6d ago

‘The greatest propaganda op in history’: Trump’s reshaping of US culture evokes past antidemocratic regimes

www.theguardian.com ‘The greatest propaganda op in history’: Trump’s reshaping of US culture evokes past antidemocratic regimes

The president’s full-court press to dominate media and control cultural institutions is straight out of the authoritarian playbook

Summary

Donald Trump is reshaping U.S. culture through a propaganda-driven strategy that rebrands symbols and controls narratives.

His actions include renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, issuing numerous executive orders, pressuring media outlets, and taking over cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center.

These moves, aimed at consolidating power and curbing dissent, mirror tactics used by authoritarian regimes, as the administration uses symbolism, legal challenges, and media manipulation to control public discourse.

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18 comments

Manufacturing consent to do the worst things you can imagine
- He and his policy's need to be stopped
  
  i'm seriously frustrated any democrats are approving any his nominees. we need to waste as much of the president's time as we can. also there's no reason to avoid a government shutdown this go around. it's better to have a total freeze in all action than to continue down the rails to where he's conducting this train
  
  Those people are so complacent that they really think it's just business as usual. But at this stage, not rocking the boat is collusion. The boat should be in smithereens at the bottom of the Marianas fucking Trench.
  
  What's preventing Musk from self-funding the Trump admin during a shutdown?
  The DOGE kids will still get paid to keep fucking shit up while things are "shut down."
  As horrible as it is to admit, a shutdown could end up hurting our ability to respond to their attacks.
  I fear it may be too late for anything less than a General Strike.
  
  Absolutely agree, this is insane and cannot fathom why they're rolling over
  
  There's a few possibilities, and as with all things in life no one explanation is the full explanation, and it's a combination of all the explanations
  They are blinded by short term greed. Their position in congress lets them insider trade, and that hasn't changed with Trump as the president. They'll just go along with it so long as they get theirs (even though the right wing beast has already tried to assassinate Nancy Pelosi 3 times now, and will continue trying to kill her). This crowd is in a lot of ways the most dangerous group. There's probably nothing we can do to dislodge them at all.
  They don't actually understand how bad things are going to get. They lack the perspective to realize that Donald Trump actually factually is analogous to Hitler. I see Jon Stewart peddling this one. He says he'll believe Donald Trump is analagous to Hitler when we get to Kristallnacht. There's just one problem with that: Kristallnacht came 5 years after the crossing of the Rubicon of the Enabling Act in 1933. This type of mentality is waiting for it to be too late to do anything about it to do anything about it. This crowd is in a lot of ways the group we need to be talking to the most, trying to convince them "No yeah, it really is this bad. You have to act now while you still can"
  They think they're doing everything they can. They're so locked into a single way of doing things and behaving that they don't recognize that they're being ineffective, and their equivalence is not Charles de Gaulle, but rather Neville Chamberlain. They think how you combat fascism is you wait for fascism to tire itself out and then put it down for its nap and go back as if nothing ever happened. This crowd in a lot of ways is the most frustrating group. Every time we ask them to do more they dig their feet in and say we don't know what they know, why don't we trust them.
  
  (4) They think that, because they've been playing the game so long, they have some kind of profound insight that is denied to the hoi polloi, but really, they're just narrowly focused tacticians with no principles and no strategy, unless smugness is a strategy. And if things go in the way it increasingly looks like they will, when we're at the barricades, the DNC will be on the sidelines attempting to tone-police us as we fight for our lives. All they were ever good at was playing good cop, and they weren't even all that good at that.
  And I agree that Jon Stewart has been consistently out of touch on this issue. If we are able to turn this mess around, the people doing the turning will have to be made of sterner stuff than that. Resistance is not going to be something that happens with the pinky finger extended. Only after things have returned to normal will people like Jon Stewart again be relevant.
  
  This is a good post, but unless there's a different clip you're referring to, you're misstating what Stewart said. He was talking about the right timing to use (what should be) powerful labels. The fact of the matter is most of the country is in category 2 right now. Using these labels now takes away their power later because people are not primed to take them seriously. Then, when we need to use them, the power is gone and everyone will tune out. He's waiting for the moment when there's enough of a shock from Trump's actions that using a powerful label can wake people up.
  https://youtube.com/shorts/TDVyrWA8KMg
  
  Thank you for this. I reckon I misunderstood what he was saying

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