On Facebook it's plenty of anti-conservative groups and social pages publishing cartoons or funny images portraying the latest devilish outburst of these "wingnuts", as Right Wing Extremists are usually called by the liberal media.
You can read the latest Bill O' Reilly's nonsensical rant about "Obamacare promoting selfishness" or Ken Cuccinelli raving that "oral sex is a communist plot".
For some reason, wingnuts use harsh and blatant tones like if they're always addressing a brawling crowd in a night cellar.
Instead this is not something to laugh at. These people's communication strategy is extremely and carefully pondered. Their nonsensical rants over extremely sensitive social issues are all part of a nefarious strategy to attract the sympathy of their audience segment and beyond.
The GOP's communication strategy is basically focused on one single keyword: Emotions.
Playing with emotions is the key to reach the people's emotional sphere bypassing their consciousness and rationality.
By Doing so they make people let them into their emotional sphere so that they can prop up their huge clashing contradictions, because average people's mind relies on the very basic principle that "seeing is believing".
Just an example: after having tried to repeal for 42 times the Healthcare reform which aims at saving the lives of about 50.000 people each year and tried to cut $40 bn of food stamps which support 40 millions of American citizens and after having threatened to shut down the government to defund Obamacare, Republican Senator Ted Cruz was portrayed while praying hand in hand with other "people" in front of the White House. A real display of hypocrisy indeed.
However instead of having bystanders spitting on his face, (they probably hired an army of policemen plus private security) he made himself the opportunity to take this picture:
What he was praying for? These are the kind of questions average people don't ask themselves, as average people only see the exterior side: "this humble politician asks for the help of god". It doesn't matter if he's a mass killer. He's praying hand in hand with an elderly citizen, a woman, a pastor and a black man. This picture is a flashy postcard that aims at representing a stereotyped old fashioned image of a society, (which doesn't exist anymore), tied-in by the faithful Republican man.
Although in this picture there's nothing of today's real society, there is no same-sex family and there are no children. This picture is Astroturfing(1) at its best.
First of all this picture lacks authenticity because these propaganda amateurs made two major mistakes:
1) the first is they "forgot" to include children and they did it on purpose because otherwise the attention would have been focused on the kids instead of Ted Cruz whose face is the missile that has to reach the emotional side of the audience. 2) The biggest mistake is represented by the fact that praying is a very intimate moment and such a public display of "faith" is at least anachronistic, because people today do not pray in public and it belongs more to a psychiatric environment rather than politics.
Praying is a moment of intimacy between yourself and God, so the public display of faith is something that only prophets and saints have done in the past and Republicans chose to present a medieval setting which confirms their refusal to accept reality and their living in total denial.
The intentions of this very-non-subliminal message is "Ted Cruz is a prophet". A prophet that aims at cutting people's food stamps and healthcare assistance. Amen.
However in order to be successful, such a public performance needs extremely talented players because otherwise, (like in this case) the outcome can be a total disaster and it can produce opposite effects of what you desired in the first place.
While Astroturfing is a wonderful idea, you always have to consider that human beings are substantially "living Consciousness", who carry values and beliefs, (unless they are complete sociopaths).
Unfortunately for these amateurs, Consciousness is unable to lie and you can't hide it in a box and unless you hire professional actors, Consciousness always outs to manifest its real feelings, despite what the script says. Nonetheless even if these people perfectly knew it, they insisted using non-professional actors for these public display of religious faith.
Archetypal postures is a subject of study within the discipline of Anthropology, the science that studies human behavior. If you look at the praying picture above and focus your attention on the green-dressed woman kneeling on the right side of the picture, you will notice that her head does not bow down straight ahead but it's clearly turned to her lower-left, while usually when you pray you bow the head down as a sign of submission to God, not towards the left or the right.
Why this woman turns her head to her left-down side instead of bowing her head straight ahead?
Shame.
Despite what she's been told to do, this woman's consciousness made its way up to the surface and she's actually not even looking left, she's looking away in sign of shame. She feels ashamed of what she's doing because she knows what she's doing is not ethical and not moral according to the values she grew up with.
This posture not only is able to literally kill the picture, but to completely destroy the whole plan of showing faith, because the picture thanks to this woman, acquires a new meaning and the new meaning is "the revolt of Consciousness". You can tell her attitude is coherent because she's the only one who doesn't hold the hand of the fellow next to her, interrupting the human chain while the old man next to her he's hiding himself too, but he's not displaying the same level of shame she is.
Unfortunately for these "Astroturfing amateurs", Consciousness always outs, and what's even worse is that the photographer (just for pure luck) was able to catch one of those rarest moments in life in which you see Consciousness in action.
That woman's unique pose indeed represents the moment in which Consciousness embodies an archetypal feeling that is already present in the collective imagery, which is something that takes place once in a million times. And that feeling is Shame. But not simple shame, Universal Shame. The Archetypal Shame. The picture was probably taken by chance or by a unique combination of factors that happen when the Universe collides together with Consciousness.
That picture will go down in history as a legendary iconic image of Consciousness Awakening and its value is incommensurate.
What really makes it a bad-luck event for Ted Cruz and his gang is the fact that Archetypal Shame is universally recognizable because archetypal postures are the most powerful way to transmit a message to an universal audience.
Indeed while trying to Astroturfing religious faith and submission to God, Ted Cruz managed to do something that completely destroyed the chance of any future attempt towards that direction by anyone.
Because that woman, (whose identity is unknown) will be remembered in history books as the manifesto of the power of Human Consciousness. That means "you can't lie to your own Consciousness", you can't stage a fake feeling such as compassion or faith because Consciousness will always out and completely destroy your pathetic attempt to stage the most desperate of human acts: praying.
Humans pray when they are desperate, when they need the help of a superior force. These people are not desperate for help, (indeed they are but in another sense). These are just political cyborgs who are told what to do and they do it, but one among them has some Consciousness left. And that's when the real miracle happens!
This is the greatest lesson these "people" could have ever received: if you carry things too far that's what happens: you get punished by your own meanness! That's what Consciousness usually does...and you can tell this is exactly what happened here because the effect that this picture produces is the exact opposite of its initial intentions.
Indeed all the Democratic forces on the planet should say "Thank you" to Ted Cruz, because thanks to his hypocritical initiative and his absolutely contradictory nefarious intentions, once again Consciousness prevailed. And that's a lesson these people won't forget.
This picture in my opinion not only represents the end of these people's Astroturfing Politics, but the starting point of a new era, the era of the inevitable truth of Consciousness.
E Pluribus Unum
(1) Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message (e.g. political, advertising, or public relations) to give the appearance of it coming from a disinterested, grassroots participant. The term astroturfing is a derivation of AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to look like natural grass.
Gianluca D’Agostino is an Italian journalist and Scholar has a Ph.D in Theory of Information and Communication. He worked as Researcher at the Department of English of Stanford University and was Visiting Scholar at the Media and Communication Department of Fordham Uniersity NY an at the Film Studies Program of UC Berkeley. He also worked for CNN and Associated Press.
