I originally wrote this as a Guest Opinion (OPED) piece for the Washington Post in July 2024. The piece was not published, but fortunately I control my own platform.
The OPED the WP declined to Post
Propaganda is meant to push rhetoric into action. This sinister art form targets groups of people and makes them fight one another. This creates tribalism inside their own echo-chambers and entices them to disavow anybody who seems nonconforming by even a short margin. The bizarre and the unsavory will be normalized; your attention span will become oversaturated.
Tyrannical and extremist regimes are becoming the norm worldwide. To prevent this from engulfing the USA we must understand this bewildering reality in context. Authoritarians only care about themselves, even their most ardent acolytes are disavowed and we’ve seen this throughout history. But that is another reason why authoritarians gravitate towards one another, even if they eventually end up backstabbing each other. A historical example is the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin before World War II in 1939.
This came as a huge surprise to the world because Communism and Fascism are opposites in political extremes. Although Stalin received intelligence that Hitler was going to betray him, Stalin refused to believe it until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Eventually this incited Stalin to fight alongside the U.S. and Great Britain against Hitler. And, of course, this alliance of convenience eventually devolved into the Cold War from 1947 to 1991. Willful ignorance is tacit consent for an authoritarian leader to impose absolute control over your life. Authoritarian history is repeating itself around the world and in the USA. As adversarial forces near the finish line in exploiting our autonomy, many Americans have not yet gotten to the starting point of a contest they may not even be aware has begun. Among those who know it exists, they hope somebody else is paying attention and doing something about it. Meanwhile, a very small minority is doing all they can to prevent authoritarianism from being galvanized. They are largely ridiculed or ignored. Which of those groups do you identify with? To be honest, it does not matter because in the end it affects us all.
Authoritarians are only as powerful as their followers. In order to garner total control, they rely on propaganda. Authoritarian propaganda capitalizes on exploiting our biases. We all have biases; these are preconceptions about something we either favor or dislike. When biases are weaponized, rationality gets overwritten by visceral emotions. A propagandist wants to make you angry and capitalize on your frustration. They will bombard you with a myriad of incendiary topics in order to gauge your response. Counterintuitively, they don’t actually care about your virtues, political leanings, religious affiliation, or patriotism. Instead, they will use these factors as metrics to turn you into a mere pawn, or worse, eliminate your voice.
Propaganda is meant to push rhetoric into action. This sinister art form targets groups of people and makes them fight one another. This creates tribalism inside their own echo-chambers and entices them to disavow anybody who seems nonconforming by even a short margin. The bizarre and the unsavory will be normalized; your attention span will become oversaturated. For example, if there is a scandal, they will issue another distraction with a different flashpoint to have the news cycle chase this new shiny object. For instance, a sex scandal would garner a lot more attention than racketeering or embellishing of official business records. Plenty of influencers will also use it as click-bait. Meanwhile, the merits of the original scandal are skewed, or downright forgotten. As the algorithms keep pushing what you want to hear instead of what you need to hear, escaping from the echo-chambers is increasingly difficult.
Propagandists will issue easy to remember talking points, catchy chants, slogans, memes, and any other attention-grabbing token to their followers. They are instructed to parrot these talking points far and wide. They are also endowed to become the “knights” who will battle against any dissenter - even if that means trolling other social media accounts going out of their way to insult others, or pridefully purchase and wear vulgar merchandise disparaging the opposition. The propagandists’ followers become their primary cash-cow, yet they are also disposable the very second that they become inconvenient, no matter how loyal they were until that point. Dissenting with the propagandists is always punitive. That is why a lot of these authoritarian groups eventually become a dog-eat-dog dystopia.
In my professional and personal spheres, I’ve met a significant number of people who clamor that they would have prevented Hitler or Fascism from enacting their unfathomable atrocities. Well, now it is your chance to do so. Hitler took his own life in 1945 on a bunker when the Soviet Red Army advanced to Berlin, but his ideas are very much alive and gaining an insane momentum worldwide. Some people don’t realize that Nazism was, in a way, legitimized because they used the U.S. as a metric to classify groups of people as second-class citizens during the Jim Crow era. We are not responsible for our ancestors’ miscalculations, but we are very much responsible for what we do or fail to do today. Are you letting authoritarian history repeat under your watch? HLC
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Author Transparency Note:
The WP first response was "Dear Marcelo, Thank you very much for sharing this piece with us, but we won't be able to use it for the oped page. Good luck and please stay safe.” It took a couple of times of me asking to get their metrics for their decision. Finally, their (from an op-ed Administrator) response was “I'm sorry, the editors didn't give any feedback on this one. We receive over a hundred oped submissions per day and have to turn down many good ones.”
I don’t know if this will be a good one under their metric, but what I wrote then rings true today as it did then. Hence, I am sharing it with you on my own platform. The topic is about Authoritarian Propaganda in the USA. This piece will be followed by articles expanding on how these traits are became a reality in other countries, and how the USA is moving in that direction - regardless of who will end up in command of the White House.