What Does American Propaganda Look Like?

And what a French philosopher had to say about it.

Truth Social/The New York Times

The “president” of the United States recently shared an AI-generated image depicting him as Jesus, even though he says he meant to portray himself as a doctor, another role he’s remarkably unqualified for.

Yeah, that’s propaganda.

But also:

A flurry of notes has been circulating through the homeschooling co-ops I’m in, offering guides to help parents talk about the “Iranian propaganda videos” that have taken over the internet lately. It made me realize something:

Americans think they understand propaganda.

They don’t.

They keep using that word, but I do not think it means what they think it means. So, we’re going to talk about Jacques Ellul in a minute.

But first:

We learned about propaganda in history class. At least, we thought we did. We looked at those cringe war posters from the Wilson and Roosevelt eras. We laughed. They’re so obvious. We’d never fall for that, we said.

We’re too smart.

And since we think we know what propaganda looks like, because we studied a bunch of war posters, we miss everything else.

So when Iran releases a series of Lego videos that beats almost anything SNL or Comedy Central has done in years, something more honest than 90 percent of our own media, it gets labeled as “propaganda.”

But it’s not propaganda. It’s satire. It’s clearly engaging in satire. It has all the features of satire. So why aren’t we calling them the “Iranian satire videos” or the “satirical music videos from Iran?” It’s a good question.

Americans don’t say “Iran’s satirical music videos,” because they’ve been conditioned to see Iran as some kind of existential threat, a hardline regime run by lunatics, a place where you can’t even crack a joke. Even the snooty Americans think they understand Iran because they skimmed a few pages of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Anything and everything out of Iran that isn’t dripping with pro-Western honey must be propaganda. That’s how propagandized we are.

And it shows.

So, what does American propaganda look like?

You and I already know that billionaires control the vast majority of our news outlets, and we’ve watched them gradually apply more and more influence over the years. Now they also own the vast majority of our social media, and most Americans just sat back and let it happen, drinking down propaganda about their personal security and TikTok. It wasn’t so direct at first. Even five years ago, papers still published rather blistering critiques of Amazon. Now, we get this:

That right there, that’s American propaganda.

That’s American propaganda in its purest, most unadulterated form. It’s the red, white, and blue meth of propaganda, the Heisenberg special. It kicks like a mule with its balls wrapped in duct tape and rubber bands.

(And it has a special ingredient.)

The newspaper didn’t just publish that piece about Bezos. They promoted it. They pushed it out to our devices. It showed up in my NYT feed, right up there with war coverage. This was not a backpage fluff piece. The editors and owners of the paper wanted everyone to see it and read it, even knowing it would stoke anger. Ironically, it’s just as cringe as those war posters from a century ago.

They’re getting sloppy. The propaganda is getting more obvious, and that speaks to how much control they have. When they act like they don’t have to sneak it by us anymore, that should scare you a little.

It scares me.

Imagine what Jacques Ellul would say about that headline. A French philosopher and sociologist, Ellul published more than 60 books on propaganda and related topics while teaching at the University of Bordeaux. Even though he died in 1994, right around the birth of the internet, he warned us about “technological tyranny.” This man gets the Cassandra Gold Medal.

What did he say about propaganda?

According to Ellul, propaganda doesn’t just come from your government. It comes from everywhere. It’s not as blunt and obvious as we’re taught in school. It’s slower, more insidious. It sneaks into you over time. It promotes bigger ideas, beliefs, and ideologies. It sells you on social norms. It sells you on life aspirations. It sells you on “technological imperatives,” otherwise known as beliefs that adoption of new technologies is inevitable, and resistance is futile.

When you look at all the tech bros salivating over AI, all the big companies shoving it down our throats on every app, constantly telling us how great it is, warning us we’ll be left behind if we don’t use it, that it’s worth risking Skynet and extinction-level events, that’s a technological imperative. That’s them telling you that you have no choice but to use it, no matter the costs.

That’s propaganda.

Propaganda for MAGA Dummies

Propaganda doesn’t have to slap you in the face.

It can be subtle.

It guides public opinion over time. It shifts the window of debate, and it frames our discourse. It tells us what we’re allowed to talk about, what’s plausible, and what’s extreme. It tells you what to believe in, and what’s an unhinged conspiracy theory. It’s a kind of gaslighting.

Jacques Ellul outlined three main kinds of propaganda in his 1962 book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. And while the title could use an update, everything else is spot on, and more relevant than ever.

He shows us how smart people fall for propaganda.

First, he drew a distinction between “agitation” propaganda and “integration” propaganda. You see agitation propaganda in those cringe war posters from the last century. It advocates for direct, specific, and often violent action. It often comes from a single, centralized source, like a government office. Trump’s regime often engages in agitation propaganda. If it looks bad, or it makes you laugh, then it’s probably not even directed at you. It’s targeting someone else.

Here’s an example:

Deleted Truth Social Post

As you’ll see by the end, Ellul would call this post propaganda for dummies. It’s very direct, very overt, and very specific. It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. Trump wants to liken himself to Jesus.

It practically parodies itself.

But that’s not the kind of propaganda you need to worry about falling for. It’s the other kind, as Ellul continues to explain.

Next, Ellul distinguished between “vertical” and “horizontal” propaganda. Government offices and agencies engage in vertical propaganda, sending out messages and memes over all kinds of media, telling you exactly what to think. Again, Trump appears to prefer this vertical kind of propaganda, and it’s why he puts so much pressure on big companies like CBS.

And posting ridiculous AI memes of himself…

Guys like Jeffrey Epstein and Stephen Miller understand horizontal propaganda, which happens through peer networks. It’s more sophisticated. All the incel nonsense, all the QAnon conspiracy theories, that evolved via horizontal propaganda. These things didn’t just happen spontaneously. At the top, someone was guiding them and nudging them along, in the background, out of sight. That’s horizontal propaganda. You plant the misinformation like a seed. You water it. You give it sunlight. Otherwise, you mostly try to let it grow on its own.

Finally, Ellul distinguished “sociological” propaganda from “political” propaganda. Like “agitation” propaganda, political propaganda focuses on specific actions. It comes from an explicit, specific source. It focuses on the short term, like a revolution. Sociological propaganda focuses on more general worldviews and orientations. It comes from a number of sources. On some level, it’s not even “intentional,” so much as a nearly unconscious motivation to reinforce and privilege certain economic systems, class divisions, and hierarchies.

Trump’s direct actions often take the form of agitation, vertical, political propaganda. It’s so easy to spot, and it works extremely well on his MAGA base. It doesn’t work on you or me, but that doesn’t mean we’re free from propaganda. We’re often exposed to the other kinds: the integration propaganda, the horizontal propaganda, the sociological propaganda. It tends to work on “smarter” people, you know, those of us with advanced degrees, who think we’re above it.

We’re not.

You and I are always at risk of falling for this other propaganda, because it’s far more insidious and sinister. It works on you over time, from multiple angles. It worms its way into your hopes and dreams. Sometimes, the source of propaganda doesn’t even truly realize that they’re spreading propaganda.

It’s sleeper propaganda.

Propaganda for Liberal Brainiacs

Sociological propaganda doesn’t tell you exactly what to do. It just asks you, in a very innocuous way, why Lauren Sanchez Bezos doesn’t deserve happiness, because she’s trying to protect the narwhal after all.

She’s won environmental awards.

She can’t be that bad. She’s no Melania Trump.

Is she?

When Trump hijacks the Kennedy Center to show the Melania movie, that’s overt propaganda. Meanwhile, sociological propaganda comes in the form of Bill Gates publishing a book on the climate crisis, telling us to drink from paper straws while he traverses the globe on his private jets, buying up all the farmland, and paving the way for AI data centers. It comes in the form of supposedly liberal billionaires declaring their desire to pay more in taxes, when they can just cut a check to the IRS any time. It comes in the form of world leaders hopping from one climate conference to the next, giving the mic to oil executives. And I know this will make you angry, but you need to hear it: Sociological propaganda even comes in the form of AOC telling you that Kamala Harris is “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” in Gaza, when she’s not. That’s propaganda aimed at you, a reasonably intelligent person.

Political propaganda works on dummies. It’s bottom-shelf.

You, my friends, get the top-shelf propaganda.

Feeling special?

We must resist all forms of propaganda

Sociological propaganda works on you, even if you’re smart, because it often tells you what you want to hear, while enabling the exact opposite of what’s good for you. And many of our friends fall for it. They fall for it despite their liberal politics. They fall for it despite their test scores. They fall for it despite their degrees.

That’s why we have to pay attention to it.

You find Ellul’s propaganda in your Netflix and chill. You find it in commercials. You find it on the local news. You find it in Marvel movies. You find it in fluff pieces. You find it in Inc. Magazine, Fast Company, and Forbes.

You find it all over the personal wellness industry and their bazillion podcasts, listicles, and online courses.

In America, it’s all selling the same message:

All of your problems are personal. The mountain is you. Get out of your own way. You only have to work 4 hours a week. Girl, wash your face! Think and grow rich. Here’s the secret, you can just ask the universe for everything. Here’s 7 habits of high effective people. Actually, it’s grit. Don’t waste your time on protest and politics. It won’t serve you. You are a badass. Make your bed.

And so on…

When CNBC or Business Insider devotes an entire section to how this or that millennial made a million bucks while living in their parents’ carriage house, that’s horizontal, integration, sociological propaganda. If you have a good bullshit detector, you can smell the hidden message: “Millennials complain about the economy all the time, but we found a few who struck it rich. Why can’t you do that? What’s wrong with you??? It’s not the system’s fault. It’s not lack of regulation. It’s not capitalism. It’s not neoliberalism. It’s your poor, deafest attitude.”

Does Jim Cramer know that he’s an agent of Western propaganda?

Probably not. He’s just a CNBC host.

A book like Rich Dad, Poor Dad delivers just as much propaganda per page as anything coming out of Iran or China. But since Robert Kiyosaki doesn’t work for the government (he’s just really good friends with Trump), his book doesn’t get labeled as propaganda. He’s just a good little capitalist whose book, published in 1997, taught an entire generation of young men to resent their hardworking fathers simply because they weren’t cutthroat CEOs or tax evaders.

Nobody regards a book like The Secret as propaganda. The author isn’t even American. But her book mainstreamed Christian Science into the American public consciousness, with a big boost from Oprah. It conditioned an entire generation to believe diseases only exist in your head, you can think your way out of cancer, and the universe exists for the sake of granting wishes.

Nobody considers that propaganda, because it doesn’t come from a government source, and it doesn’t look like a war poster.

It’s still propaganda.

Ellul said that the U.S., China, and Russia have always engaged in propaganda. He even said that Maoist China leaned more heavily on more overt propaganda because it’s how they reached their rural populations. As they modernized, their propaganda evolved. His theories explain why we see these two competing strands of propaganda in the U.S. The glossy, sociological propaganda works on educated Americans and ensures they don’t deviate too much from the larger goals of the Epstein class. They use guys like Epstein and Miller to run sophisticated, horizontal networks of propaganda. Meanwhile, Trump posts the more overt, vertical propaganda that works so well on his rural MAGA voters.

It’s almost like they’ve read Jacques Ellul…

But that’s crazy, right?

That’s why the work of sociologists and philosophers like Jacques Ellul is so important now. It probably sounds like a conspiracy theory to talk about books, magazines, and podcasts as forms of propaganda. But it’s there. It’s true. There’s an entire body of research, an entire discipline, devoted to carefully explaining why and how it functions, and why it works so well.

There’s no easy solution for this problem. You just have to practice good listening. You have to be willing to examine your own thoughts. You have to look at your own sacred kittens. You have to be willing to admit you were wrong about something, and you have to realize that you’re not simply the sum of all your political beliefs and opinions. You’re a thinking machine. You’re allowed to change.

I was raised as a “moderate” Republican. For a while, I was a diehard “vote blue no matter who” liberal. Over the years, I’ve changed. I’ve had to look back on things I said and did, and decide that I can do better. I learned something else: Propaganda works best on people who are scared to admit they were wrong. It gives them the license to cling to beliefs they know aren’t true.

So, that’s what American propaganda looks like.

You can fall for it, and so can I.

But we can do better.