Moodboard: "CULTS OF THE CULTURE WARS (PART 3)." (A. GLASS. JANUARY 20, 2021)

29/11/2024

Trump wins the Presidency again, largely due to Musk's misinformation crusade on his revamed Twitter, where he has locked out rationality, by swamping the platform with mania which sides with the Far Right of politics.  Losing advertising revenue en masse.  Is he prepared to run ex-Twitter at a loss for propaganda purposes?  It appears so.  And not to forget this extreme conspiracy theorist (masses of illegal immigrants voting for Kamala trick, which galvanized the stupor) podcaster, and apparent flip flopper who was able to build a massive following in the heydays of Alt Right claims that the "wokes" under Hillary Clinton wanted a war with Russia, by planting false evidence that Trump was siding with Putin/Russia, to win the 2016 election.   When in fact, the Mueller Report document of 2016 found that Russia had indeed tampered with the 2016 election to favour a Trump win, in turn causing the Right Wing conspiracy theorists to dig in even deeper, accusing the Mueller Report to be a conspiracy against everyman's (Musk's paranoia that too many women were voting for 'commie' Kamala Harris in 2024. Until a wave of men saved the day for Trump) Fascist Donald Trump, who has clinched a redux to become President of America (again).  Like a feedback loop of lunacy. 

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In light of Donald Trump possible return as the President of the United States, which by its definition is not only an absurd reality, it seems unbelievable.  Yet, these political events, within its absurdity, are indeed a uniquely American affair, that one of the most dangerous Presidents America has ever seen, could end up sitting in the Oval Office once again.  This is testament to how powerful digital media is and how it can influence not just public opinion, but instigate  misinformation and conspiracy theories in steering a voting majority towards extreme Right Wing beliefs.  And we have seen this with the so called Culture Wars of the last decade that were essentially created by an ad hoc contingent of far Right neoconservatives and their 'cherry picking' Paleolibertarians via podcasts and Fox news.  And it seems this bunch are stirring again, despite some of their, at times, muddled flip flop commentary after Trump's fall from grace in 2021, are trying to have Trump re-elected in 2024.  Using the same old scapegoats with their conspiracy laced mania, that the left wing are trying to reshape American Christian values.  "Cults of the Culture Wars" was written at the start of 2021, when Donald Trump created a fervor of conspiracy theories on why he lost the election to Joe Biden.

2023

24/11/2023 *update*

Extreme far right paleolibertarian Javier Milei, has won the Argentinean presidential election.  A conspiracy theorist and believer in the myth of statism/shadow government, is against abortion and women's rights.  And a bonafide climate change denier.  A diehard fan of Trumpansim.

Extreme right wingnut Geert Wilders has won the Dutch elections and is their new PM.  Wilders is probably the most fascist leaning politician Europe has seen since World War Two.  Also, he is a big fan of Trump.   

6/12/2023 *update*

The largest democracy in the World, which is India, is now leaning further towards the hard right with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party now ruling over the continent, after defeating the secular party.  So, it is no surprise that the majority of disinformation and support of the Fascist and extreme right wing Israeli genocide, and ethnic cleansing of the 'Palestinian' problem, is coming out of India.

(A.Glass 2023)

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Financial crisis of 2008

On the 15th September 2008, the prestigious Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, as a non-interventionist token, it was allowed to go bust.   Denied access to the Federal Reserve Bank interbank lending program and a taxpayer bailout, the collapse of Lehman Brothers was a shudder felt throughout the banking sector and financial markets,  despite the millions of Americans of that time that had lost their jobs and houses due, specifically, to the greed of Wall Street and investment banks, trading entangled debt instruments and selling them onto the global banking system.   The ‘writedowns’ on investments for global banks caught up in the crisis attributed to over Two Hundred Billion dollars, while the American banking sector, the epicenter of the mortgage collapse, spiked to over $800 billion dollars.   Banking industry lobbyists, reinforced by the Federal Reserve chairperson, at the time, Ben Bernanke, a monetarist and believer that markets should be backed by massive and widespread intervention to offset a second Great Depression.  Pushed by the Republicans who held the balance of power and presiding President Bush to release $700 billion dollars of taxpayers monies to be used in underwriting and shoring up the American financial system.  It was approved in late September 2008, as the biggest taxpayer bailout of the private banking system ever orchestrated – including the investment banks, that by definition should not have been bailed out, changing quickly into public bank holdings, all the while what is known as Main Street, continued to take the hit as a recession took hold.  The lost of houses of the middle and working class and their livelihoods continued to wreak havoc across America.

The discord of the bailouts of the general populous of American continued on throughout 2008 with democratic president elect Barack Obama offering, at the time, an ideal of a more liberal and open approach to dealing with America’s woes both overseas as its militaristic operations begin to overstretch congressional budgets and domestic problems.  Promising to close down former President Bush’s largely unpopular Guantanamo Bay military prison for terrorist suspects and winding down the disastrous war on terror, he also had to contain an inherited economic mess that was still reeling after the mortgage markets had collapsed and threatened to shutdown lending and credit throughout America and the world.  

Yet, despite the promises of egalitarian hope, the growing divide between the rich and poor in America widened, as did the distrust of government policies particularly economic.   The libertarian viewpoints of the detriment of big government and social policies mixed with Austrian economic theory, ala Rothbard’s mantra; that printing money and flowing more credit into an overstretched  economy – would further create a natural unbalance of markets, began, at least from a theorized aspect, to ring true.  But, it would be the social scapegoats which became polarized amidst a dissatisfaction of Obama’s tenure, that, even though after the 2008 market meltdown, the nation skirted with a recession – it nevertheless caused a widening schism between demographics, solidified as the two major camps of liberalism and conservatism.  Both, with commentators, economists and politicians on both sides either urging for more stimulus for the American economy or less, to which the libertarian aspects of politics began to shine through, the core of the philosophy held an attractive viewpoint that an overabundance of big business and bank bailouts as an attempt patching together a broken economy will only lead to larger government, over regulation and what libertarians feared the most; statism and corruption, with rights of the individual to become more and more stifled.

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Authored:  A.Glass 2021