“Education is not memorizing that Hitler killed six million Jews. Education is understanding how millions of ordinary Germans were convinced it was required. Education is learning how to spot the signs of history repeating itself.” -Noam Chomsky

This Chomsky quote is an essential starting point in this year’s mandatory project to recover a huge part of the American population from years of disinformation and veritable brainwashing. Not unlike the Germans of the 1920s and 1930s, an ingrained anti-Semitic prejudice has always been alive in the U.S. population, but dormant and rightfully suppressed by powerful social norms that have historically worked to keep it that way. It’s only been since the rise of Trump and the new social order in America that such prejudices are now erupting through social media, primarily.
This “new social order” in America has to be aggressively taken on by a large majority of Americans in this critical presidential election year or democracy is doomed.
This “new social order,” as I call it here, began, in its latest iteration, to be unleashed in the U.S. starting in the early 1970s as a marginal movement, operating in the culture created under the rubric “postmodernism.” It was a cultural offensive ostensibly in reaction to the world that New Dealers, first, and Dr. Martin Luther King had been shaping up from the time of the FDR administration until Dr. King’s untimely demise in April 1968.

A new cultural paradigm was sought by those captains of industry and finance who had backed Hitler, including among major elements in the U.S. They’d sought unsuccessfully to assassinate FDR prior to his inauguration in early 1933 and to boost Hitler with pro-Nazi rallies in the U.S. during the 1930s, including one that packed Madison Square Garden to the hilt, and their energies were applied to trying to keep the U.S. out of World War II with an “America First” movement that almost worked.

It was a parallel to the situation today where pro-Putin elements among Republicans in the U.S. Congress are holding back funding for the Ukraine military’s heroic efforts to stem the advance of Putin into Western Europe. Like then, when it was only the entry of the U.S. into World War II that prevented the Nazi takeover of England and permanent Nazi occupation of Europe, today’s Hitler is Putin, and his designs are the same for all of Europe.

Today’s “America First” phalanx in the Republican Party is just like their forebears who sought to keep America out of World War II in the 1930s.

Their atrocious attacks today on the rights of women, in particular, is another of their obscenities that mark their hatred of democracy, in general.

If there is something new in the “new social order” of today, it is the extent to which social media, in particular, has empowered a mass movement now taking the center of our culture, a movement grounded in a new kind of anger against American political institutions.

Through social media, deliberate disinformation continues to be spread like wildfire and it is well documented that it continues to emanate from democracy’s sworn enemy Russia. It is continuing this election year as it did in 2016 and 2020 to boost the candidacy of its ever so foul agent in place in the U.S., Donald Trump, and, on its flip side, to attack Biden on any vulnerabilities it can find to go after.

Even with the massive mobilization of the nation’s women and their allies that is setting up for a major and resounding defeat of Trump later this year, way too much of the U.S. population is veritably sleepwalking through this most decisive period in human history. With the mainstream media clearly on the side of the “new social order,” the public is generally too lazy and bound up in its selfish self-interests to discern where, on the one side, the horny hand of Putin and his pro-Nazi interests, including his Hamas operation designed to weaken his opposition in Ukraine, are working, and, on the other, the FDR-like policies of Biden.

Many more of us need to wake up this year.