Evaluating the factors that account for the current accelerating descent of American culture jettisoning democracy and embracing authoritarian fascism, while strong elements of this tendency have always been among us, it was in the 1970s that the process began to metastasize into a new, more robust and terminal form. What we are seeing in the Trump coup today had its origin in the answer by the global elites to the anti-war, pro-civil rights ferment of the late 1960s.
This counter-revolutionary offensive went unnoticed by virtually every mainstream social medium, including those tasked with chronicling such trends in the popular media, academia and traditional political and faith-based institutions. A full-court press was initiated to defuse and reverse growing public sentiment toward significantly-furthered equality and justice arising from that period.
The decisively-new roots of this offensive can be traced back further, to the post-Korean War period of the 1950s, when social control techniques adapted from ancient Chinese methods were first experimented with in the west, including what went under the term, brainwashing. A major warning about this was issued through a 1959 novel by Richard Condon, made into a major Hollywood movie starring Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in 1962, “The Manchurian Candidate”, as much as its true purpose was obfuscated.
Projects like the CIA’s MK-Ultra’s experimentations with mind control, including by use of mind-altering agents like LSD, weaponized this approach that in the 1960s was determined to be more effective when used in a small group, or cult, environment to enable required constant reinforcement. By the 1970s, the assault on progressive currents in American society took the form of a proliferation of such cults, some religious, some political in nature, all aimed at beheading the “enemy” seen as reflected in an evolving pro-equality domestic culture.
Central among the targets of this offensive, apart from their political forms that included anti-war, civil rights, feminist and gay liberation aspects, was basic cognitive function, itself, including the powers of reason and common sense. Advancing this in the wider culture involved encouraging, sponsoring and popularizing the so-called “postmodern” movement in the arts, philosophy and social norms. This often took the form of anti-rational, anti-scientific assertions, including as defining the social declarations of the popularized French pseudo-leftist, pro-fascist Michel Foucault, who assaulted notions of love, loyalty and solidarity with nihilist and atomist claims that the only authentic human strivings are those for power and pleasure.
From this, the Christian fundamentalist current was emboldened to adopt a political posture for the first time, and the women’s and gay movements were diverted toward strictly hedonistic and self-serving objectives, with the effect on the fine and performing arts decimated by the AIDS epidemic. Thus came the Reagan Revolution of 1980, and from it the “Greed is good” mantra of that era, evolving forward to the present day.
We now find ourselves in a culture that has legalized and is widely abusing mind-altering and deadly drugs (marijuana being far more potent now than in the hippie days of the early 1970s) like fentanyl (far more potent than heroin), legalized and promoted, senseless sports and other forms of gambling (despite the reality that “the house always wins”), and wildly popular games despite being widely recognized for routinely inducing brain damage in its participants (football and mixed martial arts), the modern equivalent of Roman gladiator and other “bread and circuses” diversions.
The demise of your news, dear reader, has to be appreciated in this context. It used to be that the nightly news was always presented by the networks free from ads in order to avoid even a hint of being tainted by untoward influence. Now, all news is subordinated to the almighty dollar and outfits like Fox News have dropped all pretense at objectivity or fairness, cynically adopting the slogan, “fair and balanced.”
No wonder Trump can now assert that black is white and be cheered for it. No wonder, in this context, everyone else in the news industry gets held to an impossible standard of denuded non-partisanship, of so-called “objectivity” and of a mandated assignment of moral equivalency.
It’s not just Trump. Our culture and way of life have been corrupted to become almost beyond recognition.