To those who are still aghast that America has elected a convicted criminal, rapist and insurrectionist as president, you’re not alone. The rest of the world looks at us like we’re crazy, again.

On an unprecedented scale, the United States has been subjected to industrial scale propaganda campaigns which normalized the insanity surrounding Trump. A huge number of people still believe, against all evidence, that he won in 2020. These people also believe that we were being actively invaded by hordes of criminals piling across our borders like the zombies in World War Z. Under the Biden administration we had unprecedented economic growth and the lowest unemployment in decades. Yet the majority of voters thought the economy had never been worse and that Biden had single-handedly destroyed it. Facts and perceptions were so far apart as to be different universes.

How was this done? The interests of those who wanted to see Donald Trump back in office—both domestic and foreign—employed a very specific propaganda playbook. This playbook is described in detail in the book Sowing Hate and Chaos: How Propaganda Is Used to Destroy Democracy by Mary Wald.

The techniques the author describes in her book are diabolically effective. And Trump and his people followed them to the letter. Stephen Miller’s emphasis on the immigrant invasion. The rhetoric of Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Elon Musk and Trump himself were sometimes direct quotes from the materials this book exposes. Trump’s and Vance’s racist screeds about Haitian immigrants are just one tiny example. “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats…” “Immigrants are poisoning the blood.” Sound familiar? Part of the impetus of the Rwandan genocide was radio propaganda describing the Tutsi population as cockroaches.

Like it or not, the propaganda America has been subjected to is effective in ripping apart a society and we are not immune. So how do we defend against it?

The propaganda techniques laid bare in this book have a very critical vulnerability:

…the power in these psychological techniques lies in their being undetected. Making them known deflates their power. He repeats this twice in his book.

We need writers to write about it, film makers to make films about it, speakers to speak about it.

In the final chapter of Wald’s book she discusses some ways in which this fact can be used. For example, cyber security education has become an industry. People have now become more aware of the dangers of sharing too much information on social media. They have learned to become suspicious of phishing emails and phone calls, thus thwarting the criminals trying to rob them or exploit them in other ways. Awareness of propaganda techniques needs to be achieved in similar fashion in the general public. In this way, the operators pushing this destructive rhetoric will find a growing number of deaf ears, or even better, fingers pointing back at them.

Liars and manipulators have a distinct vulnerability. They like to remain hidden and in the dark. And they like using others as mouthpieces which also serves to keep themselves hidden. As we fight back against those who are loud, obnoxious and visible, the hidden propagandists are winding up more loud and obnoxious voices. This becomes a game of whack-a-mole, never getting at the true source.

Understanding how this propaganda system operates will expose the fingerprints of the actual perpetrators. And getting people to understand what they are hearing will render them powerless.

Let’s finally get to work.