Right Wing Watch: Breitbart Editor: The Goal Is The ‘Full Destruction And Elimination Of The Entire Mainstream Media’
That is, an authoritarian, conservative government that determines the truth, and no one else is allowed to say respond or criticize, or point out evidence to the contrary. Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Except that it couldn’t work now, since the internet is beyond the control of … well, except authoritarian governments like North Korea. Hmm. Maybe it could happen.)
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Salon: How Breitbart media’s disinformation created the paranoid, fact-averse nation that elected Trump.
More about the Columbia Journalism Review study.
Breitbart not only led the right’s obsessive, hostile focus on immigrants, it was also the first to attack professional reporting such as the New York Times and Washington Post. Breitbart’s disruptive template fueled the political and information universe we now inhabit, where the right dismisses facts and embraces fantasies.
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Salon: Steve Bannon and the occult: The right wing’s long, strange love affair with New Age mysticism
There is a long-standing intersection between mysticism and conservatism in America. This marriage extends back to the late 19th century when globetrotting occultist and Russian noblewoman Madame H.P. Blavatsky depicted America as the catalyst for a revolution in human potential in her 1888 opus “The Secret Doctrine.” “It is in America that the transformation will take place,” Blavatsky wrote, “and has already silently commenced.”
This strikes me as an example of how humans more susceptible to the “I’m so very special, and the place I live in and the religion I believe in are obviously the mostest special things in the world” mental bias are, of course, conservatives, prone to dismissing real world evidence and attracted to anything that confirms their biases. And lacking any understanding of the actual, physical world, are prone to fairy-tales about how it might work, as long as it they confirm those biases.
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Thus, yet again, David Barton’s selective reading of history: David Barton Picks History He Likes and Omits the Rest.
Quoting lines from Thomas Jefferson out of context.
