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The right wing mindset is extremely hostile to soft power or even just preventative methods in general. A general sort of example of the phenomenon: them refusing vaccines but saying you should nuke your body with horse paste if you get sick. Or refusing to pay for infrastructure until a bridge collapses. You apply that mindset to the boring work of maintaining an empire and this is what you get.
See: everything, but especially climate change
The latest Trashfuture touched on this through the lens of how most people (I.e. Not leftists, or anyone who pays attention) sees this: they see all of this as the government spending money on the undeserving, that is, anyone who’s not white in the US, and anyone who’s not American for the rest of the world.
They don’t care about the reality of these programs, or their contribution to their comfortable imperial core lives, because all that matters is what feels right, and it feels that telling people to overthrow their government is the weak way of exerting control, when they can just drop in with their military and invade, the macho-way of geopolitics.
They won’t learn from history because there’s no history in their mind, only vibes and chsuvinism.
Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a dipshit of himself in full view of the world
I agree with Musk, unfortunately. I would be super owned if I stopped receiving my Sorosbucks. If he defunds RFE then it’s joever for communism.
Please please please have Doge audit the Pentagon. Please, president Trump.
Nah they’re only dismantling soft power making the inevitable chaos only solvable by bombs. It’s the “when you only have a hammer” thing but because you’ve intentionally thrown the rest of your tools in the lake.
Radio Free Asia too, hopefully.
The capitalist class becoming too stupid to sustain its own existence may be an even more lethal contradiction than class contradictions.
Decades of US soft power being undone by a billionaire for likes on twitter
Europe is free now
“But still didn’t forgive us for it”Honestly does the US really need to actively fund propaganda outlets anymore? I feel like Amerikkkans are so propagandized now they’ll just spawn this kind of content on their own, for free.
RFE isn’t for Americans, it’s meant to suppress leftists in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. It’s one of the tools in the Gladio/Color Revolutions playbook meant to give the imperialists an edge in the region. The other tools are fascist goons, police violence, and NATO military actions.
Edit: I guess I missed the biggest and most obvious tool: financial control and IMF structural adjustment programs.
I think they would rather directly support fascist/neolib orgs intead of using a 3rd party like USAID, like how elon went to that Adf event
Which is very stupid because tight wingers are flighty and unreliable. AfD is friends with musk now, but who knows if it’s going to last. The benefits of VoA or RFA is that you have direct editorial control, it helps you coordinate with other intelligence operations in the region.
Yes they really do need to fund these things. The average person is not politically active nor do they care. Propaganda is incredibly important to fostering an environment where radicalization is difficult.
We shall see how it turns out. But my personal opinion is destroying the propaganda arm of the fascist US is the most important precursor to actually dismantling US hegemony.
Weren’t these started as propaganda against the USSR during/after the Cold War?
Is this one of those situations where the “worst person you know does something good?”
Not trying to be snarky, honestly curious.
No yes that’s exactly what happened here, he’s dismantling the soft power the US has in Europe because he thinks they don’t need it anymore. And TBH, maybe fascists in Europe are strong enough now that it won’t immediately backfire, but it’s probably true that eventually this is going to look very, very bad for them when communists have enough popular support and no one is around to spread right wing propaganda.
I think you are underestimating the grip the right has on the media here and will continue to have. RFE is superfluous when there are other, better media outlets to spread their shit, and not just traditional press. In any case the absence of US influence will just leave a niche for the local bourgeois media.
Yes of course, fascists will continue to have their cultural hegemony that they inherited from US efforts to suppress the left. What I’m suggesting is that this can only be a permanent condition as a result of external force, and the steady state condition is a tendency toward class consciousness as material conditions worsen. It’s like there was a magnet that was holding a pendulum all the way to the right, but now the magnet has released and the pendulum will swing to the left (over several years, of course, not immediately). It’ll swing back, dialectics, but having a weaker local enemy is always preferable to having an untouchable international enemy.
It’s to launder fascism into the liberals.
Yeah this is probably objectively good for hindering the US’ propaganda efforts. It’s absurd that anyone would call these outlets radical or leftist haha. Voice of America though was actually started in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, allegedly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they intended it to also help steer people away from the Soviet messaging at the time. It’s funding was increased throughout the Cold War.
Yet another case that feels weird but can be explained easily when you go back to this phrase: The 20th century makes a lot more sense when you realize the Western Allies came to regret the side of the war they fought on. VoA has only ever been used to spread anticommunist right wing propaganda since the 50s, it was an important part of Gladio.
Yeah pretty much
Honestly they’re only used by Wikipedia editors to argue that the DPRK killed 8 gazillion babies last year. That and fed left groups on Twitter that argue that China isn’t socialist (see all off Xinjiang is in prison!).
No normal people listens to US state media but the journalists making the news reporting normal people actually consume often do and will quote US state media, thereby laundering their views to a much wider audience.
If you’re a lib journalist with a tight deadline you’re not going to do your own research on Korea when you can just copy-paste some sensationalist bullshit from RFA that already aligns with your worldview.
The vast majority of bullshit DPRK news articles source back to Radio Free Asia. The Radio Liberty/VoA orgs are a cornerstone of the Consent manufacturing machine.
Trump and Musk aren’t against the US Empire, but they don’t like how US Imperialism is sugarcoated with “bringing Democracy”, “human rights”, “freedom of speech” and the “plight of Women/Uyghurs/LGBT etc”… This is “leftism” to them. Their version of US Imperialism is, we’ll take your oil and minerals.
Trump has always been straight forward US Imperialism.
Shouldn’t we need to make plenty of twitter accounts to egg him on? “Good job sire, that’ll teach dem wokes. Now the woke military!”
I’m just imagining some country creating mass bot accounts to do precisely that lmaooo
Maybe some brer rabbit type ones too? “Oh please Mr Musk, I, a radical leftist, love Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia please don’t shut them down!”
Chat, who is your favorite radical leftist? Mine is definitely J Edgar Hoover
I really like Ronald Raegan, the color of his party was red so he was def an extreme leftist anarchist-maoist
Lmao too stupid to live America is cooked
Lol @ VOA being described as radical left when it’s only listened to by chud psychos.
Communism is when the government does stuff.
VOA is something that is done 100% by the government.
Therefore VOA is radical far left woke communism.
