Understanding the madness: some media literacy
#1 “Preemptive narrative inversion”
This concept is useful to make sense of some of the current craziness. It is at play when Trump is warning that the Democrats rig the election or when QAnon conspiracy delusionists warn that Hilary Clinton is running a pedophilia ring: You take something that is true and turn the story around to make an informed discussion about it impossible. You can own and weaponize a story that could otherwise damage you.
There is clear proof that global elites have been running a sex trafficking ring with underage girls, but it wasn’t Hilary Clinton, but Trump who was partying with Jeffrey Epstein and making comments that he “likes beautiful women on the younger side.”
Since QAnon has picked up this pedophilia story and inverted the narrative, the people involved in those disgusting actions gained some great advantages:
1) The believers have been inoculated against any future sex trafficking allegations against the involved people, thinking they know the truth and it was actually the Democrats who ran this ring.
2) The ones who are informed enough to understand that QAnon is a conspiracy theory, will most likely consider any future news about sextrafficking allegations as nonsense and link it to wild conspiracy stuff as well.
Similarly with the election rigging:
Of course the elections are rigged, because the GOP has been working for decades on gerrymandering, pushing discriminating voter-registration laws, cutting down on polling stations, buying voting machines not according to security assessments but based on the donations from the machine makers they received, blocking laws that would improve election integrity — and of course trying to dismantle the US Postal Service and undermining mail-in voting.
But when Democrats fall for the trap and claim that the elections are not rigged, to encourage people to vote and keep up some faith in the democratic institutions, they are locked in. It makes it much harder to claim after the election, when they have lost, that the election was not fair and democratic.
Even if they had claimed that “yes, the elections are in fact rigged but by the other party!”, in the hyper-polarized political environment it had appeared as a lame, reactive rebuttal, a he-said-she-said that moves facts into the field of opinions.
Again, a grain of truth that has been spun in order to be weaponized to the perpetrator’s advantage.
As a general rule of thumb: Assume that whatever Trump accuses others of doing is exactly what he and his team are doing.
#2 "Flooding the zone with shit"
Another idea that helps to make sense of the current madness.
If you feel overwhelmed by all the stories, lies, scandals, craziness that is dominating our daily news headlines, if you lose interest or already forgot about the shocking and unprecedented thing that happened just a few days ago - that is by design.
Steve Bannon - Trump's former chief strategist, who is currently charged with defrauding donors in a "We Build the wall" fundraiser - explained in 2018: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
It is a propaganda strategy for the digital age: Constantly blowing out misinformation, explicitly saying shocking things or vaguely alluding to events in order to overwhelm the media's capacity to process and research news events, and the individuals capacity to assess information and discern fact from fiction. Creating cynicism, distrust and disinterest.
It is not "the world" that has gone nuts and it is not you who is too stupid to follow: It is a deliberate propaganda strategy.
Trust your heart to assess what is good and bad, and your brain to assess what is right or wrong.
#3 “Ideological subversion” or “Psychological warfare”
explained by Yuri Bezmenov, a Russian KGB defector, in an interview from 1984:
“To change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that — despite the abundance of information — no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.
It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slowly and is divided in four basic stages. The first one being “demoralization”, it takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why this many years? Because this is the minimum number of years, which it requires to educate one generation of students. […]
Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to lack of moral standards. As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information, the facts tell nothing to him. […] The next step is destabilization. […] The next stage, of course, is crisis. […] And after the crisis, with the violent change of power structure and economy, you have a period of “normalization”. […]
United States is in a state of war — undeclared, total war against the basic principles and the foundations of this system.”
Any of this sounds familiar? Watch the full interview with Yuri Bezmenov here.
#4 Political bait as click bait — Don’t get distracted
In September, Microsoft issued a warning that Russian and Chinese hackers are targeting the American political parties before the upcoming election again.
Some articles argued that they were trying to get hold of emails, since “the emails that were hacked and leaked before the 2016 election caused great damage to the Clinton campaign.”
To be clear, the emails did not have any agency. They did not do any damage. Incompetent media outlets that overreported on the emails did the damage. The emails were a bait and too many news channels fell for it.
I cannot imagine any emails from the Democratic Party that could be worse than what Trump has done out in the open over the past four years: Children in cages. Rolling back on environmental regulation and the Paris Climate Accord, which will push our planet closer to collapse. Betraying Kurdish allies in Syria and letting them get killed. Asking foreign nations to interfere in US elections. Calling Nazis “very fine people”. Teargassing peaceful protesters for a photo-op. Unprecedented levels of corruption and nepotism. A muslim ban. Using the coronavirus stimulus package to restore hundreds of millions of dollars to the pentagon budget, after having previously redirected those millions to his egomaniac Border Wall project. Spreading misinformation about mail-in voting to rig the election in his favor. etc etc etc.
Don’t get distracted.
#5 Critical distance instead of cynical ignorance
Have you heard of the Columbian Chemicals plant explosion?
On September 11, the anniversary of the Twin Towers attacks, residents in Louisiana in the US received text messages about the release of toxic gases following an explosion in a chemical plant. A screenshot of the local newspaper website started circulating on twitter, describing the explosion and a video appeared on YouTube showing news footage where ISIS was claiming responsibility. Soon the hashtag “columbianchemicals” started going viral, and fearful residents tried to get in contact with local authorities.
The thing is: There was no explosion. It was a hoax. Or rather a “a highly coordinated disinformation campaign”, a “virtual assault” involving “dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN, they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers.”
This was most probably the work of Russia’s Internet Research Agency — and it took place in 2014 already!
This level of sophistication was taken to new heights with their 2016 US election interference campaign, where they spread divisive messages to millions of Americans and created fake events that got thousands of protesters marching either for or against Trump.
For the 2018 midterm elections, the US launched a cyber attack on the Internet Research Agency to take it offline temporarily.
But six years after the Columbian Chemicals hoax and four years after their probably most successful foreign influence operation, the Russians are still at it:
- FBI Director warning about “drumbeat of misinformation” to undermine Biden campaign
- A freelance writer learns he was working for the Russians
It is important not to create cynical ignorance towards news about the US elections, but critical distance. It is shockingly relevant what is happening there at the moment, also for us Europeans ( and for every other human being on this planet…).
Whether the New York Times releases Trump’s tax returns five weeks before election day or Rudy Giuliani suddenly comes across an old Laptop with emails that supposedly show Biden had corrupt dealings in Ukraine — none of the current headlines should influence your opinion about any of the two candidates. Both have extensive public records. None of the current headlines should have any influence on your immediate actions.
Don’t share any stories that you haven’t fact checked.
Don’t listen to sources that you cannot trust.
If you want to learn more about foreign influence operations, Russia’s playbook, and the role of social media, though, I recommend this article.
