The Measles Outbreak, Medicaid Cuts, and Healthcare and Research Spending Reductions: Straight out of Hitler’s Propaganda Playbook

1. The Erosion of Public Health Spending
2. Using Hitler’s Propaganda Playbook
   1. Cultivate chaos, conflict, and confusion
   2. Exploit Opportunities

It’s hard to be working on self-actualization when you’re worried about rats eating your baby at night. That line has stuck with me over the years. I was talking to a Black colleague about New Age sensibilities in the 1980’s, and they were trying to explain to me the difference between white and Black people problems. They were pointing out what Maslow had eighty-odd years earlier with his thoughts on the hierarchy of needs: before you can work on higher order needs, basic needs, like food and shelter have to be met first.

The Erosion of Public Health Spending

As the Felon Reich engages in a witch hunt for woke references in research grant applications and uses criticism — both perceived and actual — as a litmus test for dispersing federal funds, it is clear that the healthcare needs of the country are not going to be addressed. With RFK’s anti-vaccine vanity project, which is now becoming an unhealthy obsessive-paranoid vendetta, a direct assault on the health and welfare of many Americans is well underway. down the research and investment infrastructure of healthcare and science in the States, it will make providing the basic needs of food, water, shelter, and safety for the majority of Americans much more difficult.

With these policies and practices in place, it buggar’s the question of what it is all for? Why would anyone engage in such reckless and destructive behavior? What could they possibly hope to gain from it?

Ye Olde Blogge has frequently predicted that the Orange Ego would attempt to destroy the country and world because of the narcissistic wound inflicted on him by losing the 2020 election, but why would anyone in their right mind go along with such hubris and destruction? Especially considering that we’re in the worst measles outbreaks since the licensing of the measles vaccine in 1963. What motive could Trump, RFK, Jr, or the Republican Party have for inflicting measles on the country?

Using Hitler’s Propaganda Playbook

The answer is rooted in two principles from Hitler’s propaganda playbook, which the GOP has been increasingly relying on.

Cultivate chaos, conflict, and confusion

Rule number one was Cultivate chaos, conflict, and confusion: Keep everyone arguing and fighting over meaningless divisive culture wars and ridiculous policy goals.

With every government contract, grant, and services being part of a larger grift for a criminal enterprise masquerading as a government, it is easy to see how living vaccine-free in a healthcare desert and a minimum wage job would keep you from being able to contemplate the reasons our country has slide into such a hellhole and what role you might could play in helping us escape it. It simply makes it much more difficult for and much less likely that large groups of citizens to organize political resistance to the authoritarian take over of our democracy because too many of us will be too busy pursuing our basic needs to have the time and energy to effectively resist the fascists.

As needlessly cruel as that seems, in our new psychopathocracy our empathyless rulers see no reason not to exploit the pain that such policies would bring about for their own gain. But, it also appeals to another of the plays in the fascist instruction manual.

Exploit Opportunities

Rule number two was Exploit Opportunities: Seize every chance to stir up controversy or create a political maelstrom. It’s easy to see why a true chaos-agent like our Felonious Traitor would be attracted to RFK’s anti-vaccine shtick. In a landscape mired in preventable diseases — echoing the chaos of the #COVID19 pandemic that served him so well — what better way to divert attention from one’s own misdeeds than by promoting misinformation that allows preventable illnesses to sweep through the population? It’s a modern take on the old classic, when you’re beating off alligators, it’s hard to remember the GOP promised to drain the swamp.

While we’re all mired in health crises, grieving the early deaths of our loved ones, and working two jobs and a side gig, we just don’t have the ability to determine what is true and what is fiction or where the vast wealth of the nation has disappeared to.

As the Congressional members of the Grifting Old Party will enrich themselves from insider trading and “donations” from a variety of lobbyists, why are state and local politicians going along with this obviously bankrupt policy? The state and local office holders haven’t even sold their constituents to the oligarchs, they’ve just given them away for the promise of maybe one day being “elected” to an office that will allow them to grift their way to riches.

The only remaining questions that we face are whether the needless wanton pain, misery, and early unnecessary death will break the stranglehold that Trump has over MAGA. They are willing to forego government benefits — only 26.4% of eligible people receive TANF benefits — rather than see them help Communities of Color. Famously, MAGA would rather not have public swimming pools if it meant that they would have to swim with the Blacks. It is not clear to me that losing children to gun violence, opioids, and, now, measles while living in healthcare deserts would be enough.