"....once you've convinced enough people that truth is just whatever you say..."

[Miles Archer]

Thom Hartmann
March 11, 2026 8:00AM ET

....once you’ve convinced enough people that truth is just whatever you say no matter how outrageous or transparently false it is, you can do pretty much anything.

You can bomb a school full of little girls and blame the victims.You can try to rig an election and, when you lose, call it stolen from you. You can watch a million Americans die and say the virus is just going to disappear. You can claim that tax cuts for billionaires will help average working-class people. You can say that increasing poisons in the air and on our crops will Make America Healthy Again. You can argue that destroying unions will increase working people’s standard of living. You can claim that taking people’s healthcare away “encourages individual initiative” and “independence.”
Trump didn’t invent this. But my G-d, has he ever perfected it.

Trump also didn’t build this lie machine all by himself. Most of it was built for him, over a period of 50 years, with billions of dollars, by morbidly rich people who never appear on television and never have to answer for any of it.

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/trump-iran-2675993330/

[sop]

1. Trump is the inevitable end product of corporate mass media's 50-year disinformation strategy.

[jfz9580m]

8. Can't argue with that

I do dislike it being made all about Trump when he is exactly what you would expect.

Talarico gets it. I posted this recently and I think he gets it. I am not American, but as India will be clobbered by climate change, it is not a matter of indifference to when any crazy politician, whether it is Jay Bolsanaro or Trump, gets into office and breaks more and more shit:

https://www.salon.com/2026/03/09/democrats-should-go-all-in-on-texas-and-talarico/

Instead of portraying the existential fight in contemporary American politics as right versus left, Talarico describes it as a battle between top and bottom. Like an evangelist giving an altar call, his bid is invitational in nature. His refusal to place the blame solely on one person — Donald Trump — in favor of indicting “the system itself” has the potential to build a coalition of progressives, liberals, independent voters and disaffected conservatives. “Who was sitting in the front row at the inauguration?” he recently asked at a rally. “Who runs the 24-hour corporate media that treats news as entertainment? Who owns the algorithms that keep us angry and divided? A handful of billionaires have redesigned our politics for their own profit.”

I wish Talarico well. His youth is also a plus. I realized recently looking at Epstein and other garbage that it has little to do with ageism..I am an older woman battling loathesome systems myself. Someone like Alexabdr Wang superceding the only ai scientist I really trust, Prof Yan Lecun, is s bad sign.

But it is a totally different situation with our power elite, far too many of whom have far too many unsavory entanglements.

For survival it would be best for honest young people, who will have to contend with a very corrupt system as they try to build back better, to compromise minimally to avoid getting corrupted and bend only to unavoidable pragmatic considerations.

[Doodles]

12. Twilight Zone '63

My husband just insisted I watch the episode “He’s Alive.” I think Rod Serling was prophetic and knew all about a Trump kind of person. It’s pretty freaky. With Dennis Hopper.
Also finally saw Neuremberg. Amazing film.

[Goonch]

2. ;-{).....

[malaise]

3. A lot of truth there but eventually people wake up

and tear it to bits.

[UpInArms]

4. Past the paywall

https://archive.ph/GnJyc

[malaise]

5. Thanks

[NH Ethylene]

6. And, War is Peace . . .

[kairos12]

7. To do a bad paraphrase of Hannah Arendt

You don't have to convince people of your propaganda, you just have to convince them to believe nothing is real.

[jfz9580m]

14. Very true

All that “do your own research” was really bad for society.

This is the type of stuff I find most frustrating:
https://www.audubon.org/news/no-5g-radio-waves-do-not-kill-birds
Where idiotic conspiracy theories these anti-vax and similar types pollute the place with via the platforms of those tech creeps (YouTube, Facebook etc) - they serve as red herrings distracting from the real challenges facing earth. And further allow pro rubbish industry lobbying groups to paint all activists, critics or complainants as kooks.


Further, you have to identify not just the right actors, but also the specific mo. No doubt Russian, Chinese and some of those sleazy Israeli software groups are destroying reality. But based on some things I suspect widespread political ransomware is the mo rather than anything as hazy as influence, a concept I am suspicious of. I don’t think humans are actually that malleable. The Facebook emotion contagion study struck me as the usual humblebrag. They pollute the place and destroy info. That is real. But as the op pointed out a 50 year war on critical thinking and the sane parts of the human gut instinct, being swayed by random events rather than having a consistent worldview, each part of which interlocks with other parts, seems expected.


(Housekeeping note: I am a bit repetitious with my favorite pieces/points from over the years not because I am demented but having now dealt with a foul sledgehammer and trickle across infonomics style I loathe, I am okay with savagely meting it out deliberately finally..damn dolts think I am the one who needs dimwitted tests..I will show the lying bastards..)

[Grumpy Old Guy]

9. "Less is more."

We heard that one during all the leveraged buyouts in the eighties, when they were dismantling our corporations and shredding the workforce.

[Fil1957]

10. Let us not forget that the people that believe this crap are themselves to a a certain extent accomplices. All con men

know that one of the ways to get people to believe outlandish things is to know what they WANT to believe. The truth is out there, and in this age of the internet, one can find out what it is without too much effort.

The thing is though, many on the right WANT to believe these fairytales, and avoid seeking out the truth. Hence, to a large extent they are accomplices.

[PatSeg]

15. I was thinking the same thing

We can find fault with the deceived as well as the deceivers. Some people got the version of "truth" that they wanted. And many people are just looking for a fight and any excuse will do.

[Scubamatt]

11. This is so true . . .

it's one of the reasons why so much of my anger is directed to the so called media. I have come to expect Republicans to be liars and cheats and greedy authoritarians - it's baked into their DNA and you might as well ask the sun not to shine. But we know that the media can be different and should be different and that we cannot have a functioning democracy without some watch dog checking this authoritarian tendency.

[llmart]

13. That is one of the most important points and thank you for expressing it so succinctly.

I watch CBC and BBC news and it is so much more professional than ours. There is no nonstop opinion chatter or trivializing of things that truly matter. Our legacy media has been instrumental in the downfall of our country.

[Martin68]

16. The advantage conservatives and MAGA have is that whatever their politicians say, Fox News, talk radio. and the rest

of the rightwing media will chime in confirming, bolstering, and generally confirming that their lies are "the truth."

[kairos12]

17. Thank you for this. My memory isn't what it used to be.