Double bind

After one information session, I asked my main Russian intelligence briefer about what we could do. She was young, a Russian-speaker, and philosophical about disinformation. She shrugged her shoulders. Not because she wasn’t concerned about it, but because the dark genius of disinformation is that it worked a little like double-bind theory. If you engaged disinformationists—which is what they wanted—they won; if you did not engage them, they won. They tapped into prejudice and ignorance and grievance. They weren’t so much creating resentment as aggravating it. Yes, facts mattered, but since they did not really engage with the world of facts, it didn’t have much of an effect. At the end of the day, she said, they didn’t acknowledge that empirical facts even existed. Their goal was to persuade everyone else of that, too.
Information Wars (2020) by former TIME editor and Obama administration Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel. Page 243

All that stuff about democracy and fairness and diversity

“All the questions I got were fundamentally the same. People around the world asking, ‘All that stuff you’ve been telling us for so long — about democracy and human rights and fairness and diversity — it’s not really true, is it?’ American public diplomacy is ultimately about values. And now people around the world were saying that this story was a fiction. It’s not as though people around the world had never said that before. We’d been called hypocrites long before Donald Trump decided to run for president. But we’d never had someone running for president who so explicitly rejected those values both in his ideology and in his behavior. That was something new.”
The view from 2016, from Information Wars (2020) by former TIME editor and Obama administration Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel. Page 326

A referendum on reality itself

There is perhaps no better place to witness what the culture of disinformation has already wrought in America than a Trump campaign rally.

Tony Willnow, a 34-year-old maintenance worker who had an American flag wrapped around his head, observed that Trump had won because he said things no other politician would say. When I asked him if it mattered whether those things were true, he thought for a moment before answering. “He tells you what you want to hear,” Willnow said. “And I don’t know if it’s true or not — but it sounds good, so fuck it.”

The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along — and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Leaving the rally, I thought about Arendt, and the swaths of the country that are already gripped by the ethos she described. Should it prevail in 2020, the election’s legacy will be clear — not a choice between parties or candidates or policy platforms, but a referendum on reality itself.

The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President, by McKay Coppins, The Atlantic, March 2020
“He tells you what you want to hear, and I don’t know if it’s true or not—but it sounds good, so fuck it.”
— Trump rally attendee Tony Willnow, from The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President, by McKay Coppins, The Atlantic, March 2020

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951