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Disinformation Works [1]

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Date: 2025-01-07

In the early Roman Empire, one province out in the hinterlands was proving particularly troublesome because its inhabitants were being ungrateful about being ruled by Rome. Rome made a bad situation worse by sending out a series of governors who were often incompetent, cruel, and rarely had any understanding of or interest in what the locals thought. One governor, who was so bad that his cruelty eventually got too much for even Rome to tolerate, tried to solve the problem by executing anyone who looked likely to cause trouble.

One of his victims had a small group of followers who hadn’t expected to lose their leader this way. They came up with an explanation that they wanted to spread around the empire, but they had two problems (“stumbling blocks”): First was that they couldn’t get their own people to believe them, and second, the Romans had nothing but contempt for those the empire had executed.

Their solution to both of these problems was to shift the blame from the local Roman governor to the local population. It worked, and it worked so well that 2000 years later, many people still continue to blame the locals — and their descendants — for the actions of a venal Roman governor.

By now you surely realize that I’m describing the crucifixion of Jesus and the actions of the gospels to shift the blame from Rome to the Jews. This is probably the most successful disinformation campaign of all time — and if you even pause over that sentence and think it might be sacrilegious or even blasphemous, then that is evidence that this disinformation is still working.

Now think about that as we watch the current disinformation campaign unfolding. Personally, I would argue that it started with slavery and the South’s attempts to justify it — they benefited from “religious instruction”; slaveholders were “paternalistic” toward their slaves; the Civil War was really about states' rights, not slavery. This disinformation too was largely successful, until the civil rights era that started in the 1960s, during which historians began to reveal what really went on in the antebullum South, as well as in post-Reconstruction South and onward. This attempt at correcting disinformation was and continues to be strongly, even violently, resisted by those who have emotional and financial stakes in history misremembered. Florida, for example, is in the forefront of the current campaign to "whitewash" the history of the Black experience in America.

The Republican party (which sometimes still boasts that it is the “Party of Lincoln”) seized on this rejection of history early on and made it one of their most important tools for gaining and keeping power. The racism at the heart of the Reagan presidency was its first real success (Nixon didn’t quite get there). Racism — which can only survive on disinformation — continues to drive Republicans to the polls and to power.

Now enter Trump. His desire to control his image, his insistence that the world operates according to whatever asinine notion he holds at the moment (and subject to change on his whim) has made him the perfect exponent of disinformation, and thus the paradigm of the modern Republican party. Look at how he mishandled Covid, or how he continues to insist that he won in 2020 (even though it no longer matters now). Just this morning his lawyers got Trump’s personal judge, Aileen Cannon, to block Jack Smith’s report on Trump’s mishandling of classified material. And there’s this from two days ago: A Day of Love’: How Trump Inverted the Violent History of Jan. 6.

Now enter Elon Musk, who, having successfully deceived his millions of followers into voting for Trump, has turned his sights on the British government, falsely blaming the prime minister for the sex scandals of a dozen years ago. It’s not just Britain that is concerned about Musk: 'I find it worrying': European leaders fire back after Elon Musk's hostile X posts. Vladimir Putin, a master of Russian disinformation, hardly needed to exert himself.

We need to fight back on all fronts as hard as we can, but the continuing success even today of the anti-Jewish lies from 2000 years ago shows that this is a never-ending struggle.

Mark Twain wrote the line quoted in the image in a slower age. These days, a lie goes three times around the world before truth can get out of bed.

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