How Long is the Shelf-Life of Damnable Racist Capitalist Lies?

Glen Ford, BAR executive editor

22 Aug 2018

Silicon Valley and the corporate media are far more effective in conjuring alternative realities than the chaotic Trump White House.

“Trump tells lies that are easily countered; the New York Times and Google erase facts from history, systematically.”

U.S. mass media have always lied. In particular, they have specialized in lying about Black people, who are the ultimate “Other” in U.S. society. Many a lynching was deliberately set in motion by a headline that went something like, “Black Buck Runs Amuk!” It is a new twist, however -- and a sign of profound disarray among the ruling class -- that a white racist billionaire U.S. president finds himself treated like the “Other” by most of the corporate media.

For more than two years the corporate media mob and its deep state nightriders have been trying to lynch Trump for proposing closer relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia – a liaison now deemed more taboo than miscegenation in Old Mississippi. Orange Buck Runs Amuk!

It is a battle royal, as the inveterate prevaricators of the U.S. press joust with Trump, a master of the Art of the Lie. The difference is, Trump lies to promote and protect himself, often without regard for even the interests of his class. He also commits the cardinal sin of failing to keep track of his lies, and contradicting himself.

“The corporate media mob and its deep state nightriders have been trying to lynch Trump for proposing closer relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.”

Trump’s defamations of nonwhite peoples and nations are not quite the same as lies, but reflect a diseased and delusional worldview shared by more than half the white population of the country. They, and he, actually believe that non-whites are incapable of self-government -- a premise that, for half a millennium, justified European rape and pillage of the planet. Ideologies, such as white supremacy and the (related) belief that the rich should rule, should not be confused with outright lies. You can’t simply disprove ideologies; you must defeat the people and classes that profit from them.

Trump and his enemies in much of the rest of the ruling class, the Democratic Party, the corporate media and the national security (deep) state actually share the same ideologies, but are deeply conflicted on how best to sustain capitalism and global white supremacy. Trump’s rise to national executive power and capture of the Republican Party -- an ascent largely engineered by his current nemeses in corporate media and the Democratic National Committee, who believed the Orange Oaf would be easy to beat -- has created a crisis of legitimacy for the U.S. ruling class. The anti-Trumps have gone quite nuts, fouling their own nest until it stinks to high heaven. In their frenzy, they have convinced themselves that The Donald represents an existential threat to the free flow of capital and the maintenance of U.S. global power.

“The anti-Trumps have gone quite nuts, fouling their own nest.”

They are determined to destroy the Frankenstein they created, but the monster refuses to die, knowing that there is no proof of the predicate crime of which he is accused -- “colluding” with Wikileaks and Russians to steal incriminating evidence against Hillary Clinton from the DNC. In the absence of proof, the anti-Trump faction of the ruling class and their minions in government, the corporate media and national security services have unleashed a tsunami of lies -- against Russia. They have even coerced oligarch Mark Zuckerberg to make his Facebook algorithms lie, to tip the scales against the sharing of allegedly Russia-tainted information.

Google seemed far more eager to collaborate with the national security state that gave it birth. Its algorithms speak consistently with forked tongue. Google employees are up in arms over having to collaborate in Chinese government censorship of the Internet, and have balked at helping the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence schemes, but they have not protested the systematic marginalization of leftwing sites accused of sounding too much like “Russians,” including Black Agenda Report.

Silicon Valley and the corporate media are far more effective in conjuring alternative realities than the chaotic Trump White House. Trump tells lies that are easily countered; the New York Times and Google erase facts from history, systematically. Trump will one day be gone, but the liars and censors of the corporate press and internet will be producing false versions of reality deep into the twilight of capitalist rule.

“The center of the world economy has effectively shifted to East Asia.”

The deeper the crisis of capitalism, the worse the lies will get, and the further the United States will descend into an information bubble of conjured “facts” and beliefs that are rejected -- held in utter contempt -- by the rest of the planet. I’m not talking about the nonsense that buttresses “American exceptionalism,” a two-bit cracker ideology that the non-white world recognizes as nothing but white settler hubris (even when preached by a Black U.S. president). I mean U.S. "bubble knowledge" vs. hard facts, the kind that erode the very legitimacy of oligarch rule -- such as the reality that China has already surpassed the United States economically, and that the center of the world economy has effectively shifted to East Asia. These are mega-facts that cannot be hidden. The U.S. is no longer a model for the world (if it ever was), and American rulers offer nothing to their own population but endless austerity, falling living standards, precarity and war. Someone must be blamed.

“Russian Buck Runs Amuk!”

No, that won’t do, not for long.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].

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