The firehose of falsehood still spews
Missed some things while on the road over the weekend. Something about an aborted revolt in Russia, was it?
Jay Rosen’s comment on Anne Applebaum’s essay at The Atlantic made me look. Russian citizens along the Wagner Group parade route to Moscow came out to gawk, shake hands, and take selfies with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenaries. “Nobody seemed to mind, particularly, that a brutal new warlord had arrived to replace the existing regime,” Applebaum writes:
The response is hard to understand without reckoning with the power of apathy, a much undervalued political tool. Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin’s Russia has been designed in part for this purpose. The constant provision of absurd, conflicting explanations and ridiculous lies—the famous “firehose of falsehoods”— encourages many people to believe that there is no truth at all. The result is widespread cynicism. If you don’t know what’s true, after all, then there isn’t anything you can do about it. Protest is pointless. Engagement is useless.
“Resistance is useless!” as a young Vogon spaceship guard bored with the mindless tedium might shout. But hey, the machismo, that uniform, and the low-slung stun-ray holster! Or if you are Steve Bannon, two shirts.
NYU’s Rosen comments that Applebaum’s description may be of Putin’s Russia, “but it’s happening here as the GOP goes culture war crazy. Flooding the zone with shit. Nonstop attacks on the news media, teachers, experts. Half meant conspiracy theories. The effect is to make paying attention pointless.”
People say the GOP is Donald Trump’s Party, but it’s also Steve Bannon’s. The federal grand jury investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection subpoenaed Bannon in May, roughly. He is still running his “War Room” podcast:
Bannon, who now hosts a podcast, was previously charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate after he received congressional subpoenas from the House Jan. 6 committee, and he was convicted of two charges in July after a jury trial. In October, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols sentenced Bannon to four months in federal prison but suspended the sentence while Bannon pursued appeals.
Sean Illing and Dave Roberts of Vox discussed Bannon’s approach to propaganda in 2020:
We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism.
The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.
I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
A firehose of falsehood, in other words. Except here it seems the Trumpist right’s goal is not apathy for its believers but a constant state of agitation. For the general public, the kind who might pose for selfies with mercenaries, the goal is to entertain, confuse, and overwhelm. Eventually, to anesthetize.
“A political party tries to court your vote,” tweets Anat Shenker-Osorio. “An authoritarian faction tries to keep you from voting.” Either by actively erecting bureaucratic hurdles or by breeding apathy and convincing people there is no point to trying. Don’t let it happen to anyone you care about.