About

Short Version:

Conservatives forward hateful, lie-filled, and sometimes racist emails to each other with the intent of making the base angry and therefore active.  This is a place for those emails (and occasional other media) to be compiled and discussed.  All in one location.

Long Version:

Over a period of several years I have been the unwilling recipient of forwards sent by conservatives.  Disgusting, judgmental, racist, sexist, spiteful, petty emails filled with grossly incorrect information.  And it has become apparent to me that a great number of people believe this stuff without questioning it.  And I believe that an ill-informed electorate is more dangerous than an uninformed one.

Granted, they’re using an old method of spreading their propaganda, but it still needs to be countered.  I’d like to tell myself that the only people sending this stuff are older people who really aren’t going to be active for their cause, but I’ve seen enough town halls and little tea party protests to know that some of these people will actively participate in public… umm… discourse?  And sometimes in an angry and potentially violent fashion.

So it’s important to compile all of this stuff online in a single location in order to A) debunk it and B) shine a light on just how big and orchestrated a movement it is.  Don’t think for a minute that these emails are written by ordinary citizens who are fed up with this or that.  They are written by highly paid Washington consultants, disciples of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, with the sinister objective of destroying their perceived opposition no matter what the cost.

One thing that I may not be able to get across here is that the authors of these messages tend to fill their emails with cutesy über-patriotic graphics (circa 1995) and frame their lies as jokes in order to make this trash seem more presentable, but more importantly to make them look like they were written by ordinary people.  It makes the recipients feel like they were created by people just like them.  Just another way to “catapult the propaganda.”  And they often end with sentences like “if you agree, pass it on, but if you disagree, just delete,” which is an insultingly subtle way of trying to keep people from vocally opposing the content while ensuring it gets to the base.

It’s also worth noting that not every one of these emails is expressly political in nature, but is still written with the overall goal of advancing right-wing political success.  The most common example comes in the form of emails about how Christianity is somehow under attack, or that Christian practices are currently being (or about to be) abridged even though nothing of the sort is true.

And so this space has been created.  Hopefully discussing this tripe will go a tiny way towards countering it.