Thread by @JYSexton

As America passes half a million dead by even conservative estimates, we need to examine how we got here, how this tragedy could have taken place, and how the wealthy and the powerful and the GOP created the perfect conditions for such a disaster.

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jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/a-country-de…

We need to begin with Richard Nixon, whose tarnished, disgraceful presidency left the Republican Party in tatters in the 1970's and many in the GOP wondering whether they would ever recover.

If they were to come back, it would take a new plan and a new strategy.

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William E. Simon was Nixon's Treasury Secretary and he believed the survival of the GOP and capitalism depended on an aggressive new strategy to create a "powerful counterintelligentsia" that could twist reality in their favor.

It inspired a deadly new trend.

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The Right heeded Simon's call, and with the power and financing of America's wealthiest business owners, spawned think-tanks, financed skeptics of science and experts, and began constructing a media-fueled Right Wing alternative reality that suited their interests and needs.

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This alternate reality was particularly useful for energy companies, who in the 1980's were told they were creating a climate crisis.

Instead of changing course, they paid people to skew the consensus, blur reality, and give them cover to continue profiting.

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Even while the energy companies and the GOP knew climate change was real, the political strategy was to lampoon it, inspire conspiracy theories, distrust in science.

It was a bad-faith movement, all in favor of profit over the lives and wellbeing of the people.

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Of course, any conversation about the alternate reality of the Right would be incomplete with mentioning the influence of Roger Ailes, Fox News, and the media ecosystem that intentionally spreads these bad-faith narratives to serve political and economic ends.

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Ailes had been Richard Nixon's media advisor and believed if a Right Wing media had been thriving, Nixon would've survived Watergate and the GOP would've continued to consolidate power.

So, he created that media for just those very purposes. To twist reality.

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The relationship between the wealthy and powerful and the GOP in creating this "counterintelligentsia" had another moment in 2010 as billionaires like the Koch Brothers, long investing in alternative realities to suit their economic needs, carried out a takeover of the GOP.

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Taking advantage of anger over the Housing Collapse and racist fears of the first Black president, the Kochs funded, trained, and grew the "Tea Party Movement" to dismantle government, cut their taxes and regulation, and drive the Right further into libertarianism.

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The Kochs and Fox News, both members of the planned counterintelligentsia, promoted the constructed, artificial Tea Party as a real, organic movement, both for political and economic purposes.

It was an alternate reality that could entrap more and more people.

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Donald Trump was a result of the constructed alternate reality and the counterintelligentsia. His presidency and failure/unwillingness to address the pandemic are consequences of the intentional demolition of objective reality, science, and politics as a means of public good

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The resulting splinter of reality in 2020, with Americans living in that intentional counterintelligentsia-powered world, made the pandemic deadlier and the focus of continued battles over experts, science, and what reality was and is.

The tragedy was preventable.

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To watch medicine and science become so politicized was only another front in the continued plan of the counterintelligentsia

Because science didn't conform to economic and political whims, it was discarded, attacked, undermined. The system created massively tragic results.

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Bizarre alternative reality moments like the hawking of hydroxychloroquine as a magic cure, a snake-oil that might fix everything and just open the economy, is only further proof of how this tailored, alternate reality combats science with intentional alternatives.

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In a bizarre echo from the past, Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education for Trump, took a page out of the Koch playbook and flooded conspiracy theories and artificially constructed "movements" with cash to push her economic interests.

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"Reopen" rallies took place that undermined the science and narrative that the pandemic was real, a replay of the Tea Party Movement that had been constructed to change reality in 2010.

It was the wealthy, once more, shifting reality for their own purposes.

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In this type of environment, conspiracy theories surge, leading to incidents like the Coup Attempt of January 6th, violence, further distrust in science, experts, and institutions.

It is an intentional disruption and manipulation that furthers the goals of the wealthy.

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It did not have to be this way. The Right could have reconsidered their positions, recalibrated, accepted science and reality and charted a new course.

That reality has been attacked and destroyed like this, that so many have died and suffered, is an an indictment.

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The sad truth is that, unless we fight against this, unless we expose the counterintellgentsia for what it is, what it has done, and what it continues to do, this tragedy will only be one in a long, long line.

We have to do better and we have to learn from this.

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