A Propa’ Ganda at Propaganda
We are in the storm, folks, but the windows haven’t blown out yet so here I am again. Over the months since I started this newsletter I’ve talked a lot about preparedness, both in terms of what we can do to fight fascism and what loss will look like in the near future. We’ve talked about where fascism started, what Hitler’s rise looked like, and how all of these things interconnect with where we are now. I’ve even touched on the use of propaganda in Nazi Germany, but I want to use today’s article to closer look at a tool that isn’t reserved for fascism, but certainly makes rising to power easier if they wield it correctly (and boy, are they wielding it).
Propaganda is the spread of biased or misleading information in order to rally support behind, well, anything. The two capitalist propaganda campaigns in the United States I hear about most often are milk and razors, and there are still plenty of people who don’t realize they were propaganda campaigns at all. If you’re someone who isn’t aware, pre-WWI and post the invention of pasteurization is when milk started to be pointed at as a staple in the diet. Because it contained fat, salt, protein, etc., it was said to be a full meal, and the U.S. dairy farmers ramped up production to send to soldiers overseas during the war. After the war, we found ourselves in a milk surplus with no one to buy it since it wasn’t common for adults to drink it at the time.
When the Great Depression set in is when dairy farmers started to struggle. They weren’t making enough from their abundance of milk, and they staged strikes to demand higher prices for consumers, but the public was struggling, too. So, the government had to step in to create an artificial demand. They created the School Milk program to send milk to schools for low rates, and later passed the National School Lunch Act in 1946 to ensure milk would be served with school lunches. When WWII brought about a similar tide of issues, they bought up surplus milk to turn it into government cheese, butter, and milk powder to be put into food assistance packages for low income households. Following WWII, when milk sales dipped once again, the infamous Got Milk? campaign was born, and the rest is history. Milk as a beverage became an American staple and people mostly forgot that milk isn’t that great for us until recently.
I won’t go into the history of the campaign for razors, though it‘s similarly convoluted involving a nylon shortage and WWII, mostly because I feel the milk example is the simplest breakdown of how a propaganda campaign might work. The US was never honest about a milk surplus, they simply created some story about milk being good for us in order to sell more of it. I also like to use this example because it’s very mundane, and when people find out about it for the first time they tend to feel lied to. Doesn’t my doctor tell me milk is good for me? Wasn’t my school lunchroom covered in Got Milk posters featuring all of my favorite celebrities? Well, yes, because the dangerous thing about propaganda is that once it spreads, it starts to permeate society and change our history and for the most part, we might not even know it’s happening.
Right wing propaganda over the last ten years is more of a roller coaster than the straight snapshot of the milk push. It’s harder to wade through, there are many different facets, and a lot of it is just outright lies that the base has been digesting for years all mixed up in conspiracy thinking. The “evil left” that’s coming to trans-ify your children and put litter boxes in your schools is an outrageous example that most reasonable people are able to see through, but the “evil left” that wants to spend spend spend on people who “don’t deserve it” and who will drain your 401k to do it? That has been harder to frame as propaganda, and I think that hits on a critical point I want to make. Every single one of us is susceptible. All they have to do is find the right one of our fears to exploit, tap it a little, and let us do the work for them.
The Trump regime has been hard at work on the propaganda machine, with one of the most outrageous (and scary) examples this week. Before I get into it, I want to preface with the fact that I don’t spend a lot of time in mainstream news anymore. It’s often fast but wrong, loud but not actually saying anything. I read a lot of independent journalists and then use mainstream to help fact check or gain a simpler understanding. I have curated my social media to be a constant stream of knowers and helpers and people who can’t help but Know Things and tell other people about them, and that usually means I know things sooner or know more about something sooner than people who rely on mainstream news.
That’s not a brag or me dunking on anyone who hasn’t set themselves up this way. I’ve worked hard to cultivate my little information ecosystem over the last five years (once I realized mainstream news was not correctly reporting on COVID), and it’s hard work to keep up and keep fact checking even once you have sources you trust. I sincerely wish my own insanity on no one. I prefaced with it to set up for a story where I find out that we’ve deported 238 men with tattoos to El Salvador on three different planes, and that that’s not how the right or mainstream news reported it.
It started, for me, with an article about a judge who ruled that several planes that had already departed the US needed to come back while he reviewed whether or not the regime violated the law to do it. The regime that just signed a 6 million dollar detention deal with El Salvador to hold U.S. detainees refused, the planes landed, and the internet filled with a host of videos of men in white tanks with shaved heads and tattoos being led around in chains, heads down, by men in face masks. My personal feed was in an uproar as I waded through article after article about the families of these men not realizing what happened until they saw their husbands and fathers and brothers in these videos.
I was obviously instantly horrified, which is the main indicator that I need to start fact checking. If you want to survive this news cycle I highly suggest adopting that strategy as well. If it makes you feel an extreme emotion, it’s time to look it up before you repeat it. So, I went looking, and I found a host of Trump tweets threatening to deport people to El Salvador for being anti -Tesla. I found stories of a man who was grabbed because of a soccer tattoo, and more stories of more men with tattoos unaffiliated to any gang with no criminal history being railroaded onto these planes with neither due process nor any thought to their future safety. I remained horrified, and then I opened X (twitter).
I don’t post there anymore because it is, at its core, a right wing propaganda machine now. The algorithm often fills my regular feed with news stories that are overblown or fear -mongering stories reminiscent of Vance’s rumor that Haitians were eating cats in the suburbs of Ohio. Anything I would bother posting wouldn’t gain any traction anyway, as anything truthful about the regime gets squashed, so I keep it around to keep an eye on the losers who are still there. Knowledge is power, and knowing what they’re spreading can be useful. It certainly was in this case, when the first story I saw on opening the app had the headline “Venezuelan Gang Members Deported to El Salvador”, and I immediately understood that we were now firmly in an era where U.S. citizens can be deported as long as you make sure their fellow countrymen think they committed a crime.
That’s always been true, of course. Immigrants have long faced being designated as criminals who are coming here to steal our land or our women or our jobs, and when they’re deported people shrug and say they should’ve come here legally. It’s never mattered if they did or not in the first place, no one ever checks because it doesn’t matter as long as they believe they’re on the moral high ground. This has been true through both red and blue presidents, so please understand there’s no inherent bias against the current president to frame it a certain way, but the scale and the immediate re-framing of what’s happened is what makes this act not only heinous, but only the beginning of a deportation nightmare worse than what we’ve experienced in the past.
There was no process for these men. They had no reason to be picked up at all, they never saw a U.S. judge for any sort of hearing. They were taken, moved around, put on a plane, and deported before a judge ever said their name. And I was suddenly having conversations with reasonable blue -sided people in my life about how even if they were criminals they deserved a process. They deserved humane conditions. Even if they were gang members they are still human beings, and none of that matters because most, if not all, of these men were not, and now they’re in a prison in a random country most of them are not even from, which should raise some major red flags for everyone considering deportation is, at least, supposed to return people to the country they came from.
So, now we know how easy it is to be taken for a ride, right? We’re angry that we can be manipulated so easily, we’re angry they have the balls to do any of this at all, right? How do we fight propaganda when both sides are capable of it? It is surprisingly easy to combat, since the hardest part is acknowledging we can have the wool pulled over our eyes at all (pride’s a real kicker, ain’t it?), and that it is most definitely not only right wingers who can fall for it. At its simplest, for those of you at home just trying to make sense of everything, you can do what I stated above. If you read an article, or even a headline, that makes your mouth drop open, either research it or don’t spread it. The news cycle as it is today exists to extort our fear, but it can’t do that harm if we aren’t willing to stoke the fire.
If you want to get more complicated with it you’re going to have to do some leg work and ask (and answer) every question you can think of. Article freaks you out, so you look for who’s talking about it. Are there any big publications or is it just small tabloid papers? Can you find any independent researchers who have put out articles? How are they framing it? What are their political allegiances? Bias exists in everything, and if we’re going to combat misinformation we have to take everything with a grain of salt. Who do you trust? How are they dealing with this news?
Find the source of the propaganda. Going back to razors as an example, if you look up something like “razors and World War II”, you’ll find a lot of stories about Gillette producing their first razor as we know them today for servicemen. You might see a tidbit here and there about how after the war they transitioned to selling those razors to women, and you might wonder how or why they made that transition. So you look it up, and you find out that Gillette, like milk, had a surplus of razors and men not in the military didn’t really need them anymore. You have your why, so you look at how Gillette marketed those razors, and you remember reading an article about propaganda that mentioned a nylon shortage being connected to women’s razors. Nylon was used during the war to make parachutes, airplane cord, etc., and now you’re in a place where Gillette had a surplus of razors at the same time that there’s a nylon shortage and women’s fashion is becoming more revealing.
Maybe you search something like “nylon shortage WWII”, and you realize that there was a marketing decision made by the women’s beauty industry post WWII to promote bare underarms and legs, something very uncommon only a few years before. They filled magazines with hairless women and asked, Don’t You Want To Look Like This? Or asked men, Do You Really Like Your Wife Hairy? Not only are you more knowledgeable about history, but you’ve come to the conclusion that women’s beauty standards are a fabrication in the name of capitalism, and that you were led to believe something because of a market overproduction. I know I said I wasn’t going to go into the razors earlier, but I had an opportunity so here we are.
All of us are hesitant to stand for things in this age of uncertainty. What our peers think plays a large part in how we react to things and how information travels, and a lot of us play it closer to the chest than we maybe once would have. The main thing you can do to fight propaganda is to ask why, a lot. And when you’ve asked why as many times as possible, check in with what you believe. It’s okay to stand for things. It’s okay to read something and be the authority that says it isn’t right, even if you don’t have thousands of hours plugged into a degree. What will make the difference will be your willingness to learn. Be curious. Before you say it isn’t right, decide why you think that. If someone pushes back, ask yourself if their information is correct, and then ask yourself if that changes your stance. Be the annoying two year old poking at things, just don’t cross the line into devils advocacy. Those people don’t stand for anything, they aren’t trying to learn, they don’t care why, they just care that you believe something and they don’t and instead of internally working through it they make it everyone else’s problem.
Propaganda is scary, and we’re about to digest it on a scale I would say this generation of people learned about in school but haven’t experienced. We have to be willing to question authority now more than ever. We have to be the adults in every room we’re in, for ourselves and for the people who can’t or wont. If you find yourself repeating something and halfway through it sounds like something the right would’ve been talking about five years ago, question it. Encourage others to do the same. At no age do we know everything, even when we’re not embroiled in the lead up to a third world war.
Stay safe. Organize. Be vigilante and be prepared. Say fascism a lot, and when they tell you you’re saying it too much, call that fascism, too. It’s one of the f words for a reason (did that work? I’m going to pretend that worked).
I’m going to link a few articles below on the situation in El Salvador. As always, feel free to comment on this post or reach out to me on signal oneofthefwords.77 or at oneofthefwords@proton.me, I’ll do my best to respond or, if appropriate, bring it up in another article. Thanks for reading.
AF
Nikki McCann Ramirez
Philip Holsinger
, USA TODAY
Adrian Carrasquillo
Logan M. Davis