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I ran into a friend’s father I hadn’t seen in awhile and his first question was: “Is this real?”
I didn’t know exactly what he was referring to but he didn’t really have to specify. Did federal agents actually shoot two Americans dead in the streets of Minneapolis? Did our government actually label the mom who said she wasn’t mad a domestic terrorist, and call the ICU nurse who was helping a woman off the ground an assassin? Did they really tell us to be grateful that they saved a 5-year-old boy from the freezing cold by shipping him off to a Texas detention center?
It’s all pretty hard to believe, and the government is trying to make sure that we don’t. The victims were no angels. The people in the streets have ill intent. The left is inciting violence. The media is making up stories again and should frankly be ashamed of themselves for even asking about the victims of the president’s pedophile friend. Those emails are fake. That name had to be redacted. No one cares about this story anymore.
Do we know if the government is still murdering suspected coke traffickers instead of arresting them? Did they really just arrest a pair of journalists who two different judges refused to charge? Did the President actually say that he intends to take over the election process in places that didn’t vote for him? Did he really just post a video depicting America’s first Black president and former First Lady as apes, only to have his White House dismiss the criticism as fake outrage?
Is this real? Yes, in the sense that it all happened. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult – and disorienting – to figure out what’s true and what’s not anymore; to tell the difference between factual information and propaganda and the absolute slop that pollutes our screens. Was that image AI? Was that human-seeming reply actually from a bot? Was that bot-seeming post actually written by a human? Does it even matter?
In many ways, the confusion and craziness benefits regimes that don’t want their authority questioned or their decisions criticized – that just want to govern without all the messiness of a participatory democracy. I’ve been thinking about the title of Peter Pomerantsev’s memoir that chronicles his time as a TV producer in Russia during the period where Putin consolidated power: Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. The Russian people weren’t so much brainwashed or persuaded by the regime – they simply didn’t know what to believe, what was true, or whether objective reality was even possible.
There are obviously echoes of that from the Trump administration right now, but I think it’s important for us to realize that their strategy has failed in Minneapolis – and it’s failed because of the people of Minneapolis... ...
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