Tactics of the Propagandists: Part 1

In Part 1

Emotional Signaling

The War That Must Be Won At Any Cost

Rules Can’t Be Wrong

Engineering of Consent

Straw Man Arguments

Fake “Fact Checkers”

Testimonials From COVID Patients

Lockdown propagandists recognize that they cannot persuade anyone based on logic. They have therefore relied heavily upon another powerful weapon of persuasion — emotional signaling. Acting is a major part of mass communication, including “non-fiction” media. Did you know that late-night talk show interviews are actually scripted and rehearsed before shooting? They are! The talk show host and guest make it seem like it is impromptu but actually standard industry practice is for these conversations to be loosely scripted and rehearsed, right down to the funny remarks each will say and the laughter reaction.

Radio shows, same thing. There may be three hosts to a morning radio show. These hosts invariably seem like really funny and outgoing people, but in reality, the “conversation” that they are having is usually from a script so that it will be entertaining and there won’t be any awkward silences. Depending on the skill of the hosts, the script may be read during the live broadcast, or memorized. As in television talk shows, these radio productions are designed to seem impromptu, or ‘real,’ if you will.

News programs are no more real than late-night talk shows or lively morning radio programs. Journalism is a lucrative and highly demanding industry. Students in journalism programs receive extensive training in acting to enable them to convey whatever emotions their producers wish. Strategic expression of emotion is a core component of non-fiction television and radio media such as news programs, news magazine shows, documentaries, and talk shows. The messages in these programs are calculated by the producers who instruct the actor-journalists on which perspectives to take on each issue and which emotions to convey. Media agencies, including public broadcasters, are revenue-maximizing firms. Their perspectives on a given story are ultimately based upon commercial motives. 

On to emotionally signalling. It is a powerful method of persuasion. A fact of human nature is that we look to others for what to think and how to feel about a given topic. For instance, if you witness that most people are angry about the cost of housing in your city, you likely will become angry over it as well, even if you used to think that the cost of living was fairly reasonable. The influence of others’ opinions and emotions is greatest in regards to a new issue and/or an issue that is difficult to understand. The coronavirus outbreak was certainly a new and novel situation in which very few people in the world have prior experience. Therefore, it can only be expected that people will look to others to know how to feel about it and how to react to it.

Needless to say, the greater the readership of a newspaper or viewership of a news show, the greater will be their advertising revenue. The media is notorious for sensationalizing stories to make them seem more important than they are. Whether it is a comment made by a politician, or gossip on a famous singer, the commercially-driven media makes everything into a ‘big deal’ to garner our attention. 

Enter the Wuhan virus outbreak. From its very beginning, the media has made it sound as scary as possible. The media’s fear generation has continued unabated to this day, even though they know it is causing tremendous damage, such as people dying from healthcare avoidance secondary to fear of coronavirus exposure. There is no sign of this trend letting up. Every news report on coronavirus is staged to be as terrifying and theatrical as possible. From the ultra-grave tone of voice to the expressions of sheer terror, actor-journalists continually pump up the drama, fright and panic to maximal levels. 

The greater the fear, the more people will watch their program and the more money will be made. If the media adopted a more appropriate reaction to COVID-19 and didn’t express high levels of panic and fear, the public would get the impression that COVID wasn’t something to be terrified about. They would thus not compulsively consume the news and the revenue of the news agencies would be much lower.

Fear is not the only emotion that actor-journalists express in abundance to inflate their ratings. Rage is another strategically expressed emotion in the media. Again, journalists are highly trained and skilled in acting and they exploit those skills for commercial gain. Reporters can commonly be seen expressing outrage that a politician or government is not taking the pandemic ‘seriously enough’ and demands the government ‘do more’ to mitigate viral spread. This is not real anger. They are acting. When they express outrage that people are not scared enough of coronavirus, they are inciting fear and panic over the virus so that people will read their paper or watch their television program more. Anger and disgust are the most common emotions that actor-journalists perpetually express in order to incite like feelings in viewers. These emotions are not real. Expression of intense emotion is a form of acting used by news media corporations to incite greater consumption of their products.

In politics, emotional signalling is also essential to public communication. Politicians usually express rage when they have no logical justification for their position. For instance, a reporter may ask a politician why she gave a lucrative contract to a company without letting other companies bid and the politician will respond by yelling furiously, “That company was clearly the best choice! Why would I ask for other bids when I know they wouldn’t be as good?!” 

As with journalists, politicians possess advanced acting skills. They often use them in lieu of a sound logical argument. In real life, people usually only become enraged if there is a genuine reason, so when we witness a politician’s or journalist’s outburst, we tell ourselves that she must be in the right even though we can’t think of a logical justification for her position. Emotional signalling is used to manipulate perception. It is crucial to always keep this in mind and judge the validity of someone’s position solely on its logical merit.

The attitude of lockdown zealots is that preventing contagion of SARS-CoV-2 is a war; a war that must absolutely be won at any cost, no less. According to this bizarre narrative, which has been mainstream since the beginning of the outbreak, becoming infected with coronavirus is the worst thing that can happen to a person. Therefore, everything must be done to prevent coronavirus infections, no matter how much harm is done in the process. Coronavirus is society’s number one ‘enemy,’ thus an all-out war must be waged against it. “We can’t beat COVID with half measures,” as some ads put it.

Suffering, enslavement, imprisonment, poor health, and death are inevitable casualties in winning this holy war. There is no point to calculate if the measures to prevent coronavirus contagion are causing more harm than the virus itself because the war being waged is not to protect people, it is to defeat the ultimate enemy of coronavirus.

Most people have adopted this preposterous attitude about the pandemic. It is almost universally held in the media and government. The win-at-all-costs attitude is so pervasive that people don’t even want to hear evidence that the restrictions are more harmful than the virus. Many people recognize this to be the case; they simply don’t care. No matter how much suffering is caused by social distancing, no matter how many people will die sooner because of distancing, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters under this narrative is that coronavirus contagion is being dampened by our life-negating practices. 

The media either doesn’t report the harms caused by mitigation measures or states that these harms are actually caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The only thing that politicians or journalists discuss is decreasing coronavirus contagion. They intentionally avoid any discussion about doing what is best for people overall because they want to keep fear of the virus as high as possible.

I have a confession. I don’t know how to discredit this narrative. It is so absurd, it is not based on any logic. Clearly, all factors must be considered to determine the best course of action for an individual or society. A doctor would never prescribe a medication, for instance, whose side effects overwhelmingly outweighed its benefits citing that the only thing that matters was an improvement in the reason for the clinic visit. 

Responsible public policy must also factor in everything that affects public wellbeing, directly or indirectly. Politics being politics, more popular issues receive favorable policy attention, so public policy often does not consider all factors. However, no issue in history has hijacked policy decisions as much as COVID. The public has bought into the self-defeating narrative that COVID mitigation is a war of greater importance than any the world has ever seen, thus all else is irrelevant.

At first, this framing seems like it could only work on young children: “Follow the rules. Rules are rules. They must be good for you or we wouldn’t have them.” People in high income nations often have a high level of trust in their governments and thus see laws as necessarily benevolent. Lockdown propagandists take advantage of the public’s intrinsic faith in the rule of law. They can’t logically justify pandemic restrictions so they play up the fact that the restrictions are laws and therefore must be just.

The “rules are rules” rhetoric not only exploits pre-existing trust in the government laws and regulations, it is also a form of social intimidation. Reporters usually frame the rules angle by smearing people who are not following the pandemic restrictions. There is a particular preference for the expression “flouting the rules” to describe the act of social interaction. The snarky manner in which this expression is used leaves no doubt that the lockdown propagandists are trying to frighten people with social retaliation for interacting with others. The implicit message is “If you hang out with others, you will be shamed and rejected by everyone.”

Please be aware that rules of any kind, such as public laws or social norms, are not universally well-intentioned, yet alone effective in their stated goals. You need to ask yourself about the motivations behind a given law. Does it appear to be a sincere attempt at improving society, or does it look like an attempt at garnering political support? Politicians know that their constituents only care about mitigating the spread of COVID, so they create laws around that appear to support that goal. 

Having said that, COVID policies and public health orders are usually not even genuine attempts at mitigation. For instance, there is no public messaging about how to strengthen your immune system and effective medical treatments for COVID-19 are often banned. Mask and social distancing mandates have no evidence of decreasing contagion. Rules are made to appease the hysterical public, not to actually lower COVID deaths.

More of a broad concept than a specific method of propaganda, the engineering of consent refers to the notion that people are terrified of social rejection, thus to popularize a view, make it so that it is socially unacceptable to express a contradictory view. Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda, developed this strategy in the 1920s and it has since formed the backbone of elites’ efforts at controlling public opinion. 

By making conflicting opinions taboo, propagandists set up an environment of self-censorship among the population. Even if people strongly object to the mainstream narrative, they will be too afraid of social retribution to say so. In recent years, the engineering of consent has gone to extremes in which people literally have their lives ruined by saying something counter-narrative, a phenomenon often called ‘cancel culture.’ 

Like most types of propaganda, engineering consent can be used positively. The campaign to make ‘drinking and driving’ taboo, for instance, can only be seen as a positive development. In other cases, engineering consent limits the framing of a social issue to the detriment of progress on the issue. The Black Lives Matter movement is an obvious case. Reducing the homicide rate of African Americans is a noble cause, but considering that 94% of homicides in that demographic are at the hands of other African Americans, making it socially unacceptable to discuss only homicides from police officers and racists has greatly limited the potential progress on the issue. 

For other issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the efforts of propagandists to make it socially unacceptable to freely discuss all aspects of the issue has led to a dystopian society. It is actually socially unacceptable today to stand up for basic human rights or discuss what is best for people’s overall wellbeing — a feat of social control hitherto thought only possible in science fiction novels. Discussion of the fraud committed by politicians, once considered the very duty of a citizen, is now a taboo heralding the title “conspiracy theorist” — 2020’s equivalent to a “heretic” in medieval Europe. 

Speaking the truth and protecting your fellow man form the foundation of morality. Don’t be deterred by accusations and social rejection. A concrete rule of social progress is that it inevitably involves walking through a fire of scorn. Remember how critics of the Iraq War of 2003 in the U.S. were condemned for being unpatriotic? Does anybody now think that the war was a good idea? Hardly any. Perhaps you remember the degradation heaped upon economists who warned of a housing bubble or instability in the financial system in the mid-2000s? They became rock stars after the 2008 collapse of the housing and financial industries. Look at any positive social development in history — its heroes were all villainized prior to being commended.

A common tactic used in debate is the ‘straw man.’ This fallacy occurs when someone attacks a distorted depiction of his opponent’s argument. It is like attacking a decoy or straw man, as opposed to his real opponent. He may take advantage of vague language used by his opponent to make his argument appear different than it is in reality. 

The tactic takes advantage of the fact that most consumers of the news are not that familiar with the argument under attack and are not motivated to verify if it is being properly represented by its detractors. Often, straw manning involves blatantly and drastically misrepresenting the opponent’s argument. 

Lockdown propagandists have used all sorts of straw men to deceive the public. For instance, the proposal for appropriate pandemic response of the Great Barrington Declaration has been consistently reported as one providing no protection for the public from coronavirus. Deaths from coronavirus will soar, argue lockdown zealots, if the Declaration is enacted. In reality, almost all COVID deaths are in the elderly and other vulnerable sub-populations. The Declaration advocates protecting those people more than they have been under lockdowns, not less. 

Another common straw man used against lockdown opponents has to do with their motivations and beliefs. The media and government claim that all anti-lockdown advocates are ‘anti-maskers’ and/or ‘anti-vaxers” and their protests are centered on getting rid of mask and vaccines mandates. True, many people who oppose lockdowns, also oppose those mandates, but by far the primary concern of citizens opposed to pandemic restrictions is ending social distancing laws.

A final straw man worth mentioning is that anti-lockdown advocates claim that there is no such thing as SARS-CoV-2 — it is a hoax that this virus even exists. Among anti-lockdown activists, yet alone citizens opposed to lockdowns, hardly any of them believe the existence of this virus to be a hoax. That is a straw man used to discredit the human rights activists. Many of the activists consider the pandemic response to be a hoax, in that it is sold as being constitutional and good for public health when, in reality, it is neither. 

Citizens requesting that their basic rights be respected and the COVID vaccines that have skipped the standard safety testing procedures (which is all of them) should not be forced into people’s bodies are mercilessly straw manned. The media calls these people “anti-vaccers” and claims that they are “against vaccines” which is false. They are not trying to stop COVID vaccination. They are fighting for their constitutional right, that medical procedures should be voluntary, to be respected. People believe these straw men are real because the human rights advocates have been silenced. They cannot get their voices heard in the media, or through social media.

Many news agencies have formed “fact checking” divisions in the last few years, mostly to make leftist political views appear more credible. The majority of the self-proclaimed “fact checkers” are part of large news firms like Reuters or Associated Press, but some are independent. The quality and objectivity of most of the fact checking services is very low. In fact, much of their output is itself, false or misleading.

Independent fact checkers, such as Politifact and Snopes, are funded by well-known propagandists. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Google, both notorious for lockdown propaganda, are two of the biggest funders of fact checkers. The Poynter Institute, which funds and certifies fact checkers (and produces Politifact directly), is funded by the Koch brothers and Google. 

It is no coincidence that the fact checking divisions of media corporations espouse the same political positions as the commentators in the same corporation. When have you read a CNN fact checking report on Donald Trump that concluded he told the truth about anything? Fact checking has its place. There are numerous situations in which they are useful. For instance, if a politician denies saying something that a reporter has brought up, the fact checker can roll a clip of that politician saying what the reporter claims he said and conclude that the politician’s denial was false. That is a legitimate use for a fact checking service.

Unfortunately, fact checkers often pass off poor evidence as fact. To look at an example, take Dr. Roger Hodkinson’s viral phone-in statement to the Alberta legislature criticizing the pandemic response. Several fact checkers reported on it, and it basically went the same way. Dr. Hodkinson likening SARS-CoV-2 to a “bad flu” was deemed false, citing the larger number of people who have died from it in 2020 than usually die from the flu in a year. However, that is only one method of comparing the two viruses. If you compare their infection fatality rates (IFR), they are very similar. 

Another statement of Dr. Hodkinson’s deemed false by the ‘fact checkers’ was that there is no evidence that masks decrease contagion of coronavirus. The fact checkers ‘disproved’ this statement by having an ‘expert’ simply say that his statement was false. However, they did not provide any empirical evidence to support that claim, because there is none. On the contrary, the most high quality study done on the subject to date, concluded that masks do not mitigate coronavirus contagion at all. Expert opinion is only opinion. It is not fact. 

Most disturbing about fact checkers is their blatant lying. Keeping with Dr. Hodkinson’s statement, the fact checkers concluded that his statements about COVID-19 being a hoax and referring to himself as chairman of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada were both false. One problem: he never claimed either of those things, directly or by insinuation. The “fact checkers” actually lied about him making those claims. Please recognize that ‘fact checkers,’ both as part of news media agencies, and those that are supposedly independent, are nothing more than liars and propagandists.

Since the Wuhan virus has emerged, not only are ‘fact checkers’ busy misleading the public about lockdowns, but now many people are all-of-a-sudden self-appointed “misinformation debunkers.” Everyone is entitled to free speech and has the right to point out what they think is misinformation, but these individuals exploit their scientific credentials to spread lies and demonize legitimate scientists. They are effective because they know that people are too lazy to verify their claims and simply take their word as gold based on impressive credentials and endorsements from other (usually media) propagandists. 

One utterly despicable ploy used by the media to justify violations of rights is the showcasing of COVID patients. It is very common for a news program to show a person in a hospital bed looking terrible and making a heartfelt plea to viewers to stay at home so as to avoid putting someone in the hospital like her. The message is that by not following COVID restrictions, you are “putting someone in the hospital,” not unlike severely physically assaulted someone at a bar.

This propaganda gimmick is wrong on many levels: 

It villianizes innocent people. There is nothing wrong with being around others with an uncovered face. It has always been possible to give someone a cold, flu, or other respiratory infection without realizing you even had one yourself, yet social distancing and face-covering were never practiced. It is evil to accuse others, even through inference, for “putting someone in a hospital” or killing someone just for living normally. People who get COVID need to take responsibility for themselves and stop pointing fingers at others for their own failure to avoid sickness. Most people who get COVID-19 don’t even take many evidence-based precautions such as vitamin D supplementation, nor do they seek out effective treatments like HCQ. 

Being ill gives a person no scientific or moral authority. How is lifestyle advice from someone with COVID more valid than from someone without COVID? How does being sick give anyone the right to deny others’ rights? How does the horrible suffering of lockdown victims become desirable when a COVID patient tells us lockdowns are important? No argument against social distancing — the enormous net increase in suffering, the hundreds-fold net loss of both quality-adjusted life years and absolute fatality rates, the mass destruction of identity, and total denial of basic rights — is invalidated by an endorsement from someone just because she happens to have a bad case of COVID. Sick advocates of social distancing, like healthy ones, do not consider the terrible harms caused by distancing. 

It incites severe germophobia. SARS-CoV-2 is a cold virus that causes a one-time mild illness and has almost no risk of mortality for healthy people under 70 years old. By putting on display middle-aged people hospitalized with COVID-19, the media is grossly exaggerating the virus’ severity. The media has tried to trick the public into thinking that the case fatality rate was the infection fatality rate for many months, and still does to a degree. Displaying people with COVID in the hospital who are not elderly is one of the media’s many ploys to incite intense, crippling fear of coronavirus into people and get them to think that the microbe is far more dangerous than it is.

It hides the harms of social distancing. Like all reporting during the pandemic, only one aspect of public health is given attention. We are shown videos and photos of COVID patients, along with the anti-rights messaging, but we are not shown multi-media of people suffering from pandemic restrictions and along with the pro-rights messaging that would have prevented it. One could easily make video testimonials or photos with quotes from people suffering from the isolation and poverty caused by restrictions. The suffering of someone in the hospital with COVID-19 is no greater than the suffering of someone at home feeling terribly alone, angry, and depressed due to social distancing.

A similar tactic to using COVID patients as propaganda props is the endorsement of social distancing by people who have lost loved ones to coronavirus. It has the same logical shortcomings of the four points above, and may be more powerful becomes it scares people of dying, not just getting sick. The media loves to show a montage of a healthy middle-aged person who died from COVID and along with a crying relative telling us “Please stay at home or you’ll be next!” Like COVID patients, people who have lost a relative to COVID have no scientific or moral credibility and only promote lockdowns because they have themselves been indoctrinated by the lockdown cult.