A Microcosm Of How The Conservative Propaganda Machine Operates


First, you need a pretty face to sell the bull.

angela mcglowan

Angela McGlowan isn't just a pretty face, but an actual beauty pageant winner. You work her up the system, getting her jobs as a staffer for a couple congressional Republicans (she worked for Sen. Bob Dole, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett - who voted against the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act - and Rep. John Ensign). After she's seasoned, she's hired by Fox News as a talking head - yet another black conservative on television, continuing the cable news strategy/habit of having the few blacks they have on air share the political persuasion of a considerable minority of actual black Americans. This serves a dual purpose: it tells blacks that there's a line they're better of toeing to get on television, and it makes white conservatives feel a little better about their movement's racism - "see, we got blacks too".

Then you hit the motherlode. McGlowan writes a book about how those liberals are hurting blacks, intriguingly her title "Bamboozled" is the same as the Spike Lee film discussing the minstrel show. Imagine that.

Now, of course there's no actual truth or substance to the "intellectual" underpinnings of McGlowan's screed, in fact it has been liberals - black liberals like Martin Luther King - who have done the most work in fighting towards racial equality in America. It is conservatives, who left the Democratic party in the '60s in protest of LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act, who have overtly and covertly worked their asses off to keep the urban poor in their place, obstruct people from voting, support racially biased drug laws, and undermine any and all governmental initiatives to which minorities may benefit. All McGlowan's posturing does is entice conservative publisher Thomas Nelson, who also publishes David Horowitz ("Echoing Lyndon LaRouche, Horowitz and Poe smear 14-year-old George Soros as Nazi "collaborator"; new book features doctored quotes, factual errors") and Bill Bennett ("Bennett: "[Y]ou could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down""), to give her a contract.

So already, you've got a pretty face fronting a provocative yet untrue premise to aid the right, and a book funded by the right to sell it. Next step.

Conservative columnist Don Surber writes a column indicating that McGlowan is raising interesting questions about the black vote. For an idea of how ridiculous this whole thing gets, Surber cites McGlowan's argument that welfare reform ended up helping blacks. Of course, the person who signed this into law happened to be the man who has served as the liberal boogeyman for 16 years and counting - Bill Clinton.

So now we come to today, and in order to push Surber's column and McGlowan's book, right-wing blogger Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit links to both and asks "ARE THE DEMOCRATS IN DANGER OF LOSING THE BLACK VOTE?". This is Reynold's famous way (Glennuendo) of pushing something but giving himself deniability. It's the blogosphere version of "questions swirl". Now, the intriguing thing is that from 1996 to present, the black vote for Democrats has increased. It is the backbone f the party and in no danger of being lured away by shiny things or paid-for hucksters like McGlowan. White, mostly male, conservatives occasionally have pangs of guilt about conservativism's relatively limited cultural composition and this is an attempt at self-help for them. I guarantee more than a couple will see Reynolds' link, Surber's column, and McGlowan's book and come away with a world view that blacks are leaving the left to vote Republican when the reality is the opposite.

But it's mission accomplished, again, for the con propaganda machine.

RELATED: Angela McGlowan believes Richard Nixon, who violated the law and disgraced the nation in a series of acts that led to his resignation, is "a great man". That doesn't represent the opinion of most sentient beings, let alone black Americans.

>> Dumb question of the day.