Thursday, July 2, 2020

When a disinformation bubble designed to constantly ratcheting up fear and rage runs into the genuinely catastrophic...

In chaotic times, you are constantly running across data points that you know are important but because they come at you so fast it's difficult to keep track of them. I find blogs remarkably useful for taking these kinds of notes, particularly if you've been at it for a while and have old posts you can mine for relevant paragraphs.

For example, we've been talking about conservative movement disinformation for years.

The initial purpose of this "noble lie" approach was to use the propaganda to keep the base sending money and showing up for the polls through of a combination of rage and fear. As with all Straussian systems, it was assumed that those in power would be in on the joke while the people who believed the lies would simply serve as electoral cannon fodder.

At some point though (I suspect inevitably), a couple of things happen. First, the believers become leaders. This is become blindingly obvious with Trump, but the children of Fox News have been in control of the party since at least 2010 and the roots go back further. Remember how Dick Cheney insisted while traveling that all hotel televisions be tuned to Fox News?

The second, and possibly more dangerous problem is that a propaganda-fed base has no capacity to self correct, rather it continues follow unsustainable paths that only gain momentum, often exacerbated by ratcheting mechanisms. Soon you reach a point where, even if the leaders accurately perceive the situation and realized the best solution, they can no longer reconcile that reasonable course of action with what the vast majority of their supporters have been told to believe for decades.

In order to maintain these levels of anxiety and anger, the narratives employed increasingly apocalyptic language and imagery, a development we commented on four years ago.

Even in the small chunks of the Republican national convention that I listen to, there were numerous doomsday images and references to the "dark times" the country was facing. The people in the stadium found these statements credible because that's what they had been told on Fox and on the other right wing media sources they got their news from. Once you factor in the state of conservative media, the rise of Trump is neither that surprising nor that interesting.

Things have not gotten better


These are direct quotes from Adams







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