Republican Party propaganda tactics

In complexity lies opportunity for liars, slanderers and betrayers

This story is complicated, but it exemplifies the propaganda techniques that radical right sources routinely employ to deceive, polarize, enrage and foment distrust, among other bad, immoral things. In this instance, Fox News is the major lying propagandist source in this pack of lies about the horrors of Democrats. The New York Times writes:

WASHINGTON — When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump.

But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.

Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims. Yet Trump allies portray the news media as engaged in a cover-up if they don’t.

The latest example began with the motion Mr. Durham filed in a case he has brought against Michael A. Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party. The prosecutor has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.

The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.

Citing this filing, Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to “infiltrate” a White House server. The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office. And when mainstream publications held back, Mr. Trump and his allies began shaming the news media.

“The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Monday. “This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”

There were many problems with all this. For one, much of this was not new: The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

The conservative media also skewed what the filing said. For example, Mr. Durham’s filing never used the word “infiltrate.” And it never claimed that Mr. Joffe’s company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.

Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency. 

“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, both lawyers for Mr. Dagon. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats. 

After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A.”

A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.

Mr. Durham was assigned by the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, to scour the Russia investigation for wrongdoing in May 2019 as Mr. Trump escalated his claims that he was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy. But after nearly three years, he has not developed any cases against high-level government officials.

There you have it. Republican propagandists including Fox News and the ex-president, do not hesitate to make up lies and stories to smear and slander Democrats. Evidence and truth are irrelevant. There is not one shred of moral qualm in Republican Party neo-fascist, anti-democratic propaganda. 

Shift the burden to the listener, then trap them 

in a web of lies and crackpottery

A key point here is that when propaganda like this is grounded in complexity and detail, the effort the public needs to distinguish truth from lies is high. How many people who take the ex-president and/or Fox news seriously, will even consider the fact that they have been subtly lied to, emotionally manipulated and betrayed? 

That number must be pretty close to ~0.1%., or about 1 in 1,000. By now, everyone inclined to seriously question Fox, T**** and other radical right propaganda and lies sources concluded long ago that they are chronic liars and walked away. What is left is a hard core of believers who will never question or walk away. In more ways than one, that cadre of blind believers is a necessary and core part of the radical right threat to American democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties.

The ex-president, Fox, and the Republican Party and its core financial backers (corrupt mendacious capitalists) and influencers (rabid mendacious Christian fundamentalist extremists) love complexity and piles of hard to fact check detail. It works for them and against us. The liars and manipulators love it.

So, for neo-fascist Republican liars and falsehood-based manipulators, lies and slanders grounded in complexity with lots of details is their best friend. Complexity and details constitute a great ecosystem to make lies feel like truth, irrational emotional manipulation feel warranted, and crackpot partisan motivated reasoning feel rational. The cognitive and social burden and costs are too high for believers to question, so they don’t.

A last thought, Mr. Durham should be fired for refusal to answer questions. His refusal to talk looks a lot like a radical right, neo-fascist deep state operative tactic. And, while we're firing Durham, let’s also fire our grossly incompetent Attorney General Merrick Garland. At this point, neither firing would hurt and maybe one or both would help a little.