Lies, Lies, Lies, My Darling - The GOP and the Right-Wing Media Continue to Lie to Our Faces
The Republican machine chugs on
We as Americans continue to be lied to on a daily basis.
If you haven't been following the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, which is for the staggering amount of $1.6 billion, and that's with a B, then you have missed out on the curtain being pulled back on the entire Stop the Steal movement and how it was pushed by right-wing news outlets, even though they knew it was bullshit from the start.
When lawsuits head into discovery, they can shed light on information the public may not have been privy to. In the case of Fox News, it's been revealed that heavy hitters like Laura Ingram, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson were extremely skeptical of Donald Trump and his cohorts' claims of a stolen election, while also going on national television and pushing the narrative themselves.
The entire 192-page document shows the correspondence between on-air personalities as well as the reporters who were attempting to investigate the claims from Trump that the 2020 Presidential Election was somehow stolen right in front of our eyes. What the bulk of the documents show is a different conversation than what was being presented on television. Keep in mind, these are the news reports that were being circulated before January 6th, 2021, when insurrectionists stormed the capital and attempted to overthrow our government in the name of misinformation and lies.
The most telling piece of information that can be gathered from these documents is how much the people at Fox referred to these claims as "conspiracy theories" while also boosting the stories each and every night to millions of Americans. Not just that, but the majority of people working at Fox seemed to have some fairly unfavorable opinions about Sydney Powell, the American attorney who was the first on Lou Dobbs Tonight to initially spread the story about the CIA using a program called Hammer and Scorecard. Tucker Carlson himself said that Powell was lying, but that didn't stop him from continuing to portray Trump and the other nutcases’ claims that kept on pushing the narrative of a stolen election as newsworthy.
The problem just isn't with Fox News. The problem with lying is that once people see how effective it can be when controlling narratives, others will pick up the same habits. Take our buddy, George Santos. Santos has lied so much about his life that it's hard to even know what is fact and what is fiction at this time. He isn't even the only congressperson who has been caught confabulating their past. Anna Paulina Luna has also been caught embellishing her past, and now we have found out that a third GOP member has been exaggerating their credentials, Andy Olges.
And what will come of these three members of the Republican party now that they have been outed as liars? Most likely nothing. The fact of the matter is that the GOP holds such a slim lead over the Democrats in the House that any shakeup at all could lead to ruin when it comes to keeping control. But let's be real, the Republicans have been accepting outright lies for so long that they don't seem to care. In fact, they are so used to lying that they seem to get caught doing so almost daily, but no different approach has been taken.
Take the horrible train derailment in Palestine, Ohio. Marjorie Taylor Greene has seemingly done the right thing, speaking out about the horrible tragedy that has befallen a small town in Ohio. For those unaware, the train derailment has released untold damage to the region, as it spilled a massive amount of vinyl chloride into the environment, but residents have been told to return to their houses and trust that they are safe.
There's one problem with Rep. Greene's approach to the issue though. Greene blamed the derailment on Pete Buttigieg, the current Secretary of Transportation, for the issues that our rail system currently has. But here is the big caveat that Congresswoman Greene failed to mention during her attack on the current administration:
Former President Trump was the person who scaled back an Obama-era safeguard that would force companies to upgrade their brakes in order to prevent these catastrophes. It happened in 2017, back when Trump was stripping away regulatory "roadblocks" that would force corporations to spend more money to... (checks notes) keep the people of the United States safe from events like we just witnessed in Ohio.
That's the biggest problem with thinking that deregulation is keeping money in people's pockets. It's short-sided. The reason these laws were put in place was that events like this happened on a regular basis back in the 1800s before any of these laws were on the books. Factories crumbling while workers were still inside happened enough times that the American public had no choice but to have our government step in. It escapes me how current-day conservatives don't acknowledge these well-documented events in our country's history, but when you are pushing your own agenda, the facts seem to fall by the wayside very quickly. It’s also the problem with trying to flip this on Buttigieg, who wasn’t responsible for allowing the rail companies in charge of upkeeping their equipment to get off scot-free in the name of “deregulation”.
And while yes, we can always have the discussion of "both sides" using dishonest tricks in order to fool the American public, I don't think that the Democrats are as blatant as the right-wing media and politicians have been since 2016, when Trump showed that people no longer cared about substance, just pandering and showmanship. The influx of bullshit stories and conspiracy theories from the darkest regions of the internet into our mainstream news outlets, along with the staggering amount of downright lies that their lawmakers have sewn, have done nothing to push this country forward. They have nothing to do with curbing spending, nor do they enrich American citizens enough to pull themselves out of poverty, which the vast majority of us seem to be sliding towards faster and faster these days.
The only thing that these actions do is help control the narrative and ensure that their base is getting the information they are looking for. Confirmation biases and years of distrust of the government on both sides have led us here, and the Republican party doesn't have to do much at all to guarantee that this line of thinking is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
One piece of advice I always give anyone close to me when discussing politics is this: question everything, and do your own research. Look at the issue from all sides, even if it means you are wrong. These days, as I have said countless times before, the worst thing you can be is wrong or misinformed. But now, I think it's time we all ate some humble pie and started looking at actual facts, rather than the "facts" that we are comfortable with.