‘The Cost of Lies’ - Deflating the Cult of Unreality
How we puncture fascist unreality with steadfast truth
“What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”-Chernobyl series, HBO
We were too accepting of the lies. We didn’t know in 2016 that lying was the message - a drip drip drip distortion of truth, a twisting of reality, drip drip drip. We never had a presidential candidate lie and lie and lie - as he was building a Cult of Unreality.
His only qualification was being on TV. For millions, that was enough.
It didn’t seem to bother the cult that their leader once pretended to be his own publicist - inflating his wealth to try to get on Forbes 400 list. It didn’t bother the cult that he was a fake rich guy laundering money for the Russian mob, or that Art of the Deal was fiction. Owning the libs became policy.
By the time it was clear the deluge of lies was designed to cause mass radicalization, we believed that Mueller would save us. We believed by proving Trump lied we could penetrate the cult to reverse course. Instead, the cult became junkies for his lies. The more the better, as long as they came in neatly recycled slogans from Manafort’s time installing another Putin puppet in Ukraine.
And the people of this cult did not know that they were the marks all along. Or maybe they did and they didn’t care, because together they owned the libs, because that was their platform - their full politics.
They had forgotten about the years when the government was there for them during hard times. By then they were radicalized against their own best interest - caring more about rich people’s taxes instead of securing health care for their family. But at least they owned the libs.
‘Lying Is the Message’
We believed Mueller would save us - that everything would be sunshine and unicorns once the liar was dethroned. But that was not to be. The Mueller Report should have buried Trump, instead Barr the Fixer buried Mueller.
Trump’s lies were the gateway drug to the creation of more liars, and suddenly Congress was filled with goons - chronic liars wrapped in the flag and spewing QAnon conspiracies, punctuated with a ‘praise Jesus’ to dupe the churchy.
We failed to stop the lies in 2016, and the lies metastasized.
If we continue to treat the lies as we did in 2016, we will be our own undoing.
We have to apply different techniques, which is why I continually show you how I ran a Trump speech through How Fascism Works and came up with every category from the fascist playbook in Jason Stanley’s book.
These propagandists know exactly what they are doing, and now we do, too, so we must respond differently.
It’s not about the lies, it’s about how the lies are being used to destroy our democracy.
Hannah Arendt wrote that fascist propaganda aimed to transform lies into reality.
We are seeing that play out in the lies about the LGBTQ+ community - as if they’re somehow a threat - and those lies are being deployed to wage a very real war against them.
As Stanley wrote in How Fascism Works:
“In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump repeatedly and openly lied, and openly flouted long-sacrosanct liberal norms. The U.S. mainstream media dutifully reported his many lies… And yet, Americans found Trump to be the more authentic candidate. By giving voice to shocking sentiments that were presumed to be unsuitable for public discourse, Trump was taken to be speaking his mind. This is how, by exhibiting classic demagogic behavior, a politician can come to be seen as the more authentic candidate, even when he is manifestly dishonest.”
I have written volumes on the devastating cumulative effects of parroting Trump and the other liars in Congress - parroting lies furthers their propaganda.
Debunking the lies is simply an exhaustive game of whack a mole - designed to waste reporters’ time.
We are going to have to work harder. And show what the true motivations are behind the lies, the unreality, the conspiracy theories, the anti-intellectualism. We have to show how these techniques are being used to push Americans toward totalitarianism.
I wrote about denying fascists the ability to deploy their key weapon - victimhood - by exposing it at every turn.
We can absolutely derail their ability to profit off victimhood with more exposure each time it’s attempted.
It is well past time to go on offense, and put the fascists on their back foot for a change.
Timothy Snyder brilliantly debunked the Russian Federation’s attempts at playing victim. He deftly dismantled the ‘russiaphobia’ bullshit - revealing it to be propaganda based on the victimhood trope.
“Harm to Russians and to Russian culture has been achieved by the Russian government itself… the sustained training or education of Russians to believe that genocide is normal,” he testified to the United Nations Security Council on Russian hate speech.
In RadPod’s interview with Dr. Ian Garner, the author of Z Generation: Into the Hearts of Russia’s Fascist Youth, he explained how young Russians are being indoctrinated into totalitarianism, and how they’re being desensitized by the state to accept the murder of Ukrainians.
We have no guardrails against the digital poison that is pumped into America targeting our youth, and our citizens, so how soon before genocide becomes normal - what is the end game of all the gay hate bills flooding our statehouses? As I wrote in Love Thy Neighbor, it’s all our fight. We can’t allow anyone to be othered in America because a bunch of traitors are trying to hide their corruption by lying about our neighbors.
Yes, it can happen here. The advantage we have is we know it’s happening, and we know the playbook they are using.
If our Justice Department is going to lolligag and flifferfluff from making high level arrests, then it’s up to us to go straight Monkey Wrench Gang on these fascists, and throw sand in their metaphorical tanks.
We expose their techniques, punching up at all times, deflating the cult, and watching them fall.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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