A friend of mine shared a text she received from her brother:

“I’d rather receive false information and keep my conservative views than receive true information and follow a Socialist agenda.”

“They shouldn’t be fact checking anything. They should allow people to have a voice. “Trump supporter.

“You need to stop fact checking this and start reporting this.” Mike Lindell, The Pillow guy.

How did we get there?

Joseph Goebbels:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

George Orwell:

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Bill Moyer:

“Trump has resurrected the Big Lie. But, pathetically, he also resorts to the Little Lie.”

“Trump’s strategy is to flood the zone — to proliferate so many lies that by the time one lie is rebutted, he has put out several more, and he seems to believe even the lies that contradict previous lies. Ignorance really is Trump’s strength.”

Our nation’s fracture is not by coincidence. There is a cause.

When The Third Reich was storming through Europe, in the beginning stages of the final solution, the SS would role into town with the purpose of exterminating all Jews, even women and children. The SS did not possess the manpower to execute this battleplan, so they had to solicit townspeople to engage in the genocide. There would be a town meeting beforehand where the SS would deputize citizens to participate in brutal first-degree murder. They even gave the citizens an out, saying, if killing women and children is too much, then stay home. The local baker, the printer, the policemen, the truckdriver, etc., all willingly participated in the execution of the towns’ Jews. They would spend the day executing women and children and afterwards settled down to a nice family meal.

Most of the townspeople willingly participated…ordinary citizens, your next-door neighbor type.

The German and Polish people didn’t wake up one day hating Jews. There is no DNA hate Jews gene. Their willingness to personally participate in a Holocaust was implanted by a propaganda machine from the previous two hundred years, often led by pastors who decried the evilness of the infidels. The German soil was fertilized with hateful disinformation, anti-Semitism; Hitler simply exploited and harvested the hate, which had festered and metastasized for decades. The citizenry had been primed and pumped, fertile ground for a despot to exploit.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Joseph Goebbels

Last week Trump held a rally in Alabama, attended by an unmasked crowd, COVID-19 raging in the state, a state with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. These attendees are playing Russian Roulette with their lives, but perhaps more important, their loved ones’ lives. Do they not comprehend the risk, or are they unable to see the risks that are staring them right in the face?

Why would they attend this rally, putting themselves, their love ones at risk?

“If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.” Donald Trump, July 5^th, 2021.

Louisiana has one of the worse environmental records of any state in the union. Their cancer rate is off the charts, their fish and wildlife have been decimated, water contaminated in whole swaths of the state, especially in the Petro-chemical regions along the coast. In those areas you can’t fish; you can’t swim; nor can you eat any fish poisoned by the chemicals leaking into the waterways. And you can’t move as the pollution raining down has wiped out the value of your home. So, the residents endure the chemical rains that fall from the plants causing multiple forms of cancer and birth defects. And they try not to drink the water. Whole families die of cancer, often in their 40s and 50s. They are imprisoned in some chemical nightmare which they stoically endure, fueled by disinformation about regulations and government agencies like the EPA.

So, who do they vote for? They vote for Republicans who promise to shut down the EPA.

“Environmentalists want to stop the American Dream, to protect the endangered toad, she says, “but if I had to choose between the American Dream and a toad, hey, I’ll take the American Dream.”

“But word from the pulpit also seems to turn concern, away from social problems in Louisiana—poverty, poor schools, pollution-related illnesses—away from government help, and away from the Great Paradox.” Strangers In Their Own Land, by Arlie Russell Hochschild

As in Germany, the pulpit was a source for the injection of propaganda. And you could say Fox News is its own pulpit. They certainly like to repeat things…over and over and over. Dare I say Trump’s Big Lie?

A few of Fox’s greatest hits:

1. “Business anchor Eric Boiling referred to the EPA as “job terrorists” who are “strangling America.”
2. Lou Dobbs commented in 2011 that “as it’s being run now, (the EPA) could be part of the apparat of the Soviet Union.”
3. Charles Krauthammer, compared the rise in EPA air quality standards to an “enemy attack” on America.” Strangers In Their Own Land

This is a sampling of the drumbeat of disinformation that spews out of Fox daily. And they repeat and repeat and repeat their propaganda, which ignites the prejudice and racism simmering beneath the surface.

Meanwhile, the good people in Louisiana are dying from cancer while in their forties, never questioning or fighting the cause, made impotent by the bile that Fox News spews daily.

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell

In Georgia this past weekend, a vaccination event was shut down by anti-vacs protesters, fueled by the disinformation propaganda spewed out 24/7 by Fox News and their disinformation puppets of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Donald Trump—all three of whom have been vaccinated.

The irony and hypocrisy are chilling, laughable, if not for the fact that people die from this lethal disinformation. Right now, in my hometown, there is a family of four girls, all vaccinated including the mother. The father, who refused to get vaccinated, is in the hospital hooked up to a respirator. It’s not looking good for the father. The disinformation he ingested about the vaccine could literally kill him. Someone should be held responsible. His wife could become a widow and his daughters could grow up without a father.

Disinformation has consequences, including death.

Joseph Goebbels:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

After the Civil War, as plantation owners started to regain their power, a propaganda campaign was launched against the recently freed African-Americans. They were labeled animals, shiftless, lazy, dumb, poised to take a white man’s job, but perhaps their biggest sin, the biggest lie propagated, was a suppose desire to rape white women. Poor degenerate white men embraced the propaganda, giving them pride and a mission, while shielding them from the true cause of their degradation. Instead of aligning with blacks, as they were both suppressed by the white power structure, plantation owners keep the races fighting each other, which created a smokescreen to hide the real source of their suppression.

“The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Joseph Goebbels

Texas was one of the states that turned down Expanded Medicaid, a literal lifeline for citizens across the state, especially citizens living in poverty. The reason: they considered Expanded Medicaid a handout for people of color. There is this ongoing disinformation campaign that people of color are always looking for handouts, a theme pushed for over a hundred and fifty years. But it’s a lie and the consequence of that lie is that in Texas, poor people no longer have healthcare, affecting more white people than black. This disinformation propagated by white people literally sabotages white people. And not only do poor people in Texas not have healthcare, but 120 hospitals and clinics have closed because of turning away Federal money for Medicaid, decimating jobs in the areas of medical facilities.

“If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.” Donald Trump, July 5^th, 2021.

We have entered a new era where truth can be manipulated, denied, and changed. Lies are a lazy vehicle to power, as displayed by Donald Trump in his BIG LIE campaign. Trump does not believe in Democracy; he lusts for power, and will do anything to get and maintain power, which he will use to extract vengeance on his enemies, both real and imagined. Our nation has been assaulted with disinformation, often from Russia, and this propaganda fuels our nation’s fracture.

Our democracy hangs in the balance. Like Hitler, Trump didn’t create the racism, the hatred; he simply exploited it by using the technology developed by Goebbels.

We must continually assault disinformation with truth. It’s our only salvation.