Where were we?
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.
I Am The Liberal Media
