An unremarkable story about the power of polarizing propaganda

 

How radical right puppetmasters  

demagogue the political left

The New York Times writes:

FORT SMITH, Ark. — In the fall of 2020, Kevin Thompson delivered a sermon about the gentleness of God. At one point, he drew a quick contrast between a loving, accessible God and remote, inaccessible celebrities. Speaking without notes, his Bible in his hand, he reached for a few easy examples: Oprah, Jay-Z, Tom Hanks.

Mr. Thompson could not tell how his sermon was received. The church he led had only recently returned to meeting in person. Attendance was sparse, and it was hard to appreciate if his jokes were landing, or if his congregation — with family groups spaced three seats apart, and others watching online — remained engaged.

So he was caught off guard when two church members expressed alarm about the passing reference to Mr. Hanks. A young woman texted him, concerned; another member suggested the reference to Mr. Hanks proved Mr. Thompson did not care about the issue of sex trafficking. Mr. Thompson soon realized that their worries sprung from the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that the movie star is part of a ring of Hollywood pedophiles.

For decades, Mr. Thompson, 44, had been confident that he knew the people of Fort Smith, a small city tucked under a bend in the Arkansas River along the Oklahoma border. He was born at the oldest hospital in town, attended public schools there and grew up in a Baptist church that encouraged him to start preaching as a teenager. He assumed he would live in Fort Smith for the rest of his life.

But now, he was not so sure. “Jesus talks about how he is the truth, how central truth is,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview. “The moment you lose the concept of truth you’ve lost everything.”

A political moment in which the Supreme Court appears on the brink of overturning Roe v. Wade looks like a triumphant era for conservative evangelicals. But there are deepening cracks beneath that ascendance.

Across the country, theologically conservative white evangelical churches that were once comfortably united have found themselves at odds over many of the same issues dividing the Republican Party and other institutions. The disruption, fear and physical separation of the pandemic have exacerbated every rift.

If he spoke against abortion from the pulpit, Mr. Thompson noticed, the congregation had no problem with it. The members were overwhelmingly anti-abortion and saw the issue as a matter of biblical truth. But if he spoke about race in ways that made people uncomfortable, that was “politics.” And, Mr. Thompson suspected, it was proof to some church members that Mr. Thompson was not as conservative as they thought.

The NYT article goes on to point out that many churches are fragile because attendance remains well below prepandemic levels. Christian denominations are declining, along with the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian. at least some observers see a “seismic shift” underway, with white evangelical churches dividing into two camps. One embraces Trump-style messaging and politics, including belief in crackpot conspiracy theories. The other follows a different path, maybe less emotional and more grounded in reality and reason.

In my opinion, the pastor’s comment about losing sight of truth is a key insight about a key trait of modern authoritarian conservative propaganda. Loss of truth is central to how followers of intolerant, irrational falsehood-driven political-religious messaging exerts power. Those people have to detach from truth. They are mostly unaware of what has happened to them. Effective propaganda works mostly unconsciously to deceive and manipulate. 

When people have lost truth to effective propaganda, their power to decide and act on the basis of truth has been taken from them. The flow of power from the deceived and manipulated to the deceiving manipulators is real. Such personal power loss has serious, life-changing consequences for millions of average people’s lives.