It’s worse than Scott Walker and Ted Cruz: Secrets of conservatives’ decades-long war on truth

[DonViejo]

The right knows that facts and reason have a liberal bent. That's why their decades-long strategy is to lie

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

Deep on page 546 of his 1,839-page budget, Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker tucked in a crucial idea. He proposed to strip a principle from the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin, a school that attracts students from all over the nation and from 131 foreign countries. From the core philosophy that has driven the university since the turn of the last century Walker wanted to hack out the words: “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.” Rather than serving the people of the state by developing intellectual, cultural and humane sensitivities, expertise, and “a sense of purpose,” Walker prefers that the state university simply “meet the state’s workforce needs.” In the face of scathing criticism, the governor backtracked and, despite a trail of emails that led to his office, tried to claim the new language was a “drafting error.”

But Walker’s attempt to replace the search for truth with workforce training was no error. Since the earliest days of Movement Conservatism in the 1950s, its leaders have understood that the movement’s success depends on destroying Americans’ faith in the academic search for truth. For two generations, Movement Conservatives have subverted American politics, with increasing success, by explicitly rejecting the principle of open debate based in reasoned argument. They have refused to engage with facts and instead simply demonized anyone who disagrees with their ideology. This is an astonishing position. It is an attack on the Enlightenment principles that gave rise to Western civilization.

Make no mistake: the attack is deliberate.

The Enlightenment blossomed in the wake of the religiously-inspired Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century, when thinkers horrified by the war’s carnage set out to break the fetters of superstition and tradition that had prompted the strife. Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Jefferson and other thinkers advanced the idea that if people could listen to reasoned arguments, weigh them against evidence and choose the soundest ones, progress would follow. The Enlightenment revolutionized science, culture and politics, and gave rise to the modern world.

more
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/01/its_worse_than_scott_walker_and_ted_cruz_secrets_of_conservatives_decades_long_war_on_truth/

[Stuart G]

1. k. and r.

This really is what the neo conservative /right wing/ tea party / group believes in. Deliberate destruction of the truth..

[lastlib]

2. A must-read! The dumbing-down of America

is a centerpiece of the strategy of the right-wing and the corporatists. Cuts to education, the crap/pablum of television, etc., are all part of the effort to turn people into pliable, unthinking, docile serfs who are unable to connect the dots and thus challenge or overturn the existing order. Their order.

[hifiguy]

15. The systemic dumbing-down of the populace began

on January 20, 1981 and has only accelerated since that day. The project is nearing completion.

[BubbaFett]

3. Eradicate the enlightenment

bring back the dark ages, impose corporate-controlled (fascist) state.

They're just doing it without violence and massive social upheaval.

They can get us to do anything they want, even if it is opposed to self-interest.

The republican or the democrat are not the boogeymen/NFL team we are all led to believe.

They are marketing tools, branding. Packaged identity you say YES or NO to.

No gray area. Binary thinking all the way.

The real enemy knows he will never endure a fight while he gets all the monkeys fight each other.

[cantbeserious]

4. The Oligarchs, Corporations And Banks Own And Control The Politicians That Own And Control Us

eom

[Faux pas]

5. Kickin'

What great examples of xtians, I thought lying and deceit were sins?

[onethatcares]

6. you haven't been

reading the bible of prosperity though.

[Faux pas]

8. Yeah,

I missed that one. lol

[Kingofalldems]

7. Kicked, recced and tweeted.

[Enthusiast]

9. K&R! A whole bunch!

There is little doubt the right is waging a war on the truth. There is a devious ulterior motive behind all their actions.

[libodem]

10. K&R

Bookmarked!

[uhnope]

11. K&R. I think the attack on truth is ongoing and taking many forms: RW talk radio, FOX, RT...

the conspiracy theory industry, and how these all overlap

[hifiguy]

14. The New Fascists control a 24/7/365 propaganda machine

that would turn Josef Goebbels lime-green with envy. It is infinitely beyond his wildest dreams.

[mountain grammy]

12. Walker and friends didn't get away with changing the lofty goals

of higher education this time, but they won't stop trying. Soon, it will change. Just like Walker's re-election. This is what the majority of voting Americans want to happen. Walker makes no secret of what his agenda is and it gets him re-elected. Why wouldn't he gloat?

[hifiguy]

13. This crazy shit has been going on since the late 1940s.

The reichwingers came out from under their rocks post WW II and started making batshit pronouncements about everything under the sun, totally fact-free products of their own perfervid, paranoid imaginations. The triumphant election, and re-election of the moderate Eisenhower, who accepted the New Deal in its entirety, was the spur for the beginnings of the right-wing lunacy that now dominates US politics.

Back in the 1950s the loonies actually believed that Mexico was allowing Mao to train a Chinese army in Mexico to invade SoCal, starting with the conquest of San Diego. Like every right-wing fever dream it only reflected their complete disconnection from reality.

Read Rick Perlstein's Before The Storm for the entire story. He explains the reichwing swamp better than anyone ever has and how it came to dominate the US. Today's insanity has been a long time a-brewin'.

[hifiguy]

16. Kick

This is one of the most important pieces that has been linked on DU in many a moon.

These fuckers are trying to roll back everything since the Enlightenment. Different from IS in methodology but the project is the same one - reject all reason and modernity and return to a medieval mindset.

[polynomial]

17. John Locke considered the father of Liberal thinking

Yes there is a deep crucial idea embedded into the current so called Conservative political thinker. It is antithetical to the basic reality or enlightenment that is basic to liberal thinking.

John Locke considered the father of Liberal thinking was one of the first to propose separation of church and state. Perhaps Locke did not take it far enough or would be too, too Liberal to separate education from government.

Isn’t it amazing how Conservatives condemn regulation yet preserver relentlessly to interfere and regulate our country and everyone else.

From my view the argument about contemporary Conservatism has exactly that twist of humor that is the very fuel of what is trademarked in media as Comedy News hours.

The business contracts and contradictions to move forward to evolve to a better life for the working class is a natural need for the life continuum.

However, with clever opacity through the military industrial complex the University System has been the benefactor of billions in military secret research and development projects throughout the last century.

America once possessed with anticommunism now boiling over in Jihad Islamic extremism, with the University System loaded with a balance of diversity in intricate patterns that blend into modern so called enlightenment, or the educational catastrophe.

Walker opened up a paradox showing how America is flexing that living document that Bush called “Just a piece of paper”. All the while violated the first amendment portion; Unabridged right to publish.

What I would call a Johnian culture, something different than the John Doe culture of the Roosevelt era. Recall that guy next door that fellow next you the John Doe that was an American. Hot dogs, apple pie, and baseball.


Even now ABC news is playing that game identifying Jihad extremism in news as Jihad-Johns. In my view that supports the nurturing of home grown crazies done on purpose by modern Conservatives working within our modern media is the problem.

[Cha]

18. NO Shite! Mahalo DV

[BlueEye]

19. Take it away Mr. Carlin:

[steve2470]

20. k&r nt

[Bluenorthwest]

21. They have been full time, full tilt liars my entire lifetime and that's been obvious to me but

many on DU claim being a Republican was ultra moderate progressive cool all through St Ronnie of the Trickle.