Strategic Blindness

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair

How could every Republican member of the Senate, save one, have voted to acquit Donald J. Trump of abuse of power in the January 2020 impeachment trial despite the clear evidence of his guilt? Why hasn’t the Vice-president and the Cabinet invoked section 4 of the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office in light of his obvious mental incapacity to do the job? Why does the mainstream media continue to allow Trump and his acolytes to use their air time and publications to spread disinformation and propaganda?

The answer to the first two questions above is that Republicans everywhere have allowed their loyalty to the party to “trump” their loyalty to the country. The answer to the third question is that “he sells papers.”

Many Republican Senators know very well that Trump has and does abuse Presidential power. The members of the Cabinet are painfully aware of Trump’s mental limitations. And the mainstream media know that Trump and his supporters use the media to lie and spread propaganda.

They take no action because it is in their personal political and financial interest to participate in the charade. They CHOOSE to be blind about certain things as a deliberate STRATEGY to further their selfish interests.

For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.

Matthew 13:15

You cannot look for help from those who caused the problem

Our country is in a downward spiral. The Constitutional institutions that are supposed to protect us from a tyrannical president – the Congress and the free press – are not functioning to protect us. A major segment of both these institutions, specifically the Republican Party and Fox News, are actually the source of the problem.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein

I have zero faith that the Republican party will turn around and defend the truth. Not only have they given themselves wholly over to Trumpism, but their pandering to racism, religious zealotry, the gun lobby, and big money is what gave us Trump in the first place.

Fox News cannot become a responsible, honest, news outlet because they have never been in the news business at all. They were conceived as, and have always functioned as, a propaganda engine.

The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

Garry Kasparov

The mainstream media has been slow to help

The mainstream media has long treated the Democratic and Republican Parties as respectable, legitimate, fact-informed, equals who simply have different perspectives and approaches to policy questions. If this was ever true, it hasn’t been true for decades. It is most certainly not true in the age of Trump.

After some confusion at the start of Trump’s term (the mainstream media were not accustomed to using the word “lie” to describe a Presidential statement), much of the media now fact checks everything he says. One source, the Washington Post, even keeps an ongoing public tally of the President’s lies.

But their old assumptions are hard for them to overcome. As recently as December, 2019, Chuck Todd, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, called himself “naive” about how the Republicans have been deliberately telling lies to the media. He claimed to be “stunned” and “shocked” despite the fact that three years earlier Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway “introduced the doctrine of “alternative facts” on his own program” (Jay Rosen).

Lies and deception ARE the Republican message

It is time to accept the fact that the Republican party is a threat to the future of the United States as a representative democracy. They don’t care about truth and don’t feel bound by facts. They do not care if their lies upset or anger anyone. In fact, they WANT to upset and anger people because that plays to their base.

If mainstream reporters question the misinformation they get during an interview or a briefing, they are insulted personally and their employer is called “Fake News!” The White House briefing room is no longer a place to make announcements and provide information, it is a “theater of resentment” (Rosen) wherein the President shows off to his fans how “tough” he is with the press.

Trump’s acolytes love it when he “roughs up” the “liberal media.” In exchange for this vengeful satisfaction, they agree to blindly accept his “alternative facts.” To be a member of Trump’s army, they must learn to ignore the evidence of their own eyes. They “have to swallow, repeat, and defend things that simply don’t check out” (Rosen).

It is time for people and organizations who still value integrity to speak out and stop supporting this dangerous charade with their silence. Your “strategic blindness” is nothing more than complicity with evil.

Sources: “Fact Checker Database,” The Washington Post, Updated April 3, 2020.
Jay Rosen, “The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd,” PressThink, December 26, 2019.
Peter Wade, “How Disinformation Spreads, According to Chuck Todd,” Rolling Stone, December 20, 2019.
Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiricism and the Assault on Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2019.
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.” The Washington Post, April 27, 2012.