Over in the New York Times, Emily Parker provides Democrats - and everyone upset by the 2016 election, including Never-Trump Republicans - with a message they would probably rather not hear: Propaganda only works when there's a significant enough segment of the population that wants to believe a particular message. It's convenient and almost fun to blame the big tech companies - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube - for Russia's efforts to influence the election and the 2016 results, but in the end, the voters were not brainwashed into any choices.

Facebook and Twitter are just a mirror, reflecting us. They reveal a society that is painfully divided, gullible to misinformation, dazzled by sensationalism, and willing to spread lies and promote hate. We don't like this reflection, so we blame the mirror, painting ourselves as victims of Silicon Valley manipulation.

...Facebook and Twitter didn't force users to share misinformation. Are Americans so easily duped? Or more alarming, did they simply believe what they wanted to believe?

Most of the social media materials the Russians were posting were not sophisticated messages or images. If anything, they were so over-the-top that they seem too ridiculous to be genuinely persuasive. Here's one:

I mean, if you're swayed by an image that suggests that Hillary Clinton is the devil and she wants to get into a boxing match with Jesus Christ ... I'm pretty sure you were probably leaning against her already. The woman's gotten into a heck of a lot of scandals, but I don't think she's ever explicitly challenged the Son of God to get into the UFC Octagon with her.

And if Hillary Clinton supporters really want to argue that they lost the votes of a segment of progressives because Bernie Sanders supporters were persuaded by muscular-Bernie cartoons ...

... If that's really the case, well, look, it's not Russia's, Trump's, or the Republicans' fault that a part of the Democratic base is a bunch of easily-distracted shallow idiots. If your voters are getting deterred by doodles, they never really were "your" voters.

Parker concludes, "The real crisis is Americans' inability or unwillingness to sift fact from fiction, a problem that is worsened by the mainstream media's loss of credibility when it comes to setting the record straight."

Bingo.

If you're upset that a lot of Americans didn't seem all that upset about Trump's lies, broken pledges, and implausible promises during the 2016 campaign, go back and study the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012. Go back to "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan." People have absorbed the lesson that "politicians lie," so they don't particularly care when one they like lies. They may enjoy getting angry when one they dislike is caught in a lie, but that's mostly because it reaffirms their preexisting opinion that the other side is full of terrible people who lie all the time. But only very rarely does a politician getting caught in a lie sufficient to get a supporter to abandon their candidate.

One of the painful lessons of 2016, and the rise of Trump, is that the people most connected and most influential in the leadership of both parties were seriously disconnected from what large swaths of the electorate were really thinking and feeling. There's an important line or two in John Podhoretz's column about Donna Brazile's new book that details how the Democratic National Committee became an extension of Hillary Clinton's campaign before the primary even started:

Brazile has done her party a service because this honest account of the maneuverings of the Clinton campaign is a necessary step for Democrats in determining how to gauge their own organizational and ideological health.

This is long overdue. Rather than try to figure out how they contributed themselves to their calamitous 2016 fate, they have spent a year indulging the fantasy that they really won the election and had it stolen from them.

Stolen by Russian ads on Facebook. Stolen by "collusion," whatever that might be. Stolen by racism. In other words, they were robbed and the only thing that matters now is catching and jailing the robber.

Sorry, fellas. The 2016 election was the culmination, not the beginning, of a Democratic implosion.

This desire to undo Election Night 2016 continues to be one of the major driving forces in our politics. It's what transformed grassroots Democrats into "the Resistance," seeing the fairly elected president as an alien occupying force. It's what drives much of the investigation to Trump. If Robert Mueller's investigation ends with Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Carter Page, and a variety of other campaign hangers-on being sentenced to jail time, but not prove that Trump himself colluded or knew of collusion with Russia, I suspect many Democrats will be severely disappointed and maybe even insist that Mueller is complicit in some sort of cover-up. They want President Trump impeached, and they want him impeached as soon as possible. A significant number would want Pence and Ryan and any Republican in the line of succession impeached or removed as well.

- Jim Geraghty is a conservative blogger and regular contributor to National Review.

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Important   →   The point of ConserveLiberty posting Geraghty's essay is not to promote a particular political narrative per se, regardless of its indoctrinating intent. Rather, this essay offers insights into the power of narrative messaging, consistently repeated over time, positioned as factual, declared confidently and without compromise.

Finally, ConserveLiberty suggests that many of the indoctrinated are habituated into their way of thinking. Addicted. When one is addicted one repeatedly does what one repeatedly does, and repeatedly thinks what one repeatedly thinks. The indoctrinated believe that what it is they are repeatedly doing or thinking is what they want to do and think. They believe that what they want and feel is their Free Will election to want and feel and do. They believe they are making a rational decision to do what they are doing now! The indoctrinated will not usually believe that they ARE indoctrinated. They believe that they can change their mind about what they are doing or thinking any time they want to. But, they don't want to. THAT is the Power of Indoctrination.   ←   Important

Think. Critically. Conserve your Liberty

→ This posting was last updated 03 Nov 2017 17:15 PDT ←