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R.I.P., Fairness Doctrine
On June 8, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Julius Genachowski agreed to wipe the Fairness Doctrine completely off the agency's books, even though the rule has been officially dead since 1987. House Republicans have long pushed to get the Doctrine off the rule books for good, and they've finally gotten their way.
From the time it was put in place in 1949 until its demise in 1987, the Fairness Doctrine required holders of broadcast licenses to provide the public with news and public affairs programming, and present opposing viewpoints on controversial issues. Back then, the airwaves were dominated by the "big three" networks ABC, CBS and NBC -- which broadcast over publicly-owned airwaves under licenses issued by the government. The idea behind the Fairness Doctrine was to keep broadcasters from monopolizing the airwaves with a biased viewpoint, and assure that those entrusted with the public airwaves broadcast a diversity of viewpoints on important issues.
A Positive Legacy
By mandating equal time for opposing viewpoints, the Fairness Doctrine helped foster and maintain an informative media environment. One example was the part the rule played in informing people about the health hazards of smoking.
In 1967 -- three years after the Surgeon General first conclusively linked cigarette smoking to fatal lung disease -- a law professor named John Banzhaf wrote the FCC and complained that under the Fairness Doctrine, TV stations broadcasting cigarette ads should be required to run anti-smoking public service announcements (PSAs) to represent the opposite point of view -- that smoking is a health hazard. The FCC agreed, and ordered TV stations to provide free air time to anti-smoking PSAs at a ratio of one anti-smoking ad to every five cigarette ads they showed.
Even at this five-to-one ratio, the resulting PSAs were entertaining and effective. There was the famous "Like Father, Like Son" ad, and the creepy, disturbing "Johnny Smoke" ads. One ad showed a Marlboro-style cowboy unable to draw his gun from his holster because he was seized by a coughing fit. In another, Bill Talman, the actor who played the losing district attorney on the famous Perry Mason TV series, looked straight into the camera and said, "I didn’t really mind losing those courtroom battles. But I’m in a battle right now I don’t want to lose ... I’ve got lung cancer. So take some advice about smoking and losing from someone who’s been doing both for years. If you haven’t smoked, don’t start. If you do smoke, quit. Don’t be a loser." Talman, who appeared ill and tired in the ad, died while the PSA was running, which amplified the ad's impact.
In the three years those hard-hitting anti-smoking PSAs ran, U.S. per capita cigarette consumption plummeted. Cigarette companies, facing more anti-smoking PSAs as well as legislation to force them to take their ads off TV, agreed to voluntarily pull their ads off TV in January, 1971.
Another example of the Fairness Doctrine in action occurred in 1983, when ABC ran a chilling anti-nuclear war movie called "The Day After." The movie angered some prominent conservatives, like Henry Kissinger, who argued that the willingness to use nuclear weapons served to deter war. Kissinger was able to respond to the movie on national television, when the TV show Nightline followed a showing of the movie with a group discussion that included Kissinger and other conservative commentators. ABC was so even-handed -- presenting both liberal and conservative viewpoints on nuclear war -- because the Fairness Doctrine required them to be.
The Fairness Doctrine also gave rise to years of funny editorial spoofs on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update.
The real beauty of the Fairness Doctrine, though, was that it created a diverse environment on every channel in which viewers could not help but encounter a variety of opinions. No matter what channel viewers watched, they were exposed to a spectrum of opinions that encouraged them to acknowledge the existence and consider the validity of alternate points of view on important current issues.
The Demise of the Fairness Doctrine
By the 1980s, TV networks started complaining that the Fairness Doctrine overly-burdensome. While the rule didn't block opinions (but rather encouraged them), some journalists argued it was a violation of First Amendment rights to free speech and a free press. Some reporters chose not to cover certain controversial issues so they could avoid the rule's requirement of presenting contrasting viewpoints.
Despite this, the Fairness Doctrine enjoyed broad popular support across many factions of the political and cultural spectrum for many decades. In fact, it was so popular that in 1987 a bill to make the Doctrine into a law passed both the House and Senate with overwhelming support -- and President Reagan vetoed it. He then had the FCC repeal the Fairness Doctrine completely.
The demise of the Fairness Doctrine led to a polarized media environment and the rise of opinion-stars like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann and others. It has contributed to an AM radio talk show environment that is almost completely dominated by conservative pundits.
If big media corporations really had a liberal bias as some politicians argue, then big media companies would have pushed to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, since it would have given them a greater voice. Instead, their actions have been the opposite: big media corporations have fought all attempts to bring back the Fairness Doctrine in any form.
Now the FCC has wiped the Doctrine completely off its books, as though attempting to wipe out a part of U.S History.
With the Fairness Doctrine now officially dead and gone, along with it dies a legacy of balance and even-handedness in mass media that served the country very well while we had it.
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37 Comments so far
Show AllWhy don't they just have a Faux Noise chip installed in everybody's head?
They will, glogrrl, they will.
With most major networks and cable channels owned by right-wing corporations, and 90% of the radio stations & talk shows owned by right-wingers, we're headed to a completely oligarchical media. Diversity in medial will seem quaint.
With most major networks and cable channels owned by right-wing corporations, and 90% of the radio stations & talk shows owned by right-wingers, we're headed to a completely oligarchical media. Diversity in medial will seem quaint.
Exactly. It dosn't matter how many channels there are - they are all owned by the same corporate interests. And no, the internet and its myriad nooks of self-isolating choir preaching is no substitute for broadcasting diverse viewpoints.
The notion of a limited spectrum seems quaint today.
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Then you should be more than willing to give up your 50,000 watt radio stations in NY, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Boston, St. Louis, Baltimore, Indianapolis, and move your programming instead to the internet.
One spectrum is as good as another spectrum, right?
I wish to broadcast 24hr anti-war, pro-union, green energy, main street over wall street populist programming on those stations.
Can you be out by Monday?
Cygnus-X1 -- very clever retort to a load of horse manure.
And thank you for the comments from glogrrl & pjd412, too.
The velvet glove is off the "Iron Heel". Mixed metaphor deliberate.
At least we're at the "honest knave" stage, now. Any one that's remotely akin to an awake state is not going to be able to miss the fact we're HERE. Empire is counting down its choke hold on us and unless we arise to beat Them back from each other, the world of Humans is doomed.
I've been out trying to garden in this mess of weather and I've had to plant some things twice because the ground temperature itself is fluctuating too much. Even master gardeners around here are having troubles. Just as 2nd set of the peas were sprouting, they were baked off in the 99' heat. Now it's cold and wet again. Sigh. Woman plants, God grants.
The right wing demons constantly disingenuously say that they need 99% radical right wing talk radio and Fux Noise to counteract the imaginary liberal media and the supposedly liberal NPR, public radio and PBS. What a pile of bovine fecal matter. NPR and PBS have been actually fair and balanced and they have never conducted liberal only screeds and they certainly were not a propaganda arm of the Democratic party. Hate wing radio spews radical right wing libertarian bilge every hour of every day at full shrillness. Fox News is a propaganda arm of the GOP and of the rightwing/libertarian toxic philosophy. The main stream media are shills for corporate America and their job is to anesthetize the American public into total stupefaction.
JERZY: Well said.
If ideas are food for thought, and what's on the menu is mostly shit (let's call it what it is), then how is it that some in this forum can still blame "consumers" for not knowing what they don't know! Sure, they could turn off the TV and study what's on the Internet. Still, that alternative does not speak to the outright betrayal of the media, itself. Let us remember something vital: It's THE PEOPLES' AIR WAVES!
This giveaway runs parallel with a few other similar inroads into absolute control:
1. Elections between pre-vetted candidates pretending to insure democracy
2 The erasure of The Fairness Doctrine is just like defanging the EPA so that it cannot hold corporate polluters accountable for the harm they do.
3 It's like pretending to look forward in order to not hold a previous adminstration accountable for torture AND electing to undertake a War of Aggression (on a fixed, or pre-fab basis)
4. It's maintaining a Drug War that leads to an insane incarceration rate of citizens, while not mitigating the use of drugs in the least.
5 It's allowing corporations to buy politicians like some kind of public slave auction, rather than preserving the remotest form of public consent.
6 It's allowing pseudo-food giants like Monsanto, to use GM tech in items which the public is kept from knowing about (they fight appropriate labeling of their products).
7. It's muzzling a media so that it cannot let the public know the truth about global warming, the chemical status of the Gulf of Mexico, or what percentage of its collected tax monies go to war, designing weapons, or other sacrifices to the gods of death... while medical coverage is cut, schools closed, library hours shortened, etc. ad nauseum.
One of the central, most crucial components of our society is a FAIR media, not one captured by the same interests that own our lawmakers, orchestrate "our" wars, and systematically dismantle every Civil Liberty that's been bravely won over the course of decades.
Wow... it's ALL slip-sliding away. I suppose when people are angry (and why wouldn't most be, seeing their living standards reduced?) they gravitate to idiots on right wing hate radio. In that community of hatred, they feel less guilty for the dark thoughts they harbor. It must work somethng like an anesthesia.
Just as there are some in these threads who consistently try to pretend that there's no such thing as an uptick in massive climate change, there are those who are committed to keeping the sleeping masses in that very state. They fear what a mass awakening would mean... and Goddess knows, that is the ONLY way (apart from Gaia's revenge) that any meaningful change could begin to happen.
Actually, NPR and PBS haven't been "fair and balanced" for a long time. They have ben heavily scewed to the big-business-right and militarist-interventionist-right, by world standards, since the late 1980's. With the 1989 death of socialist (DSA) Michael Harington, who broadcast a daily commentry on NPR (something inconcievable today), the lurch to the right was hard and swift.
I'll never forget that darling of the liberals, Bill Moyers, stating his opposition to the Fairness Doctrine in an interview a couple years ago. He made that same bogus argument that becasue of all those channels, and the internet, it isn't needed, while implying that PBS is some kind uncompromising left-progressive news sourse that would have to broadcast right-wing views if the Fairness Doctrine was reinstated. What nonsense!
What is it about mainstream media journalists that makes them so blind to the thought control and consent manufacturing process that they earn a living serving?
Yet another sign of the Obama Administrations failures. This administration has furthered consolidation in media, and now has done away officially with the Fairness Doctrine. What's next? The AT&T/T-Mobile merger is what's next. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WE'RE SCREWED!
Anybody want some cheese with all the whine?
If you don't agree with something don't watch it. Watch or listen to a station you like and agrees with your views of the world if you can't take any contradiction. I bet most of the whiners still watch cable like in the 90s.
Chameleon: If society were about only what the individual did, you might have a point. Otherwise, your libertarian outlook fails to take in the understanding that what most watch, and thus become shaped by, in fact makes a society what it is. Therefore my individual choice to turn off the TV does nothing to change the way the nation is being altered, to the negative, because so many continue to be programmed by this highly hypnotizing media. Most of its messages are pro-war, pro-conformity, and pro consumerism, ie. the war on nature.
I've had people say the same thing to me about porn on this website. As if the degradation of half of the population is just another form of entertainment, something I personally might not wish to indulge in, but why limit others? As if what happens on a collective scale has no bearing on the quality of life that impacts all those contained within the "big envelope."
I am so tired of this line of thinking. A SANE society works hard to establish a balance between the rights, liberties, and interests of the individual, against what those proclivities, taken en masse, mean to the over-all quality of life for the larger organism. In other words, if you decide to play with your gun, and accidentally shoot someone, your "freedom" has impinged upon another person's safety. If you decide to drink and drive, thinking you'll outwit "the law," and hit someone, again, your concept of freedom drives itself into the direct harm of someone else.
These are not always easy lines to draw. However, when the morally bankrupt, and/or natural authoritarian gets to draw them, the lines asymmetrically favor the aggressor over the innocent, the warmaker over the peace protester, the trespasser over the ecological activist, etc.
The world IS coming apart because the center cannot hold (given that it's based on asymmetric values). Only a return to TRUE BALANCE can restore it.
Siousrose,
Excellent points!
However, as a minor point, there is "porn" on the internet that is not mysogynistic and exploitative.
"Therefore my individual choice to turn off the TV does nothing to change the way the nation is being altered, to the negative, because so many continue to be programmed by this highly hypnotizing media. "
But it is their choice, not yours.
That is the fundamental flaw in the thinking with the fairness doctrine. You don't have a right to stop speech you don't like or believe or even know to be false, to save someone else from listening to it. Nor do you have a right to force a business to report sides of a fight that they don't support.
Of course Faux is biased. So is the rest of the MSM. AND SO IS COMMON DREAMS and any other *news* outlet, each simply is biased in a different way. In the case of CD the bias happens to be the one we want to hear and read.
News is not a public service, it is a business that is selling entertainment. News is entertainment. If they don't think that one particular sort of comment and news sells, then why should they be forced to sell it? I don't see articles here about how great GMO crops are or ANY mention of 2nd Amendment rights. Support of Israel earns the poster a quick ban. We eat that up but it is our choice.
I understand the underlying desire to get our message out to the same people that listen to Faux and the others so that they can make a choice, but we all misapprehend what is happening. People don't listen to facts and then make decisions, they make decisions then pick the facts that support them.
The fairness doctrine in today's world is useless. If our message sold, people would listen. It doesn't and they don't.
--You don't have a right to stop speech you don't like or believe or even know to be false, to save someone else from listening to it.
** It's YOU who is stopping speech. The corrupt FCC has given the license to broadcast over the publicly owned airwaves to stations for seven years. Then regardless of whether theyve lived up to the public interest the license is renewed. The license used to be subject to revocation every two or three years. The FCC, bought and paid for by the media megaliths, is stopping my free speech by soldering that license to the hand of criminal media/propaganda businesses.
The public airwaves do not exist to make a profit. They exist to serve the public.
If you believe the commons can be claimed by private interest then I claim ownership of the public roads and will charge you $10,000 every time you wish to use them. I also claim ownership of Lake Michigan and choose to sell drinking water to liberals for $1 a gallon and conservatives for $10,000 a gallon.
The fact is limited broadcast spectrum allows for only forty or so radio stations in any one city. The spectrum is OWNED by the public. Therefore it must be shared. That was the reasoning behind the Fairness Doctrine.
Cable TV is a different animal as it is a PRIVATE service you PAY to bring into your home. The internet was created with public money by the public defense department. It should be available to all. And unlike radio where there's a limited number of channels the internet allows for literally millions of web addresses. As long as the internet is neutral, and no one website given a speed or quality advantage over another, and it is equally accessible to all, a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet would not be necessary.
--The fairness doctrine in today's world is useless.
** Oh yeah? Give me equal access to terrestrial AM radio and tv and I'll put out enough truthful information to bring our wars to an end, put at least 1,000 Wall Street bankers in prison and return to a fair progressive taxation system.
You mistake me for someone else. *I* don't have any pull at all and don't interfere with anyone's speech. Sorry for the confusion.
The airwaves exist to serve the public. Granted. How do you do that? How does one serve the public? Do you give them what you think they should have or do you give them what they ask for and watch?
I have lived in countries where there is strong government control over the airways that include in some cases local content percentages. The result? When local content comes on, most of the time people switch stations and look for what they want.
Your comment on pricing is false as well. I think that if you want an hour on radio it costs the same for either liberal or conservatives.
I have more than 40 radio stations here in the SF Bay Area. Far more.
The internet was invented with public money but the wiring is public and private. There may be some reason to have fairness, but there is an equal argument that a lot of it is paid for by corporations. It is more like railroads than airwaves.
I concur that cable is a different beast entirely.
I think that if you had 100% of the terrestrial AM radio and were pumping out truth 24/7 no one would change. Another fallacy, that people can be educated. Knowledge and belief are different things and humans when behaving as a group believe, they don't know. You wouldn't budge the needle on the American Public with all the AM in the world. Sorry.
For example look at CurrentTV and AirAmerica, neither captured much audience although CurrentTV is doing simply excellent work. The message there is slick and good and productized and still it is unwanted by more than a handful of people.
The truth may be out there but almost no one cares, in effect the truth is not a product people want to pay for, they want to pay to be pandered to and they get what they pay for.
The airwaves exist to serve the public. Granted. How do you do that?
** The first step is easy. 98% of AM political and news talk radio is dominated by right-wing ideology. Immediately you take away 80% of those licenses and distribute them to liberals, libertarians, independents and socialists based roughly on what percentage of society each group represents.
Your comment on pricing is false as well. I think that if you want an hour on radio it costs the same for either liberal or conservatives.
**You missed my point entirely. No private interest has the right to claim the public commons as their own.
I think that if you had 100% of the terrestrial AM radio and were pumping out truth 24/7 no one would change.
** Ha! Just one quick example: It would've only taken a very minor amount of airtime to refute the lies, WHICH WENT UNCHALLENGED, to have stopped the Iraq war before it happened. Imagine instead a national discussion that INCLUDED voices showing the push for war to be ungrounded. All it takes is a little bit of refutation to collapse a lie. But because the public airwaves were used as a weapon to sell Americans the war off we went. A million people have died at the cost is $3 trillion. Do you think that isn't substantial CHANGE?
AirAmerica, neither captured much audience
**Thank you for helping me make my point. The primary reason AA failed was because it was relegated to low wattage stations that couldn't be heard without hanging an antenna out your window. If you put Rush on those stations he'd fail to. The corporate media had seized all the quality 50,000 watt licenses. When they finally started to put "liberal" hosts on those stations their ratings were comparable.
Well spoken siouxrose-You are consistently one level headed poster that can be counted on -You would have made A good Umpire...
Watch or listen to a station you like and agrees with your views of the world
-------------------------
Please tell me on which AM radio station I can turn to hear opposition to the illegal war in Libya? Since the war is opposed by 60% of the American population voices against it should be found on roughly 60% of all stations who broadcast over the publicly owned airwaves.
Yet I'd be willing to bet that less than 10% of all AM radio commentary on Libya is calling for an end to the war.
I can name a hundred more issues where the people have little or no voice on the airwaves they own on issues of crucial importance.
The Saturday Night Live skits of the old days were bold and hard hitting. who can ever forget the Reagan infaltable Bean pods, Dan Akroys as Jimmy Carter (I'm a nukuler engineer!) and the cleaning lady at the TMI reactor. The Beverly Hillbillys reset as a Bedoin Arab that strikes it rich ("But then one day he was shootin at some Jews, and up for the sand come-abubblin-crude...") And, of course, Jane Curtain's biting satirical "weekend update" news reports.
In comparison, the attempts at satire on todays SNL are pathetic - you can immediately sense the fear in the screenwriter and actors of offending the NBC-General Electric-Comcast Corporation's executives.
But, this is the first time I've seen this decline in SNL's quality as being due to the loss of the Fairness Doctrine. And I suspect the loss of the fairness doctrine does have a lot to do with it.
The public airwaves are now officially the property of the anti-democracy, pro-war, pro-free market corporate media megaliths.
From this day forward when your AM radio tells you that Iran has WMD's and is a threat to the U.S. do not believe for even one moment that you have a right to hear an alternate point of view on the airwaves you formerly owned.
From this day forward when your AM radio tells you that the medicare and social security must be cut immediately to lower the debt and save the economy do not believe for even one moment that you have a right to hear an alternate point of view on the airwaves you formerly owned.
From this day forward when your AM radio tells you that nuclear power is safe, coal is clean and green energy is not yet ready do not believe for even one moment that you have a right to hear an alternate point of view on the airwaves you formerly owned.
Public airwaves, public parks, public schools, public roads, public waters...these are all just assets in holding waiting for the proper hedge fund to take possession of them.
Only when all the commons are sold off and the debt holders of our war/tax bonds made whole will freedom ring in the nation alone that God has blessed!
AM Radio? Is the MW AM band still used? I can't pick up any stations on it anymore. Try FM radio, satellite radio, cable TV, satelite TV (the lone exception being Link TV and ironically, RT - Russia TV), and 99.8% of the internet.
AM talk radio along with AM news radio has an audience of tens of millions every hour during the day.
The audience for AM radio is at least twenty times bigger than the audience of FOX (cable) news.
Cable shows such as Maddow and Schultz only have about 250K viewers per quarter hour. That's piddly. Even Bill O'Reilly, the most watched cable blowhard gets only about 600K views per quarter hour.
Even in the age of the internet no "news" media has as much sway as terrestrial radio. (Terrestrial tv national "news" also has about 20 million viewers nightly. Add in countless tens of millions more for local terrestrial tv news where they repeat the same RNC/DNC talking points if they report on issues other than murders, fires or weather at all).
The issue isn't what I watch personally. I know where to get the best quality information. The issue is what the masses of Americans are subjected to over the channels of communication THEY OWN.
Cygnus- X1 --
Appreciate all the lucid arguments you are making here to respond to an unusually large influx of right-wing talking point memos.
It's always fascinating to see what will trigger a Pavlovian response from our deep thinking friends on the political 'right' -- apparently the 'Fairness Doctrine' has been sticking in their craw for some time & this is a golden opportunity to crow a bit about its official demise.
I need to work today so don't have the time to add much to the discussion. Good luck with your valiant efforts.
Shameful, Ms. Landman, that your attempt at 'fairness' is so unfair. By lumping Olbermann together with Limbaugh and Beck you're creating a false equivalency.
Not only is Olbermann nowhere near as extreme on left as the other two are on the right, but Olbermann, presumably, broadcasts his own take on matters (no matter what one thinks of Olbermann's politics); the other 2 are nothing more than paid shills for radical and toxic right-wing think tanks established by the oligarchy to deliberately disseminate lies or skew information for the sole purpose of misinforming the electorate and perpetuating the very same oligary. The difference is substantial.
As far as I know Olbermann does not have a radio show or tv show that broadcasts over the publicly owned airwaves. Countdown was broadcast on cable (MSNBC). Cable tv, a private service you pay to bring into your home, was never subject to the Fairness Doctrine.
Ms. Landman should make a correction.
Good point. Yet another reason the comparisons were inaccurate.
Let's see:
No fairness doctrine, no anti-trust laws, no proscution of white collar crime (at least by major players), no public financing of elections, no rule of international law, no prosecution for war crimes, . . . . . . . no taxes for the very rich, no jobs, no rational planning for the future. . . . . . . .
and yes, . . . . . No Future!
Must kill all alternate views. Must bring uniformity. We am the borg. The hive mind accepts no dissent. Must eliminate left and right shoes. Now just one shoe for both feet. One glove for both hands. One unisex outfit for all. We are the borg. You've already been ASSimilated.
Libertarians' contempt for the so-called Fairness Doctrine, like the rest of their solipsistic world view, reflects their astoundingly unquestioned, proximate premise that every economic thing and service in human affairs should be privately produced/owned/and only-freely traded by the owner, to the utmost extent possible, and no matter what the functional consequences.
It's a kind of anally-driven, faux anti-authoritarianism nuttiness that in the end reproduces authoritarianism, that Libertarians embrace, god help them.
And more importantly, god help the rest of us, if they prevail...........
Deeper still, is their generally/mindlessly-accepted premise--- as articulated by their hystericalized High Priestess Ayn Rand--- that, given anything short of this "morally objective," hyper-individuated and totally-atomized political/economic arrangement which they demand come about now and forever, we humans are destined to otherwise fatally entrench a vile, life-killing, cultural denial of both Human Reason and Natural Law -----in short, destined to create a permanently fallen cognitive state which if not prevented aforehand, is guaranteed to render the entire human species indistinguishable from the horrible collectivist monstrosities of the anthill, or the beehive, or the rat's nest, etc., etc..
Read an Ayn Rand novel, to see whether what I say she means, is accurate........
Frankly, I think that most Rand-inspired Libertarians are emotionally-epistemologically sick puppies in this, their existential overview respect -- all the more lamentable since many of them seem otherwise intelligent people, wanting to be honorable, and to create Social Good, etc..
But So fuggin' reactionary and psychologically naive... .
YET: If you adduce objective proofs, for the standard Libertarian intellectual, to show him/her that Nature is, in fact, an objectively interacting, benignly SOCIALIST-like system wherein each part and function of the biosphere that keeps humans alive is the result of all aspects of exactly that System interacting by co-operative design, to support its other intimately-linked co-parts within the Whole, than any such he/she Libertarian will often freak-out--and quite badly.
I once, at a party, had a Whiskey Sour flung in my face for daring to so-challenge a Libertarian's claim to such (as I put it) sociopathic Randian "objectivity." It tasted pretty good, actually....
Libertarians can easily be out-argued in many cases, just by reasonable reference to actual Natural Law -- which Law, they dementedly insist until challenged, is co-equal to their unseen ego-ignorance understanding of It.
And we progressive need to so-challenge them in their fake analogues.
Even if it means a drink thrown in your face occasionally.
The fact is, their disastrously simplified view of the world is winning the political debate in the US.
Ignorance is strength