You Gotta have a Boogyman

Joseph Goebbels, head of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Jules Streicher, founder and publisher of Der Stürmer newspaper, and some propaganda.

A very good friend, DD, turned me onto Slate's amazing article, How Hitler Conquered Germany, a cautionary tale in terms of how people can be manipulated through the artful use of propaganda.

Propaganda was the operational method of the Third Reich, the idea that projected the ideology. Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, told the Nuremberg Tribunal “that what distinguished the Third Reich from all previous dictatorships was its use of all the means of communication to sustain itself and to deprive its objects of the power of independent thought.”5 Hitler was a magician of illusion. The cultural historian Piers Brendon has described propaganda as the “gospel” of Nazism and notes that Goebbels “liked to say that Jesus Christ has been a master of propaganda and that the propagandist must be the man with the greatest knowledge of souls.”

The other part of this twisted philosophy is the fact one must have a boogeyman in order to solidify the notion of us against them, something akin to the US using Russia as the boogeyman in order to continue funding the MIC, aka the Military Industrial Complex, while bankrupting the country.

The essence of the Nazi propaganda method was repetition. Goebbels argued that the skill of British propagandists during the Great War resided in the fact that they used just a few powerful slogans and kept repeating them.13 Historian Baruch Gitlis has argued that: “Wherever the German turned, he met his most ‘dangerous enemy,’ the Jew,”14 and that “while he walked in the street he encountered posters and slogans against the Jews at every square, on every wall and billboard. Even graffiti greeted the German at the entrance to his dwelling: ‘Wake up Germany, Judah must rot!’”

Goebbels channeled Bernays without question. Propaganda, written in 1928, was the blueprint Goebbels needed to enable Hitler to conquer Europe.

Edward Bernays the "godfather" of Goebbels

The spawn of Goebbels ...

 Illustration by Iris Legendre

The spawn of Goebbels is now Trump's chief of staff

On Friday, President Trump announced that Stephen Miller would replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff. This profile, published in July 2025, charted his path to power.

Stephen Miller was livid. It was a couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and Mr. Miller, a senior White House adviser, believed that the federal government was not doing nearly enough to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the United States. In a relentless round of meetings, phone calls and emails, he reached deep into the federal bureaucracy and, according to a former Department of Homeland Security official, berated mid- and low-level bureaucrats inside the department. To keep their jobs, he told the officials, they needed to enforce a new policy that punished the families of undocumented immigrants by forcibly separating parents from their children.

Mr. Miller’s demands, however, went unmet. That’s because he was issuing them back in 2017, and the homeland security secretary, John Kelly, had issued his own edict to D.H.S. officials: If Mr. Miller ordered them to do something, they were to refuse, unless Mr. Kelly, the only one of the two men who’d been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to run the department, agreed to the order.

Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. 

Goebbels in 1933 - Bundesarchiv, Bild

The spawn of Goebbels applies.

The Midterms saved America. 

Divide & Conquer

 

Stephen Miller White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller in Washington, D.C., on July 22
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The spawn of Goebbels plan to turn America into a dictatorship is alive and well as  divide and conquer applies. Piss people off and get them riled up is exactly what Goebbels did in selling the big lie in turning Germany into a dictatorship in 1933 just as Miller is doing in 2025. Martial Law anyone?

Stephen Miller has a theory about this political moment. As President Trump expands his lawbreaking and dictatorial rule, the powerful MAGA disinformation apparatus—at Miller’s direction—is supercharging public attention to the debate over Trump’s conduct in a way that’s designed to deeply polarize it. That will force Americans to take a side in that standoff, Miller clearly believes, driving them to embrace authoritarian rule, though perhaps without understanding it in exactly those terms.

Yet there’s another dark aim here that’s worth appreciating. Miller is working overtime to polarize the public debate about Trump’s increasingly dictatorial abuses of power. And he’s doing so quite consciously. He relentlessly depicts Democrats as allied with a vast, inchoate class of violent criminals and insurrectionists operating in every shadow of American life. Miller seizes on every attention-grabbing moment he can to amplify the point, even if—and this part is crucial—it looks likely at first to reflect negatively on Trump.

Consider what happened after ICE raided an apartment building in Chicago last week. As Garrett Graff chronicles, media coverage was brutal: It depicted jackbooted federal agents busting down doors and dragging children, some naked, out into the dark streets.

Yet MAGA was undaunted. State-sponsored propaganda video depicted the affair as akin to an action movie featuring the thrilling spectacle of defeated-looking migrants in handcuffs. Miller went on Fox News to hail the operation as an enormous triumph.

Divide and conquer and selling the big lie lives. Goebbels would be proud.

Joseph Goebbels in 1933

A defining moment

It is uncertain whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally halt funds

allocated by Congress.Credit...Ken Cedeno/Reuters

Channeling Goebbels comes to mind when reading the NYTimes piece titled White House Budget Office Orders Pause in All Federal Loans and Grants as the language used is an updated version of edicts voiced by Goebbels when disseminating Nazi policies to the great unwashed.

Joseph Goebbels in 1933

Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending “ wokeness” and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again. The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.

At this point in time, there's pushback but the question to ask is, how long thanks to the supremes granting immunity to the president for acts deemed to be official. 

The White House budget office has ordered a pause in grants, loans and other federal financial assistance, according to a memo sent to government agencies on Monday, potentially paralyzing a vast swath of programs and sowing confusion and alarm among the array of groups that depend on them.

The directive threatened to upend funds that course throughout the American economy: Hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to state, local and tribal governments. Disaster relief aid. Education and transportation funding. Loans to small businesses.

But the two-page memo from Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, left the scope of the pause, and much else, unclear.

Among the uncertainties was whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally halt funds allocated by Congress. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said in a statement that the memo “blatantly disobeys the law.”

“Congress approved these investments and they are not optional, they are the law,” Mr. Schumer said, adding that “Donald Trump must direct his administration to reverse course immediately and the taxpayers’ money should be distributed to the people.”

Click here to read the memo. 

The splintering of America has begun.

Trump rescinded the order, for now.

The art of the lie

We all know what happened on 1/6/2021 but how this disgraceful event happened was based on the art of the lie, fueled by tech and encouraged by Agent Orange as gullible people or those who have little or no real education become the perfect  petri dish for disseminators to spread misinformation 24/7 to the great unwashed.

To whit ...

Bolshevism has proved some strange and disturbing things about human nature.

It is possible to make them feel and believe practically anything. And it makes no difference whether that “anything” is true, in our conception of the word. For the people who believe it, it becomes true. It attains validity, and all the powers [Page 913]of truth. Men can enthuse over it, fight for it, die for it—if they are led to believe that it is something worthy. They can abhor it, oppose it, combat it with unspeakable cruelty—if they are led to believe that it is something reprehensible. Moreover, it becomes true (and this is one of the most vital apprehensions) not only for those to whom it is addressed, but for those who invent it as well.  George F. Kennan

And this.

Lying as a political tool is hardly new. Niccolo Machiavelli, writing in the 16th century, recommended that a leader try to be honest but lie when telling the truth “would place him at a disadvantage.” People don’t like being lied to, Machiavelli observed, but “one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.”

When looking at the art of the big lie, Goebbels and Bernays were the Zen masters without question.

Joseph Goebbels

Edward Bernays

Any questions?

What's Hitler's last name?

 

Credit: Giovanni Battista Recco, Annelisa Leinbach

Stupidity, an all too common human condition, not only can be humorous but also dangerous as the stupid can be led as seen by the rise of Hitler where the big lie was fed to the great unwashed with skill and precision by Joseph Goebbels, the propagandist elite who channeled Edwin Bernays in enabling the Nazis to attain power via the ballot box in 1933. 

Edwin Bernays                                Joseph Goebbels

When we know something or someone is evil, we can take steps to fight it. With stupidity, it is much more difficult. Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that stupidity is worse than evil because stupidity can be manipulated and used by evil. He also argues that stupidity tends to go hand-in-hand with acquiring power — that is, being in power means we surrender our individual critical faculties.

To whit ...

There’s an internet adage that goes, “Debating an idiot is like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.” It’s funny and astute. It’s also deeply, depressingly worrying. Although we’d never say so, we all have people in our lives we think of as a bit dim — not necessarily about everything, but certainly about some things.

Most of the time, we laugh this off. After all, stupidity can be pretty funny. When my friend asked a group of us recently what Hitler’s last name was, we laughed. When my brother learned only last month that reindeer are real animals — well, that’s funny. Good-natured ribbing about a person’s ignorance is an everyday part of life.

Stupidity, though, has its dark side. For theologian and philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the stupid person is often more dangerous than the evil one.

You can't fix stupid  - Trump or DeSantis 2024.

Speaking of Ron ...

 

https://twitter.com/JuddLegum

What's Hitler's last name? a blurb posted by yours truly, discusses the fact you can't fix stupid when it comes to the great unwashed electing monsters like Hitler thanks to Goebbels and the art of banning/burning books in 1933. Well, we now have a wannabe fascist in Ron DeSantis using the same Nazi playbook in order to "protect" kids from dangerous ideas in the year of our lord 2023.

To whit ...

On May 10, 1933 student groups at universities across Germany carried out a series of book burnings of works that the students and leading Nazi party members associated with an “un-German spirit.” Enthusiastic crowds witnessed the burning of books by Brecht, Einstein, Freud, Mann and Remarque, among many other well-known intellectuals, scientists and cultural figures, many of whom were Jewish. The largest of these book bonfires occurred in Berlin, where an estimated 40,000 people gathered to hear a speech by the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, in which he pronounced that “Jewish intellectualism is dead” and endorsed the students’ “right to clean up the debris of the past.”

Let me say it again. One of the very first things the Nazis did was burn books, by authors they considered dangerous, subversive, antithetical to their ideology. That’s the difference between us and them. Nobody’s burning books — LOL, “books” — by Tucker Carlson or who have you. They’re right there for everyone to read, as absurd as they are. Who does things like burn, ban, cover up books? It’s a pretty good sign you’re dealing with actual, real deal, bona fide fascists.

Benito Mussolini (left) and Adolf Hitler (right),

the leaders of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, respectively

Total Control ...

President Donald Trump greets Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr as he arrives to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025, in Washington, DC. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Goebbels would love this play for power. Ask the supremes to give Trump & company the keys to the car controlling the monies of the nation, something the six toadies of said entity just might do given the track record of this sorry lot including John Roberts, the worst sc chief justice in history.

Joseph Goebbels in 1933

In a trio of cases, two currently pending before the Supreme Court and one that is likely to land on the justices’ doorstep as soon as Tuesday, President Donald Trump claims new powers that, if he prevails, would give him near-total control over all US fiscal and monetary policy.

The first is the ongoing litigation over Trump’s tariffs. The Court plans to hear two challenges to the tariffs, known as Trump v. V.O.S. Selections and Learning Resources v. Trump, in November.

At least 10 federal judges have concluded that Trump exceeded his authority when he imposed many of the ever-shifting import taxes that have defined his second term in office. And the amount of money at stake here is massive — Trump’s lawyers estimate that the tariffs “will reduce federal deficits by $4 trillion in the coming years.” Yale’s Budget Lab estimates that they will raise $2.4 trillion if they remain in effect for 2026-35.

Trump, in other words, claims the power to levy trillions of dollars worth of new taxes without seeking new legislation from Congress.

The second case is Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, which is currently pending on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the Court often decides without explanation. AIDS Vaccine involves “impoundment,” a president’s refusal to spend money that he is required to spend under a federal appropriations law.

The final case is Trump v. Cook, which is likely to reach the Supreme Court as soon as Tuesday. Cook involves Trump’s attempt to fire a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, in violation of a federal statute which only allows Fed governors to be fired “for cause.” Late on Monday, a federal appeals court denied Trump this power — although it did so over the dissent of a judge who previously worked in Trump’s White House.

Trump, in other words, seeks total control over US monetary policy. He seeks the power to cancel federal grants or even eliminate entire federal programs at will. And he claims the power to raise trillions of dollars in new taxes by his mere decree.

End game ...

If Trump gets what he wants from the Supreme Court, in other words, he could wind up with dictatorial authority over US fiscal and monetary policy — fully empowered to tax and spend without any meaningful checks from the other branches of government. And there is a real risk that this Court, which has a Republican supermajority that has shown extraordinary deference to the leader of their political party, will give Trump what he wants.

Next up, eliminate the mid terms. Betting pool, if Trump get what he wants, 90%.

Read Vox's extraordinary piece. It will warm the cockles of your heart just like it did mine.

A civil war looms ...

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

Channeling Goebbels, Make a system look bad by crippling said system in order to eliminate it or privatize same as needs warrant, something DOGE is doing to Social Security by compromising one's ability to get or change SS settings according to one's needs. To your truly, outrage comes to mind as one, it's our money and two, compromising seniors not tech savvy or handicapped to get or control access to their money is cruel and indecent to the nth degree. 

In less than two weeks Social Security is set to enact major changes that threaten to upend services for many Americans, in order to fight fraud that amounts to a fraction of 1% of the agency's spending.

Why it matters: Social Security Administration veterans and powerful lobbying groups warn the changes, made at breakneck speed, may even foment more swindling.

The agency's internal documents caution the changes will effectively cut some Americans off from receiving benefits.

Former officials say the changes will overwhelm the agency's already stretched resources, with staffing at a record low and America's aging population rapidly rising.

Catch up quick: At a press conference on Tuesday, acting commissioner Lee Dudek said $100 million is lost each year to direct deposit fraud. To address it, the agency is curtailing its phone services.

Effective March 31, Americans won't be able to call and sign up for Social Security benefits, or make major changes to their accounts that require ID verification.

They either must use the internet or visit a field office, not an easy option for many of the people who most rely on Social Security.

By the numbers: $100 million in fraud represents about 0.00625% of the $1.6 trillion the government sends out each year in Social Security benefits.

A civil war looms ...

Update: A judge with guts puts a restraining order on DOGE regarding SS.

Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander in a scathing ruling accused DOGE of launching a “fishing expedition” at the Social Security agency and failing to provide any reason why it needed to access vast swaths of Americans’ personal and private data.

Hollander said the “defendants, with so called experts on the DOGE Team” never identify or articulate a reason why DOGE needs “unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government.”

Let's hope this is the beginning of the end of these bastards intent
on destroying a once great nation known as America.

Weaponizing Ignorance

 

Judge Royce Lambert said Jacob Chansley's role as a leader among those who went into the Senate chamber and disrupted the electoral vote tally compelled a serious prison sentence. | Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Weaponizing ignorance, a term "accidentally" coined by this rube, has been around since the beginning of time as this age old approach to gain or maintain power works, especially when using the us against them stratagem, often without proof, as man is tribal without question. The art of lying also applies as seen by Ramses altering history with the Hittites or Hitler demonizing the jews. 

His battered troops withdrew from Kadesh, but Ramses wasn’t about to let a little truth tarnish his perceived triumph. On temple walls across Egypt, he ordered the creation of murals depicting him single-handedly defeating the aggressors. In reality, after years of negotiation, Ramses II eventually signed a peace treaty with the Hittites. It was the earliest peace accord whose text has survived.

By using simplistic slogans and monosyllabic words, somebody like a Goebbels can get the public riled up, especially when the people in question are ignorant as it doesn't take much to take advantage of those who lack the education needed for critical thinking, something George Carlin talked about with power and eloquence in his great The Real Owners of the Country riff showing why the weaponizing of ignorance rings true. 

In George Orwell's masterful Politics and the English Language, the manipulation of language to defend the indefensible looms large whereas, in this case, passive and polysyllabic text is used to confuse and bamboozle the public in order to remain in power. 

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements

A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of "un-German" books on the Opernplatz in Berlin, May 10, 1933. — US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD

When one burns books, the weaponization of ignorance becomes personal as seen by what the Nazis did in Germany in 1933 and ... in the US in 2021.  Think school boards and some politicos, right?

Frequently banned books include "The Handmaid's Tale," "George," and "To Kill a Mockingbird." Amazon; Rachel Mendelson/Insider

For centuries educators, religious organizations, and parents have long sought to control what children and adults read by banning literature. Books are challenged as an attempt to restrict materials, with claims commonly based on opposing political viewpoints, explicit content, LGBTQIA+ content, or violence.

Weaponization of ignorance also sums up entries like QAnon, a far right conspiracy movement promoting theories lacking in substance and common sense, some of which were used as rallying cries in the Jan 6th debacle where several people were killed or injured by an incensed mob of Trumpers over the big lie that the reelection of Agent Orange was stolen by Joe Biden & company. 

Since Election Day of last year, the GOP has been in sustained panic. Trump lost handily at the polls in an election that saw him compete for bombast but not technocratic accomplishments. Trump banked on the false belief that loud superseded competent and came up short. In defeat, he decided to claim the election was stolen. Trump tried—with zero success or credibility—to argue the whole affair was rigged and should be set aside. Having exhausted even his most ardent allies, he then urged a mob on Jan. 6 to descend on the U.S. Capitol to force Congress to discard the results. Despite some harrowing hours, that attempt failed too, Congress rejected Trump’s antics and Biden was confirmed the winner.

As for QAnon ...

The return of JFK Jr., like most of what the QAnon conspiracy predicts, is totally bogus. 

The belief that he's still alive and acting as a secret confidant for Trump started in 2018, according to a QAnon expert who uses the pseudonym Travis View. Like much of what the Q followers believe, it began with a post on the anonymous image-board 4Chan. A person calling themselves "R" posted a picture from 1996 of JFK Jr. with Trump. After that, QAnon believers not only thought JFK Jr. was miraculously still alive, they also claimed he'd be Trump's running mate. There are even some people in the movement claiming they themselves are JFK Jr.

Weaponizing ignorance indeed.

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength - Orwell/1984

Zeno's Paradox

Tracy Ma

Yours truly has written copiously about quality and how its intimately connected to morals even if the quality attained in the creation of something is intended for a purpose not aligned with morality. Think Bernays and Goebbels to see why this take rings true. With this being said, an excellent NYTimes article titled Tyranny of 'the Best' describes Skinner box tendencies many people exhibit when obsessing about finding the best of any given thing while totally missing out on what it means to be truly alive. As one fairly cognizant about how data is packaged and dissiminated, I can honestly say I'm not a chipmunk spinning in a wheel driven to find out what 'the best' actually means, something most comforting while others continue their endless pursuit of what's 'the Best' is in a fashion similar to Zeno's Paradox where Achilles never wins.

Zeno of Elea (c. 450 BCE) is credited with creating several famous paradoxes, and perhaps the best known is the paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles. (Achilles was the great Greek hero of Homer’s The Iliad.) It has inspired many writers and thinkers through the ages, notably Lewis Carroll (see Carroll’s Paradox) and Douglas Hofstadter, both of whom wrote expository dialogues involving the Tortoise and Achilles.

Without 0, the Tortoise always wins. :)

Rankings, of course, are nothing new. Sight and Sound has put out a list of greatest films every 10 years since 1952. The U.S. News & World Report college rankings were first published in 1983. (It will probably surprise nobody that this year’s top three are Princeton, M.I.T. and Harvard.) Rolling Stone released its first list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” in 2003. Some version of the “hottest new restaurants of the year” could be found in local newspapers and magazines for decades — not to mention the best dentists, doctors, schools. These have always provoked conversation, backlash, letters to the editor.

Maybe. But to me, anyway, the experience of shopping for a hair dryer online feels less like being a pawn in a Matrix-esque mind-control operation and more like being trapped inside a box of plastic toys that have all been wound up so they constantly chatter and clatter against one another. The reality is I just want to spend as little time as possible in that box, while also hopefully buying something that won’t break the second time I use it. Best-of lists and rankings can seem like a simple solution to this problem.

There are a lot of areas where people don’t feel as if they have expertise, and ratings “get rid of that feeling of not being competent,” Rick Larrick, a professor of management and organization at Duke University, told me.

Zeno's Paradox rules as does the Skinner Box. :)

Skinner Box

From out of nowhere

 Hitler with Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Rudolf Hess. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)

June 16, 2015, Trump announced his run for the presidency, 18 moths later, he's the POTUS.
Parallels to Hitler's rise to power ... are eerily similar.

There are more ways of destroying a democracy than sending troops into the streets, storming the radio stations, and arresting the politicians, as Adolf Hitler discovered after the failure of his beer-hall putsch in 1923. Ten years later, on January 30, 1933, when he was appointed head of the German government, Hitler was the leader of the country’s largest political party, the National Socialists. Even five years earlier, in May of 1928, he’d been a political nobody, with the Nazis gaining less than 3 percent of the vote in national elections. But in the elections held in July 1932, they won 37 percent of the vote—and six months later, Hitler was in power. He seemed to have come from nowhere.

Any questions?

Newspeak 2018

Going beyond the mangled syntax of our beloved POTUS is the administration's push to censor, eliminate and codify words along the lines of Newspeak, the official language of 1984.

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." (1.5.23, Syme 1984) 

34 year later ...

Consider us officially in an Orwellian world, though we only half realize it. While we were barely looking, significant parts of an American language long familiar to us quite literally, and in a remarkably coherent way, went down the equivalent of George Orwell’s infamous Memory Hole.

Since then, the language of an America that the president and his associates reject has been under constant attack. Some of those acts of aggression were to be expected, given the campaign promises that preceded his election. Take climate change, which Donald Trump called a “Chinese hoax” long before he filled his administration with rabid climate deniers. The Department of Agriculture was typical. Its new officials excised the very word “climate change” from their website, substituting “weather extremes,” and changed the phrase “reduce greenhouse gases” to the palpably deceptive “increase nutrient use energy.” Across the board, in fact, .gov websites replaced “climate change” with vague words like “resilience” and “sustainability.”

It might be worth reflecting on the words of Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister for Hitler’s Nazi Party. He had a clear-eyed vision of the importance of disguising the ultimate goal of his particular campaign against democracy and truth. “The secret of propaganda,” he said, is to “permeate the person it aims to grasp without his even noticing that he is being permeated.”

Consider this a word of warning to the wise. Perhaps instead of hurling insults at President Trump’s incompetence and the seeming disarray of his presidency, it might be worth taking a step back and asking ourselves whether there is indeed a larger goal in mind: Namely, a slow, patient, incremental dismantling of democracy, beginning with its most precious words.

To realise English Socialism (Ingsoc) in Oceania, the Party created the controlled language of Newspeak to ensure universal orthodoxy of ideology and politics among the populace.

Seen below is a partial list of Newspeak works. 

• artsem – artificial insemination
• bb – Big Brother
• bellyfeel – a blind, enthusiastic acceptance of an idea
• blackwhite – to believe that black is white, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary
• crimestop – to rid oneself of unwanted thoughts, i.e., thoughts that interfere with the ideology of the Party. This way, a person avoids committing thoughtcrime
• crimethink – Thoughtcrime, thoughts that are unorthodox or outside the official government platform (or the crime of thinking such thoughts)
• dayorder – Order of the day
• doubleplusgood -Replaces excellent, best and benevolent
• doubleplusungood - Replaces terrible and worst

Addendum: The Trump administration is planning to instate a rule that will bar recipients of federal family planning funding from educating women about abortion options, making referrals to doctors that provide abortions, or providing abortion care. Conservatives have cheered the move as a way for the federal government to partially “defund” Planned Parenthood without requiring an act of Congress.

In essence the ... New Trump Administration Rule Will Force Doctors to Stop Saying “Abortion”?

Any questions about this version of the Memory Hole circa 2018?

That golden escalator ...

Miller pledged his utter devotion to his boss at the winter White House. Jonathan Ernst/REUTERS

The defacto president speaks ...

In the video, which has been viewed more than 300,000 times, Trump, wearing a white “USA” baseball cap instead of his usual red MAGA cap, introduces Miller, 41, and hands him the mic.

“He’s a hot commodity,” Trump said, as a woman in the crowd called out, “God bless you.”

“It was the privilege of a lifetime to join President Trump all the way back in 2015 when he came down that golden escalator,” Miller began, wearing a gray suit and standing in front of a fountain at the “winter White House.”

Something wicked this way comes - Ray Bradbury

The Yellow Bastard/Sin City

The spawn of Goebbels applies

The only constant in life is change - Heraclitus

2Step/R. Moran

Since the beginning of time, man’s reality distortion field rules as our tiny take on existence
is but a dust mote in god’s eye, something readily understood by Heraclitus, in 500 BC, stating 
The only constant in life is change. 

Heraclitus

Ignore this at your peril.

Here are the essential characteristics that define the success or failure of every endeavor.

500BC: The Art of War

The Art of War - Sun Tzu

Competency and situational awareness determine the success of any given initiative.

• “All warfare is based on deception.”
• “It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.”
• “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”
• “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle”
• “We are not fit to lead an army on the march unless we are familiar with the face of the country—its mountains and forests, its pitfalls and precipices, its marshes and swamps.”

Selling the Big Lie, aka Propaganda, drives advertising, politics and war.

The "art" of persuasion

 

1928, Edwin Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, writes Propaganda

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

1933, Joseph Goebbels, channeling Bernays, creates the gospel of Nazism

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”

“National Socialism is a religion.

 All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmodedreligious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion

Subjectivity rules based on the fact every person views reality in her own way.

The Rashomon effect: Tajōmaru the bandit and the wife of a samurai,
two characters who offer different perspectives of events in the film Rashomon

The word assume kills clear thinking as it remains forever the ass of you and me.

“Question everything.” - Einstein

Inventing ways to “explain” the unknowable never ceases to amaze.

Politics and the English Language - Orwell

Governments lie. - I. F. Stone

Misery loves company.

It’s all about the money.

News as entertainment medium

Tech never sleeps.