Hi everyone,
So the McKenzie Brothers have been on my mind, eh? Anyway, the political season is getting ramped up now and the hosers are everywhere. Here’s the hose that’s been driving the Herd crazy.
The Firehose of Falsehood: a propaganda tactic that involves pushing out large amounts of false and misleading information at once, intended to silence dissent and mislead the public.
— coined in a Rand Corporation report on Russian propaganda techniques
Here’s an artist’s rendering.
More manure is better, when you’re in the Herd. It proves you’ve been getting fed regularly.
And so I keep being reminded of St. John of the Ladder — this guy — who wrote extensively about the importance of a diet, both physical and spiritual and, we might add, “psychological.” As a rule, it ought to be nutritionally beneficial.
At least that’s what he thought.
But that was then.
Nowadays, given the Old Country All-You-Can-Eat-Buffet of fast food fodder fire-hosed into the feedlots of social media, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that the Body Poli-TikTok is suffering a kind of Mad Cow disease, the symptoms of which are only ameliorated by the very thing that caused them: a diet of resentments and distractions, prions and provocations.
“This meth has made me edgy — so I better take more meth.”
Like that.
Some of us are old enough to remember listening to Radio Moscow’s English language World Service back in the ancient days. Everyone I knew, especially the most ardent Marxist types, listened solely for the Monty Pythonesque twists, turns, and kinks in the firehose of manure that was — and remains — the key to neo-Soviet disinformation campaigns.
It was funny at the time but that was in another country, as T.S. Eliot reminds us, while Democracy now sits self-satisfied, indifferent and unaware, serving tea to friends.
The fact that some of us thought Radio Moscow was a joke was irrelevant to their psychological program for manipulating Western sentiments since we weren’t the ones who mattered in their scenarios, not to Moscow and not even to our own governments.
Anyway, like I said, that was then.
But Moscow is still busy busy busy — as we’re seeing in Ukraine and in the last couple of election cycles — and, while I may have been immune to the siren songs of 5G causing covid, Qanon and, say, pedophiliac lizard-people pizza conspiracies, I find I am not immune to this one:
Everything Trump says — and pretty much everything being fed to the Digital Herd by Right Wing media outlets — smacks of a Soviet style disinformation campaign.
Now, I confess I might be hallucinating this, but it’s quaking like a duck. The fact that this view might itself sound like a crazy conspiracy theory would be proof that the firehose is working. That’s the conundrum about identifying disinformation campaigns.
The firehose of manure gushing through the nozzles of social media trolling, Fox News Special Reports, or Tucker Carlson giving a former KGB director a lap dance, bears the signature of Russia’s traditional approach to screwing around with the rest of the world. An endless, repetitive, unrelenting spew of nonsense, partial truths, and crazy lies across multiple channels. People used to say that the purpose of Russian propaganda was to convince the West that we were decadent and that they had a better form of government — but that’s not the point. The purpose of the firehose is not to convince anyone of a particular point of view or to advertise an indigestible ideological product. Instead, the purpose is to sow doubt in our civic institutions and, better, to convince the Digital Herd that “truth” itself is no longer accessible or that “it doesn’t matter anyway” — that what matters in that booming buzzing vacuum of objectivity is simply and compellingly the commitment the herd feels to their own fears, their resentments about “the world,” and an infantile indulgence in their worst inclinations sanctioned by the joyful misbehavior of their Fearless Orange Leader.
And really, let’s just face it, that is some yummy dis-informational goodness.
Even watching the MagaHerd from the outside, I confess I’m a little jealous: every once in a while I wish I could get away with that kind of recklessly inappropriate behavior. In some fantasy bizzarro world trying to bring down the government sounds kinda fun.
Yep.
None of this is new, by the way. None of this will be surprising to anyone who lived through the Cold War, who’s studied the former Soviet Union, or suffered under the weighted blankets of its Orwellian worldview. This sort of thing has been going on for decades. It never really mattered before because, frankly, it was always too ridiculous to worry about — that is, back when Republicans still held, as a matter of faith, that Russia was a threat.
But that is no longer the case.
Should I say that again?
Republicans no longer think Russia is a problem.
Um… I mean look:
Members of the House leadership now believe that letting Russia take over Ukraine is none of our business: that it isn’t a problem — not for the Ukraine, not for Europe, not for our allies, and not for us.
In an unthinkable turnabout, Republicans are now shilling for Russia. It’s as if Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, two of Trumps greatest critics, were mysteriously converted into self-loathing obsequious little sycophants….
— oh, wait. That happened.
I confess I’m at a complete loss to understand this — except as the result of a beautifully managed campaign of disinformation and the nascent, resentment enforced stupidity of the MagaHerd. And since, as far as I can tell, no American would find this kind of campaign profitable, or sane, I have to wonder who would find such a campaign profitable and sane…. And I keep coming back to one possibility.
Trump really is either deranged, a useful idiot, or an asset of Mr. Putin, the former director of the KGB.
Of course, given the increasing presence of metaphorical olive pits in the word salad of Trump’s recent speeches, a simpler answer could be that he is finally tipping over into complete dementia.
Or that the House leadership is mentally damaged.
Yep, I’m probably overstating this, but there’s plenty of evidence of Russian troll farms working the 2016 election and, since we’re locked into an election where only one of the America’s parties is recommending actual, you know, governance and policies and stuff — and the other one has shifted into culture war non sequiturs and demonstrated a stereotypically Nietzschean herd mentality — I thought I’d at least say it out loud.
It worked in the Crimea, why not Wiscowsin?
Among the winding of the violins
And the ariettes
Of cracked cornets
Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins
Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,
Capricious monotone
That is at least one definite 'false note.'
— Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,
Admire the monuments,
Discuss the late events,
Correct our watches by the public clocks.
Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.
And here we are.
Some Firehose end notes:
From the Rand Corporation 2016
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
2022 Central Europeans
2022 USA TODAY
2016 USC Center on Public diplomacy.
2023 US Maxwell Air University
https://www.state.gov/disarming-disinformation/
2022 Scientific American
and the Marine Corps University
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And to think the US propaganda from previous righteous bureaucracracis is so good its used stateside, and you can't laugh, or recognize it. Even when it stares us right in the face. You see it in this idea that global financial markets aren't concerned about November.
I really hope people read this and take it in. You seriously need to be doing a show with Rachel.