"Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening," President Donald Trump told veterans in 2018, referring to the media's criticisms of his administration. It was one of more than 30,000 documented falsehoods told by the then-President, the biggest being the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election.
The lying hasn't stopped. Now Trump and the Republican Party are spreading a false narrative about the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, depicting it as a peaceful event to save the nation from tyranny. Like any propaganda campaign, this one needs both noise and silence to be effective.
Flooding the media space with lies works best if inconvenient facts are denied and contradictory voices muted.
The new lies of the GOP and Tucker Carlson (opinion) - CNN
I was on another message board for several years long before Trump became president, and, unlike here, I used to post regularly there. But once Trump assumed office, and his daily lying started as president, I just didn’t want to immerse myself in it anymore. I mean, it just didn’t seem healthy to me.
What I write below was an epiphany I had years ago which now seems as if it was unknowingly a prediction of what was to come.
As I participated in that other message board, I recall being more than a little mystified at some of the arguments conservatives would come up with to support their positions because many of them were often not logical, or they were easily disprovable. Sometimes, their arguments were even nonsensical. It was a real head-scratcher until one day when I thought of something that I had previously never even considered before. It was this: Those conservatives didn't care about the truth at all. In fact, the truth was irrelevant to them.
While most logical people would abandon an argument that is easily disproved by the facts, conservatives, who I've come to believe are not motivated by logic in the first place, will embrace any argument, regardless of how nonsensical it is if they believe it can help to further their narrative or their agenda. And once one of them embraces the argument, they all jump on it to agree with one another.
For people who are not necessarily familiar with politics and/or current events because they are too busy with work and raising children, it might seem compelling to hear so many people embracing an argument if for no other reason that it's difficult for the average person to accept the idea that so many people would willingly turn a blind eye to the truth and willfully (and especially knowingly) accept a falsehood instead. In that sense, Trump was the perfect candidate for conservatives because he would both lead the way with falsehoods and follow the lead of others in supporting falsehoods.
Perhaps many people think they can justify doing so based on perceived ideological differences if and when they view opposing viewpoints in the simplistic black and white narrative of good versus bad or the even worse narrative of good versus evil.
But there's a huge problem in embracing this kind of political maneuvering. You see, it can be passed off as a game during a political campaign where scoring daily points is important when candidates are chasing poll numbers and favorability/unfavorability ratings, but it's not a game when it comes to governance. After all, when falsehoods are embraced and truth is ignored in forming public policy, the end results can and will be disastrous.
To make the point in a real world way, you don't need to look any further than the Soviet Union and Eastern European Warsaw Pact countries. For decades they made public policy decisions on falsehoods while ignoring facts to the contrary. That's why their economies were such a disaster and their societies were so dysfunctional after almost 50 years. Unfortunately, it's also the reason why America has had 550,000 deaths from Covid-19, most of which could have been prevented if the truth and not falsehoods, had dictated our Gov't policy from the very beginning once Covid-19 hit our shores.
The new lies of the GOP and Tucker Carlson (opinion) - CNN
The lying hasn't stopped. Now Trump and the Republican Party are spreading a false narrative about the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, depicting it as a peaceful event to save the nation from tyranny. Like any propaganda campaign, this one needs both noise and silence to be effective.
Flooding the media space with lies works best if inconvenient facts are denied and contradictory voices muted.
The new lies of the GOP and Tucker Carlson (opinion) - CNN
I was on another message board for several years long before Trump became president, and, unlike here, I used to post regularly there. But once Trump assumed office, and his daily lying started as president, I just didn’t want to immerse myself in it anymore. I mean, it just didn’t seem healthy to me.
What I write below was an epiphany I had years ago which now seems as if it was unknowingly a prediction of what was to come.
As I participated in that other message board, I recall being more than a little mystified at some of the arguments conservatives would come up with to support their positions because many of them were often not logical, or they were easily disprovable. Sometimes, their arguments were even nonsensical. It was a real head-scratcher until one day when I thought of something that I had previously never even considered before. It was this: Those conservatives didn't care about the truth at all. In fact, the truth was irrelevant to them.
While most logical people would abandon an argument that is easily disproved by the facts, conservatives, who I've come to believe are not motivated by logic in the first place, will embrace any argument, regardless of how nonsensical it is if they believe it can help to further their narrative or their agenda. And once one of them embraces the argument, they all jump on it to agree with one another.
For people who are not necessarily familiar with politics and/or current events because they are too busy with work and raising children, it might seem compelling to hear so many people embracing an argument if for no other reason that it's difficult for the average person to accept the idea that so many people would willingly turn a blind eye to the truth and willfully (and especially knowingly) accept a falsehood instead. In that sense, Trump was the perfect candidate for conservatives because he would both lead the way with falsehoods and follow the lead of others in supporting falsehoods.
Perhaps many people think they can justify doing so based on perceived ideological differences if and when they view opposing viewpoints in the simplistic black and white narrative of good versus bad or the even worse narrative of good versus evil.
But there's a huge problem in embracing this kind of political maneuvering. You see, it can be passed off as a game during a political campaign where scoring daily points is important when candidates are chasing poll numbers and favorability/unfavorability ratings, but it's not a game when it comes to governance. After all, when falsehoods are embraced and truth is ignored in forming public policy, the end results can and will be disastrous.
To make the point in a real world way, you don't need to look any further than the Soviet Union and Eastern European Warsaw Pact countries. For decades they made public policy decisions on falsehoods while ignoring facts to the contrary. That's why their economies were such a disaster and their societies were so dysfunctional after almost 50 years. Unfortunately, it's also the reason why America has had 550,000 deaths from Covid-19, most of which could have been prevented if the truth and not falsehoods, had dictated our Gov't policy from the very beginning once Covid-19 hit our shores.
The new lies of the GOP and Tucker Carlson (opinion) - CNN
