You’ve noticed something feels off in state run press releases and social media posts. The words don’t match the actions. The accusations describe the accuser.
Welcome.
As a disinformation historian, I’d like to help explain what you’re seeing.
The Techniques
Accusation as Confession. Whatever they’re loudly accusing others of doing, they’re doing. This isn’t hypocrisy, as hypocrisy requires shame, which they can not handle and avoid like kryptonite. This is their use of projection as strategy. The accusation preemptively exhausts the vocabulary of criticism, making the accurate counter-charge sound like “not me, u.”
The Firehose. Flood the zone with so much nonsense (e.g. Steve Bannon shit) that verifying anything is inflated and expensive, becomes a full-time job. The goal isn’t to convince you of any particular lie. It’s to make you conclude that truth has a price so high it is unknowable, so you might as well believe whatever’s convenient and cheap. Resource exhaustion is the point, like the boxer who prances around a ring with fake throws to reduce boxing skill to a bad dance contest.
The Memory Hole. Yesterday’s definitive statement, or even the last hour, becomes inoperative. When confronted with the contradiction, act as if the questioner is being tedious. “Why are you still talking about that?” Every tick of the clock is positioned as ancient history. Time destroys accountability if you let it.
The False Equivalence. One side attempted a coup; the other side was rude on Twitter. One intends crime, the other objects to crime. “Both sides need to tone down the rhetoric.” This framing makes you the reasonable one for refusing to name the actual problem.
The Isolated Incident. Each atrocity exists in a vacuum. Pattern recognition becomes conspiracy theory. The forest is just a very, very large collection of unrelated trees. The more you see and prove a relationship, the more you are attacked as messenger of unwelcome news.
Demanding Impossible Proof. No evidence meets the bar. Exposed documents are “out of context.” Confessions are “sarcasm.” Threats are “jokes”. Even video or audio evidence requires us to consider “what happened before the recording started.” The bar moves until you give up.
The Loaded “Just Asking Questions.” Insinuation without commitment. “I’m not saying [horrible thing], I’m just asking why no one is allowed to talk about [horrible thing].” Or “I will not speak of [horrible thing]”, which is of course speaking of it. This lets the speaker inject the premise while maintaining deniability.
The Preemptive Delegitimization. Before the investigation concludes, before the election happens, before the court rules: declare the alignment, state the political part, say it is rigged. Now any unfavorable outcome proves the conspiracy rather than disconfirming it.
The Kafka Trap. Denial is proof of guilt. “The fact that you’re so defensive shows you have something to hide.” Silence is also proof of guilt. The only acceptable response is a confession.
The DARVO. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The aggressor becomes the victim. Resistance to aggression becomes the real aggression. If you speak, you are the aggressor. If you don’t speak, you are the aggressor. This is the beating heart of fascist rhetoric.
How to Know It’s Propaganda
Ask what the statement does rather than what it says.
We see clearly in Grenell’s official Trump Kennedy Center statement that he says “we welcome everyone” while doing the work of establishing that participation is mandatory and non-participation is partisan aggression.
You just made it political and caved to the woke mob who wants you to perform for only Lefties. This mob pressuring you will never be happy until you only play for Democrats. The Trump Kennedy Center believes all people are welcome — Democrats and Republicans and people uninterested in politics. We want performers who aren’t political — who simply love entertaining everyone regardless of who they voted for.
The statement performs exactly what it accuses others of doing. The accusation is a confession.
The false words create cover for the harmful action.
Watch for the nested contradiction. “The Trump Kennedy Center believes performers shouldn’t be political.” If you can state the position and its negation (Trump renaming) in the same sentence, you’re not looking at confused thinking. You’re looking at a loyalty test dressed as a principle.
Notice who has to explain themselves. Power doesn’t justify; it demands justification from others. The institution that renamed itself after a sitting president doesn’t explain why that’s not political. The person who dares to decline to perform must explain why that is.
In particular, when Bela Fleck said his reason to cancel was to avoid politics, the heated response was extremely political attacks on him to agitate an angry political mob against him, all of which asserted that he was the one being political.
The “woke mob” propaganda framing of Trump propagandists is particularly instructive, a throwback to McCarthyism. It preemptively delegitimizes any objection as external pressure rather than individual conscience, denying moral agency in a target’s own decision.
This framing was heavily used in radical “anti-Communist” propaganda attacking Americans during the “black ball” era. An artist or scientist showing independent thought would be accused of being brainwashed or a puppet, pathologizing them to erase their voice and authority. It also was deployed around the world during 1960s decolonization.
Any non-white nationalist independence movement tended to be re-classified by Nixon and Kissinger as “mob” thought instead, to cruelly invert the entire reason and goal for independent states existing. It preemptively delegitimized any objections to American interference as external pressure rather than individual conscience, denying non-white state leaders were mentally able to make their own decisions.
JD Vance recently has been unloading the term “brainwashed” to slander an American citizen who dared to attempt to flee aggressive shock troops. They executed her at close range and then Vance immediately both pathologized her as unable to think independently, while also he called for prosecution of her as a criminal mind.
If she’s actually brainwashed, she’s a victim of manipulation and not responsible. If she’s a criminal, she made deliberate choices. Vance holds both positions in the same breathless propaganda because the goal isn’t coherence—it’s delegitimization of American citizens from every possible angle.
She was executed physically and then her character assassinated. The state kills someone fleeing, then the Vice President attacks her mental capacity. That’s not spin. That’s the state justifying its violence by destroying their victim’s humanity posthumously.
The Hard Part
You will want to believe this is incompetence. It’s more comfortable to think they don’t know what they’re doing.
They know.
The contradictions aren’t bugs; they’re features. The point is to make you engage with the contradiction rather than the action, to spend your energy proving hypocrisy to people who already know and don’t care.
Sartre wrote about exactly this. And I warned for over the past decade that Big Data tech was bringing it back.
The only response to bad faith is to name it and stop playing. You cannot debate someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. You can only describe what’s actually happening, clearly, for the people still watching.
Which, if you’re reading this, is you.