“They who put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.” —John Milton

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Propaganda: “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.” In the United States, the term propaganda really only came into the American periphery around the eve of the first World War as the government sought to incentivize its citizenry to enlist through posters (picture Uncle Sam’s stoic brow and bold I Want You messaging, or the determined smile and working charm of Rosie the Riveter). But propaganda isn’t just overt, colorful flyers with loud calls to action. It can be subtle, quiet, nearly inconspicuous. And just as it can be used for good, propaganda can be a weapon of harmful persuasion and disinformation. From covert efforts like the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird to the harmful rhetoric dismissing the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic, America has had a long history of accepting and following damaging messaging. We are all susceptible to propaganda, and it’s important to discuss what it can look like within the confines of a Trump presidency—especially given its presence in our everyday lives.

Trolling at the Government Level

When it comes to how we perceive propaganda, we might usually think of its more “traditional” and tangible manifestations: posters, illustrations, speeches, broadcasts, news headlines, and the like. But with the conception of the Internet age, propaganda has also taken a digital facade. Memes, ads, images, online newsletters, social media, and a million other pixelated possibilities can now be canvasses for sharing perspectives and an opportunity to convince others, and all of these methods have been applied by a varied array of netizens. Yes, the Internet has indeed been a transformative force in our lives and culture, affecting the way we communicate with each other. Even our language has been modified by the digital landscape. A troll, for instance, was known to be the word for a perverse, nature-attuned creature of Norse mythology. But whereas the trolls of yesterday’s fairy tales dwelled under precarious bridges and cavernous abysses to taunt the storyline’s heroes, the trolls of today hide behind usernames to deliberately provoke and offend other Internet users. Sometimes, they don’t even hide—sometimes, trolls are the proud representatives of an entire American political party and presidential administration. The United States government’s social media managers are joining in on the fun of trolling, and they really need to touch grass.

There are few subjects that so succinctly encapsulate trolling as well as the Trump Administration does, and for good reason: the Administration’s signature is to spark outrage and to be inflammatory, insensitive, reactionary—its apathetic cruelty and aggressive mockery is not a bug, but an inherent feature. It’s all the more evident when you take a look at its social media presence, where you can find official government accounts Rickrolling users interested in the Epstein files and posting anti-immigration ragebait, including deportation ASMR and an AI-generated, “Ghibli-style” image of a woman sobbing as an immigration official handcuffs her sternly (more on that later). US Homeland Security Kristi Noem publicized her visit to the Salvadoran prison facility (the same prison that presumably holds Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man who was wrongfully deported despite the White House’s denial) earlier this year, and she has most recently cut $2.7 million in grants to Harvard for rejecting Trump’s demands to change their administrative processes. All of these visuals and headlines are meant to evoke force and control, to prop up the right as the ruling party, maybe even to evoke a sense of patriotism in the same way the military industrial complex romanticizes enlistment for prospective soldiers—through the illusion of glorifying a country that needs to be defended from outside enemies, all while ignoring or even exacerbating America’s internal domestic affairs.

Another infamous troll happens to have bought his way into the political sphere—so much so that he even had the President of the United States advertising Teslas on the White House’s South Lawn (we used to expect a modicum of integrity from the office holder). Elon Musk’s murky involvement at the electoral level, including the tech billionaire’s campaign donations and his direct boosting of alt-right content on Twitter prior to Trump’s re-election, earned him a cozy spot within the Trump Administration (which he giddily flaunts on social media with the grace of a terminally online, middle-aged divorcee who’s desperate to be seen as the self-made tycoon he purports himself to be). But try as he might, his arrogant, self-aggrandizing persona cannot be separated from his ironic history of having his entrepreneurial ventures cost taxpayers upwards of $35 BILLION. Yup, you heard right: as actual low-to-middle-class Americans are left to struggle against government-manufactured inflation and today’s exorbitant costs of living, the man who ideated the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (acronymized to DOGE, of course) to slash federal investments only became the richest person on the planet thanks to continued government funding and support.

The broligarchy is thriving thanks to Trump, Musk, and the rest of the political figureheads elected and selected under the guise of reinstating “freedom of speech.” But it does raise the question: just how far is this administration willing to go just to “own the libs”?

Generative AI: Right-Wingers’ Favorite Propaganda Machine

If you’re familiar with our work and ethos, you’re already aware of our vehement disdain for generative artificial intelligence, as this isn’t the first time we’ve openly criticized this technology. However, AI has exponentially evolved beyond a rudimentary slop generator with every new advancement, embedding itself into the online cultural landscape—to the point where OpenAI’s Sam Altman is reportedly considering creating a social media platform. But whether or not that project will come to fruition, or whether an AI-populated platform would prove that the proponents of the Dead Internet Theory are onto something, is not the subject of this conversation; rather, it’s about AI’s current threat to information and clarity as it stands.

This won’t be the only time they are cited within this article, but Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman write about automation technology’s role in anti-intellectualism, commercialization, and accelerating the spread of propagandized content in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media: “New technologies are mainly introduced to meet corporate needs, and those of recent years have permitted media firms to shrink staff even as they achieve greater outputs… The audience ‘interaction’ facilitated by advancing interactive capabilities mainly help audience members to shop, but they also allow media firms to collect detailed information on their audiences, and thus to fine-tune program features and ads to individual characteristics… Along with reducing privacy, this should intensify commercialization.” And despite this book having been first published back in 1988, it’s harrowing to see how their words still ring true. This is even more evident in today’s AI-enthusiastic age, where offloading the human mental capacity to a machine so it does the thinking for you is not only marketed as a shining beacon of innovation, but enforced as an inevitable “tool” to adapt to. Your personal information, digital footprint, interests, all of it is monopolized by data-hungry tech companies that harvest these tidbits of online identity to sell to the highest bidder and market directly to you on a personal level. And beyond the lawsuits of privacy violations and monopolization, there is another aspect of AI that makes it a convenient tool for enshittification and propaganda: its visual aesthetic.

Gareth Watkins writes for the New Socialist, “The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone—unsurprisingly, given their scatological bent, with bullshit—in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting political cruelty.” And as Dan Brooks also points out for The New York Times, “With the possible exception of venture capitalists, the demographic that appears to have embraced A.I. most enthusiastically is MAGA meme accounts, possibly because the people who have most loudly rejected it—graphic designers, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, teachers—are archetypal liberals. In the reactive logic of the MAGA rank and file, A.I. is good because the right people hate it.” I would even suggest that this “owning the libs” mentality that so prominently features in conservative-created AI content stems from a desire to not only disarm and invalidate leftist opponents, but to have its persistent usage become a signifier of wealth and class. Despite the propagandized portrayals of this technology as a driving force to “democratizing knowledge,” machine learning models are most prominently pushed by the upper class as assistive tools for their own means—replacements for the people they believe to be beneath them in the class hierarchy. Knowledge and self-actualization is not the close-minded right’s strong suit, and AI is just the generative echo chamber they needed to flesh out their vision for the future: a world in which any perspectives that challenge their own are nonexistent, and in which automation reigns supreme.

Considering this political scope on a global scale, you can also see why AI is such a popular tool among conservatives and the elite, given the classist undertones of using this technology to advocate for not just convenience, but a convenience that ostracizes workers and deprives them of proper financial compensation for their labor. While we may picture artificial intelligence developers to be sharply-dressed, high-earning tech brilliants in black turtlenecks thriving in a utopic Silicon Valley, there is an unspoken amount of work handed off by these multimillion-dollar companies to those who are the most powerless against capitalistic exploitation. This disparate dynamic is described by Callum Cant, James Muldoon, and Mark Graham for The Guardian, explaining how the digital labor that it takes to build AI (training, annotating datasets, moderating) is often handed off to vulnerable international workers who are exploited through lower wages and unideal working conditions. Therefore, “The process of outsourcing work to the global south is popular with businesses not because it provides much-needed economic opportunities for the less well off, but because it provides a clear route to a more tightly disciplined workforce, higher efficiency and lower costs” (for more about this topic from the aforementioned authors, I’d recommend Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I., as it delves deeper into the ethical and human ramifications of this technology). 

The Complacent Desensitization of Americans

I can sit here and write about the outrageous anti-democratic actions of political aggressors and instigators, but it’s still a rather passive action if all I do is engage with our current socio-political environment on a surface level, and if all you do is read this article and move on with your day. And unfortunately, that’s what a great majority of us are doing—maybe even what we’ve been conditioned to do. 

It’s no news that the communications conglomerate known as “the media” is never truly an impartial source; every transmission and broadcast is edited, mixed, and shared with the objective of delivering a clear message in mind (whether that message is spread to inform, entertain, enrage, or change opinions). This article, too, is propaganda in its own way, a cumulative mix of research and opinion meant to inform and convince you, the reader—but though written with the intent of honesty and urgency, it is far from being perfectly unbiased in the way the SPJ’s Code of Ethics asks of all journalists who serve the public. Chomsky and Herman also write about the evolution of the media landscape from its perception as “cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their independence of authority” to its actuality as a propaganda model that serves to “inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state” in Manufacturing Consent. Instead of serving as an empowering mobilization resource and a public benefit meant to give people access to political awareness, mainstream media serves to selectively filter the conversation and limit it to “acceptable premises.” You see it in the sparse coverage of Luigi Mangione’s trial, in Senator Murkowski’s admission of fear to speak out due to the possibility of retaliation, in the passive voice used to write about the destruction and suffering happening through the Palestine-Israel conflict, in the resigned sighs and shrugging of shoulders and the Oh, wells of accepting the new status quo. But this inaction and defeatism doesn’t serve any purpose other than to allow for the implementation and empowerment of forces that only seek to make life harder for the average American, and to have us accept that what they’re purporting isn’t just what they want to happen, it’s what is now demanded of us. 

German-American Jewish historian and political theorist Hannah Arendt is credited with the quote “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” Given her work chronicling the trial of Nazi Party official Otto Adolf Eichmann, it makes her line all the more chilling as you compare the twentieth-century descent into fascism that devolved into the Holocaust and the Second World War to the current political environment. Her studies sought to explore how ordinary people became active participants in totalitarian systems, and this gentle indifference from the population, as well as the role propaganda played in the election of Adolf Hitler into power, cannot be understated. And just in the same way Hitler’s Germany began with a propagandized push for a return to a golden era of the past, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” call to action evokes a similar vision for the future of America, as columnist Jackie Calms notes: “[Arendt’s] accounts of the factors behind Hitler’s takeover are chillingly resonant. After World War I, a defeated Germany’s populace felt economically cheated, alienated, distrustful of institutions—government, media, academia, business, political parties. Many Americans have similar, long-simmering grievances in the wake of globalization, Mideast wars, a worldwide financial collapse, pandemic and political polarization.” But the utopic America that Donald Trump promised is yet to be seen come together—and despite what he may say during press conferences, eggs are still expensive and your rights, as well as your fellow humans’, are being limited.

So choose empathy. It’s easy to feel defeated by everything that’s going on, but you shouldn’t let yourself be gaslit into complacency the way some of our historical predecessors were when it came to slavery, inequity, discrimination, genocide, war. That is how the atrocities that we swore would never happen again, end up repeating (just under new names and new times). Caring for your fellow human, being angry about the state of the world, is justified, because it isn’t normal to live through any of it: the blatant stripping of the Constitution, the desecration of human rights, the censoring and erasure of historical documents, the genocides and injustices happening around the world, the calls to ostracize and eliminate marginalized communities and the immunocompromised, the denial of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the apathy infecting this country—the push to ignore what’s going on is dangerous in more ways than we can allow.

I’ll leave you with propaganda of my own: Don’t let yourself be blinded, and don’t look the other way—history will thank you.