With a federal indicament of one Ol’ Pussy Grabber, the right-wing propaganda machine has come very close to overheating as the excuse making, normalizing, minimizing, double-talking, and spewing outright lies from every orifice of every conservative that can blather into a camera or tap out pitiful messages on social media. Now is a good time to revisit the propaganda tools that Fox News and others use to bag, tag, and frag its viewers, as well as what can be done to help those held in the cynical sarcastic vice of these faithless purveyors of mis- and disinformation.
We’ve looked at many of these tools in the past. Today, with the help and inspiration of The Propaganda Professor and their review of the 2015 documentary, The Brainwashing of My Dad. The film explores the propaganda techniques that the vast right wing conspiracy uses to create mass psychosis in the white rural racist-adjacent Christian right by finding white grievance in every news story and event and the effect it had on the film maker’s father.
We’ll take a special look at brainwashing and the controversies that surround the concept.
Unfortunately, I can’t watch the documentary because YouTube blocks its streaming in Cambodia for some odd reason. Or maybe it is Cambodia that is doing it. Either way, I can’t watch it, but you can and you can comment on it in the comments! And, you can read the Propaganda Professor’s review and comment on that, too. How about that? So much commenting. So much fun! Really, it is. You should try it some time.
According to the Professor, the documentary focuses on personalizing the story by exploring one individual’s journey through the toxic and polarizing right-wing media. By doing so, it connects some of the dots in way the right-wing’s baseless claims of liberal media bias have led to the dangerous normalization of their extreme and unyielding views. The documentary also wades into the debate about brainwashing, providing insight on how propaganda operates in our society. And lastly, it offers hope for a path forward.
As we review brainwashing, we’ll mix in what we know about mass psychosis, persuasive design, and partisan coverage filtering because the right wing media uses them all to keep their viewers stewing in a toxic broth of white grievance, disinformation, and hate. For more information on each, follow the links throughout the post.
Brainwashing
Brainwashing is usually defined as the systematic forcible change of a person’s beliefs and behaviors. Let’s take a look at how right wing media meets the requirements of the definition as well as some of the controversy surrounding brainwashing.
Real or Not? The Controversy of Brainwashing
The popular media presents brainwashing as some all powerful tool that will turn us all into some kind of common Manchurian Candidate or Jason Bourne — yeah, you wish. Okay, so brainwashing might not occur in quite the same way as portrayed in the movies, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a thing. The situationists suggest that most of our behavior is driven by the environment, which suggests that if we control the environment, we can control behavior.
How well does what Fox News and right wing media meet the requirements of the definition of brainwashing?
Systematic Change: Inducing Mass Psychosis
Kahneman’s associative network model explains how we come to understand the world we live in. Essentially, we look to others to inform our beliefs. If everyone believes that the moon landing was staged, then you’re more likely to believe it too. If everyone is saying that the 2020 election was stolen, then you’re more likely to believe it too.
By presenting a variety of shows with different hosts that all support the same lies, Fox News creates the illusion that many people believe these lies to be true, which keeps the audience in a constant state of outrage producing stress hormones. Constant exposure to stress, literally, reduces your brain’s ability to think and reason. It makes you much more susceptible to believing lies and much more likely. to search for simple solutions to problems, which is known as mass psychosis.
Right wing media purposefully selects the what they show their audience so that their lies. and disinformation are supported and any contrary facts or interpretations are omitted. This is known as partisan coverage filtering. For example, they only covered people claiming that the 2020 election was stolen citing vague and alarming sounding “evidence,” which was never produced. Consequently, many Fox News viewers are certain that the election was stolen and Biden and the Democrats are getting away with it. Similarly, they are flogging the Trump is being unfairly indicted and the DoJ has been weaponized against him narrative. They will not make a fair presentation of the evidence against Trump, for example, leaving their viewers to conclude that it is all true when it is painfully obvious that it is not.
Force: The Impact of Partisan Coverage Filtering
The professor seems to think that because no one forces the viewers of Fox News to continue watching, that it can’t be brainwashing. The force that they use isn’t physical, it is psychological. It comes from the fear of ostracization if you do not comply with community expectations.
Fear of being shunned is seated very deeply in our unconscious. Without the protections and help of the group, frail human beings would not have survived long on the savannas as hunter gatherers. Just because you can’t be ostracized from a group that doesn’t actually communicate as Fox News viewers don’t actually meet, is immaterial. Your primitive unconscious fears tell you that it will happen. It makes it much harder to resist and much easier to go along the outrage inducing disinformation that Fox traffics in.
Not only is it the fear, it is addiction. Listening to the rants of their prime time hosts helps to activate the dopamine-driven wanting and opioid-based liking systems. Those systems respond to emotional appeals and leave us feeling powerful. They create the illusion of group agreement. They clearly demarcate an in-group and out-group, helping viewers fear ostracization all the more.
Dopamine is a hungry beast. It only wants more more more. It is never sated.The only thing that will satisfy it in this situation is more conservative red meat. Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up! So, that is what Fox News gives them even though it cost them $787 million to settle the Dominion Voting System’s law suit.
It is also the result of persuasive design: deliberately activating the liking and wanting systems so as to affect change in behavior. You need that obsessive binge-watching to keep them immersed in stress of white grievance so they’ll believe your obvious lies.
Change: The Results of the Right-Wing Propaganda Machine
Anyone who’s lost a loved one to Fox News, QAnon, and conservative media, knows that their beliefs and behavior have changed. They have become an angry seething cauldrons of xenophobic semi-fascist Second Amendment fanatics. They’ve changed.
As I’ve written in posts past, my mother went from a racially tolerant glass-ceiling breaking professional woman in the 70’s and 80’s to race fearing member of upper management in the aughts and tens. To be honest the process started with Reagan in the 80’s, but it didn’t get really deeply engrained and reified until the aughts.
She changed from the woman who taught me to think for myself and that people were people first to someone who believed the worst stereotypes about people and hated Democrats and liberals.
She changed. What more do you need to satisfy the requirement of change?
The problem some people have with the change aspect of the definition is that it isn’t permanent, even though the definition doesn’t say anything about being a permanent change. Once people are removed from the social milieux that supports these irrational beliefs, they revert back to something resembling their old selves.
Hope: Breaking Free from Propaganda
There is reason for hope in the documentary. The family of the father featured in the film were able to bust him out of the concrete bubble of Fox News and conservative talk radio. Once he was removed from the pernicious influence of mis- and disinformation, he was able to revert back to his old self.
No doubt, had I been able to effect a similar change in my mother’s environment, she would’ve, too.
The problem is how do we deal with the deliberate propagation of disinformation and outright lies? If we could limit these outlets, regulate their content, require them to be truthful and present both sides of a story like we did once upon a time, then we might could bring this reign of mass psychosis to an end.
Instead, we can take our inspiration and instruction from the family in the documentary. We can try to wean our parents and other loved ones off of the Fox News teat, sour the milk so to speak. Until, then, we can only rededicate ourselves to the truth and supporting our democratic institutions, most importantly getting out the vote.
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Categories: Social Psychology
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Howdy John!
Thanks for the link. The video is permitted by geolocation. For whatever reason whoever has control over those controls has decided that we here in Cambodia cannot view the documentary. Hrmph.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
Calico Jack ponders the propaganda machine and the escape from it.
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I can’t think about propaganda and brainwashing without remembering two books I encountered long ago, Propaganda: The Formation Of Men’s Attitudes by Jacques Ellul, and Thought Reform And The Psychology Of Totalism by Robert Jay Lifton. They’re both still on my bookshelf 50 years later. It would be an understatement to say they changed how I observe, consume, and assess both political communications and commercial advertising.
The isolation of the individual inside an information bubble is key to both processes. Without that, they don’t work.
That isolation includes the social context and the implicit threat of being shunned. So, for the individual to escape, the isolation, both social and informational has to be broken.
Simple messages work. With that in mind, I have hope that the prosecution of Trump and his co-conspirators will mean that two words will be consistently and very frequently, simply, and loudly attached to them and their movement. Those words are FRAUD and LOOSER.
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Howdy Bob!
Oh for the day that the name Trump becomes synonymous with fraud and loser. It cannot happen soon enough.
I liked Ellul’s ideas — if I’m remembering them rightly — because he formulated an adaptive role for propaganda in modern society. It is true for us to work together as a society, we need to all be more or less on the same page. If we has a nation have an enemy, then everyone needs to treat that enemy as such. Propaganda helps us achieve that goal.
Taking a view like that helps us put the problems we’re facing into prospective: malactors are using propaganda to further their own selfish interests to the detriment of the country and people as a whole. They’ve hijacked the system.
Unfortunately, they’ve been laying the ground work for this hijacking for so long, it will be very difficult to wrest the controls of media away from them. We really need to monetarily incentivize the truth or at least a return to presenting both sides of an issue. it is clear that the Rupert Murdoches of the world will only respond when their direct interests are at stake.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I think that’s why the charges that come out of the grand juries in Georgia and DC need to be grounded in the laws of fraud, and begin with the Big Lie as a fraud, with the insurrection and sedition deriving from that, and laying out both the political and financial goals and effects of the lie. Who profited from it is as important as who did it. Framing the individual actions and the conspiracy as one huge scam on the nation and especially the donors to the cause won’t, solve the problem, but is essential.
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Howdy Bob!
Maybe some of the MAGA crowd who would watch the trial and believe the evidence will see that there is no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election and it was all just made up to further the goals of Trump et al. Maybe. Hopefully, the case in DC and Georgia will catch most of the major players and point to those who weren’t charged but also participated as in unindicted conspirators.
I’m just hoping that the delay until December suggests that Jack Smith will be busy until then working up the charges and indictment in DC.
Huzzah!
Jack
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The reasons given for the delay until December are related to Trump’s lawyers getting security clearances sufficient to handle some of the classified documents (probably, with some redactions) and chew over the evidence and testimony, which will reveal who made deals, and who didn’t. All of that will include serious narcissistic injuries for Trump, and, if he’s paying attention, give him a preview of how much worse is yet to come out of the other grand juries. He will act out, probably violating whatever rules are set about what he can and cannot talk about in public, and get in contempt of court trouble (and, drive his lawyers crazy).
Smith will, I think, let the Georgia prosecutor report out first, pulling into the Prisoner’s Dilemma context several of the key players, including, Teri Kanefield tells us, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager. That will set a bunch of others thinking seriously about what’s to come out of the DC grand jury and their vulnerability.
“Combinations of wickedness would overwhelm the world, by the advantage which licentious principles afford, did not those who have long practised perfidy grow faithless to each other.” — Samuel Johnson
Then, as regards the tormenting of DJT with narcissistic injuries, there is this piece to consider: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/23/2174882/-Entering-end-stage-narcissistic-collapse-Trump-finally-nears-bottom
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Howdy Bob!
Not knowing exactly what the prosecution has until the evidence is produced in court must be unnerving to Trump. The discovery will tell them a good deal of it, but it won’t be until the evidence and testimony is assembled into a narrative in court that they’ll know for sure.
We all know what Trump does when he’s under that kind of stress: he jactates, fabricates, and violates in public. He’s hoping that he can rouse his base to his defense, but it doesn’t seem like they’re willing to do more than attend rallies and respond to pollsters. They aren’t even turning out for protests.
We had speculated in the days and weeks after 6 January that it wasn’t Trump that organized the assault, but the militias. That was borne out in the prosecutions so far. Without the leadership of the militias to organize more armed resistance, it doesn’t seem like they’re going to be even the kind of hit-and-run attacks on infrastructure and vulnerable government targets that we see in guerrilla warfare in other countries.
In narcissistic collapse, we should expect a violent furious outpouring from Trump, but it is likely to be confined to verbosity and impotent name calling. Suicide isn’t out of the question for him, but, any real violence organized or committed directly by him, is.
The thing about narcissistic collapse is that it will occur when the narcissist is feeling trapped and can no longer pump up their facade with adulation or attention. Trump isn’t there yet. He’s stressed but he’s still able to convince himself that he will be saved from any kind of harm. Because the end will not be sudden, he will approach it being able to pump himself up with lies about how he’s going to pull it out at the end just like he always has.
He’ll be stressed more and more, but he’ll soothe himself and inflate his own ego again.
Huzzah!
Jack
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As long as Trump can convince himself that he will be back in the White House, he will not fully collapse, because he can imagine getting there and “putting everything right”, and destroying his enemies.
On what happened on Jan6, I think it is clear that the plan among those doing the planning (the ones inside the WH and Capitol) or informed of the plan (the militias outside the Capitol) was that Trump would go directly from the rally to the Capitol to go in and take charge of the situation. Exactly what that would look like may have been a bit vague. There would not have been a Plan B, because Trump doesn’t make Plan Bs. When he was prevented from going, someone in the WH had to tell the others that he wasn’t coming. From then on, they had to improvise, and I suspect that is when the chaos went ballistic.
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Howdy Bob!
I’m very doubtful that Trump planned anything on 6 January. It was clear that the plan was for Trump to lead the mob to the Capitol and for the militias to be ready to enforce his martial law. Trump didn’t plan it of that I’m sure. He was just playing his part.
One thing the planners, Trump or whoever else didn’t plan on, was for the secret service to refuse to drive him there. Of course, Trump wouldn’t walk with the mob. That would be too pedestrian… literally and figuratively. He needed to arrive above everyone else, appearing as the leader of the mob even though he had no real idea of what or how to command them.
If Trump had been there, maybe the police would stand down at his command, maybe not, though. The militias were ready to breach the Capitol building no matter what. Their preparedness was clear from the footage. Once inside, they were too well prepared to find the Congressional leadership and Pence. There was planning and execution and adaptation going on.
None of it emanating from Trump. He commanded others to plan. He would be there to take command. Wouldn’t that have been comical if he had tried to command the mob and the militias? Violent. Bloody. God knows who would’ve gotten to shoot Pelosi and Pence. Maybe Bobert and Greene would’ve shot each other in the fight for the honor. Who knows.
Thank goodness for the secret service and the capitol police, though. They saved the day… just barely.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Right, he didn’t plan it, even though he had to be convinced that whatever the plan was it was his idea. I’m not sure that most of those who were in on the plan had any clear understanding of just how violently inflamed the mob was and would become more so when trump didn’t show up. The militia guys at least had some semblance of unit discipline, but the “regular folks” were just crazed. The Secret Service guys might (low probability) have let him go there if they thought he could command and control the mob, but they knew mobs and him well enough to see that wasn’t going to happen, even if he had had a PA system in place there to talk to them, which he didn’t. They saved him and us from his narcissistic wet dream of leading a coup.
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Howdy Bob!
You’re probably right, no one was sure about what would happen at the Capitol that day even the planners and instigators of the insurrection. Given the number of guns held by Republican members of Congress that day, I think it is safe to say that some of them had a role to play should the mob reach their chambers, especially if Trump were there.
The whole damn thing just seemed a mess from beginning to end, and given the people involved in the war room at the Willard, it is no wonder. Trump and company’s incompetence is probably what defeated them.
Huzzah!
Jack
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I might have to do a close reading of Sun Tzu to see if he had something to say about the difference between confidence and believing you can’t lose. We are going to see that happens when a large number of dark tetrad personalities get put in the prisoner’s dilemma context of “Can I trust my friend to trust me to trust him to trust me to trust him” … ad infinitum.
Speaking of confidence, overconfidence and dark personalities, there is this study to ponder: https://www.psypost.org/2023/06/overconfidence-dictates-who-gets-top-jobs-and-research-shows-men-benefit-more-than-women-165977
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Howdy Bob!
The game theory material should be very applicable to the GOP and coup plotters. Someone is going to earn a PhD on their experience. I would also be very curious about any comments that Sun Tzu might have that could be insightful.
Huzzah!
Jack
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Quite so. In game theory somewhere there is probably something about high risk moves, like the NC GOPers suing to implement the “Independent State Legislature” theory, wisely rejected by SCOTUS. Yes, it make it much easier for them to keep their majority, but would cost them hugely if they ever lost it. In fact, the Repubs are doing so much at the state level where they have control that will come back to bite them in the ass if they lose control even once.
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Howdy Bob!
Game theory is a fascinating subject, but it quickly gets too mathematical and abstract for my brain to follow. I’ve dabbled in it, but, man, it gets complex quickly. My guess is that this situation is an example of risk dominance in which the players are selecting their best strategy to achieve the payout when they don’t know what the other players are doing. In this case, the biggest payout is staying out of jail. Trump wants to shift that best payout to not being blackmailed or otherwise harmed by him. I guess that is the mob boss strategy. I can do a lot worse to you than a prison stretch, so don’t cooperate. Once that threat is removed, people tend to cooperate, thus the witness protection program. That’s almost a blog post.
I’ve often wondered if there was a point at which you couldn’t gerrymander a majority with a minority population. At what point is a minority no longer able to engineer victories in a set number of districts to achieve a 50.1% margin in overall outcomes? I’m sure there is an answer to that question, but it is beyond my ken to be able to cypher it. If you ever hear of an answer to it, please let me know.
Huzzah!
Jack
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It is clear that those who cooperate will, if they run for reelection be defeated in the primary. Other than the flying monkeys of MAGAland, that is his biggest threat. Different players will calculate the Gain-Loss choices differently, which makes them less predictable to each other.
The gerrymander question is a puzzler. It likely would vary from election to election depending on the motivation level and concerns of the low frequency low information independent voters.
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Howdy Bob!
As long as everyone is uncertain about what everyone else will do, it makes it more likely that one of them will cooperate, like Rudy Giuliani, who Trump stiffed for legal fees. I think Rudy having lost his law license, been humiliated repeatedly on national TV, and rejected by Trump, probably, has more than enough incentive to flip. His years long manic episode may be coming to an end.
The gerrymander question should be answerable if you make some population assumptions. It seems intuitive that there must be a disparity at which you can no longer effectively gerrymander a minority majority. Oh well. If you ever see anything addressing the question…
Huzzah!
Jack
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The way Rudy has been looking and sounding for the last several years, any decent lawyer would be telling him it is time to make a deal because he’s in no shape to do 10+ years in prison. Then, there are the original never-trumpers who caved to him and are looking at the poll numbers and the indictment and ready to grow a new backbone.
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He’s also in no shape to have a defense for their charges. They pretty much have them. Rudy was making the phone calls, making the promises, and soliciting the bribes. He’s toast unless he deals.
Jack
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Yes, he is. He was so often the front man. And, it was he who admitted in court in AZ that they had no evidence, only theories. Yep, toast.
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I think we should start using the phrase, “Sing like a little Rudy” to describe someone who suddenly starts telling the truth.
Jack
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I like it!
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