How to Deprogram Us

American Greatness ^ | 27 Jan, 2021 | Victor Davis Hanson

[MtnClimber]

A new buzzword on social media, cable news, and among leftist activists is “deprogramming.”

Along with terms like “reprogramming,” “de-Baathification,” and “deplatforming,” deprogramming refers to cleansing the incorrect mentalities of former Trump Administration officials—and even those who voted for Trump.

Note that deprogramming does not refer to elites who peddled the “Russian collusion” hoax for years, despite the abject absence of evidence.

Not long ago, two Washington Post columnists offered some solutions to the Trumpist threat. One, Max Boot, wished to ban Fox News and other conservative stations from cable subscriptions.

The other, Eugene Robinson, suggested that there was a need to focus on mostly “white” Republicans to “deprogram” their thoughts.

Pro forma “diversity training” has already been upgraded to include coming clean about “white supremacy” and “unearned privilege.”

Graduates are supposed to emerge washed of their sins of entitlement. Only when thus vaccinated, can they become fully certified that they no longer pose a threat to the Other.

Still, how might a proper stepped-up deprogramming system deal with any diehard Trump refuseniks? Why not borrow the current Chinese “social credit system”?

Non-participating dead-ender Trumpers might lose so many social awareness points that they would be disqualified from staying at their beloved Holiday Inns or banned from Olive Garden restaurants.

Milder rejectionists could wear red MAGA cone hats. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, such dunce cones proved useful in identifying and shaming the right wrong people.

Television, social media, and Hollywood could do their part. Viewers might be first required to participate in two-minutes of hate shouting, aimed at enemies on the screen: Donald and Melania, or perhaps former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.

[Dat]

Every time I hear this I think of the movie “The last Emperor”.

[JennysCool]

There are a couple of non-violent, extremely useful tactics I can see being employed to counter the “elites,” both of which must be extremely comprehensive, and EXTREMELY well-funded.

For one, a network that functions as a completely honest source of news. That means NO partisanship and NO propaganda for either side of a story. A network that establishes itself, day one, as a stringent reporter of NEWS, not the opinion of its reporters and producers.

BUT this network is also dedicated to covering those who have hitherto been uncovered ... The so-called “elite” of business, politics and entertainment. Those heretofore faceless “masters of the universe” who aren’t used to having a reporter show up at their luncheon, asking questions about how their public statements don’t seem to match their political contributions. And then showing up the next day, and the next ...

But this is America, of course, so coverage should also include a little TMZ, New York Post-style digging. For example a reporter and photographer showing up at the golf course to ask the normally-comfortable tech CEO about his son, who was so unfortunately arrested the other day in regard to a drug-trafficking investigation. “That was in Belmont, wasn’t it sir? Don’t you have extensive real estate holdings there? Have the authorities contacted you about that?”

The second tactic, which has been running through my head for some time, would be establishing — again, an EXTREMELY well-funded — investigative agency dedicated to ferreting out corruption in government at every level. It always stuns me how people just seem to nod and say, “Okay, sure” when they read a news story saying that an agency suspected of corruption is investigating itself. A private agency with pull and dedicated to probing government corruption has been needed — oh, well, since the first government was formed.

I emphasize the “extremely well-funded” aspect because we have websites and small networks aplenty trying to do this sort of thing, but they’re doing it for the most part under the radar — cable channels in a comparatively small amount of households, websites that do good work, but are not household names. For either of these operations to work, they would need to hit the ground running, with enough PR and advertising to get above the chatter, and instantly noticed and credible.

These ventures — perhaps done in tandem — might well put the fear of God in the “elites” — where it belongs.