Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Bill O'Reilly and the Problem of CRAP-loaded Propaganda

The image of Bill O'Reilly is from here

[CRAP is an acronym standing for Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy]

Bill O'Reilly wants your mind.

Here's a synopsis of what he wants everyone to believe, or at least tries to convince others of:

The poor are a threat to the rich, in that they allegedly exploit the rich to get things they don't deserve or aren't entitled to. Capitalism is good. Being a billionaire is enviable and desirable.

Undocumented workers, immigrants, and refugees, particularly if from Mexico or Syria--not of European descent--are a threat to the employment and rule of white/U.S./European working and middle class people, and to mythic ideas about such political/regional heritages. And, again, 'they' exploit the system to garner advantages they are supposedly not entitled to and that ruling classes supposedly do not have.

Black and Brown people allegedly threaten the relative well-being and entitlements of whites.

Women are allegedly threat to men, sexually, economically, socially, and politically. What they threaten is the dominant standing of men and unbridled sexually violent, abusive, harassing, or coercive actions of men.

Islam is allegedly purportedly evil. There are variations on this theme. Muslims allegedly threaten the safety and well-being of non-Muslims, globally. Arab Muslims are allegedly aligned with extremist terrorist's ideologies and practices. The Koran allegedly only promotes violence, especially against the West.

LGBT people are presented, generally, as a joke or source of entertainment for het folks. The socially conservative anti-queer perspective is that we are also a threat to the alleged sanctity of dominant institutions, both religious and secular. Especially marriage. We also pose a risk of recruiting, sexually abusing, or morally corrupting youth.

The globe and all its life is not threatened by corporate environmental destruction.

Now, for some truths:

The rich don't work to increase their wealth. They invest. They don't work to maintain their lives; they hire people for that. The rich exploit corporate capitalism in every way conceivable, through tax loopholes, inheritance, off-shore bank accounts, shared awareness of how the system works, using social connections, arranged marriage, and inheritance laws to hoard wealth. The resources made available to some poor people are paltry and punishing, and are paid for by the labor of other poor people who support the economy rich people exploit. The rich do not generously fund a healthy economy. They greedily ruin it for everyone except themselves.

This economy always has been built on and rests heavily on the unpaid or exploitively paid labor of people who are not white. Work conditions for poorer people are intended to be brutal, exhausting, and dehumanizing. Nothing has changed. Black, Brown, and Indigenous people are under attack and continuously are threatened with genocide, which is on-going.

Men's wealth depends on white women's and women of color's unpaid or exploitively paid labor. Men's identities depend on sexual access to, and abuse of, women. Women of color

Islam is a rich complex religious and multi-cultural practice and system of belief rooted in history, like Christianity and Judaism.

LGBT people present alternatives to the dehumanizing reality of heterosexist existence. We are targeted for harassment and murder, particularly and disproportionately when Black and/or poor.

Corporate exploitation of the Earth is the practice of ecocide.

What this reveals to me is something far too many of us in the U.S. may already know: it perpetuates the most typical narratives of this dominant culture. But with particular focus on perpetuating and further entrenching xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and heterosexual normalcy.

Not only that, but such media outlets and popular spokespeople are engaged in very well-crafted propaganda techniques which include:
Panic mongering
Character assassination
Rewriting history and reinforcing false cultural myths
Scapegoating and 'othering'
Naming resistance to oppression as being dangerous violence or terrorism
Naming U.S. militarized foreign and domestic policy as necessary and peace-making
Bullying of anti-status quo truth-tellers and overt hostility to truths that undermine the status quo
An assault on higher education as a means of truth-gathering; a rejection of academic 'experts' as only biased by liberalism
Diversion and avoidance of substantive engaged subjective sharing of experience and theory-naming

For more on that, see here: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/1964:fourteen-propaganda-techniques-fox-news-uses-to-brainwash-americans

I conclude that Bill O'Reilly is thuggish and bullying propaganda-pusher, along with all Right-wing corporate media and extremist Christian and Jewish media and spokespeople. Their terrorism goes unnamed as such by their media, not surprisingly. They perpetrate all significant manifestations of Earthly evil.