“I cannot listen to the news anymore.” Have you heard that, too?
No one that I spend time with advocates for willful ignorance. But we have learned in recent years to protect our mental state. We want to socialize and work and play with productive minds; and our minds, if preoccupied with the Trump regime and Republican party politics and the daily barrage of their preoccupation with dismantling the good parts of the nation we built, are despaired. Who genuinely wants to see the regime begin another unwinnable, prolonged, unjustified, deadly war? None among we who lived through the Vietnam war and the Bush era wars. The billionaires who profit personally from wars have interest in another unwinnable, prolonged, unjustified, deadly war and whispered in Trump’s and Hegseth’s ears You need more distraction from the affordability and Epstein issues. Afterall, their children will not be in harm’s way.
We can receive news and information in our own ways. I receive several newsletters in my email box every day, among them are The New York Times, Democracy Docket, The Texas Observer, and The Atlantic. Reading the news is my way of avoiding the emotional timbres of television reporters and political analysts. Even the best among journalists on television and podcasts raise their voices and rant. Like arguments between friends and family members, our voices and body language remain longer in our memories than do the spoken words. From what I’m reading, this weekend’s alleged shooter was a rational person until recently. My mind does not have to stretch far to imagine that a steady diet of podcasters, social media, and television news reporters who rile their audiences radicalized him. A steady diet from a sole source is never healthy…red meat or news. My car radio is set on a local NPR station. NPR holds its reporters and news stories to the highest standards of professionalism…no rants, no yelling, no propaganda.
Thom Hartmann is one of the writers and news analysts that I pay attention to. His essays and reports land in my email every day (The Hartmann Report). Today’s report is “How the Hate-Industrial Complex Keeps Marching On.” This is an excerpt:
“The attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night shouldn’t surprise us. Not only does America have the world’s most active small-arms industry that essentially controls the GOP (the reporters got a taste of what American — and only American — schoolkids experience every few months from their “realistic” active shooter drills), but we also host the world’s largest and most profitable hate-amplification industry.
Algorithms that amplify hate and division in order to “increase engagement” have made Mark Zuckerberg into one of the richest people on the planet, complete with a super-yacht and a doomsday bunker estate in Hawaii; Elon Musk’s X has turned into a sewer of Nazi style rhetoric while Musk himself has posted, according to The Washington Post, nakedly white supremacist slogans and statements over 850 times just in the past seven months.
The Republican Party writ large has also benefitted from all this, since it was reinvented mid-20th century by Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy and Reagan’s embrace of “states’ rights” as the party of Christian white male supremacy. (The last four Black Republicans in the US House of Representatives are ending their political careers this year.)
Because every rightwing movement in history has been founded on hate and/or xenophobia, the openly neo-Confederate MAGA movement was simply the logical end-point of this turn the Party took a half-century ago. History shows that when the right wants to seize power, it reaches for the oldest weapon in politics: teach people to fear and then hate their neighbors, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.
Finally, the billionaire class and the massive, monopolistic corporations that made them rich benefit from the hate industry because when working-class people are mobilized to hate each other based on race, religion, gender (and gender identity), nationality, or political affiliation they’re far less likely to organize together to demand union rights, benefits, healthcare, education, and/or better wages.
Some even argue that the current state of GOP corruption, billionaire greed, and societal hate in America proves that democracy has run its course…”
Yes, willful ignorance, a large uneducated populace, and the widening gap between the Haves and Have-Nots contribute to our growing divide. However, we can rationally suggest that willful ignorance and the growing socio-economic divides are the result of something else. Willful ignorance breeds willful ignorance because Americans have the opportunities as never before to explore and satisfy their biases. As local newspapers disappeared, televised news and information monopolies thrived. As independent and public media grew, far right leaning billionaires and their corporations purchased much of the remaining powerful news networks. Millions of Americans search their social media pages for news and information, tune into their favorite podcasters on TikTok and YouTube for the biased information they want to hear, and willfully avoid journalism that challenges their biases. The U.S.A. is a nation of willfully ignorant people who feed daily on biased news and information, delivered in rants, presented as entertainment, and profiting from the irrational, misinformed grievances they cause.
Although as Hartmann points out, America’s political and religious right wing is largely responsible for the growing anger, misinformed citizenry, resentful and radical young men, and the losses among our free press, liberals have used the same propaganda techniques to win larger audiences. I cannot watch MSNBC, MS NOW, or read Huffington Post without sighing in despair for good journalism. These media barely rise above right-wing media.
We need to know what is happening in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the rest of the world. We need to know what is happening outside our communities of comfort and across the nation. We need to be aware. Seeing the dangers, hearing about the courageous resistance, realizing how different we are in all our sameness, learning about the governments’ handling of our nation’s resources including the free press, finding out ways that we can Be Helpers…we need to know what is going on. Willful ignorance will not make our lives or our grandchildren’s lives any better. Willful ignorance is a cancer, and Americans’ use of confirmation bias is the catalyst.
PS Be helpful, hopeful, kind, and productive. Be the Helpers that our neighbors look for in these dreadful times. Challenge your own ideas; we can be wrong but we want to be informed.
