6/ Kautilya told the king that open wars are a bad idea. Your own people can die. Heck, you can die.
Concealed wars are when you spread lies to beat your enemies. This is safer and easier.
He gave examples of how to do this.
6/
For example, figure out how to get an undercover spy to spread the rumor that their king is cheating his top ministers.
If you’re lucky one of them might even be driven to assassinate the king and then throw their kingdom into chaos.
7/
Think how much easier that is than trying to kill your enemy king in an open war.
A Soviet Union spy manual bragged that Russians had invented and perfected the art of disinformation.
Interestingly, that claim is a piece of disinformation, told for a purpose.
8/
By the way, I know these things because I have a book coming out on disinformation so I had to do a lot of research.
The point is that using lies as a way to weaken and destroy an enemy, and build up your own power, goes back a long way.
9/
Disinformation is used by people who are trying to consolidate power, which is exactly what the Republican Party is trying to do.
I’ve said that oligarchs and would-be oligarchs have a problem: If they are trying to consolidate their own power and maintain a hierarchy. . .
10/
. . . with themselves at the top, they have to enact policies that hurt their own constituents.
So what do they do? They lie. They invent enemies who are trying to upset the order and destroy and take what belongs to ‘real’ Americans (who are of course, white).
11/
People who are lying on purpose in order to gain power are not going to stop.
People believe lies for all kinds of reasons. The lie can make them feel good. The lie might reinforce their worldview.
12/
Trump told his base that they are the "real Americans" and they would be at the top of the hierarchy except for people taking what belongs to them. This made them feel good.
(Most of us don't consider these guys the top of any hierarchy)
13/
Sarah Huckabee Sanders explained that Trump’s lies pointed to an "important truth."
An example: Birtherism was a provable lie, but pointed to what Trump’s base sees as an "important truth": Obama is Black. He’s not a real American.
14/
Some people embrace the lies because the lies destroy, and they want to destroy.
Some people caught in these cults hard to reach. Some are your own family members. Cult specialists have ideas for reaching them.
Psychologists tell us that mocking them will not help.
The best strategy is to outnumber them at the polls.
16/
Right now, one of the best vehicles we have for reaching them is the criminal investigations into the Capitol Riot because the people who participated were deep in these conspiracy theories.
I’m reading their pretrial motions, and some are realizing they were duped.
17/
That's why I'm watching these investigations closely. I also think that defamation lawsuits can help dissuade those who are lying on purpose.
In the end, there will always be liars who cynically lie to gain power.
18/
There will also be people who believe the lies because they want to believe the lies, and people with cognitive limitations, who I believe we should think of as victims.
Another strategy is how to respond to the lies, but that's a big topic, so I'll save it for another day.
19/
I think disinformation is the greatest threat to democracy. As our friend Kautilya explained, it's easy and much safer than violent coups.
Fascism is based on lies. Rule of law requires truth (I talked about this in video #6)
The Internet makes it much easier to spread disinformation and harder to control.
The most important thing we can do is educate people. If you have teenagers (particularly boys) online, teach them to spot a person trying to radicalize them.
21/
Speaking of teenagers, mine is looking at superfun videos.
Me: "You don't think informational videos on the history of disinformation are fun?"
Teenager offers one of those teenager-special-level-stares. Almost an eye-roll, but more effective.
There are probably some who are so far gone that they'll think the courts, judges, juries, and police are all in a grand conspiracy to get them to lie and say that they were duped.
I think enough, though, will see the light and tell their friends.
One consideration is the probability that the defendant will be convicted and face jail time because otherwise, you run the risk of ruining an innocent person's life.
(A jailed person probably loses his or her job. What if there are kids to support, etc.)
The goal of the GOP is to dismantle the federal government and return to that time (before 1920; for others, before 1860) when white men could basically do what they wanted.
On the frontier, they could grab land!
Before modern rape laws, they could grab women!
2/
Before the alphabet-soup regulatory agencies (the "deep state") they could cheat!
🔹They could fix prices and manipulate markets!
🔹They could sell rotten goods and it was the buyer's fault for not inspecting better!
🔹They could pollute rivers!
Mr. Gideon was a poor man accused of theft. He represented himself because he couldn't afford a lawyer. He was convicted. He appealed to the Supreme Court on a handwritten letter from prison. The Court heard his case and held that poor people get court-appointed lawyers . . .
. . . he had a new trial with a local lawyer who understood how the false accusation happened. The lawyer did some investigating, presented facts that Gideon has been unable to obtain, and Gideon was acquitted.
Our current criminal justice system took form after the Civil War, when the reactionaries and White Supremacists found a way around the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery except in the case of punishment for crimes after conviction. 1/
The solution: Convict lots of Black men, put them in jail, and put them in chain gangs. At the time, there were no limits on what police could do.
So they often beat confessions out of innocent Black men.
Along came Charles Hamilton and his protégé Thurgood Marshall.
2/
As a result of literally decades of work (and one of the few times we had a liberal Supreme Court under Earl Warren), we got rulings that the Fourth Amendment outlaws things like beating confessions out of people.
If we're lucky, Trump will be politically bankrupt with at least 60% of the people, which is not enough for the crazies to seize the government, but enough for them to remain dangerous.
Prison will not matter to them. Why would it? His followers do not live in a world of facts. They will see him as a victim.
Imprisoning leaders never breaks up a movement.
I'd hope it would cause him to lose credibility with at least 60% of voters.