The Laws of Propaganda

I did a lot of reading this week and was fortunate enough to discover a wonderful article by Michael Anton entitled “That’s not happening and it’s good that it is”

It was subtitled “a quick and dirty guide to regime propaganda”

Given my repeated suggestion that you believe nothing and verify everything you are told by government and the media, the subject of propaganda process was immediately of interest.

We’ve all been subject to a torrent of falsehoods, misinformation and outright lies over the years by institutions we were trained to trust.

That nexus of trust – between we the people and those who seek to rule over us,  is now broken…some would say beyond repair.

That’s why Anton’s seven rules of propaganda is fascinating. It explains how we are being manipulated.

Let me explain a few of them to you.

First off is the Law of Merited Impossibility which holds that:

“That will never happen, and when it does, boy will you [homophobes, transphobes, racists, sexists, whatever] deserve it.”

This law has several purposes. The first is to disarm resistance to any change by claiming it has only positive impacts. This also helps to dismiss the ‘slippery slope’ argument which has actually proven so prescient in recent times.

Do you remember when people were mocked for saying that allowing men to pretend to be women would ruin womens sport or make real women uncomfortable in bathrooms.

We were told it would never happen. That’s the Law of Merited Impossibility in action.

This naturally leads to the law of Salutary Contradiction whose formulation is “That’s not happening and it’s good that it is”.

Anton writes:

"While the previous law applies to the future, this one is about the present. It’s what the ruling class immediately switches to after what they insisted would “never” happen is happening before everyone’s eyes."

Think about the collectivists approach to electricity. They insist solar and wind power are basically free and hence wouldn’t put upward pressure on prices. Of course they were wrong.

That in itself is not surprise as leftists get most things wrong.

So when prices did go up, they invoked the law of Salutary Contradiction by claiming price rises were a good thing and actually necessary to drive people toward that free electricity.

Then we have Anton’s third law he calls the Celebration Parallax.

This states that: “the same fact pattern is either true and glorious or false and scurrilous depending on who states it.”

You may have experienced this for yourself. I certainly have.

When I released my book The Conservative Revolution, their ABC and people like Carrie Bickmore from The Project took me to task for discussing the lower statistical outcomes for children in fatherless families.

I was called all sorts of names by idiots who hadn’t even read what was in the book.

If they had they would have realised that what so incensed them was a direct quote from woke hero Barack Obama.

That’s just one example of how dumb leftists use the Celebration Parallax.

Other variations could include opposing racism by being overtly racist or opposing sexism by being sexist…think affirmative action, quotas and the like.

There are more propaganda laws in Anton's column including the Enmity Counteraccusation in which ‘the enemy labels you an enemy because you notice their enmity’

It’s invoked whenever you object to whatever hateful bile a particular leftist is vomiting up in your direction.

If you dare defend yourself against an attacking antifa thug you are labelled the violent one. Or if you respond to a Leftist insult with a frank character assessment of the insulter you are the wrongdoer.

The Left have already captured politics, the media and the education system. Now they are taking over how we communicate.

They are appropriating language and convincing the punters that up is down, right is left, men are women and advocating black power is somehow less racist than supporting white power.

They get away with it because they control the institutions and have been busy brainwashing generations to accept their nonsense.

We cannot accept that any longer.

Our duty, our moral responsibility is to speak truth to this garbage and to put people in parliament that will stand up to these leftist purveyors of propaganda.