Open advocates for turning America into a white-supremacist neofascist ethnostate run websites, Facebook groups and even appear as prime-time commentators on large national platforms like Fox News.
Most deadly of all, multiple nations that have rejected democracy in favor of oligarchy, authoritarianism or outright kingdom now run well-funded stealth operations to fill American social media and the internet with trolls pretending to be citizens. These apparently "average people" post a steady stream of messages denigrating democracy and arguing "both parties are the same" so "there's no reason to bother to get involved in politics or vote."
The result is now clear. A third of Republican voters today think Donald Trump will be reinstalled as president in August, and about the same number believe Democrats are up to satanic activities that include drinking the blood of Christian children. This is a frightening echo of the antisemitic blood libel of the Russian Tsar's 1903 disinformation campaign spearheaded with the publication of the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion that Hitler used to justify his "final solution" of the Holocaust.
Large quantities of Republican voters now openly reject democracy and have become convinced that a white-dominated ethnostate as advocated by Donald Trump should be the future of our nation.
America is experiencing a crisis of democracy, and disinformation and blatant lies from both foreign governments and domestic "dark money" groups are the main forces driving it.
This is a particular challenge for a nation founded on a free press and a nearly absolute right to political free speech.
We don't want the US government to decide what's "news" and what isn't because when the GOP gets the next Donald Trump in power a wannabee autocrat like Rick Scott or Tom Cotton would simply use that power to pull the plug on real media and exclusively promote their allies' neofascist propaganda. It's a conundrum.
As one of our Founders noted in 1786:
"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them."
Reading is relatively universal in America but understanding how propagandists can twist and distort reality is largely lacking, as we can see with the millions of Americans who've bought into patently false rightwing neofascist conspiracy theories.
So if we can't regulate the "news" or even stop foreign trolls from stirring up Americans, how can we activate the "immune system" of democracy?
Some folks think that bringing back the Fairness Doctrine that Reagan stopped enforcing and Obama finally removed from the IRS code is the answer. But that only required "equal time" to rebut statements and editorials presented by the owners or management of media outlets; it didn't deal with the content of on-air talent or the way news was presented.
Breaking up media monopolies and bringing back local ownership rules blown up by Congress and Bill Clinton with the 1996 Telecommunications Act would be a big step toward bringing back a healthier American media ecosystem, but it won't deal with the problem of naked lies and misinformation.
Instead, we have to figure out a way to help Americans spot open lies or realize how bizarre, antidemocratic and destructive to democracy is so much of the rhetoric coming from these trolls and sites.
Finland believes it has found the answer. They're actively teaching their people how to spot propaganda and media disinformation, starting with schoolchildren and extending all the way to the oldest of their citizens.
It all began a bit more than a decade ago when Finland was overwhelmed by online and social media trolls, many coming out of Russia and aligned nondemocratic countries, pushing the idea that bringing Syrian refugees into the country would "pollute" the nation's gene pool and destroy their "Christian heritage." It was a onslaught reminiscent of Trump's and Fox News' hysteria about the "caravans" of brown people coming to "invade" our southern border just before the 2018 midterm elections.
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