The aim of propaganda is the same today as it was when, hundreds of years ago, a Pope first came up with the idea of telling a compelling story, in all the languages of the known world, to propagate the One True Faith.  Motivated by true faith in the absolute truth, armies are capable of waging endless holy war. 

Propaganda is the same as ever, except that the techniques have greatly improved and the means of spreading and receiving it are now in everybody’s pocket, charging next to our beds to be seen as soon as we open our eyes.  Plus, we in the West are primed for propaganda and the non-critical thinking it produces.  We live in a culture where, since our earliest memories, we are bombarded by countless ads targeted directly to people our age, as we grow up.  We learn to mostly tune out ubiquitous ads (at great cost to our attention spans and ability to think critically), but ad-makers learn to influence us anyway.

A short history of American propaganda/advertising was laid out in season three of a great podcast called Drilled [1].  The skinny version is that Edward Bernays (see episode 6 summary [2]), the brilliant nephew of Sigmund Freud, arrived in the US prior to World War One and worked for Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, the propaganda department tasked with making American men enlist to gloriously fight the enemy in a ridiculous war. They whipped up enthusiasm for The War to End War, The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy (and the war to ensure that American bankers did not lose a shit load of money if Britian and France lost the war).  Bernays distinguished himself with his astute psychological understanding of what motivates humans to fight to the death. Hitler was a great admirer of their ruthlessly effective propaganda and modeled his own propaganda on their zero-sum approach.

After the war Bernays brilliantly applied these same psychological techniques to commercial advertising, which he styled Public Relations.  He is regarded as the Father of Modern Advertising and became wealthy and very well-respected as an American thought leader.   One of his great coups was immensely increasing the market for cigarettes by making it a matter of asserting liberty, freedom and equality for women to smoke.   He also made a tidy sum helping the Oil Industry clean up their filthy image and advance their profit-driven interests.  

Why do millions of people believe plain, easily disproved lies?  They are exposed to nothing but propaganda, 24/7, personalized to tickle and outrage their prejudices.  We all want to be right and we respond best to what makes us feel justified, confirms our biases.  If the actual facts don’t support our views, fuck the facts!  Millions will never hear another side of the story, or the “facts” of the case.   That is by design.  Who decides what people will hear?  Billionaires who buy the public forum and reap vast profits from angry traffic on that forum.  Fair is fair.  Get the government out of our bedrooms!

If the 82 year-old husband of a top Democrat, second in line for the presidency, is assaulted with a hammer by a MAGA maniac looking to cripple the man’s powerful wife, right before a crucial election,… here’s an idea!  The 82 year-old is a randy old adulterous homo (and who does Christ despise more than one of those?) who got into a fight with a gay prostitute!!! Take that, libtards!  Click to retweet!  Click!!!  If you love Jesus, and hate homos, for the love of God, click!  I OWN Twitter, bitches!

This is the power of propaganda, boys and girls.  Where there is no dispute as to the facts — SF police witnessed the “alleged” hammer attack by a MAGA man who smashed a glass door to break into the house of his gay “client” — we can create one by sowing a distracting narrative millions will embrace.   Virtually no election fraud ever found in the US?   THAT DOESN’T MEAN THERE IS NOT A TON OF ELECTION FRAUD, YOU LYING FUCKS!   World burning up, wildfires, droughts, floods, apocalyptic killer storms every season?  BURNING FOSSIL FUELS IS GOOD FOR THE EARTH, YOU FUCKING COMMIE RATS!

And so forth.

I am nauseously optimistic about the 2022 midterm election.  I think, however the propagandists spin it, that a vast majority of Americans are sickened by the openly defiant MAGA march toward fascism.  I think triumphant American fascists (who represent at best 39% of us)  did an in-your-fucking-face victory dance a few months too soon after a zealot like Ginni Thomas (likeliest culprit) leaked Alito’s insane Christian Dominionist/medivalist draft to lock in a nakedly partisan, patriarchal, theocratic opinion clawing back 50 years of hard fought constitutional protection for half of the population.  Women, and men who care about women (most men, believe it or not), should be fucking outraged.   

There are two ways to vent outrage in today’s USA — one is by rioting to prove your lies are TRUE, the other is by voting and getting others to vote, in numbers too big to rig.  I’m hopeful that millions of first time voters, and formerly indifferent voters, are going to turn out to say HELL, NO! to American autocracy.  This is my hope in spite of knowing the diabolical power of propaganda/advertising and endless, lying attack ads.

53 or 54 actual democracy-focused Democrats in the Senate, maintaining even a slim majority in the House, and we have a decent shot to head off the criminals who openly defy all norms and all laws in the name of a higher calling: absolute power for the already obscenely privileged.  As one of their right-wing forebears famously put it (I paraphrase slightly)  “extremism in the cause of owning the fucking blood-drinking, child-molesting, godless commie, fascist Left is no vice.”   Nah, not in our democracy, assholes.

[1]  Here’s the link: https://www.drilledpodcast.com/s3-the-mad-men-of-big-oil/

[2] from Drilled:

Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, coined the term “public relations” when propaganda started to become a negative term. His specialty was using psychological know-how to manipulate the masses and orchestrate cultural shifts in his clients’ favor (clients like Standard Oil, the American Tobacco Company, and General Motors). A few decades later, W. Howard Chase built onto that foundation with the idea of issues management—predicting an industry’s potential issues, and manipulating political, social, and cultural forces to neutralize them. Chase is responsible for one of the best-known examples of greenwashing, the so-called “crying Indian ad,” which introduced the idea of “litter bugs” and individual responsibility for pollution. Transcript

Heather wonders about the wider political significance of the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, and the callous MAGA response, coming during an epic battle of faithful election deniers versus a potential tsunami of voters, especially young, especially female. The deranged attack on Paul Pelosi, 82, who survived at least one hammer blow to the head, has become fodder for sly MAGA sadists joking about the violent home invasion on right-wing news outlets. As Adam Serwer wrote, the cruelty is the point. Heather:

“Anecdotal data point,” conservative commentator Tom Nichols tweeted this afternoon, “Had lunch with an old friend, a fellow former [Republican] (but not in politics or media or anything) and he said that things feel different after the Pelosi attack. Not sure why. I feel the same thing; not sure that it’ll matter, but have that same sense.”

Perhaps it is the echoes of lawyer Joseph Nye Welch, who in 1954 on television confronted Joseph McCarthy as the Wisconsin senator shredded people’s lives by accusing them of being communists: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Perhaps it is the many observers pointing out that in a time when more than half the Republicans running for office have refused to acknowledge that Democratic President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and when Republican legislatures are claiming the right to choose presidential electors without the input of voters, “American democracy is on the line.”

Or perhaps it is the sheer horror of Republican politicians joking about a brutal attack on the Speaker of the House, the second in line for the presidency, an attack that left her elderly husband with a fractured skull, but Nichols is right: something feels different.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/november-2-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Then she quotes extensively from an excellent speech Biden delivered tonight about the present struggle to preserve our experiment in democracy.

Whenever you want a small group of wealthy men, with unpopular ideas, to weild absolute power, over the wishes of the majority of citizens, you need to employ deadly violence. These powerful autocratic men need deadly groups of violence fanatics, like the Ku Klux Klan , as enforcers of their will.

The Ku Klux Klan would be powerless without their credible rep for torture, humiliation and terrifying death, unpunishable by the law.

See that picture in your mind of laughing law enforcemeny klansmen at their attaignment for murdering three civil rights workers. They couldn’t look more relaxed, one of them dipping into a bag of Red Man tobacco, his buddy with a big Lyin’ Ted smile on his face. Those are good old boys that mutilated three voting rights advocates in Mississippi, looking forward to Justice at the hands of a a jury of their white peers, under the state criminal code, and local customs, of Mississippi.

Without groups like the Klan it would be very hard, in a democracy, to effectively suppress minority voting, that is the voting of the local majority. The majority will win elections unless intimidated by terrorism so they will not cast a vote. Hang, burn and dismember just a few of their leaders and watch how quickly the rest of them will hide on Election Day.

That’s how it’s done whenever you want a small group of wealthy men to rule absent the consent of everyone they rule. The only way to do it is by force, you have to have the threat that you will actually be able to legally torture and murder as many motherfuckers as you need to make examples of, if not all of them in the ultimate solution, or as Mr. Hitler’s colleagues called it die endlösung.

Get out and vote. Vote against American Nazism. It is a cliché because it always works this way, but first fascists come for those they deem helpless, poor, frightened women, and girls, and then political opponents, and then other enemy groups they have a vendetta against. In the end, if they haven’t gotten to you yet, they inevitably come for you.

I never had a strong feeling about Jake Tapper one way or the other. Tapper seemed reasonable enough, the few times I watched him opining on the news.

New leadership at CNN, formerly disparaged by the right as the “Clinton News Network,” determined to capture more centrist viewers with content more sensitive to the views of American Nazi types.

In the aftermath of the horrific assassination attempt at Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco, and in the stinking wake of new Twitter CEOs tweet claiming Pelosi’s husband was drunk and fighting with a male prostitute (tweet since taken down) Jake Tapper weighs in to remind CNN viewers that certainly not all political violence is restricted to the extreme right.

In fact, in 2017, Tapper intones, it was a left-winger who shot up a bunch of Congress people at a softball game. He then goes down a short list, a guy wanted to shoot Boof Kavanaugh. He includes on the short list the (right-wing, pro-Trump) punks recently convicted for their plot to kidnap and execute the Democratic governor of Michigan, and a presumably left wing attack on MAGA NY gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin to, eh, prove his point. Both sides are violent!

Apparently a highly paid shill like Tapper will read whatever is placed on his teleprompter. Fuck media pundits like Jake Tapper, who know better, but speak with the authority of paid celebrity product endorsers.

Listen for yourself to how fair and balanced CNN’s presentation of political violence is. No reason to mention that American intelligence (Homeland Security) and law enforcement (FBI) have rated the alarming rise of right-wing, white supremacist terrorism as the number one threat to our democracy.

Or, as Jake Tapper points out, political violence is never acceptable and does not belong to either party. Here’s 90 seconds of fair and balanced influencer Tapper, giving both sides, for his new boss at CNN.

Mehdi Hassan explains the weaponization, by America’s pugnacious Minoritarian party, once know as the Grand Old Party, of paying government debts already incurred. A government shutdown over the artificial “debt ceiling” was unthinkable until Charles Koch and friends’ unlimited, secret, tax deductible money and hundred tentacled political machine got enough traction in Congress and was amply amplified by dedicated right-wing media.

Put the “debt ceiling” right up there next to the sacred filibuster, something the sainted framers of the Jesus Christ-dictated Constitution never imagined in their wildest nightmares. But there it is, sacred and inviolable, ready and waiting for MAGA, to wield like Thor’s hammer as they unleash the Kraken that will destroy America’s credit rating and shake the global economy. A small price to pay for absolute power…

Give Mehdi a few minutes to explain, he does a great job.

What I feared would be in place for the 2020 elections may be ready to go in 2022, armed citizens enforcing the “Election Integrity” measures enacted in response to a sore loser’s repeated lies about election fraud.  The sore loser had Bagpiper Bill Barr, in the lead up to 2020, making repeated claims about the “obvious” potential for massive voter fraud, from mail-in and drop-box voting, before Barr told the sore loser, privately, amid dozens of voting fraud cases dismissed for lack of evidence, that DOJ investigations found no fraud anywhere on a scale that would have changed any election.  

The thing I worried about tin 2020 was intimidation of voters by armed goons at polling places and everywhere else.  It didn’t happen on a wide scale, thankfully, but these assholes have had two years to work out the kink in that plan of organizing an army of MAGA “poll watchers,” the army of armed loyalists MAGA man had called for before the 2020 election.   Here’s Heather Cox Richardson from last night’s Letter to an American:

Over the weekend, the Maricopa County Elections Department announced that two people, both armed and dressed in tactical gear, stationed themselves near a ballot drop box in Mesa, Arizona. They left when law enforcement officers arrived. At least two voters later filed complaints of voter intimidation, both complaining that they were filmed dropping off ballots. One complained of being accused of “being a mule,” a reference to people who are allegedly paid to gather ballots and stuff drop boxes for Democratic candidates.

Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Recorder Stephen Richer issued a statement: “We are deeply concerned about the safety of individuals who are exercising their constitutional right to vote and who are lawfully taking their early ballot to a drop box…. [V]igilantes outside Maricopa County’s drop boxes are not increasing election integrity. Instead they are leading to voter intimidation complaints.”

She then goes on to describe the Redeemers, violent racist motherfuckers in the former Confederacy who employed terrorism to rescue endangered White Women from the ravages of “Negro Rule”.   It started with the Ku Klux Klan, who killed an estimated 1,000 southerners before the 1868 election to ensure their cherished way of life would not be changed by voters, or based on the victors’ dictates after an unfairly won war.   The terrorism of the Klan was not enough to ensure the prewar status quo, rich whites organized to make sure to preach loudly, so that any changes would be rejected by the populace. They’d win if all their folks were riled up to go vote and they made it hard for the wrong people to vote.  They used now familiar MAGA arguments and displays to motivate their aggrieved base to vote their little hearts out.  Heather:

Black voting, they insisted, was “Socialism in South Carolina.”

In 1876, “Redeemers” set out to put an end to the southern governments that were elected in systems that allowed Black men to vote. “Rifle clubs” held contests outside Republican political rallies, “Red Shirts” marched with their guns in parades.

Their intimidation worked. Democrats took over the South and created a one-party system that lasted virtually unbroken until 1965. Without the oversight that a healthy multiparty system provides, southern governments became the corrupt tools of a few wealthy men, and the rest of the population fell into a poverty from which it could not escape until the federal government began to invest in the region in the 1930s.

The great triumph of Movement Conservatives in the 1980s was to convince Republican voters to ditch the ideology of their founding and instead embrace the ideology of the old Confederacy.

After World War II, the vast majority of Americans in both parties agreed that the government should protect equality before the law and promote equal access to resources. That system gave us highways, business regulation, world-class universities, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, clean air and water, labor protections, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-23-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

The former Confederacy, in many ways, and certainly in every way for Blacks, was run like a fascist state, in many cases also like a feudal state, ruled by a few wealthy white employers who made the law for everyone.  Heather then describes the effort, accelerated by the actor Ronald Reagan’s administration (1980), but starting right after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruled segregation in public schools illegal (and started the rise of private white schools, school vouchers, Betsey DeVos, etc), to return America to the good old days of the former Confederacy in the south, where one party ruled unmolested, making laws to ensure its one-party rule in perpetuity.   Making the Confederacy Great Again.

To paraphrase a giant, stinking, organge pile of scats:  We have to fight like hell, because if we don’t fight like hell, we’re not going to have a sometimes successful experiment in democracy anymore.