution in world history, at the expense of the middle class.

Maybe that explains why every Republican presidential nominee this century has come from the United States’ most powerful families and graduated from the country’s most elite universities. Their fathers ran automobile companies, Midwest industrial states, the United States Navy, New York real estate empires and the country itself. I can hear the voice of my grandmom saying, “To whom much is given, much is expected.” While we have not inherited the wealth and power of these American oligarchs, we have been given a republic. Let us spend the next year doing what we can to save it.