Author: North Coast BBQ

WHAT! How ridiculous to suggest half the US voting population is deceived and manipulated.

Read the article and see if it doesn’t ring some bells. I’ve included a few excerpts from the article here to give you the gist of the argument.

Letters from an American
OCT 06, 2024
heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-6-2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
I’m a history professor interested in the contrast between image and reality in American politics. I believe in American democracy, despite its frequent failures.

Some excerpts from this Oct 6 article:

“Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world.”

“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world.”

“Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.”

“This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out.”

“In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

“The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile.”

“It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

“Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,”

During my first term I served with eight different councilors and three different mayors. After having one city manager from 1996 to 2016, Manzanita has had three since. And through all this turnover, the work of the city continued. Challenges were met, and progress was made.

As a councilor, I’m one of about thirty volunteers that make our citizen-driven local government work. We serve on the Planning Commission, Budget Committee, STR Committee, Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee, and City Council. We have a variety of backgrounds and represent a diversity of perspectives. We attend a whole lot of meetings, read a load of reports, and do plenty of independent research on behalf of the residents of Manzanita, as well as its many non-voter stakeholders.

We collaborate with our outstanding city staff to address an array of issues, not just for today but often with impacts well into the future. We are constantly building on the work of our predecessors, and planning for the work of our successors.

Manzanita is in the early stages of revising its Comprehensive Plan, and we need to reach a workable consensus on what kind of community we want to be. We have far more houses than residents, and with that come more complexities to address than in a typical town of 600. We need our revised plan to reflect how we see ourselves now, and moving forward. Our revised plan will drive policy decisions in the years ahead impacting our finances, housing stock, environment, commercial development, demographics and more.

Local governments can at times be short-sighted or reactive, but I see little risk of that here, particularly under the leadership of an exemplary mayor and an extraordinary city manager. It’s an honor to serve with them, and with the other volunteers and staff that make our city work. From where I sit, we are blessed to have so many committed people offering their talent and effort to enhance our community. I appreciate the calm, deliberative, and measured approach regularly on display at both the volunteer and staff levels, and I believe Manzanita voters can support the current team with confidence.