Fox News did not air a second of the speeches from alienated GOP leaders and former Trump officials who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris at this week’s Democratic National Convention.
The DNC speakers included former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who spoke in prime-time before Harris’ Thursday keynote; former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan; former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham; Olivia Troye, who served as a homeland security aide to former Vice President Mike Pence; and Mesa, Arizona, Mayor John Giles.
MSNBC and CNN treated those speeches as newsworthy, airing each of them in full, according to a Media Matters review of the networks’ convention coverage. But Fox hid the content of all of those speeches from their viewers, often displaying the video on screen without audio as the network’s on-air hosts and guests offered commentary.
It’s not hard to figure out why: Fox is a Trumpist propaganda organ that helped the former president purge the GOP of his critics and is working tirelessly to return him to the White House.
The network typically shies away from highlighting dissension in the party’s ranks. Fox virtually ignored former Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to endorse Trump and former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s denunciation of the former president as “unfit for office” — both of which originated in Fox interviews.
Guess which network refused to show speeches from Republicans and former Trump supporters that spoke at the DNC? It’s GOP propaganda outlet Faux “News.”
There are plenty of conservatives willing to join an alliance to put the GOP out of its misery and preserve democracy.
Some liberally minded people don’t understand that you don’t win elections by just turning up the volume when you preach to the choir. It’s necessary to leave the building and do some proselytizing in language that those outside your circle can relate to.
A former Trump voter named Rich Logis writing in a progressive publication provides some tips.
I’m no longer registered with any party, but I intend to vote Democrats straight down the line—not because I want to become a convert but because I believe it is in the national interest to submit this current form of the GOP to a political mercy-killing. I believe that in this state, and across the country, there are many like me, and I believe that Biden and his Democratic colleagues can, in their closing argument, effectively summon us to their side.
We need to avoid boring talk about policy and keep our message short and memorable.
These voters won’t likely be reached with talk of policy, any discussion of which is going to get filtered through the media’s interrogations, as well as the million-paper-cut process to which all legislative ideas are subjected. These are the long stories of politics; here, shorter ones are preferred. What about the maintenance and advancement of democracy, the expansions of rights and freedoms? Here, we’re getting warmer.
We need to use the word freedom more often. That’s what Ukrainians are fighting for and women in the US are demanding freedom from Trumpist red state reproductive police. A few weeks ago I came up with this tag which puts abortion in a new light...
# the sanctity of reproductive freedom
The word freedom should never be abandoned to those who would take it away from us. Franklin Roosevelt made the Four Freedoms a rallying cry against fascism.
It’s necessary to let voters know that Trump Republicans don’t really care about them. Their big policy idea for the economy is always big tax brakes for the filthy rich while cutting programs which help everybody else. Trump himself is a bigtime scammer who fattens his bank account by ripping off people with swindles like “Trump University”.
Charity and goodwill, it turns out, are attractive ideas. It suggests a possible leitmotif of the Democratic Party message between now and November and beyond: malice toward none.
There are, perhaps, some Republican elites capable of exhibiting sincere care for others; most on the right, however, understand that displays of empathy will more often than not incur the ire of Fox News, Breitbart, and the Alex Jones set (though Jones may have bigger problems now). The right-wing media’s function is to keep pumping the trauma, and they’ll gleefully turn on their idols and transform them into outcasts if they stray too far from being reliable demonizers.
An honest, effective leader will always care about others, even at the risk of losing money, relationships, and votes. But showing care for others, in the Republican Party’s political trauma era, is a perfidious weakness.
The Trump Republicans are not in the majority but they try to rig the system and hijack civics to hold on to power. As their numbers slowly shrink, they grow more desperate.
The revisionist histories of the GOP enforce the inaccurate assertion that America is not a democracy but a republic; we are both, and the Framers instituted a complex form of majority rule to potentially safeguard against a tyranny of the majority. It’s also a political party that understands that it’s not actually in the mass appeal business anymore: To the GOP, you are either a traumatized convert or an outsider to be treated with malice.
There can be little doubt that the Founders would admonish this Republican Party and demand that they read those yellowing and never-opened pocket U.S. Constitutions they carry everywhere on their persons. Nowhere in our Constitution—or any of our founding documents, or the Founders’ writings—will one find a singular syllable championing the alleged features and benefits of what the GOP actually wants: permanent minority rule.
Remind people what Trump Republicans will do when in power. More importantly, let people know how it will hurt them.
We already know what a GOP congressional majority will do, given the chance: At best, it will accomplish a whole lot of nothing; at worst, it’ll continue to dismantle democracy root and branch. We already know what GOP majorities in governors’ mansions and state legislatures will do: They’ll tell 10-year-old girls, impregnated by their rapists, “Good luck, let us know how you make out, and go to church on Sunday.” They’ll keep giving teachers compelling reasons to exit their field. They’ll offer continued advocacy of Molochian bargains, cheerleading AR15-toting 18-year-olds who aspire to enter the infamous pantheon of mass shooters. Yes, this is a party that’s thrown in its lot with these dealers of schoolyard mayhem, the best-equipped and best-armed serial killers on earth, the better to keep the chaos and its attendant trauma churning.
Donald Trump—that most insatiable head on the GOP’s hydra—is the most politically injurious figure to emerge in recent memory. It’s only in this aspect that he is extraordinary. The Stockholm syndrome he’s wrought in the GOP is indefinite. In a way, he’s the political version of a car accident on the highway. Everyone slows to look at the wreckage; there’s some ancient instinct in us that beckons us to take a long and lingering look at the damage. The modern GOP wants its base to keep staring at the damage in a voyeuristic trance, soaking up the trauma.
It’s not easy getting people to snap out of a trance. But enough people did so in 2020 to keep the country from falling off a cliff.
Low key one-on-one conversations take time but they tend to produce better results than screaming slogans at people.
