Controlling the Voice of the Opposition

0:00I saw a meme this morning on LinkedIn of all places. Yeah, LinkedIn, it's usually the place that us professional media dorks mingle with other professional media dorks so we can create more professional media dorks. It's mostly just for networking, but sometimes people get political like what would be more expected on platforms like Facebook or Twitter, never going to call it X. And for people like me whose work is usually political by nature. Anyway, this was one of those political posts. One I happen to agree with and something shared by somebody that I'm not even connected to. It's a meme that said this, quote, You watched The Hunger Games incited with the resistance.

0:35You watched Star Wars incited with the resistance. You watched The Matrix incited with the resistance. When it's fiction, you understand tyranny, oppression, and despotism. But you refuse to see it in the reality that you live in, unquote. Now, obviously, this meme is taking a swipe at Trump supporters. But nuance is often lost in memes. Because I'm willing to bet that most Trump supporters see themselves as the resistance to liberalism. But I also think this cuts to something much deeper than each side seeing themselves as the resistance. And here's my response to said meme. Quote, Enter the rise of the antihero.

1:13Where the lines get so blurred they stop existing. Because we've trained ourselves to sit with the bad guy and understand him. The problem is that when you sit there long enough, empathy has a tendency to turn into justification. Now the resistance starts identifying with the same things that it claims to hate." Which is something that we're seeing on both sides of the political divide. This kind of sick and twisted symbiotic relationship between two opposing forces that requires each other to exist only so they can feed off of each other in the most unnatural and unholy passive-aggressive toxic alliance.

1:50The right wing needs to hate the left for the current power structure to exist. And the left-wing needs to hate the right for the same reason. Just look at what's happening right now at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Trump's Justice Department just issued federal fraud charges to the SPLC for failing to disclose to its donors that they were funneling money to paid informants within the Ku Klux Klan. Now the right-wingers are pointing at this and saying that it's evidence that the SPLC was funding the opposition so they can justify their own existence. And in return, the SPLC is calling this nonsense, and that they were simply keeping a tight lid on paid informants who had infiltrated the KKK in order to take it down.

2:28Both sides think that they're fighting for the resistance here. The fact that it's coming from Trump's DOJ does nothing to convince me that these charges are legit, and the SPLC should have disclosed this to their donors. And if they were sending buckets of cash to paid informants embedded within the KKK, they had better get ready to show what they got in return for those investments. Yeah, I trust the SPLC about as much as Trump's DOJ. I don't. But I say all of that because then the conversation leaps to another very interesting level of controlling the voice of your opposition. And what an incredibly powerful tool that can be when it comes to disinformation and misinformation and any other kind of shun that is capable of scrambling people's brains at scale.

3:10Because the best way to control your opposition is to lead it. And when you realize that people in power know this better than anyone, another very bizarre twist might occur to you. What if the right infiltrated the left, and at the same time, the left infiltrated the right? So now, each party has been controlled by the opposition for so long that the game is not only rigged, it is completely insane because nobody knows which side they're really fighting for. It's a bit of a brain bender there. So let me reiterate. We're talking about the possibility that the left is controlled by the right and the right is controlled by the left, each side trying to make the opposition behave more erratically so that people revolt against the degraded party.

3:53The problem is, under this hypothesis, is that we would now be in a race towards the bottom intentionally. And no, I don't believe this is the entirety of what's happening in our country, but I do believe there could be something to the idea that impacts us more than we realize. A super pack is the perfect place to play this game. You can pay for messaging that makes your opponent look louder and crazier than they really are. And you can make it look like it came from inside their own house. I mean, talk about blurring the lines until nobody is quite sure who is pushing or why. There are other ways this plays out in the real world as well.

4:29You don't even have to pretend to be the opposition when you can just bankroll the loudest and most unhinged voices from the opposition until they become the face of the entire group. You can do the same thing with grassroots that aren't really grassroots movements. You can help pick who the other side puts forward by elevating the weakest or most polarizing candidates. You borrow their language, and you bend it just enough to steer people somewhere else. Flood the zone with soundbites, video, and commentary until perception becomes reality, because perception is ultimately much stronger than reality.

5:01And when all of this starts working together, it turns into a web so tangled with half-truths and full lies that nobody can quite tell what's real anymore? Or who's actually pulling the strings? Is it any wonder that everyone thinks that they're part of the resistance now? I'm starting to think that most of us don't even know who the real enemy is, and that it's impossible to win these culture wars because they were designed to go on forever. And thinking that all of our problems are because of those damn liberals or because of those damn conservatives is so incredibly elementary when you take any of the dynamics that I'm talking about into consideration.