George Rebane
[24apr25 – This piece was submitted to The Union on 23 May 2025 for their Other Voices op-ed contributions. Not only was it not published, but they did not even deign to answer my follow-on inquiries about its acceptance and status. Clearly I stepped over their editorial line with this piece. The same fate befell a subsequent mildly worded letter-to-the-editor on another topic. I may have made the shit list for this strong voice of the Left in these foothills.]
The chaos currently reigning in the Democratic party highlights a propaganda gambit long practiced by socialists and communists of all hues. Since the Democrats have no program of governance that even they would consider acceptable to broad American constituencies, all they have left to fill the void of their public messaging is to criticize what the Trump administration is doing to exercise its broad mandate from last November to restructure the federal government, cutting waste, corruption, and abuse. And how do they accomplish this?
The way they have again selected is the tried-and-true method that has worked with the ignorant and lightly read since collectivism crawled into public discourse. The method is supremely simple and extremely effective. To wit, first tell an audacious lie about what your political opponents are doing or plan to do, and then spend the remainder of your tirade describing what terrible things would come to pass when/if these fabricated policies were implemented.
The guileless have neither the intellectual skills, background knowledge, nor accessible resources to refute the initial lie, and therefore it is taken as a given to consume the subsequent harangue that details the public suffering to come.
It is easy for the well-read who pay attention to confirm this with their liberal brethren. Just recount some current events and happenings that embarrass the Left. You will then quickly discover that they have little or no knowledge of such goings on for the simple reason that their lamestream news outlets (to the extent that they even partake) don’t cover such topics or simply give them short shrift in their reporting.
As a somewhat hyperbolic example to make the point, consider if our habitually comfortable leftwing voters are assured that the Republican-backed parochial schools and home schooling programs promote racism. And that is the reason why African-Americans and Hispanics rank low academically in public schools and America remains a racist nation. Having established that preamble lie, our socialist propagandists are then free to launch into extended dissertations about the historical horrors of racism, many of which continue today, and all promoted by Republicans, or Trump, or DOGE, or whoever happens to be chosen as the menace du jour.
To extend this example, we can now see why the Left wants to keep the Department of Education in business getting more money and doing the same ol’ same ol’ with the teachers’ unions while student academic performance continues to deteriorate as it has under decades of their careful anti-student ministrations. And the saddest part is that their constituencies have no clue of the (Einstein?) established admonition about ignorance.
rebanesruminations.com 
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