Dana Blankenhorn

Propaganda for Good

Russia thought it was attacking a Russian province.

Turned out it was attacking Europe.

Europe is a state of mind. It’s egalitarian, but it’s fractious. It’s united, but not entirely. It’s western civilization in microcosm – messy, slow to anger, but mighty when provoked.

The invasion revealed that Putin’s Russia wasn’t even a nation-state. It was a medieval Empire, gilded by 20^th century ideologies, wealth, and technologies.

What makes this Empire so dangerous is that it has used all it had to attack America. Until recently it was successful. Putin ran our government, through Trump. Had we not beaten Trump he would be sitting in Kiev right now.

The Putin threat to this nation is still alive. It can still win. That’s because Trump was never Putin’s most dangerous puppet.

Rupert Murdoch is.

Without Fox News, Trump would have gone nowhere. Without Fox News, racism could not still be rising. Putin is a King. He won’t be satisfied until he rules everything. Murdoch is an oligarch. Rich man wants to be King.

Find me three issues on which Murdoch and Putin fundamentally disagree. I’ll wait.

I’ve written this before. It is time for Americans to become Ukranian in the defense of our heritage and rights. I’m not talking about grabbing guns and heading for Kentucky. I am talking instead of using what Ukrainians have taught us, in their hour of need, about propaganda.

The video above teaches this lesson. The song is about mothers, how they grow gray but still treat us like children, protecting us. What we see are women soldiers rushing into the war zone to take children to safety.

Then note the twist. These aren’t their own children they’re saving, or not just their own. When the children are safe, the women go back to the war. They seek their faith. They go on. They are soldiers. Everyone is a soldier.

What America is going through is a struggle. It’s a struggle that can be won. But it will take every weapon at our disposal, including propaganda. We have 5 ½ months and, if we win this time, anything is possible. If we fail, nothing may be possible for a long, long, long time.

The Year of Clarity

This is the year the masks came off. This is the year the cold war became a hot one.

Russia’s attack on Ukraine was a mask coming off. The oligarchs who embraced Vladimir Putin for two decades, and all those who pretended he wasn’t the second coming of Hitler, were exposed. Some tried to back away. Others doubled down. It doesn’t matter. We know now who is on the side of freedom, and who isn’t.

It was a clarifying moment. It created clarity across Europe, and in much of America too. Lines have been drawn. On one side lies democracy, liberty, everything we’ve claimed to stand for over 230 years. On the other side lies evil. Yes, many of its ghosts are American, in genocide, in slavery, in racism and eugenics and the rest. But these are ghosts.

At least we pretended they were.

The leak on overturning Roe vs. Wade is a second clarifying moment. That’s not so obvious yet. Many still try to pretend it is politics as usual.

It’s not. It’s a declaration of war.

The Way to Wealth is Tolerance

There’s nothing wrong with wealth.

Wealth is supposed to create a sense of responsibility. Andrew Carnegie understood this after he sold his Carnegie Steel in 1901.  Thereafter he devoted himself to giving all his money away. MacKenzie Scott, formerly Mrs. Jeff Bezos, is doing that today. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have promised to do that.

They do it to protect the system. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith defended capitalism by positing that wealthy people would be inclined toward the common good. Some are. Others are not.

For every Carnegie there’s a Vanderbilt. The good news is that, after a few generations of profligacy, even a Vanderbilt fortune can run dry. Anderson Cooper is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt but he’s not a rich man. That’s a hopeful story.

The good news is that, so far, 2022 is giving me an 1898 feeling. David Traxel’s book on 1898  describes a nation facing a Populist uprising amid a progressive ferment. It describes a war that was blissfully short, a turning point because it brought to power a man who would get along with Wall Street.

The Progressive movement and Wall Street’s self-interest lined up perfectly. Few people understand this, even today. Utilities for electricity, telephony, for transport, for water and for natural gas, could only be created through regulated monopolies. The late 19^th century’s efforts to create them in other ways failed. J.P. Morgan portrayed the evil trust king in the popular imagination, and Theodore Roosevelt the benevolent trust-buster. But they were working toward the same end. The result was today’s American cities.

The Biotech Cathedral and the Bazaar

We have become accustomed, in the first decades of the 21^st century, to thinking of technology as providing the highest value-add.

Software, made by hand but scaled instantly over cloud networks, is where the money is today.

But that will not be the case a decade from now.

The next revolution, in biotechnology, is already underway. I’ve described it as “DNA as a Programming Language.” While I made my life in computing, mostly as an observer, my son is now making his way into biotech, as a participant.

COVID-19 provided the “Visicalc moment” for this revolution, the giant “ah-ha” that created the mass market. Moderna, BionTech, and mRNA technology, gave the west vaccines against the disease long before older technologies. Moderna developed its vaccine within days of getting the DNA map of the COVID-19 genome.

Silent Majority

The thing about a Silent Majority is that we’re silent.

We just want to get on with our lives.

There used to be two seasons in Washington. There was political season and policy season. Drunk on the attention of the last few election cycles, Washington reporters and pundits now think it’s always political season. Republicans, the minority party, have indulged them with constant outrage. The insurrection meant to bring down the U.S. Constitution was just the start.

But I can’t see a single issue on which Republican stands represent a majority view. The only way these views get any traction is by filtering everything through a Republican prism. There’s an entire media class, owned by oligarchs, doing nothing but that. Extremism in the defense of liberty is a vice, for in extremism there is no liberty. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is a virtue, for without moderation there is no justice.

The Privilege of Struggling Against Taliban and Oligarchs

I had no idea I was privileged until I moved into my present house.

My new neighbors were all black. Lower middle class. They worked hard. They had bought into the neighborhood 15 years before, in a rush, after the Open Housing Act enabled “integration” in Atlanta. It was, in fact, just a new form of segregation. But they were thankful for what they had, with a stubborn working-class pride in what they did and what they had done.

They raised me. (Mrs. House here lived to be 101. She was 99 and still going strong when I took this picture.)

About 20 years ago, with Afghanistan underway and Iraq coming, Republicans talked about how “we have to fight them over there, so we won’t have to fight them here” and about how “freedom isn’t free.”

Now we are fighting them here. The American Taliban and economic oligarchs represent the whole of today’s Republican Party.

They were right about one thing, however. Freedom isn’t free.

The Trouble with Dictators

Russia may or may not invade Ukraine.

Either way, it can’t hold it.

Russia is no longer communist. It’s a personal dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. He holds all the reins of power. If a bus ran him over tomorrow, Russia would be plunged into chaos.

That’s why it doesn’t matter if he invades. Ukraine has spent a generation building a sense of national identity. They even have a democratic system that will let them choose a new President. Thinking they can be held down forever is naïve.

Bottom Up

The relationship between the Washington press corps and its readers has become as abusive as anything Donald Trump ever drew up. The same is true for the relationship between “Lefty Twitter” and the left.

As usual, it’s a question of business models. You make money by getting clicks. You get clicks by energizing people, by making them angry or scared, preferably both. Straight news doesn’t pay.

That’s why The New York Times, Washington Post, The Hill, Politico, even CNN and MSNBC, have become trolls. If Politico writes a story saying the economy is improving, with numbers attached, no one is going to read it. But if they throw in a “but,” leading with a counter-example – a place where it’s not growing, people who are being left behind – that draws readers. Talk seriously about vaccines and you hear crickets. Write up some anti-vaxxer and its happy days. You’re getting clicks.

What to Teach Journalists

I have always had a love-hate relationship with my journalism education, which came from the Medill School at Northwestern University in 1977-78.

Back then Medill taught that journalists were people who worked for people who bought ink by the barrel. The analogy has shifted (bits by the petabyte) but the idea remains the same. Journalists work for others. We have no real control over their career path. We’re dependent.

I can understand that. It’s a comfortable feeling, getting a paycheck and ignoring the market. But I didn’t get to be my class’s last man standing on his beat by being dependent. I’m a freelance. I have defined my own coverage area, which is the future with a business orientation. Following the Medill career path would have had me out of this business decades ago.

Imaginary Crisis

One thing I have learned reading American history is that every generation feels it’s in an existential crisis.

Usually, they’re right.

In the Founders’ generation, John Adams passed a Sedition Law against Thomas Jefferson and his supporters. Then James Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” lost a war and saw his Capitol burned. America was only saved by Bonaparte’s downfall, which caused Great Britain to lose interest in us.

Jackson Democrats saw Whigs as oligarchs, looking to destroy the poor for the benefit of a few. The death of Whig President W.H. Harrison in 1841 destroyed Nathaniel Hawthorne’s faith in democracy. Abraham Lincoln was a Whig, then 1 in every 50 Americans died during the Civil War, which was nearly lost.