Thom Hartmann
June 9, 2024
Photo by Frank Okay on Unsplash
The politically cancerous pattern of using racism for political gain and financial profit dates back to the earliest days of our republic, but now, amplified by Donald Trump, is again increasingly in our faces.
Black workers at a General Mills plant in Georgia are suing over white management allegedly sanctioning a “Good Ole Boys” club that uses Confederate symbols and open racism to intimidate and cow them.
A producer on The Apprentice show is — now that his NDA has expired — telling the story of Trump’s casual and repeated use of the N-word, questioning whether Americans would ever “buy a n— winning” the show’s faux business competition.
The GOP and rightwing hate media have turned racism into both a political weapon and a machine to generate billions in annual profits. Today’s “school choice” movement, racial and anti-immigrant hatred, and the MAGA movement all have the same roots.
America’s media and the GOP try to pretend that the primary animating force of Trump’s MAGA movement isn’t race, but it absolutely is. And it’s been both politically and financially profitable for those willing to join him.
When, in 1954, the then-moderate-dominated Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling and said that public schools must integrate, the response from the right was swift and certain. By the end of that decade public schools across the South had closed, leaving private school or no school as the only option. It continued into the 60s.
Prince Edward County, Virginia, for example, shut down all their public schools from 1959 to 1963. In Clarendon County, South Carolina, that school district closed the all-Black Summerton High School in 1966 to avoid integration, so white parents sent their children to a newly-built private segregated school instead.
Jerry Falwell opened an all-white “Christian” private school, one of hundreds across the country, and Bob Jones University proudly continued to admit only white students.
That an anti-racist Supreme Court decision also kicked off today’s modern conservative movement. In 1957, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote an infamous editorial for his National Review magazine titled “Why the South Must Prevail” in which he argued that segregation must continue because Black people, he said, are incapable of participating in “civilization.”
“The central question that emerges,” Buckley wrote, “is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?
“The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.
“It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. …
“NATIONAL REVIEW believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the [Black] majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by [White] civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical [Black] majority.”
Oil baron Fred Koch, the father of Koch brothers Charles and David, helped fund the 1958 startup of the John Birch Society, whose major project in that era was placing billboards all across American proclaiming that Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote the majority opinion in Brown v Board, must be impeached.
As the brilliant new documentary Bad Faith details, in the run-up to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan the anti-integration movement needed a new non-racial issue to publicly blur their racism while bringing together the nation’s bigots into a “Christian” voting bloc.
Even though Reagan had signed the most liberal abortion law in the nation as California governor, George HW Bush and his wife were both big supporters of Planned Parenthood, and Jerry Falwell and the racist all-white-school evangelical movement had been pro-choice right up until 1978, they collectively picked abortion as the non-racial hook on which to hang their political activism and organizing.
After all, abortion was then most often used by middle-class white women and was thus, they noted, “depriving the nation of large numbers of white babies.”
The so-called Moral Majority movement (and its successor, the Tea Party movement) were heavily funded by oil billionaires (including Fred’s sons) after Reagan, Falwell, et al, committed to broadening their agenda to include deregulation of monopolies and the fossil fuel industry, along with massive tax cuts.
Thus was born the modern-day alliance between the morbidly rich, polluting and monopolistic industries, and white supremacists that has taken over the GOP and calls itself MAGA.
But, as the fascist governments of the 1930s showed in Europe, for a movement to seize control of a government it must not only have rich donors but also requires a powerful media arm.
To accomplish this, President Reagan fast-tracked citizenship for Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch (the son of media mogul and notorious racist Sir Keith Murdoch) in 1985 so he could legally purchase US media properties; Fox “News” was launched here the following year, as Reagan ordered the FCC to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine and Republicans in Congress later gutted the Equal Time Rule.
In this, Reagan knew what he and the GOP were getting; Murdoch had by that time already flipped both Australian and British politics toward the hard right using frequent and lurid stories featuring crime by minorities.
Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times) former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his rightwing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”
“The uncomfortable truth is,” Rudd wrote, “Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable. The core question is why?”
While Rudd calls out the Australian equivalents of Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the focus of his article and the damage done within his own nation was the influence of Rupert Murdoch.
Noting that, “Murdoch owns two-thirds of the country’s print media,” Rudd added,
“Murdoch is not just a news organisation. Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view.”
Brexit happened in the UK because of the newspapers and media Murdoch owns there, Rudd wrote, and:
“In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”
Murdoch’s positions aren’t at all ambiguous, Rudd noted. They’re simply pro-white, pro-billionaire, and pro-oligarchy and thus, by extension, anti-democracy.
“In Australia, as in America,” he wrote, “Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism.
“Given Murdoch's impact on the future of our democracy,” Rudd added, “it's time to revisit it.”
Here in America, Fox “News” has had such a powerful influence on American politics that its most recent political creation, President Donald Trump, even ordered government agencies to show it on their in-house TVs.
Fox and Murdoch’s power come, Rudd says, from their ruthlessness.
“Murdoch is also a political bully and a thug,” former Australian Prime Minister Rudd writes, “who for many years has hired bullies as his editors. The message to Australian politicians is clear: either toe the line on what Murdoch wants or he kills you politically.
“This has produced a cowering, fearful political culture across the country. I know dozens of politicians, business leaders, academics and journalists, both left and right, too frightened to take Murdoch on because they fear the repercussions for them personally. They have seen what happens to people who have challenged Murdoch’s interests as Murdoch then sets out to destroy them.”
When Fox and Tucker Carlson set out to rewrite the history of the treasonous January 6th coup attempt at our nation’s Capitol with a three-part special alleging it could have been an inside job by the FBI, two of their top conservative stars, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest.
Text messages released by Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the committee that investigated the January 6th attempt to overthrow our government show that the network’s top prime-time hosts were begging Trump to call off his openly racist and murderous mob while at the same time minimizing what happened on the air.
Even worse, revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and acknowledging he was a “sore loser,” they said the exact opposite to their audience.
Along with their relentless attacks on America’s first Black president, Fox’s support of Trump’s Big Lie helped tear America apart and set up the violence and deaths on January 6th — while also making billions for Murdoch and his family.
Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely no liberal (he was a White House advisor to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:
“Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.”
While Biden press secretaries Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have been humorous in their dealing with Fox’s Peter Doocy’s attempts at gotcha questions in the White House press room, there’s nothing funny about inciting attacks on our country and then openly lying on the air about “antifa” to cover it up, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented that Fox did.
That white backlash to the Brown v Board decision is still alive and well in America, and was amplified by the election of Barack Obama as president: it led straight to Trump’s racist birtherism and the flowering of his 2015 candidacy. Fox and rightwing media have exploited that reaction and relentlessly used it to enrich themselves in the modern day.
It’s also the foundation of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential candidacy, which is being endlessly promoted across the rightwing hate media spectrum. Tucker Carlson and other heirs to William F. Buckley Jr. — along with the MAGA contingent within the GOP — continue to promote his and Sir Keith Murdoch’s message of white superiority, albeit shrouded in more acceptable language for today’s audiences.
This is how Rupert Murdoch succeeded in reinventing American politics in the image of his own paranoid, xenophobic, and arguably racist worldview, just as Rudd documents he did to Australia and the United Kingdom.
Fox “News” led the charge to amplify Trump’s racist “birther” claims against President Obama, positioning him to run in 2016; without their help he never would have become president and done the damage that he has to this country.
“Banishing from polite company” is a phrase from a different era, but it’s time to ask if Fox has grown to such destructive dimensions that our government’s press rooms should stop recognizing them as a legitimate “news” organization and our military should reconsider rightwing media’s impact on our troops.
On average, every cable-connected household in America is paying two dollars a month to Fox “News” via their cable company fees. A growing movement, https://www.nofoxfee.com/ is trying to change this.
To continue with Rudd’s metaphor, if our media and body politic are infected with a cancer — driven by white grievance and an unending thirst for profits, regardless of the damage it does — it’s our responsibility as Americans to call it out and isolate it so it can’t further harm our democracy and, by extension, the other democracies of the world.
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