Racial fearmongering

With just a few clicks of your mouse you can be transported into the Internet underbelly of U.S. society.

A headline caught my eye this morning – “Fear of a Black President: Conservative Media Deumming Up Racial Fear.” Turns out it’s a YouTube video which I cannot play on my dial-up connection. You can view it HERE and give me a report on its content.

Quotes such as the following make it apparent that the right-wing media are attempting to undermine Presiddent Barack Obama by stirring up racial hatred in America:

With all evidence to the contrary, Rush Limbaugh, on his Premier Radio Network show of July 27, had this to say about Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: “Gates is an angry racist.”

On July 28, Fox News’ superstar Glenn Beck had some choice words to say about Obama, although with Beck he seems to say something inflammatory, then attempt to recant his own words.

Said Beck: "[Obama] has exposed himself, I think, as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or white culture" … "I'm not saying that [Obama] doesn't like white people. I'm saying he has a problem. He has a, this guy is, I believe, a racist."

I’ve had three blogs over the last several years and am on record as having pointed out that Fox News is in no way a professional journalism outlet. It is, in fact, a well-run propaganda machine.

Reading comments – many replete with blatantly racist remarks - on the various sites I researched this morning, I found this truism:

“If Heinrich Himmler were alive today he'd take notes from Fixed Noise. I don't think in the history of Man there has ever been as efficient a corporate-state propaganda machine as this channel. Even the average citizen in Nazi Germany didn't believe the state propaganda as hard as the right believes in the propaganda from this channel.”

Hell, Josef Goebbels would have his own show!

The media – any media – love conflict. It sells. Over the last week there has been much discussion of racism following the incident at Professor Gates’ home. The time to examine racism in America was after those horrifying television images following Hurricane Katrina. Ironically, the only person with a microphone who wanted to discuss the apparent racial ramifications of those images from New Orleans was Don Imus, at the time on MSNBC. Sadly, the I-man was silenced, when he himself was accused – in my opinion, falsely – of racism.

The Boston Herald (LINK) reports this morning that Professor Gates is receiving death threats and is considering moving from his home. Is it any wonder with the right-wing wunderkinder above exacerbating the situation?

One more thing: I noted a number of comments claiming that worldnetdaily.com has a photocopy of “Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate.”

Is there any question in your mind, dear reader, that all of this is simply an effort to undermine Obama’s presidency and his policies?

And once more, it all comes around to this question: is there any level the right-wing won’t stoop to to promote its twisted ideology?