Reject the Evidence of Your Eyes and Ears: How MAGA Consent Is Manufactured
Even though it feels too late, we have to fight for the hearts, minds, and media diets of our fellow Americans every day.
Our MAGA friends and loved ones are being told to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. It is their party’s final, most essential command.
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In the wake of Renee Good’s death at the hands of a federal agent, Kristi Noem and DHS, known to have lied repeatedly to Americans about the circumstances of ICE aggression, said the officers were under threat from violent rioting terrorists while digging out a vehicle stuck in the snow. [Note: Noem has a history of outright corrupt behavior, including funneling hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to the husband of DHS spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin.]
There was no violent riot and none of the videos from the scene immediately preceding Good’s death show a vehicle being dug out of the snow. The American public writ large was not the true audience for these lies. The misleading statements were made solely for the benefit of keeping up the facade of a false reality for our MAGA friends and loved ones.
In the videos, our eyes and ears only witness protesters peacefully filming and blowing whistles to warn their neighbors.
No reasonable person would call this a scene of violent rioting.
No reasonable person would say these agents, weapons holstered, casually walking, are behaving as if their lives are under threat.
No reasonable person would believe a mother, driving her car through the neighborhood she’d just moved to with her wife, who simply “stopped to videotape” and was calmly waving cars by moments before her death, had any intention of using her vehicle as a weapon.
The media sources MAGA consumes, in coordination with the irresponsible and misleading rhetoric of their elected leaders and appointed officials, are pairing isolated frames with highly charged political language designed to wall them off from reason, from reality as it exists before every American set of eyes and ears.
It is gaslighting at an industrial level. Republican leaders and pundits are manufacturing consent for a state sanctioned killing that the world saw with its own eyes and ears. Some are even going so far as to impugn the character of Renee Good for things like being gay and having a child out of wedlock. Watch this Orwellian clip of Fox’s Jesse Watters saying those exact things, then calling Renee Good, a “disruptor.”
Boundless Hypocrisy Sustained By The Need To Win
Republicans have historically cared deeply about government overreach.
Just ask the libertarian think tank Capital Research Center, founded by a former Senior Vice President of the Heritage Foundation, which last year posted an article titled, “Ruby Ridge, Waco, and other bad days for the FBI.”
But a strong adherence to libertarian principles has been replaced for many in the MAGA movement with the need to win at all costs, to beat their fellow Americans who belong to the other team—the enemy according to their movements leaders—even if that means abandoning once cherished principles. Conditioned by toxic media diets, MAGA is allowing their eyes and ears to be hijacked by a machine designed to manipulate their feelings into cheering on the federal government as it kills citizens.
In this way, MAGA’s media diet serves as a Trump protection, excusing and permitting anything he says and does.
Another useful example—MAGA was instructed over the last couple of years, especially during Donald Trump’s two presidential campaigns, to hate foreign intervention and regime change. But the instant Trump went back on his promise to end foreign conflicts, the media they consume completely reversed course.
To the detriment of American democracy, MAGA Americans are allowing their media sources to convince them to cheer for the unthinkable.
MAGA, the rest of us are imploring you to reject the propaganda and respect the evidence of your eyes and ears. It’s our most essential demand.
Send this to a MAGA loved one who needs to hear it. We desperately need all Americans to begin consuming fact-based, pro-democracy media diets. It’s never too late to lift all information boats. And it is imperative because, as you can see, information becomes our outcomes.
It’s a battle for reality every day—an information war being waged against American minds that we don’t talk about nearly enough. Will you fight for fact-based information today?
Here’s the video version:
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