Oh yeah! I promised we'd talk about propaganda and "scale" and then wandered off into a side-quest about the collapse of thermostatic politics and the rise of quantum politics caused by the long-term toxic effects of the legacy media's Both Sides Do It fetish.
And then I figured this would make for a very on-topic theme for the Professional Left podcast, which it now is.
So if you're a regular podcast listener, much of this will sound familiar.
If not, I'll remind you that our point of departure on the last post was midway through a chat among the Pod Save lads about why the Democratic party sucks. Yadda yadda. Joe Biden. And so forth. And now that we're all caught up, onward!
Back to the lads, and for your convenience I've highlighted the phrases that are doing a backbreaking amount of heavy lifting.
Jon Favreau: But I do think that there is just a... a... a severe lack of trust in the Democratic party, um, and the Democratic brand that comes from, I mean, come ... comes from decades, but it also comes, like. specifically from everything that happened in... in... at the end of the Biden administration. Joe Biden running is part of it.
Um, you know, Lakshya [Jain] points out uh the Democratic position on crime, uh, is a big part of it ... or at least what the perception of the Democratic position on crime is. Which was unfortunately, um, hurt by the defund the police discussion. Um which of course, you know, [inaudible] you didn't have Democratic candidates saying defund the police, but enough activists were that the perception became that Democrats want to wanted to defund the police.
Lovett: Most Democrats didn't, but a few did.
Favreau: A few did... few did. And those were the voices that were elevated by some often by the other side...
Ah, perception. That's always the question, isn't it? To quote Aldous Huxley from "The Doors of Perception":
I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.
What does that have to do with where we're headed? Not a lot, but it's always fun to quote people like Huxley, if for no other reason than to remind the Very Serious People that it is possible to be a "normal person" and still savor big concepts and deep reading.
Anyway, since "perception" is hauling the Pod Save lads whole thesis here, it seem nuts to shrug the concept off as just, y'know, a thing that happened. Like an unfortunate weather event, that was often elevated "by the other side"...
So instead of that, let’s do some arithmetic in the specific subject of "Defund the Police".
In early June of 2020, right after the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that followed, the phrase “Defund the Police” begins to show up on Fox News. Within days, it’s everywhere in their ecosystem. By summer, it’s not just a phrase -- it’s a frame. By fall, it’s a weapon.
And then never leaves.
According to data aggregated from the GDELT project and cited by RealClearPolitics, by March of 2021 -- less than a year in -- Fox News alone had aired the phrase 4,116 times.
That’s one network.
Not Fox Business. Not Newsmax. Not OAN. Not talk radio. Not podcasts. Not YouTube. Not the Daily Wire or Breitbart or the email blast industrial complex.
Just Fox.
Now, let's scale that out conservatively.
Across the entire conservative media ecosystem between 2020 and 2022, a reasonable estimate lands somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 uses of the phrase “Defund the Police.” Call it 200,000 as a midpoint.
And that’s just utterances. That’s not counting amplification -- the chyrons, the viral clips, the retweets, the repetition across platforms, the algorithmic juicing. If you count exposures, you’re easily into the millions.
Now hold that number in your head -- 200,000 -- while we look at the other side of the ledger.
How many Democrats actually ran for office during those same cycles?
Back of the envelop figuring puts federal, state, local -- that'd be the House, the Senate, state legislatures, mayors, city councils, school boards, judges, water reclamation districts, mosquito abatement districts, etc. -- you’re probably looking at something on the order of 50,000 to 150,000 Democratic candidates across 2020 and 2022.
That’s the statistical universe.
Now: how many of those candidates explicitly ran on a “Defund the Police” platform?
Not “police reform" or “reallocating some funding.” or "rethink public safety.”
The actual slogan. The actual Fox chyron.
Maybe, what? A dozen of two dozen at most?.
Out of tens of thousands.
That’s not 10%.
That’s not 5%.
That’s not even 1%.
That’s somewhere in the .01-something percent range. In terms of probability, you had about as much chance of stumbling across a Democrat in the wild running on "Defund the Police" as you would of drawing a royal flush in poker on your first hand while being hit by lightening.
Which means 99%+ of Democratic candidates did not run on “Defund the Police.”
Now let’s put the two numbers together.
Around 200,000 uses of the phrase across conservative media
Let's say 24 candidates actually running on it for some office somewhere.
That gives you a ratio of about 8,300-to-1.
Eight thousand three hundred repetitions of the phrase for every one human being actually advocating it on a ballot, and once you see the ratio, the game gives itself away. No sane person or fair-and-balanced media outlet could possibly believe that “Defund the Police” was a reasonable and fair description of the position of the Democratic party. It was propaganda. Slander. An exploding dye pack, used to stain every Democrat everywhere with the same color, regardless of what they actually said, did, or ran on.
Did your local Democratic candidate for county board run on fixing stormwater drainage and keeping the library open on weekends? Doesn’t matter. Defund the Police.
Did the moderate Democrat in a swing district explicitly oppose the slogan? Doesn’t matter. Defund the Police.
Did the Democratic mayor increase the police budget? Doesn’t matter. Defund the Police.
Because the point wasn’t accuracy. The point was saturation. And while Fox and it's imitators yelling into the conservative media bubble 200,000 times is powerful, it’s not sufficient. It needs help. And that's where the legacy media leaps into action, because what makes propaganda saturation decisive is when the rest of the media ecosystem treats the frame as legitimate.
And they did.
They “both-sided” it.
They hosted
panels about it.
They asked every
Democrat from dogcatcher to president, “Do you support defunding the police?”
as if it were a party plank instead of a niche activist slogan.
They turned it into a litmus test.
Which is how you launder propaganda into “the conversation.”
By the time CNN and the rest got bored and moved on -- as the data shows they largely did by late 2020 -- the damage was done. Fox kept hammering. Talk radio kept hammering. The clips kept circulating.
And the frame stuck, which is how modern propaganda works.
Not by persuading you of a specific policy, but by creating a feeling that something is broadly true, even when it is numerically absurd.
It’s what we refer to at The Professional Left as Velveeta Media. Engineered. Shelf-stable. Smooth. Consistent. Melts the same way every time. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t cheese. What matters is that it behaves like cheese under the right conditions.
“Defund the Police” was treated like a Democratic platform plank because it was processed, packaged, and reheated until it achieved the right consistency.
If you take nothing else away from this, remember that somewhere north of 99% of Democratic candidates had nothing to do with “Defund the Police.” Compare that to the majority of Republicans running for or holding office --
A majority of GOP nominees deny or question the 2020 election results
Experts say their dominance in the party poses a threat to the country’s democratic principles and jeopardizes the integrity of future votes
-- and an even larger majority Republican voters --
Trump's election fraud claims spread distrust before midterms, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds
...Some 46% of respondents said they agreed with the statement that there are large numbers of fraudulent ballots cast by non-citizens in U.S. elections, with 82% of Republicans agreeing compared with 18% of Democrats and 38% of independents.
About 53% of respondents said they were worried about fraudulent mail‑in or absentee ballots, compared with 43% who said they were not, with partisan division again apparent: 83% of Republicans expressed concern, versus 33% of Democrats.
Taken together, the responses indicate that years of messaging by Trump and his allies casting doubt on voting have resonated strongly with Republicans, particularly around claims that non‑citizens vote in significant numbers and that mail‑in ballots are unreliable, despite repeated audits and academic research finding fraud in either case to be exceedingly rare.
-- who would still swear on the lives of their children that they believe the outrageous lie that the 2020 election was stolen
And yet it was "Defund the Police" which was blasted across the conservative media ecosystem hundreds of thousands of times, amplified into millions of impressions, and laundered into mainstream discourse. At a ratio of roughly 8,300-to-1.
Talk about straining at gnats and swallowing camels (Matthew 23:24).
That’s not politics. That’s industrial-scale message warfare.
And it works.
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