The Big Lie Rolls Along

Joseph Goebbels must be giggling in his grave.  The Nazi propaganda chief has been dead for well over half a century, but his spirit is very much alive.  Indeed, it has been resurrected by American liberals who have adopted his techniques for promoting their cause.

Goebbels once opined that if a lie is told often enough, it will be believed.  The lie can be enormous and based on nothing but a desire to deceive.  It can be outrageous and on its face absurd.  Nonetheless, if it is repeated with sufficient regularity, it will begin to sound like the truth.

The Germans managed this despite the bizarre nature of some of their claims.  First they blamed the Reichstag fire on the communists.  Then they condemned the Jews for subverting the nation.  Then they actually told the world that the Poles started World War II by attacking Germany first.

Now we find liberals using this same playbook against president Trump.  They too have discovered the virtues of repetition, simplicity and consistency.  To be credible, an egregious untruth must not only be reiterated, it must be reiterated in the same streamlined terms.  Complexity or inconsistencies would ruin the effect.

Thus, for the Nazis, either the communists did it, or the Jews did it, or the Poles did it.  Meanwhile, for the liberals, Donald Trump did it.  He ought to be impeached because he ruined the country and sabotaged the constitution.  But most of all, he collaborated with the Russians to win the election.

How often have we been told that the Trump team colluded with the Russians?  How frequently has it been suggested that our president is a puppet of Vladimir Putin?  The evidence for this does not matter.  That it is totally absent is no determent to an endless loop of accusations.

James Clapper, the former director of the National Intelligence Agency has recurrently said that he has seen no evidence of collusion.  But this is discounted.  Actually it is ignored.  Senator Diane Feinstein has said virtually the same.  At best, she has lamely alluded to unsourced newspaper stories.  Yet her words too have disappeared into the ether.

What has held center stage is the drip, drip, drip, from reporter after reporter and politician after politician.  They all say the same thing.  Where there is smoke, there must be fire.  They do not, of course, confess that they created the smoke and are assiduously fanning it.  That might generate doubts.

And so the big lie roles along, night after night, on TV channel after TV channel, and during the day in newspaper after newspaper, and twenty-four hours a day on the Internet.  First, the New York Tines concocts a fairy tale, then the Washington Post picks it up.  Then CNN, MSNBC, and CBS illustrate it and trumpet it around the world.

So consistent has this sequence been that a recent Harvard study documented that in many cases over ninety percent of stories told about Trump have been negative.  While he gets more attention than previous presidents, it is uniformly hostile.

The White House advisor Steve Bannon described the media as the opposition party.  Journalists immediately took umbrage.  Bannon decried the volume of fake news and was mocked for misunderstanding the function of a free press.

But the press operates like an insurrectionist party.  A large part of it has been agitating to remove Trump from office.  Resorting to the Goebbels playbook is part and parcel of this program.  The big lie is supposed to mobilize the American people so that they demand his expulsion.  At minimum, it is intended to stop his conservative agenda in its tracks.

The fact is that the national journalists and liberal politicians swim in the same Washington Swamp.  Although they pretend to care about the constitution and our democratic traditions, they do not.  As self-declared socialists, they are actually power hungry totalitarians.

The goal of contemporary liberals is plainly to change America.  And they don’t care how they do it.  The first step is therefore to fool voters as to what is happening.  That is the purpose of the big lie.  The question is: will it work?

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Ambition Is a Good Thing

Opponents of capitalism tell us that capitalists are greedy.  These oligarchs use the free marketplace to grow rich because they want to have more than others.  In fact, they intend to take the bread out of the mouths of the poor so that they can pay for solid gold bathroom fixtures.

Socialists think of the wealthy as bloated buffoons or clones of Scrooge McDuck.  Either these plutocrats are plotting to trample over the rights of working stiffs or literally swimming in counting houses filled with gold coins.  Far from being hard workers, they are jet setters skiing the slopes of Gstaad or playing the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo.

The reality is somewhat different.  Truly successful people are usually workaholics.  They are like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.  Microsoft and Amazon,com were not initiated by lazy good-for-nothings.  Their founders had a vision that they were driven to fulfill.

Wealth is nice, but it has its limitations.  After a certain point, it does not buy additional comfort.  Given that this is so, the quest to grow richer would inevitably run into a brick wall.  The very successful would simply stop working because they did not need more money.

They don’t stop because what drives them is ambition.  They want to be the best.  They want to have more than others because this demonstrates that they are winners.  And they want to win.  They want to be the biggest winners of all.

But who does not want to win?  Most of us will never climb to the top of Disraeli’s greasy pole, but if we could, we would be thrilled.  Instead, we obtain vicarious victories by rooting for sports teams.  When our favorites come out on top it is as if we had won.

Yet there is a downside to winning.  If some grow rich, then others are left behind.  They may not be starving, but they realize that they have less than the truly affluent, which is galling.

But something similar is true in sports.  We love it when our team wins, whereas we hate it when it loses.  Hence it was great when the Falcons got to the Super Bowl and heartbreaking when they were defeated by the Patriots.  It was similarly wonderful when the Braves were the best team in baseball and frustrating once they became also rans.

Nevertheless doesn’t the chance of winning compensate for the pain of losing?  Would we really want socialist inspired sports leagues where all teams were equal?  Would a world filled with mediocrities set our hearts thumping or swell our chests with pride?

It is the same in the marketplace.  Were everyone merely to try to get by there would be no innovations.  Likewise, if everyone settled for exactly the same compensation, no one would be motivated to turn out quality products.

If this sounds doubtful, the experiment was tried.  It was in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and most recently Venezuela.  In every case, it led to economic catastrophe.  In none, did it provide ordinary people with the promised affluence.

What was worse, in order to enforce equality, repression had to be instituted.  If no one was allowed to be better than anyone else, ambitious souls had to be held back.  They had to be brutalized and stripped of their gains.  As a consequence, the Russian Kulaks were killed, while Chinese artists were expelled from the cities and compelled to live as peasants.

In the United States, in contrast, inequality produced more assets than in any large nation in the history of the world.  Millions of individuals in quest of personal glory contributed to an economic dynamo and democratic phenomenon.  Their ambition impelled them to efforts from which billions benefitted.

Yes, some folks did better than others.  Yes, this was not always based on who was best.  Cheating and luck sometimes played a part.  Even so, collectively we have come out just fine.

What we need, therefore, is not complete equality.  Instead we require equal opportunity and equal treatment before the law.  If so, personal ambition will continue to prosper, which will be to our joint good fortune.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Donald Trump Pulls the Trigger

When President Trump fired James Comey as Director of the FBI, it was as if the whole world had exploded.  Not only was the firing unexpected, but so was the extreme reaction from the Washington political class.

Although both Democrats and Republicans distrusted Comey, many of the former perceived this as an opportunity to bash Trump.  Before an hour was up, the president was denounced as a tyrant and would-be dictator.  His action plainly bespoke nothing less than a reprise of the Watergate scandal.

The dismissal was literally compared with Nixon’s Saturday night massacre and Trump was accused of being Hitlerian.  While he might have had a legal right to sack the Director, this was depicted as a “constitutional crisis.”  It was clearly done to derail the investigation into Trump’s connection with the Russians.

Despite a total lack of evidence of collusion, Democratic politicians spoke as if this had been proven.  The national press corps, of course, shared the hysteria.  They too spent days and weeks implying treason at every turn.

During the Obama administration, reporters formed a Praetorian Guard to protect the president.  His misdeeds were covered up and achievements exaggerated.  For Trump, however, they transformed into a firing squad.  Even the smallest misstep was magnified to epic proportions.

Any objective observer of the daily White House press briefings had to be impressed with how critical journalists became.  These folks competed with each other to nitpick every word uttered from the podium.  The objective was clearly to find the subtlest incongruity so that it could be labeled a nefarious contradiction and cited as proof of the administration’s incompetence.

The question then arises as to why this non-stop frenzy?  Both the Democratic operatives and mainstream reporters share a liberal perspective, but why did they become so much more hostile.  Nixon was loathed, Reagan demeaned, and the Bushes mocked, but Trump is treated as the devil incarnate.

The reason for this intense hatred has been attributed to many things—most often the president’s own failings.  In a sense this is correct, yet it is not his shortcomings that are to blame.  The real source of exasperation is his potential achievements.

After Reagan fired the Air Traffic controllers, onlookers realized he was a man to be reckoned with.  No one initially thought he would have the courage to take such bold action.  When it turned out that he did, they suspected that he might make other audacious decisions.

It is the same with Trump.  He too has shown unexpected daring.  What might be next?  Could he institute policies that eviscerated the liberal hegemony?  Given his unpredictability, might he do things from which standard politicians would shrink?

Consider the potential damage to Hillary Clinton and her entourage.  As Sean Hannity has been suggesting, might not a new FBI Director reopen investigations into their undoubtedly illegal activities?  If so, might not a series of convictions rip the heart out of the Democratic party?

But the implications of this development are even more serious.  If the FBI or Department of Justice pry into former Nation Security Advisor Susan Rice’s unmasking endeavors, or the earlier cover up of IRS bias against conservative organizations, or the Benghazi affair might this not lead to the doorstep of Obama himself.

The mind boggles as to what could come of such probes.  They might make Watergate look like a child’s birthday party.  The damage done to the liberal cause could be so immense that it would take decades before its reputation recovered.

And so here we have the basis for the political panic.  If Trump goes where liberals fear he might, their careers and ideological aspirations will be in jeopardy.  Instead of history marching majestically toward their idealized future, it would be thrown off course.

And so we get a preemptive strike.  If Trump can be destroyed before he destroys them, their world will be spared.  If his reputation can be so thoroughly discredited that none of this initiatives come to fruition, their agenda will survive.  In other words, the idea is to turn him into a failure so that progressive fiascoes are not recognized for what they are.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Exposing Cultural Marxism

Not long ago I had an opportunity to hear Dr. Jefrey Breshears talk to the Georgia Tea Party about “The Origins of Cultural Marxism and Political Correctness.”  Although, as a student of social change, I have some knowledge about these matters, his presentation was so masterful that I saw many things from a new perspective.

Before I continue, I must disclose that Jefrey is a friend of mine.  More particularly, he has been a history professor at Georgia State and Kennesaw State Universities.  He is also the founder and guiding light behind the Areopagus, a Christian study organization.

Although Jefrey and I disagree about some things, most notably religious issues, I have learned to respect his intellectual honesty and devotion to moral causes.  He not only wants to promote Christianity, but to make the world a better place for us all.

To this end, he has sought to uncover the Marxist roots of contemporary progressive beliefs.  Most Americans are not aware that talk of “compassion” is actually a disguised effort to usher in a communist utopia.  The idea is to discredit the present to make room for a fictional future.

Dr. Breshears dealt with far too many aspects of cultural Marxism to be discussed within this short column, but let me mention two.  Each concerns intellectuals who are largely unknown to the public, but who laid the groundwork for what many people now think.

The first is the Italian communist journalist Antonio Gramsci.  Writing back in the 1920’s, he became aware that Marx’s predictions about the proletarian revolution were not coming true.  Ordinary workers were not rising up to support a socialist insurgency.  Most were happy to be left alone, as long as they had good-paying jobs.

Gramsci did not believe that this would change and so he sought another avenue to social transformation.  He decided that the change agents would have to come from the middle class.  If these folks could be converted to the communist cause, they would use their skills to promote it.

But how could this be achieved?  Why, by educating them in socialist orthodoxies.  And how could this be accomplished?  By taking over the schools and mainstream media.  In case you haven’t noticed, this is exactly what occurred in the United States and Europe.

As a college professor, I can attest to the fact that most of my colleagues are dedicated to advancing “progressive” ideals.  This is what they teach; it is the criterion they use to decide whom to hire.  Furthermore, because they also indoctrinate future teachers, it is what is largely taught in K-12.

As you may also realize, most journalists are imbued with neo-Marxism.  They too, despite the many failures of communist regimes, are convinced that only extreme egalitarian ideals can rescue us from the alleged oppression and discrimination inherent in capitalism.

Nowadays neo-Marxism is often labeled “social justice,” but it is just old wine in new bottles.  The same goes for “sexual liberation.”  This was the brainchild of Herbert Marcuse.  He argued that unless people are freed from bourgeois sexual repression, they can never be happy.

The real goal, however, was to disorganize society so completely that it would be vulnerable to a communist takeover.  Once people could no longer depend upon secure family attachments, they would be ripe for control by centralized authorities.

Today we see this attitude represented by the radical feminists.  Although they say their goal is to allow women to live up to their potential, their means of doing so is by destroying the commitments between husbands and wives and parents and their children.

The consequences of this cultural upheaval can be seen in the proliferation of divorce, cohabitation, and unwed parenthood.  Yet despite propaganda to the contrary, anyone who believes this development has increased our store of personal happiness is badly mistaken.

Cultural Marxism has been a disaster.  Dr. Breshears reminder of its roots is therefore a necessary corrective.  Unless we understand how our values have been subverted, we are unlikely to defend them.  If so, the path to ruin will be paved with the broken bottles of neo-socialist snake oil.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University