WHAT! How ridiculous to suggest half the US voting population is deceived and manipulated.
Read the article and see if it doesn’t ring some bells. I’ve included a few excerpts from the article here to give you the gist of the argument.
Letters from an American
OCT 06, 2024
heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-6-2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
I’m a history professor interested in the contrast between image and reality in American politics. I believe in American democracy, despite its frequent failures.
Some excerpts from this Oct 6 article:
“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.”
“The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told a reporter in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world.”
“Many people turn to a strongman who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up. As scholar of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt noted, authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.”
“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.”
“In his autobiography Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle,” Adolf Hitler wrote that people were more likely to believe a giant lie than a little one because they were willing to tell small lies in their own lives but “would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.” Since they could not conceive of telling “colossal untruths…they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
“The U.S. Office of Strategic Services had picked up on Hitler’s manipulation of his followers when it described Hitler’s psychological profile.”
“It said, “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
“Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,”