I read this recently on Hacker News, in a discussion about "They Thought They Were Free" (1955) [1]
This is something that Russia has been doing for more than a decade:
> We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”2
> Contemporary Russian propaganda has at least two other distinctive features. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency.
> Interestingly, several of these features run directly counter to the conventional wisdom on effective influence and communication from government or defense sources, which traditionally emphasize the importance of truth, credibility, and the avoidance of contradiction.3 Despite ignoring these traditional principles, Russia seems to have enjoyed some success under its contemporary propaganda model, either through more direct persuasion and influence or by engaging in obfuscation, confusion, and the disruption or diminution of truthful reporting and messaging.
* https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
Steve Bannon used the same technique during Trump 1.0:
> While watching the news coverage of Steve Bannon’s initial appearance in federal court on Monday, I kept thinking about his 2018 confession to the acclaimed writer Michael Lewis. His quote is like a compass that orients this crazy era of American politics. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
> That’s the Bannon business model: Flood the zone. Stink up the joint. As Jonathan Rauch once said, citing Bannon’s infamous quote, “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
* https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-s...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon#Political_ideolog...
The irony is all of his concerns were about the spread of Marxism in the US. Well, it turns out the methods are useful for anyone.
detailed report about it from RAND Corp: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
The approach can be considered something of a DDoS attack on your attention span and mental energy: keep up a constant attack, and then, at intervals known only to the attacker, drop the flow just for a second to allow for an attack -- in this case, to allow for the official party line to be created and spread via Fox News, RT, etc.
When mentally exhausted, people eventually gravitate to that which hits their "bellyfeel" best, and by pandering to that and tying it into whatever agenda you want to push, you can essentially push a narrative that is 100% against the interests of the people supporting it.
Capitalism's ruthless, creep-into-everything marketing approaches make this even easier, since there exists apparatus to do this already, and all you need to make it work is to pay for the marketing (via ads, influencers, marketing bots, etc.).
There was always going to be a day of reckoning. If you want multiculturalism, you need to follow Europe's lead with everything from strictly banning Nazis (Germany), to healthcare, to getting over 90% mutlilingualism (Nordic countries).
Yeah, I remember reading about all those US feudal lords that preceded slavery...
(Incidentally, in the US, divide-and-conquer often happens on racial grounds, for example. When American oligarchy starts feeling threatened, it can easily reach for the race card by giving the appropriate people a platform to manufacture paranoia, grievance, outrage, indignation, and antipathy. Solidarity breaks down. People stop talking about how badly they're being governed and manipulated by gov't and private interest and shift focus toward hating each other. Indeed, this is how democracies function in practice. Whereas dictatorships often rely on a good deal of brute force, oligarchs in democracies must be craftier in their methods - this includes the abuse of media, or the phenomenon of sexual lib, as described by Aldous Huxley, as another intersecting example. The citizen cannot know he is subject to manipulation or coercion. Media and education become instruments of conditioning and inculcation, with society functioning as a force multiplier.)
I partly agree with your general observation in parenthesis there, it seems this situation is being significantly sponsored by the American oligarchy (e.g. Thiel).
And yet, when the people at the top, the ones implementing these strategies and policies, are explicitly lionizing Hitler in a variety of ways, on top of mimicking his policies, strategies, values, and ideals, suddenly treating the comparison as if it's absurd or illogical starts to seem like it's trying to distract us from something...
Then when he won reelection I concluded I was consuming media in an echo chamber.
This fear you're commenting on goes way farther back than dt.
Ballroom, mueller investigation, Benghazi, guantanemo, tan suit, parkland, Alex Jones, mission accomplished, 911. These all got airtime. Some longer than others.
You're commenting on the nature of media to fill silence with noise, and the expectation we place on the reader to triage the news.
It could be the case that the level of cronyism and weaponizing we see today is the same amount as in the past.
It's up to the reader to determine how much of their opinion is due to bias, and how much is due to a real increase in nefarious political strategy. Some are more diligent about checking their sources that others.
To be fair to Trump, he was the target of lawfare after his election loss in 2020, for instance. He claimed later that he would have vengeance. Not a magnanimous move, but Trump is not magnanimous. He has stated before that he enjoys destroying his enemies, with relish and verve.
In any case, when we fixate on one political figure or party, we lose sight of the general picture. In sociological terms, Trump is not very important. He is more of an expression of the times than their cause. He may catalyze certain changes, but he's hardly alone in doing that. In the broad sense, the general historical trajectory is not really deflected by him.
A wiser perspective is to look at broad trends. One should read Plato's Republic. The decadence of society described in that book - degenerating into timocracy (rule by honor), then oligarchy (rule by wealth), then democracy (rule by freedom), ending finally in anarchy - are a good context for understanding how these processes tend to play out.
News triages the newsworthiness. Viewers triage what elements of the news that are most meaningful to them.
I don't really see the problem, except qualms about execution.
The reader has to wade through all that to triage the absolute importance.
After years of consuming media that led me to believe dt was a Russian spy or at best a political underdog I stopped believing there was some grand scheme that he's trying to overtake the government. Half the country voted for him twice, the dedicated investigation did not convict him of collusion, the supreme court is doing its job.
Do you not see the trend to keep you anticipating some terrible coup etc?
To be fair to reality, no, he wasn’t. He committed a number of very serious crimes flagrantly out in the open and the Justice Department was inordinately slow in responding to them out of a number of factors, including institutional partisan bias (even under Democratic Administration the bulk of the federal criminal investigatory apparatus has always been Republican, including political appointees at the FBI, and every single FBI director in the bureau's history), concern over appearing political trumping concern over enforcing the law, and, well, a number of other things.
Moore knew something stunk, but he was groping around in the dark in a totally different political climate less receptive to questioning authority.
This is just a way to jam up the courts, but make no mistake -- Big Tech is allowing it to happen.
This seems like one such thing, it's a ploy for the public, it distracts from other things, it takes space away from other thing in the news, it ties up courts and others.