The Big Lie Rolls Along

Joseph Goebbels must be giggling in his grave.  The Nazi propaganda chief has been dead for well over half a century, but his spirit is very much alive.  Indeed, it has been resurrected by American liberals who have adopted his techniques for promoting their cause.

Goebbels once opined that if a lie is told often enough, it will be believed.  The lie can be enormous and based on nothing but a desire to deceive.  It can be outrageous and on its face absurd.  Nonetheless, if it is repeated with sufficient regularity, it will begin to sound like the truth.

The Germans managed this despite the bizarre nature of some of their claims.  First they blamed the Reichstag fire on the communists.  Then they condemned the Jews for subverting the nation.  Then they actually told the world that the Poles started World War II by attacking Germany first.

Now we find liberals using this same playbook against president Trump.  They too have discovered the virtues of repetition, simplicity and consistency.  To be credible, an egregious untruth must not only be reiterated, it must be reiterated in the same streamlined terms.  Complexity or inconsistencies would ruin the effect.

Thus, for the Nazis, either the communists did it, or the Jews did it, or the Poles did it.  Meanwhile, for the liberals, Donald Trump did it.  He ought to be impeached because he ruined the country and sabotaged the constitution.  But most of all, he collaborated with the Russians to win the election.

How often have we been told that the Trump team colluded with the Russians?  How frequently has it been suggested that our president is a puppet of Vladimir Putin?  The evidence for this does not matter.  That it is totally absent is no determent to an endless loop of accusations.

James Clapper, the former director of the National Intelligence Agency has recurrently said that he has seen no evidence of collusion.  But this is discounted.  Actually it is ignored.  Senator Diane Feinstein has said virtually the same.  At best, she has lamely alluded to unsourced newspaper stories.  Yet her words too have disappeared into the ether.

What has held center stage is the drip, drip, drip, from reporter after reporter and politician after politician.  They all say the same thing.  Where there is smoke, there must be fire.  They do not, of course, confess that they created the smoke and are assiduously fanning it.  That might generate doubts.

And so the big lie roles along, night after night, on TV channel after TV channel, and during the day in newspaper after newspaper, and twenty-four hours a day on the Internet.  First, the New York Tines concocts a fairy tale, then the Washington Post picks it up.  Then CNN, MSNBC, and CBS illustrate it and trumpet it around the world.

So consistent has this sequence been that a recent Harvard study documented that in many cases over ninety percent of stories told about Trump have been negative.  While he gets more attention than previous presidents, it is uniformly hostile.

The White House advisor Steve Bannon described the media as the opposition party.  Journalists immediately took umbrage.  Bannon decried the volume of fake news and was mocked for misunderstanding the function of a free press.

But the press operates like an insurrectionist party.  A large part of it has been agitating to remove Trump from office.  Resorting to the Goebbels playbook is part and parcel of this program.  The big lie is supposed to mobilize the American people so that they demand his expulsion.  At minimum, it is intended to stop his conservative agenda in its tracks.

The fact is that the national journalists and liberal politicians swim in the same Washington Swamp.  Although they pretend to care about the constitution and our democratic traditions, they do not.  As self-declared socialists, they are actually power hungry totalitarians.

The goal of contemporary liberals is plainly to change America.  And they don’t care how they do it.  The first step is therefore to fool voters as to what is happening.  That is the purpose of the big lie.  The question is: will it work?

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University