The GOP and conservative media now resemble the communists of my youth

Lying about democracy, a mainstay of the old Communist press, has also become standard for American media outlets aligned with Trump’s GOP—as witness the months of lies about the “stolen election,” for which there is no evidence. At least in the United States, some of those outlets have had to issue retractions and disclaimers.

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And then there are the verbal pirouettes of whataboutism. They formed the bedrock of Commie propaganda. Whenever the Communists were forced to acknowledge errors and imperfections in running the economy (which they eventually ran into the ground), they ramped up their propaganda about racism and homelessness in the United States to create the mirage of moral equivalence. Does that sound at all familiar?

Another tactic is selective attention. Watching Fox and its competitors, one is rarely confronted with the reality of the January 6 insurrection in its full scale and moral ugliness, as that which does not conform to the party line does not exist. After all, it is a well-known fact that there were no airplane crashes or train wrecks in communism, since the media did not report on them. . . . When real journalists like Bret Baier or Chris Wallace tell the truth or ask tough questions of GOP spin doctors, one suddenly has the same sense of surprise as watching the reformist journos doing something slightly more daring during the Gorbachev perestroika than just parrot the official story. Which I admit is unfair to Wallace, Baier, and those few remaining real press men and women over at Fox, but I cannot help myself with the feeling.

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