thomas leverett weblog

truth in the age of trump

Somebody recently pointed out a few things about the propaganda war that really disturbed me, so I thought I would write about it. It was mainly just a plain old guy in a red state pointing out what he saw, but it struck home to me because, though I am technically in a blue state, I also am surrounded by this situation.

What he said basically was that the right's propaganda machine had eight years to hone itself into perfection, as it basically tried things that worked and got people to believe fundamental lies. One of these was that Obama was a Muslim, and that he wasn't born in the US. But a more general one was that Obama represented a foreign takeover of our government, that the deep state was involved, that Clinton was responsible for a number of murders and suicides, and that immigrants use up millions of dollars of entitlement revenue.

We can examine each of these in terms of its truth value, and mainstream media (MSM) has been pretty good about getting to the bottom of them whenever possible (which is their job). When you ask, how come 40 or 50 percent of people believe Obama is a Muslim, that should be our first clue that this propaganda machine is pretty effective and that people are no longer relying on objective truth. But the problem has obviously gotten more serious. Back in the Obama days, I figured (and so did most of us, I presume), what difference does it make if 40% of people believe some obvious untruth about Obama's religion or birth?

Well, the problem is, now 40-50% believe that 1) it's ok for Republicans to throw elections, 2) nothing Trump did even compares to what Hunter Biden has done, 3) that Hillary's emails were the real problem; and 4) that Trump shouldn't have to respect Congress or respond to their subpoenas etc. It's a kind of systematic, all-encompassing propaganda that basically takes apart our democracy and our system. And underlying it is the fundamental distortion that what MSM says itself is a kind of propaganda.

But it's not just two different opinions here. On the one side we have almost all the mainstream news outlets reporting the facts, which are, that after all those years, there really wasn't much scandal to Hillary's emails, outside of perhaps putting a few of them on the wrong server. On the other side, we have a relentless and ubiquitous propaganda machine that has resulted in the belief that Hillary killed Epstein, and that a president shouldn't have to follow the law.

We are deluded if we think the majority of us simply care about the truth and will finally go to the side of the truth. If the machine represents the dems as evil, brown, murderous, etc., then those who follow the machine will never go that way.

And remember, we're talking every doctor's office, 50% of living rooms, most mainstream churches (a major source of this Obama-is-a-Muslim crap), and most of talk radio. I see the two biggest perpetrators as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, but they aren't the only ones. It's a kind of collective effort that has stepped up its efforts as they feel more and more cornered by the facts (demographic, for example: they can clearly see that, even without immigration, the tide is turning against white numbers in the US). Racism is an underlying current and motivating force, but, because they can't say things like "Make America White Again," they say things like "Obama is a Muslim." Eight years of this gave them a chance to figure out what worked but Trump gave them a leader, willing to use their code to rally the racist vote and do things that the propaganda machine would support.

It's dangerous, it's evil, and it's fundamentally opposed to the truth.

posted by tom @ 8:34 AM