A Re-blogged Essay: The New Committees of Correspondence - Granite Grok

A Re-blogged Essay: The New Committees of Correspondence

What follows below comes from a posting I made on GraniteGrok in 2010. I want to re-state it now, preparatory to my next posting (see above). It’s in large part about the American Revolutionary-era institutions known as the Committees of Correspondence. Here’s an edited version of what I said:

I spend a lot of time reviewing “what’s going on” in America and the world, including politically, culturally, economically, religiously, technologically…you name it. I often come across things that interest me, and that I think may well interest others. I pour them onto one or two personal political lists of allies that include people from around the country, or just with NH. As I think this process is important, both within and outside New Hampshire.

Why?

Because disseminating such information in this way creates an “mass communication effect” similar to that of the Committees of Correspondence which led up to the Revolutionary War. Since the 1930’s our country has been “ruled” by an information monopoly that has radically skewed the information the American people have been allowed to receive. We generally refer to that (dying) information monopoly as “the Mainstream Media.” It is dying because it no longer has the power of being an “information gatekeeper.” The monopoly has been broken, and the skewed view of reality it purveyed for over a half-century (i.e. the “liberal-and-further-left point of view) is now challenged by an alternative point of view offered by media as disparate as the Drudge Report, PJMedia, InstaPundit, and in a small way, GraniteGrok.com itself.

All of these, and many, many more are what are being called “the New Media.” To talk about it, we’ve got to look at some history:

The first big victories of the emerging American “information monopoly” were the initial and repeated elections of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, starting in 1932. He and the people around him, with the help of Pres. Herbert Hoover before them, took a sharp economic correction, deepened it, and prolonged it into a ten-year Great Depression. If the American people had been privy to the information that the Internet provides us all today, Roosevelt might have been thrown out in 1936 (Republican Pres. Herbert Hoover prepared the ground for Roosevelt; Hoover was the Pres. George W. Bush of that time; he followed the excellent Calvin Coolidge, for whom he was Vice President. In a sense, Ronald Reagan was the modern version of Cal Coolidge, while both Pres. Bush I and Bush II played the updated parts of Pres. Hoover for the two Democrat Presidents who followed them). But Roosevelt was re-elected three more times (just as Obama has been reelected after four years of failure, so the New Media is obviously necessary, but not sufficient).

In any event, the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, and then the takeover of Congress by the Republicans in 1994 (for the first in more than half a century), was an attempt by the American people to correct the damage wrought by Bush I, and then Clinton in his first two years; the election of Obama in 2008, like the election of Clinton in 1992, was an attempt to get away from the damage wrought by Bush II (just like the election of Roosevelt was an attempt to correct the damage done by Hoover from 1928 to 1932; Roosevelt, believe it or not, ran as a “free enterprise” guy, pledging to use good free market economics to fix the depression the country was then in…just as Obama ran in 2008 as a “moderate” pledging to fix the problems that the statism of Bush II had helped create and exacerbate.) Ironically, the corrections performed by Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress in the two years from 1994 to 1996 enabled Clinton to be re-elected in 1996 and gave him a successful Presidency because of the budget surpluses wrought by the Republican conservatives in Congress).

BUT THERE’S NOW A BIG DIFFERENCE: Since the Mainstream Media has lost its control over the information-gateway to the American people, a HUGE amount of truthful, reality-based information is being disseminated throughout our country by virtue of…again, blogs, web sites, email lists, talk ratio, etc., all modern equivalents of the Revolutionary Committees of Correspondence. This “new information-sphere” is, in the end, why I post so many varying types of information from all over the Web and the world. I want to both create and harness the “echo-chamber effect” used for so long by the mainstream media monopoly, except now it consists of  of people disseminating points of view alternative to—and contrary to—the falsehoods of the remaining “Mainstream Media complex” (i.e. all the national networks, all of the cable news networks except for Fox; most of the newspapers in the U.S., including the New York Times, the Washington Post; Time magazine; and others).

In short, this is what we have, people! Let’s use it! Yes, many of us repeatedly get the same information. That’s great! It means the info we’ve seen and disseminated before has “gone viral” and reached a “saturation point” among much of the American populace. We want that to happen! One of the ways to make it happen is to get the information out to as many places as possible, to be disseminated as widely as possible. My hope is that people on the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire list, my private list, and others, pick up on the information being disseminated, pass it on, and create an “echo effect,” until each piece of truthful information has a level of saturation close to that of the MSM.

Why? Because the MSM is what allowed Franklin Roosevelt to be the first President to break the sacred tradition established by President George Washington to quit after two terms. This was in part because Roosevelt’s transgressions were protected by the then-newly-created Mainstream Media information monopoly. They protected him by incessantly chanting their monopoly “echo chamber” to the effect that “Roosevelt is saving America from the Great Depression! He’s saving America from the defects of capitalism!” It all was false, we now know, a monstrous lie. But who was to challenge the new, emerging information monopoly in the 1930’s? By the end of the 1950’s about the only national conservative voice was a little magazine called National Review. That was the best we had. Later, in the 1960’s, the Wall Street Journal editorial page began coming into its own. ONLY when Rush Limbaugh single-handedly created Talk Radio in the 1980’s was the MSM information monopoly seriously challenged. Then came the Internet, and the rest is becoming history. Happily so!

Well, I also said in that blog post that, “Where Roosevelt was a four-term President, Obama will have a single term only. If there were no talk radio, no Internet, no blogs, no email lists, no Fox News, Obama himself would be a multi-term President (Constitutional Amendments can be by-passed, as we know, or repealed), but unlike both Clinton and Roosevelt, Obama will be defeated after his first term and relegated to being one of the worst, if not the worse, Presidents in U.S. history.”

Boy, was I wrong: After the worst four years since the Great Depression, with the help of a non-conservative and non-combative Republican nominee, Obama was able to eke out a 51% to 47% win over Romney (compared to Roosevelt’s 1936 landslide victory of 61% to 37%). The change in favor of the nominally conservative GOP in 2012 was almost certainly driven by the downfall of the MSM information-monopoly. Unfortunately, in the face of a rapidly changing American electorate, that was and is not enough. (Nor, I believe, will it be enough in the future; I’ll talk about that later).

Bottom line? The alternative information sphere provided by the New Media is important. Important. And that is why we should all be forwarding truthful information to our own email lists and blogs that contradicts the falsehoods still purveyed by the still-strong MSM.

In the America of 2013, the non-MSM New Media is the new Committees of Correspondence. We must use it. We must expand it. Please feel free to do so.

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