I have no interest in seeing the Angry Birds movie, one case where I don’t give a damn how long it takes to get to Japan.

If the movie is anything like the game as it is today, it will be interrupted every two minutes with advertisements, and every once in a while the film will stop so that Rovio reps can walk through the audience and pressure people to give up personal information. Also, the movie will be shown without audio and the audience will be forced to pay for headphones that require constant additional “in-theater” payments to last through the entire film.

I liked Angry Birds when it was a game. I recently looked at what they have now, and essentially it has turned into a huge commercial. Became a horrendously sucky experience real fast.

Seven years ago, in the midst of the Great Recession, when Jonathan Chait worried that the economy would recover and Obama would actually get credit for it, he fretted that Republicans didn’t seem to have a contingency plan for that event.

My response was that they did have a contingency plan: lie.

That’s how they claimed Clinton was not responsible for the booming economy he oversaw. If the economy gets better, claim it was because of actions taken by Republicans in the Bush years which came to fruition later, because of economic conditions completely divorced from Obama, and because of pressures Republicans exerted to shape policies during the Obama administration. Meanwhile, they will blame Obama for every piece of negative news during that time (there is always something bad happening), and will claim he’s the most liberal and worst president ever.

Is Chait new here or something?

Wow, was I right. Just last week Brit Hume was claiming that Bush deserved credit for the recovery, and he’s far from the first. And in that same piece, he blamed Obama for everything that went wrong. Again, not the first time.

Not that I was unusually prescient or anything. It was totally predictable and easy to see coming.

You may have heard about conservatives being in their usual rage about how Facebook is “censoring” them. Complete nonsense, of course, but this is one of their favorite things to do.

Conservatives love being the victim. Christian conservatives adore martyrdom (have you noticed all the movies on that theme lately?), but conservatives in general simply can’t get enough of claiming they’re horribly oppressed. Liberal media! Reverse racism! Feminazis! Religious persecution! Gun grabbers! Voter fraud! The list goes on.

My favorite representative example of this mindset was a news story back in 2005, about how quotes printed on the side of coffee cups at Starbucks were more often liberal than conservative. Right-wingers got in the exact same state about Starbucks then as they are with Facebook now. The media obliged, running stories on the “issue.”

The money quote, however, came from a woman named Yvette Nunez, a 27-year-old Republican from Tampa. Originally, she hadn’t even noticed the supposed imbalance, but once alerted to it, she quickly fell into line. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “I’m used to being under-represented.”

Keep in mind that in 2005, conservatives controlled pretty much everything. They had had the White House for 5 years, control of the House for 11 years, and the Senate for 9 of the previous 11 years. Conservatives dominated the Supreme Court, and similarly exercised controlling influence over the media—all of this in the shadow of 9/11, when the conservative agenda carried more power than ever.

This woman, however, perhaps from reflex more than anything else, felt “under-represented” because her coffee cups disagreed with her more often than not. Not that she had actually noticed or been affected in any real way.

This is more than just a conditioned reflex or personality quirk amongst right-wingers, however; it is also very much a conscious strategy. It’s called “working the ref.” The more you can claim to be disadvantaged and that the deck is stacked against you, the more you can demand things be “corrected” in your favor. It’s a negotiating ploy: insist that the reasonable center is in fact somehow terribly skewed against you and that the “real” center is way more toward you, and you can shift the end result far more in your direction.

Conservatives will play on this any and every time they possibly can. The entire “liberal media” lie is based on this. The claim of a “color-blind” society which actually suffers from “reverse racism” is founded on the same principle. The specter of “religious persecution” against Christians in a country absolutely dominated by them mirrors this imagined imbalance. We see it in “scandals,” like the story about how the IRS was targeting conservative groups, or how Homeland Security was maligning conservatives by citing a threat from their ranks.

It is, in short, one of the favorite forms of “political correctness” that conservatives take glee in demanding. “We’re being discriminated against and disparaged!” we hear. “Correct for that!”

The whole Facebook “scandal” is exactly the same, and based on evidence just as shoddy. Apparently, one anonymous, admittedly conservative, and presumably disgruntled former worker from Facebook made a completely unevidenced and possibly biased claim that other workers at Facebook were allowing their liberal bias to steer them in their control of the “trending” list.

If you read the story carefully, however, the headline and the main claim can be seen for the bullshit they really are. After reading the headline “We [Facebook] Routinely Suppressed Conservative News,” and multiple accusations about conservatives getting “deep-sixed” and “blacklisted,” we read the actual practice:

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories. …

“We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said one former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.”

In other words, Facebook was trying to exclude political bias—not practice it! They were told that if a story was not being picked up by the major news sources—not just liberal ones—then it should not have free rein on Facebook. Note that the description of the process did not exclude the possibility that liberal stories would also be held from trending if they were not also reported in the big news outlets—which was probably the case, if any of this was true.

If that’s how it worked, then that makes eminent business sense: Facebook would not want to let itself devolve into a partisan cesspool, where any one point of view dominates—thus alienating potentially half their audience. It is fully likely that liberal-leaning trending stories were “suppressed” exactly as much—but the anonymous former worker, a self-described conservative, didn’t notice or care about those.

In the wake of this, conservatives acted true to form: they railed and wailed about how badly they are oppressed, taking advantage of the idea that tech companies are so liberal and conservatives are so put upon. What, at worst, would have been a subtle act of bias only a fraction as significant as run-of-the-mill daily business as Fox News (which is actually a “news” outlet, unlike Facebook), was treated as so utterly scandalous that even a congressional investigation was warranted—and immediately threatened.

Facebook, in a strikingly acquiescent move, agreed to have a group of notable conservatives come to Facebook to judge them first-hand. Among them was Glenn Beck. I will admit, I figured him to be the most explosive of the bunch, and fully expected to hear him lead the pack in ranting and hair-pulling, no matter what Facebook told them.

Instead, surprisingly, Beck was actually the voice of reason in the group—which might tell you something about how rabid the group was. Beck wrote:

Walking out of the meeting, I was convinced that Facebook is behaving appropriately and trying to do the right thing. They were humble, open, and listened intently to everyone in the room. …

Conservative media, which was started as a reaction to the inherent bias in the main stream media, does not trust anyone outside our circle. Hell, we don’t even trust the people inside our circle. So it’s understandable that going to Silicon Valley, for many conservatives, is like going into enemy territory. … as a general rule, we do not trust them. And with one story, conservatives told Facebook, “There’s nothing left in the trust bank. There’s no goodwill. You must have been scamming us this whole time.” …

So what disturbed me about the Facebook meeting?

I sat through a meeting that, to me, felt like I was attending a Rainbow Coalition meeting, that people (not me) had come with a list of demands.

I looked around the room, I heard the complaints, I listened to the perspectives, and not a single person in the room shared evidence of any wrongdoing. …

I sat there looking around and heard things like:

1) Facebook has a very liberal workforce. Has Facebook considered diversity in their hiring practice? The country is 2% Mormon. Maybe Facebook’s company should better reflect that reality.

2) Maybe Facebook should consider a six-month training program to help their biased and liberal workforce understand and respect conservative opinions and values.

3) We need to see strong and specific steps to right this wrong.

It was like affirmative action for conservatives. When did conservatives start demanding quotas AND diversity training AND less people from Ivy League Colleges.

He also stressed several times that this whole thing was based upon one story from one source, not something with any real evidence behind it.

Beck’s point about the conservatives being so liberal-like in their demands, however, shows up another propensity on the right: accusing the left of doing something, then doing it far more vehemently themselves. “Democrats filibuster!” they raged in 2005, and then when Republicans took over Congress, they filibustered several hundred percent more. “Liberals are too politically correct!” they rage, and then demand that no one says “Happy Holidays,” and rage when anyone publicly discusses gun control after yet another mass shooting.

They despise exactly the things Beck pointed out the conservatives were demanding—but only when liberals do it. But It’s OK If You’re A Republican.

Not that Beck isn’t still biased in his reporting, or that he won’t go all nutball again tomorrow. However, when Beck himself sees his own people as going off the deep end, you know that it’s not all “fair and balanced” in that crowd, to be sure.

I have written before about how conservatives make rookie “mistakes” in economics when it serves their purposes. They claim that Reagan doubled revenues but “neglected” to take inflation into account; they claim Obama drove unemployment up to 10% but “forget” that unemployment is a lagging indicator; they claim minimum wage hikes caused job losses in 2008, but “overlook” the subprime mortgage crisis.

With the current minimum wage debate, conservatives are at it again. With willful ignorance, they make two glaring “mistakes” in their claims.

“Mistake” #1:

In 2013, Boehner said, “When you raise the price of employment, guess what happens? You get less of it.” This quote exhibits the exact same knowing ignorance behind the whole minimum wage issue: that increasing wages is an cost, and when cost goes up, consumption goes down.

The rookie “mistake”? That employees are a commodity. They’re not. They’re an investment. Saying that raising wages will make businesses hire less is like saying that when stock prices go up, people don’t buy as many.

When you raise wages, people leave the job less; turnover is reduced. Employees stay on longer, acquire more experience, have greater job satisfaction, and they become more skilled, more efficient, and more effective at their jobs. In short, their value rises. Employers recognize this, and give the employee greater responsibilities. End result: by investing, the employee becomes more valuable, thus returning on the investment and making it worthwhile to the employer.

“Mistake” #2:

Conservatives often claim that businesses will not be able to afford higher wages; a common retort they have is, “Where do you think that money comes from?” The answer is easy: where do you think the money goes?

If all minimum wage earners get a higher wage, that is a massive amount of money going into the economy. Minimum wage workers do not stash their money overseas like a rich person would; they buy goods and services here and now, because they need them. Where do they shop? They shop at the exact kind of business that pays their workers the minimum wage. So the money that pays minimum wage workers goes right back to the businesses paying minimum wage.

That’s where the money comes from.

Cruz and Kasich are out, and many now are beginning to fear that Trump might actually win. The question is being asked, “How is this possible?” How did it happen that Donald J. Trump could be in striking range of being president?

I can tell you exactly how this happened.

In order: Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Rupert Murdoch, George W. Bush, the Koch Brothers, and Sarah Palin. Allow me to walk you through it.

Ronald Reagan opened the doors in two ways. First, he was an actor who made the presidential race a scripted, fictional play on a stage, where someone who was more about flash than substance could be president. People embraced it because it made them feel good, feel hopeful. Second, he began in earnest to create the “Narrative,” an alternate reality populated by Welfare Queens and Job Creators, a faux reality that people could believe existed based solely on partisan politics and faith. “Reaganspeak,” using euphemisms for political gain, were a significant development which helped establish and build The Narrative.

Rush Limbaugh was one of the biggest innovators of the partisan media, which he used to further The Narrative, using what Stephen Colbert would later term as “Truthiness.” Limbaugh used demagoguery, never worrying about whether his “facts” were actually true. His high ratings and broad appeal triggered the generation of dozens of talk radio personalities of the same ilk. They justified their value by creating the myth of the “Liberal Media,” setting themselves up as the disseminators of actual truth.

Newt Gingrich began the Congressional trend of the “take no prisoners” style of politics. Based more and more upon the fictional Narrative, ultimately a revision of reality, he began the fortification and coordination of the Republican Party, allowing them to dominate the airwaves with a coordinated message. Remember all those montages Jon Stewart made for us on The Daily Show where dozens of conservatives would use the exact same phrasing? Gingrich pioneered that. The Narrative fed by The Message. While he was often outmaneuvered by Clinton, he did set the stage, and was the author of a pivotal document: “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” in which he codified the completely fact-free use of language begun with Reaganspeak.

Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, arrived from Australia via Britain, buying up 20th Century Fox and using the profits from the Entertainment division to build Fox News, which quickly dominated the ratings, based upon a rock-riffed, outraged version of reality, and the beginning of the death of modern journalism. While partisan journalism existed before then in small pockets, Murdoch exploded it, using the already burgeoning myth built by Limbaugh, Gingrich and others about a fictional “Liberal Media.” This development ripped from our culture any hope of maintaining its most vital resource: a trusted source of objective information for an informed electorate. Walter Cronkite left the building, Edward R. Murrow was surely and truly dead.

George W. Bush took the mantle of Ronald Reagan one step further. Where Reagan was more than anything else a figurehead behind which a team of neoconservatives rewrote our nation’s character, George W. Bush was a hand puppet, and the puppeteer—Dick Cheney, one of the same behind-the-scenes neocons from the Reagan administration—was virtually acting in plain sight. Bush was a prop for others to control, he was a lightweight—and he established the dangerous precedent of electing a complete idiot to power.

The Koch Brothers were not the first billionaires to support politics, but they were pioneers in shamelessly building a political machine. Their greatest creation: the Tea Party. By this time, Reagan, Limbaugh, Gingrich, and others had built The Narrative to the point where it was not just believed by tens of millions, but had generated a culture of outrage based upon a groundless but raging set of fears which prompted millions to froth and act wherever the trusted source of “fair and balanced” non-“liberal media” told them to rage. Thus was born the Tea Party, but the most important element was that free-floating fear and anger by which they were manipulated. The Koch brothers also began the accepted practice of billionaires openly directing politics, along with others like Sheldon Adelson.

Sarah Palin was the last straw that began with Ronald Reagan and was refined with George W. Bush. She was the idiot’s idiot, who repeatedly insisted that Death Panels were real and that she was qualified in foreign policy because Alaska was close to Russia. Completely devoid of any substance, she was endorsed and backed by the conservative establishment, praised endlessly by the right-wing media, and loved by millions. She lowered the bar for political acceptance to the all-time low of being snarky and borderline coherent. She drew the connection between so many of the elements of the foundation already made: the idiot figurehead spouting the fantastical fictional Narrative, using the power of the conservative media to rally the enraged shock troops of the Tea Party mindset.

That was how the groundwork was laid for Donald Trump. That was how he was possible. Because actors behind the scene made the American public accept the specter of the bizarrely fatuous figurehead becoming president; because they created millions of fervently dedicated followers who could be led by whomever was most entertaining and whomever could best manipulate the fear and anger generated by The Narrative so carefully cultivated. He was even a billionaire, but even better, a billionaire who could claim he was not beholden to any special interests. Even better still, he was earnest, “authentic” being the word used, in that he was able to display a natural sincerity which, via Reagan and Limbaugh and Palin, was valued and prized far more than any kind of factual accuracy or attention to truth or detail.

Conservatives created a huge base of voters and supporters who lacked a key element: an anchor. When people are anchored on principles, they tend to follow those who represent those principles. This new base the conservatives built had no anchor; they were instead founded on fear and anger. These are free-floating, meaning that they can be hijacked by anyone who knows which buttons to push.

And who knows which buttons to push better than a professional entertainer and media clown like Donald Trump? He’d been pushing the buttons in the background for years, getting lots of play on Fox News by being the Birther-in-Chief.

THAT’s how we came to the point of Donald Trump being where he is.