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More musings on poptimism and cultural decline…
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Sadly, FAFO seems like a new way to describe a general journalistic trend in crime reporting. The right-wing use of crime as a tactic for promote fear and disgust is a major reason they are celebrating news stories about detention or deportation. The linking of certain groups of immigrants to illegality and immorality is not new. The goal is to sway public opinion and gain support using “anti-crime” or “pro law & order” platforms/promises. We can find examples of TPTB using the media to smear those who have been arrested, justify brutality, or excuse excesses in sentencing by a quick look back at coverage of the Black community.
We should not treat the lives of people as mere pawns in a partisan game. People’s lives, after all, are the only reason politics matters in the first place.
Really? What’s interesting to note is concerns about it going too far mainly seem to come up when the folks involved look like the ones pictured here. Readers are encouraged to consider humanity when victims or perpetrators are considered to be white. The tactics described above used to influence public opinion against POC are instead used to justify or minimize what led to arrests, explain why readers should empathize, and decry any penalties applied as being too harsh.
Now we’re supposed to believe pointing out how people’s choices led to a specific outcome is a ‘“gotcha” game,’ as the author defines it. Glossing over that part or refusing to include it because that would be “depraved” just sets up people to never connect the dots. How can lessons be learned if the press is determined not to bring up certain mistakes or confirm whether or not they were ever made? 
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A great one from Belle about the point of society (for those who lean into nostalgia for the past and/or complain about anyone who receives assistance):
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Here is an article he sites… cites… zites…? citopodes?
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It’s the cultural equivalent of Maga – the lie that there was some glorious past where things were flourishing and wholesome and if we can just get back there we’ll be on track again. But there never was that past. It’s a distortion of immature childhood memories and historical rewriting by big corporations.
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Back in 1996 in Australia, a xenophobic populist senator named Pauline Hanson was elected. She’s still around, alas. At the time, the former Prime Minister Paul Keating said this about her:
The great tragedy of the shamelessly regressive politics of Pauline Hanson is not so much that it is rooted in ignorance, prejudice and fear, though it is; not so much that it projects the ugly face of racism, though it does; not so much that it is dangerously divisive and deeply hurtful to many of her fellow Australians, though it is; not even that will cripple our efforts to enmesh ourselves in a region wherein lie the jobs and prosperity of future generations of young Australians, though it will – the great tragedy is that it perpetrates a myth, a fantasy, a lie. The myth of monoculture. The lie that we can retreat to it.
Paul Keating, 1996
My emphasis.
I love nostalgia; it’s like a really pleasant wine to me. And I have to always remind myself it’s a one-sided tale at best, and a lie at worst.
edit:tyop
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I miss old school scholars complaining about nostalgia.
Like, I don’t know, Halbwachs or Schlesinger.
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In the first video, is she holding a makeup brush as if it were a microphone?
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