https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-6-2024
"This morning began with a
CNN headline story by fact checker Daniel Dale,
titled “Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response.” Dale noted
that Republican nominee for president Donald Trump has been one of the chief
sources of the disinformation that has badly hampered recovery efforts.
Trump has claimed that the federal government is ignoring the storm’s victims,
especially ones in Republican areas, and that the government is handing out
only $750 in aid (in fact, the initial emergency payment for food and groceries
is $750, but there are multiple grants available for home rebuilding up to a
total of $42,500, the upper limit set by Congress). He has also
claimed—falsely—that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is out of money to
help because the administration spent all its money on Ukraine and undocumented
immigrants.
Trump’s lies are not errors. They are part of a well-documented strategy to
overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world.
Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than
on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government to
an authoritarian.
Russian political theorists who were key to the rise of Russian president
Vladimir Putin after the collapse of the Soviet Union called this manipulation
“political technology.”
They developed a series of techniques to pervert democracy through this virtual
political reality. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help
favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those
of opponents in order to split the opposition vote and thus open the way for
their own candidates, created false parties to further splinter the opposition,
and, finally, created a false narrative around an election or other event that
enabled them to control public debate.
Essentially, they perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters
choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders
they had been manipulated into backing.
This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to
avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a
firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to
figure out what was real and simply tuned out.
But it has also worked in the United States, where right-wing leaders have used
it to divide the American people and spread disinformation. While
“misinformation” is simply false information—which we all spread innocently and
correct with accurate information—“disinformation” is a deliberate lie to
convince people of things that are not true."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
