Let’s illustrate the mad-right’s narrative machine, and how sadly incurious millions of our neighbors have become, nodding and swallowing anything that gets fed to them on Fox.
Use this! Ask your crazy uncle what he thinks of a man named… George Soros.
Oh, any Fox-watcher will tell you about Soros! How he is a criminal mastermind with a huge media empire that has suckered millions of Blue Americans into raving socialist-communist frenzy.
Never mind that Soros’s wealth and media “empire” are minuscule compared to the triumvirate of Rupert Mudoch, the Koch boys and the Saudi royal family, all co-owners of Fox. Folks following the narrative call George Soros a “super-leftist” master-demon.
A special moment: they nod in terror when Glen Beck howls “Soros toppled EIGHT foreign governments!”
In fact, that’s true! For once, Beck ain’t lying at all. George Soros did help to topple eight foreign governments! He is, indeed, a formidable fellow. Alas, in a sign of how far GOP intellect has plummeted since days of Goldwater and Buckley, not one audience member of the Beck or Limbaugh or Fox riefenstahl-rallies ever lifts his head to ask …
“Um… Glen? Rush? Sean? WHICH eight foreign governments do you credit Soros – the super leftist with toppling?”
In ten years of daring these guys, none of the Fox-ites I’ve confronted has ever been able to name even one of those toppled foreign governments. It just never occurred to them, to ask.
Are you ready to ask? Ready for the list? Here are those eight foreign governments Beck/Limbaugh/Fox credit George Soros with toppling.
The communist dictatorship of Hungary.
The communist dictatorship of Poland
The communist dictatorship of Czechoslovakia
The communist dictatorship of Romania
The communist dictatorship of Bulgaria
The communist dictatorship of Estonia
The communist dictatorship of Latvia
The communist dictatorship of Lithuania
And mind you it isn’t just uber-conservatives Beck and Limbaugh who credit Soros with this terrifying feat! The Heritage Foundation and AEI and most rightist pundit-castes have repeated it! Along with many GOP candidates. (Though sometimes the figure is nine since it rightfully should include East Germany.) Indeed, Soros’s relentless efforts to undermine the USSR and communism made up his core life’s work and even many sane political observers credit him substantially.
Let’s make this explicit. Glen Beck and all those other right wing mavens officially credit terrifying leftist George Soros with the toppling of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Warsaw Pact, the liberation of hundreds of millions and the victorious end of the Cold War.
Huh. I thought it was that other liberal (compared to today’s GOP) Ronald Reagan. In fact, they both share equal credit with Michail Gorbachev and with the architect of our grand 1945-2000 plan — George Marshall. (With Jimmy Carter deserving more of an assist cred than you’d believe.)
Look, the crux here is not who actually tore down the wall. Hey, let’s credit the people of those nations, above all.
No, the core point is this: why are the viewers of Fox and Beck/Limbaugh so cosmically stupid that they never — any of them — ask enough questions to notice the tsunami of ironies and contradictions and outright lies at their Nuremberg Rally?
So… um… where does this ghastly example of looniness, incuriosity and knee jerk obedience to declared dogma leave the credibility of today’s monster that has hijacked the once intellectually solid American conservative movement?
Oh, pity Barry Goldwater. spinning 6000 RPM in his grave.
A Personal Blog
by Michael Froomkin
Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
My Publications | e-mail
All opinions on this blog are those of the author(s) and not their employer(s) unelss otherwise specified.
Who Reads Discourse.net?
Readers describe themselves.
Please join in.Reader Map
Recent Comments
- Jermaine Chad Ingram on Some Thoughts about the Downballot (Voters’ Guide Part II: Judicial Retention Elections)
- C.E. Petit on I Voted
- Jane Moscowitz on I Voted
- Ally Figueroa on Some Thoughts about the Downballot (Voters’ Guide Part II: Judicial Retention Elections)
- Seth Miami on Election 2024 Summary & Downballot Voter’s Guide
Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 52 other subscribers
lol
http://balder.org/judea/George-Soros-The-Secret-Financial-Network-Behind-The-Wizard–By-William-Engdahl.php
The link above appears to be to an antisemitic web site, possibly with ties to the BNP and neo-pagan racisism.
Time magazine has characterized financier George Soros as a “modern-day Robin Hood,” who robs from the rich to give to the poor countries of eastern Europe and Russia. It claimed that Soros makes huge financial gains by speculating against western central banks, in order to use his profits to help the emerging post-communist economies of eastern Europe and former Soviet Union, to assist them to create what he calls an “Open Society.”
The Time statement is entirely accurate in the first part, and entirely inaccurate in the second. He robs from rich western countries, and uses his profits to rob even more savagely from the East, under the cloak of “philanthropy.”
His goal is to loot wherever and however he can. Soros has been called the master manipulator of “hit-and-run capitalism.”
As we shall see, what Soros means by “open,” is a society that allows him and his financial predator friends to loot the resources and precious assets of former Warsaw Pact economies. By bringing people like Jeffrey Sachs or Sweden’s Anders Aslund and their economic shock therapy into these economies, Soros lays the groundwork for buying up the assets of whole regions of the world at dirt-cheap prices.
The man who broke the Bank of England?
An examination of Soros’s secretive financial network is vital to understand the true dimension of the “Soros problem” in eastern Europe and other nations.http://balder.org/judea/George-Soros-The-Secret-Financial-Network-Behind-The-Wizard–By-William-Engdahl.php
The link above appears to be to an antisemitic web site, possibly with ties to the BNP and neo-pagan racisism.