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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Fox News chief a**hole Tucker Carlson recently whined that billions of US taxpayer dollars spent on helping Ukraine could be put to better use to “pay off half the medical debt in the entire country… [to] pay for two years of community college tuition for every young person in the United States... [and to] fund all out-of-pocket expenses for cancer patients for five years.”
Yup. Those are pretty important – and awesomely progressive – options.
But how about taking the money from the Forever Wars being fought for Putinesque dictators like Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, the Saudi crown prince behind the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi?
Or from the “black budgets” for the never-ending surrogate wars the United States has undertaken on behalf of corporate profiteers, including the toppling of democratic governments from Iran to Panama to Chile, incursions into numerous African nations, and gross interference in Central America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
Of greater concern is if Carlson’s diatribe is just another salvo in Putin’s proxy war against the United States. After its humiliation in attempting a ruthless shock-and-awe takeover of the entire country of Ukraine a year ago, Russia is now counting on its far superior resources and disregard for the suffering of its own people to grind down Zelenskyy’s country over time.
In covertly using the face of Fox TV to turn Americans against support for democracy, Russia is again gambling on Twitter-bred attention spans and crisis-clutching headlines to distract free folk from the good ol’ U.S. of A. from the true danger in this puppeteering, the real political costs of Putin’s Cossack dancing. That it won’t stop with Ukraine.
There is more. The spawn of Putin in now suggesting that the East Palestine train disaster was driven by woke progressives attacking a rural white community. Jesse Watters, Carlson’s brother-in-arms on the Fox front lines, claims that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency was nominated because he promised to fight off environmental racism.
“Is this his idea of fighting environmental racism? Spilling toxic chemicals on poor white people in Ohio? He doesn't have time to worry about a cloud bomb of toxic fumes over Ohio?”
What a call to arms for white Americans!
Already suffering from an economy heavily skewed to the wealthy, the lack of healthcare, labor abuses and more, it’s no wonder a sense of failure is infecting many Americans and driving them to strike out wherever directed by the talking heads who feed those feelings.
I tend to avoid conspiracy theories, but they did evolve as a survival mechanism to protect early hominids from attacks by lions and tigers and… other nefarious hominids.
So who’s to say that the plethora of bizarre activities from the millions of Americans who truly believe that Trump won the 2020 election to antics of the current Supreme Court to the law promoted by Ron DeSantis to protect Floridians from discrimination and “woke” indoctrination are not being coordinated by nefarious anti-American interests in Russia or China or an al-Qaeda hideout.
Logic has no boundaries in fantasy universe of the proponents of the Big Lie. And Putin and others who would benefit from the disruption of the United States will take every opportunity possible that these folks offer in their never-ending quest to destabilize western democracy.
Hiding in my progressive echo-chamber, I nevertheless hear comments from people in other parts of Los Angeles and California who repeat the off-the-wall comments of the QAnon crowd with fervent belief in everything they say.
On the other hand, the political left has its own conspiracists – the 9-11 theorists, the anti-vaxxers, and gamboling paranoia that the government is snooping into every aspect of their lives.
Well, maybe not so paranoid with regards to a growing group who are standing up to corporate abuses and political shenanigans but, in the same way that the manpower needed to organize and hide the deliberate derailment of the toxic train in East Palestine would provide full employment for all citizens, there is an element of the ludicrous in the government spying on all Americans all the time.
How did we get here? More importantly, how do we get out?
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
