Spencer and Jeff define propaganda as a deliberate effort to distort societal perceptions—like Nazi Germany’s Goebbels-led campaigns or modern false promises—to manipulate the Zeitgeist, contrasting it with fringe misinformation (e.g., anti-vaxxers, Flat Earthers) that lacks strategic intent. While Spencer argues these groups are byproducts of institutional distrust, Jeff insists they’re zealots without power-driven agendas, though their influence could be weaponized if co-opted. The debate underscores how propaganda thrives on undermining authority, even when fringe movements reject objective reality, revealing the fragility of shared truth in polarized eras. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
I'm here today with Jeff.
Jeff, how are you doing?
Evening, buddy.
Not too bad.
Yourself?
Pretty good.
Just off the top, before we get involved in anything else, if anyone has any questions, concerns, comments, things they really think we're wrong about, send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Otherwise, we're going to get right on with the show.
Today we want to talk about propaganda.
Spicy.
Yeah.
A lot of people call a lot of things propaganda.
They tend to call anything they don't agree with propaganda these days.
So I think it's important to really talk about this and make sure that it's only the thing that it really is and not any of the things that people claim that it is.
So what is propaganda really?
I call propaganda an organized effort to distort reality or the accepted truth of society at large.
So the idea, you know, as soon as you accept that you're going to engage in propaganda, you are accepting a set of ideas about the world.
You're saying that the public has a generally held set of views and that you wish to then change some of those general set of views.
There was a word that I thought would come up a lot more often on this podcast when I first started it that has almost never come up, but it's a word called the Zeitgeist.
It's a German word that means the spirit of the age.
Coincidentally, Zeitgeist was in about seven of your title options that you discovered were taken by other people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, yeah.
But if you're going to engage in propaganda, this is sort of the thing you're attempting to influence is the zeitgeist.
And so maybe you might even consider propaganda to be an attempt to engineer the spirit of the age or to engineer the zeitgeist.
What do you think of this, Jeff?
Oh, absolutely.
Propaganda is social engineering.
Yeah.
100%.
Right.
But it's usually not for a specific thing.
It's usually trying to change an entire outlook on the world or on a group or a specific thing.
What do you?
Well, no, usually like I see like your definition of the act of propaganda, I think, is fairly spot on.
But like part of what comes with that is the purpose for which it is used.
And typically, I think propaganda is used when you have a small group of people seeking to sway the consciousness and thus control the outcomes or actions of a large group of people.
That's fair.
Yeah.
I mean, if you were a large group of people, you probably wouldn't care all that much about what a small group of people thought unless that group of people was very influential.
Like it would be super weird if all of the electorate collectively worked to get some kind of propaganda to be used against just our politician.
That would be super weird.
I think when it works that way, they call it lobbying.
Yeah, I guess.
Well, you might call it an election.
Yeah.
But it would be not that weird at all to think of politicians attempting to use propaganda to use against all of the electorate.
Oh, 100%.
So I have a couple of questions that I think about when I think about propaganda.
Here's a big one that I'm sure is going to take up a bulk of this podcast today.
Is propaganda different than what happens in current day political campaigns?
Do we consider what politicians do and say on the campaign trail and what the additional groups that are meant to help the politicians to win elections, do we consider what they do to be legitimate political discourse?
Or do we consider them to have some unearned lever on society?
What do you think?
Before I answer, I need you to expand upon the point some unearned lever on society.
Well, I mean, to me, science is an earned lever on society.
It's attempting to show people what's really happening.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, I got you.
So propaganda is not doing that.
It's not based on objective reality.
It's just trying to earn political favor or interest.
Or provide social leverage.
Sure.
Yeah.
Through falsehoods.
A small number of people influencing a larger number of people.
I think one would be hard pressed to comb through in any contemporary political race on our side of the border, south of the border or in any other Western democratic nation.
You would be hard pressed to find a political campaign from any politician, regardless of stripe, that did not use propaganda at some point, in my opinion.
Yes, there is like the purpose of the political campaign, ostensibly, idealistically, back in the day when all this stuff was dreamed up, was an opportunity for politicians to go around and tell the public what they were planning on doing and, you know, inform them of what their platform was, what they would do if elected.
And then a bunch of politicians slowly discovered over time that people's attention spans are generally short.
And sometimes you can get away with not telling the truth when you tell them what you're going to do.
And you tell them you'll do something and then subsequently not do it.
And you might still survive unscathed next election if you manage to bullshit them enough.
So like, I would consider that 100% to be propaganda.
If you're trying to gain elected office based on straight up false promises that you have no intention of following through on, or chucking mud at your opponent on points that you know will score points with the voter base.
Right.
We see that all the time.
And that chucked mud rarely contains very much substance at all.
It's usually like a light dusting of facts heavily seasoned with like buzzwords and trigger words and sensationalist speech.
Oftentimes when I see these, the thing that passes as facts is largely removed from all context.
Oh, 100%.
That's your favorite thing to do.
Quotes taken way wildly out of context.
And there's very often, it's almost comical, the scary music that goes along with it, like politician X really wants to take the money out of your wallet.
And it shows a picture of them and it's slightly darker than it needs to be.
Violins playing in the background.
Right.
Maybe, you know, if I were making it like a parody of it, you know, their eyes would glow red like a demon.
Yeah.
You make a good point there because like one of the cornerstones of politics.
Oh my God, I can't believe I'm blanking on it.
Goebbels, Goring, Goebbels.
Goebbels.
Goebbels, the famed Nazi propagandist.
Yes.
One of his favorite tactics and like one of the cornerstones of the thrust of their propaganda campaign is dehumanizing a group or opponent.
And current political campaigns excel at that because like you said, they always find the most unflattering picture.
And if they can capture an unflattering soundbite, that's even better.
So I don't think there's any real difference between like what we think of as like the dark, sort of sinister propaganda used by totalitarian governments, you know, 40s era Germany and 40s through 70s era Russia.
I don't think there's any difference significantly between that and what we see in current political campaigns or even governments currently sitting in office.
Like it seems like the campaign season never really ends anymore.
I think it happens quite a bit south of the border because like I see a lot of it on the social media content that I pick up and I get a fair sampling of it as a Canadian like we all do.
But up here as well, like I think there's always private ads taken out.
It used to be ads on, I think it might be a subject of another episode or something that we've already brushed across with our social media episode.
But I think like inexpensive accessibility to an audience through stuff like social media has really, really seriously ramped up the level of propaganda in politics.
Because before, if you as a politician or a political party or a political group with an agenda wanted to sway the public consciousness, your only option was to like take out an ad on television.
That was your best bet for reaching a wide audience or like occasionally billboards, but like.
There's even been some in like the New York Times newspapers that were more or less nationwide in the U.S.
Yeah.
But now like all you need is an internet connection, man, and a couple of dedicated volunteers to generate content for you.
And we see it all the time.
Like it actually became a, I'm not informed enough on this to speak to it with authority, but I remember hearing multiple stories in elections over the past five years of like lawmakers kind of throwing their hands up at like, how do we control this?
Because, you know, there's very clear rules over what you are and are not allowed to say during a campaign and how you're supposed to behave during a campaign.
And most importantly, where your advertising money gets spent and what those ads say.
There's a lot of ethics there because like we tried to build a framework around the politicians so they won't lie and cheat all the time.
But social media, because it's such a grassroots thing, it's really easy to basically slip a bunch of false content past the goaltender and get it out to the public consciousness.
And then, you know, if you get taken to task for it, you can distance yourself from it because it wasn't you personally that did it.
Right.
That leads directly to kind of my next thought on this is that we could almost divide this in my mind anyway, we could almost divide this into two separate sort of flavors of propaganda.
One that I would call institutional propaganda.
This would be what a nation or like a political party would do, an organized effort from the top working down and having some strategy involved, like a set strategy.
And something that I would maybe just call organic propaganda.
It might even be called like spontaneous propaganda, but that's probably not as good as organic propaganda, which is more like the propaganda that results from an ideological movement.
Like what?
Well, I'm thinking like Flat Earth or anti-vaxxers or any one of the groups that are maligned enough that they're just not seeing reality the same way anyone else is.
And they're coming up with memes and they're looking for quotes to take out a context on their own.
And they're attempting to distribute these all over the place all on their own as they go.
And this isn't based on a real coherent strategy from anyone.
It's just ordinary individuals who just feel that a certain thing should be true and they are looking to bend the view to look at that thing.
They look at only certain things and say, oh, well, look at this.
This is showing that, you know, the UN is fake and they know that the Earth's flat and that you need to see that this is true.
I mean, this is happening all the time on all these platforms, Facebook and Twitter, especially, but also there must be, I don't go to Instagram, but I probably should.
And, you know, there's got to be some there because they're everywhere else.
And of course, all the darkest corners of the internet is where they would congregate in larger numbers.
That's, of course, where QAnon thrived originally.
And I think that this is this organic propaganda is much more difficult to counter as far as a person that's from what I'm doing is attempting to look at the situation as how do we get people to see objective reality?
Because it's not, it's not a cabal of political thinkers in a room who are working out a strategy and I can't find that room and expose it for what they're really doing as far as propaganda goes.
It's just a series of people who have the wrong set of ideas who are sitting in individual rooms all by themselves and encouraging each other to go on about their propagandistic ways.
Yeah, I got to step in there, man.
I think there is a huge difference between those, like so much so that what you consider organic propaganda, I wouldn't even consider propaganda.
Okay.
Because we should probably pull up like a Webster's dictionary definition of the word at some point through this, just so we're not caught talking completely out of our ass.
Well, let's just take a moment and do that.
I got dictionary.com.
While you're looking that up, I will try and expand upon my thought.
So propaganda has a purpose, and that purpose is not just to make you agree with me, because if all I want to do is make you agree with me, generally I agree with everything or agree in principle or knee-jerk react forward because I agree with it.
So I agree with the premise, so I won't take the time to fact check it.
That's not propaganda.
That's just someone regurgitating things they believe.
Propaganda is, I think, by definition more sinister than that.
It has a purpose.
And that purpose is usually some form of control or profit by the individual performing the act of propaganda.
So the groups that you mentioned, like the flat earthers and the anti-vax and yeah, anti-vaxxers and the flat earthers is their endgame is just to get you to believe this.
Compare that to like a politician who chalks mud at his opponent and tells a bunch of half-truths about him and has some of his aides start a social media campaign that, you know, he's on Jeffrey Epstein's had sex with small children list.
But that politician's endgame towards those with those acts is to get himself elected into a nice cushy role where he can get lots of kickbacks and have a fat life at the trough.
Well, that would certainly be the institutional propaganda goal.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And the Nazi party in Germany, obviously, they wanted to gain as much wealth and power for themselves as possible.
And they did it by selling the German people on this myth of Aryan dominance.
And again, like plenty of evidence, like everybody at the top of the food chain of the Nazi Party, they were just in it for themselves, right?
Wealth and power.
That's all they wanted.
Plenty of evidence for that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But like a coven of flat earthers sharing internet memes about flat earth, they gain nothing by convincing other people to agree with them, other than the satisfaction that they have swayed public opinion to come around to their worldview.
Like I think it's something that's so far removed from the more obviously premeditated nature of propaganda that I don't think it even qualifies as propaganda, even with the organic prefix.
Okay.
So the dictionary.com definition of propaganda is probably not that much different from any of the others, but it says information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.
So here's what I think is kind of more realistically what's happening with these groups that I consider to be doing what I call organic propaganda.
On the surface, like ostensibly, they would appear to be attempting to gain more backing, a larger number of people who agree with their set of ideas.
And I think they would be happy if they got that.
But actually, what is a better description of what they're really doing is really just an attempt to tear down the opposite side.
So when I look at all these groups, and I've looked at several of them for a very long time, they don't care at all that they might have to claim something is true today that they thought yesterday was not true at all.
They don't seem to care at all that there are some levels of hypocrisy in their overall view.
They don't care at all that the shape of the earth, according to flat earthers, has changed on average every three months in the last five years or something.
And they don't care at all that that's happening at all.
That's not, you know, they're not looking for one specific shape that's it.
It's more that they just don't want it to be the shape that the other side says.
And same is true for the anti-vexors.
They don't really care if any of the info that they're putting out today is directly working against anything they said two weeks ago.
They just seem to care that it looks bad for the other side today.
Yeah.
And all the fake news that used to be, it's still there, but it's not quite as big as it was in the peak that it was in about 2016.
All the fake news, they didn't care that anything they said on any of those fake news sites was directly contradicting some other thing previously said.
They didn't even keep an archive of that.
They didn't even try to keep track of any of the lies they said.
They weren't trying to make their untruths coherent.
They only cared that in this one moment, it looked bad for the other side.
And that's a much better description of what really seems to be happening from this side, from my view of the internet and looking at these different groups and attempting to see many of the things that they say.
That's really what it is.
And that fits to me, that fits the description of propaganda, information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, or nation.
The fact that it's not a coherent strategy and no one gains anything is a point that you make.
And I understand it, but I don't think it matters to them.
And I don't think that that's necessary for it to be propaganda.
What do you think?
I'm not sure.
Well, I mean, there's a couple generalizations in the statement that you made, speaking of they as flat earthers, like they're like an organized group and they're not.
No, it's true.
They're a collection of zealots and you need to treat them the same way you would deal with a set of religious zealots.
So speaking about a group as an organized bundle of individuals and then pointing to the chaos and lack of coherence in their argument is, I think, sort of unfair because at their root, they're disorganized.
So of course their facts aren't going to jive day to day because depending on who you talk to, you've got different stories.
And they're all mining from the same filthy pool because we know empirically the earth is not flat.
So they have no one true touchwell of truths to go to for information.
They have to find liars or fellow bamboozled people who are creating or forwarding this false content.
Like as an aside, I think I remember stories not too long ago about, I think it was Flat Earth Circles, but it might have been anti-facts, where the irony got too hard and it wound up in the wrong echo chamber.
Like, you know, the propensity of like the sort of the go-to internet propaganda meme that's like not designed to sway a new person, but designed to reinforce your core base.
And it usually contains a picture of your, an unflattering picture of your opponent with a statement or comment or belief of theirs taken out of context.
And then usually like a real zinger at the end of it that points out some hypocrisy on the opponent's side and allows us all to pat ourselves on the back at how much smarter we are.
That's like the general theme of them, right?
And it's usually including some level of mockery at some level.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, exactly.
And there were some people that started making flat earth memes that were those kinds of attacks against people who don't believe in flat earth, but like so far over the top, like they were deliberately being satirical.
Like these were satire pieces, like something you'd see on The Onion, except they found themselves on legitimate flat earth pages because somebody saw it and went, heck yeah, that's true.
I agree with that.
And forwarded it along.
Right.
So again, like I still don't think it qualifies as propaganda because like, what's the goal other than having people agree with you in your delusion?
Why does it need to be a better goal than that?
Well, like check your debt, check your definition.
Well, the definition doesn't say anything about goals.
It's what, no, but it does say to help or harm.
Help or harm a person, group, movement, institution.
So I guess if we lower the bar of help to, I am satisfied I convinced someone to agree with me, then yes.
Or harm, I made it look like the other side is ridiculous.
I mean, I see anti-vaxxers and all the disinformation from anti-vax to be deliberately spread to harm society, even if they are somehow able to convince themselves that they're helping society.
It still fits the definition.
Well, yes, I guess.
Which is why I why I get it.
I think one of the core points with, I think one of the core points with propaganda, though, is belief.
If the guy peddling it believes it, it's not propaganda.
Okay.
If the guy peddling it knows it to be untrue and is cynically peddling it for another purpose, he's got another goal or another play on another level.
That's propaganda.
Okay.
But if the guy peddling it buys it himself, that's just a zealot preaching to his choir.
Okay.
I think you're onto something there.
Yeah.
I think you got it.
I think you proved your case.
I'm going to, I'm going to give you this one for sure because that's.
Oh my God.
That's like two out of 10.
Sweet.
We're not keeping score, but I got to skip dinner more often.
Today you got this one for sure.
That's the point that I think is the most true is that it's propaganda if the person spreading it knows it's not really true.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
I think that that's that's actually not included in the dictionary definition, but I like that definition better.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay.
I mean, like if you wanted to dive deeper into that, I think it would be better to do a parallel between like anti-vaxxers and flat earthers and like cults.
Well, cults are going to, they're on an upcoming episode, so we're not going to give you that today.
But I do have a closing sort of thought for this episode.
So when I think about this, you know, whether or not we're going to accept organic propaganda as real propaganda or not, when I think about this thing.
Except we just conceded that we won't.
Like you just said, I was right.
And it's been recorded.
Well, I can still call it organic propaganda.
Okay.
I think it relates to a feeling that many sort of have increasingly now that the world itself is fake, that the things we believe are true are only true because of perception.
And that if we can change the perception of what's true, then we can change the actual world.
This allows people to put themselves in direct opposition to literally anything.
They can claim that gravity isn't really there or that there's a secret world of comic book superheroes that work to save us from equally powerful super villains.
They can claim that the world is actually inside out and that all the people who are attempting to help us to stay alive are actually trying to kill us for reasons they can't explain.
To me, this is the illusion of the power of democracy.
We pick our leaders based on how many votes they get.
And then some of us now have come to the conclusion that we can pick our reality if we can just convince enough other people to also believe in that reality.
And I think this is a thing that's at the heart of this problem, this organic, we'll call it pseudo-propaganda.
How's that?
Does that grab you?
Okay, that'll work.
Organic pseudo-propaganda.
Yeah, right.
So that's what I think is really at the heart of this is that people really think that they can change reality if they just change the minds of enough people.
And that's not really true.
Objective reality is there whether we know it's there or not.
Before we knew how light worked, light worked the way it worked.
It was always radiation coming from a star that's very, very close to us.
Even when we didn't know that that was true, that was still true.
In the age when everyone in the Western world believed that the earth was flat, it still wasn't flat.
Even if all of us at the time believed it was, it still wasn't.
And all the facts about how the world works, you know, germs were real and were there before we ever knew that germs existed.
Everything was true.
And that's, that's the, the real message I'm trying to get across to people is that we have to find a way to accept objective reality as it is.
We have to get away from this idea that we just have to convince everyone else that something else is true.
And then that would be fine, because that's never going to get us to real solutions.
Well, I mean, I think a lot of what you have been discussing as sort of, what are we calling it?
Organic pseudo-propaganda.
Organic pseudo-propaganda.
Right.
I think is really more of a byproduct of institutional propaganda, perhaps the love child of institutional propaganda and our modern information post-truth age.
It's like, I totally agree with what you said about how we hit on a point now where like everybody's jaded.
Everybody believes that everyone's lying.
And there's always like, I'm sure if you ran a poll of like a random sample of anyone in the Western world, you would get a general sentiment that as a reflex, we do not trust the word of authority anymore.
Right.
That sounds right.
And of course, a go-to play in democratic propaganda is, you know, your most, your loudest messaging is generally always the guy trying to unseat the incumbent.
And that's why so much of political campaigns center around smear campaigns and fear campaigns.
So we've just been fed a steady diet for decades of the people in charge are frauds, the people in charge are monsters, the people in charge are lying to you.
In some cases, the people in charge actually were lying and were frauds.
But in almost all those cases where they were, the voices that were attempting to tell us about the fraud was still wrong about what the nature of the fraud was.
Yeah, like it's which tells me that they were still just making it up, even if they happened to be right about them being fraudulent.
So it's really interesting.
Yeah, it's like Communist Manifesto 101, right?
Like the bourgeoisie convinced the proletariat to overthrow the ruling class by vilifying and demonizing the ruling class, which is easy to do because they're already assholes.
But like the bourgeois want the proletariat to do the work, but they're planning on being the new ruling class themselves at the end of it.
That's the old cycle, right?
And then a new bourgeois class rises up.
Like, you know, there's never more than two siths.
And the cycle continues ad nauseum.
But I think sort of the wingnut fringers have always been there.
It's just they haven't had the reach that social media affords and that the information age affords.
So I think these messages that we're seeing, they've always been out there.
They just spend so much more time circulating in the collective consciousness because all you need is an internet connection to get it out there.
And, you know, a handful of people who agree with you to click and forward.
And exponentially, messaging grows so fast.
Right.
I think like the combination of the great big megaphone that social media affords with the constant barrage of negative messaging about people in authority and who's in authority?
Science.
Yeah.
Right.
Like how long have we been, how much have we been told lately, trust the scientists?
Right.
And when the people in charge are telling us to trust the scientists, of course, those with natural social media oppositional defiance disorder.
Are like well, obviously we can't trust the scientists.
Yeah, they.
They say science is a religion and you can't trust these religious zealots.
So now you know.
But those same people will say oh, but we should trust this set of religious principles, which is much less founded than science.
But like I don't think, like specific to flat earth and anti-vax, like I can't conceive of any political gain or political agenda that could be satisfied, other than the fact that anti-vax might statistically coincide with pro-life, in which case you can tug on one hook to get the fish to bite for the other thing.
But because there's no gain for someone in a position of power to improve their position of power by getting people to believe what they believe, I don't, I don't believe that these things qualify as as propaganda.
They're propaganda byproducts.
They're the wing nuts that haven't yet been steered by someone, like the same people that are are spinning this stuff, are the ones that could very easily be whipped up to believe that you know the foreigners are coming for our jobs Or any of the other like terrible, sinister propagandist acts that have been committed in the past to steer the public towards acts of violence.
But like the meat and potatoes of what it is, they are arguing is not propaganda, it's just wrong.
Like they're just wrong.
Okay.
Well, with that, I think we're done for the night.