The Propaganda Prone Brain
It took decades for doctors to understand the effects of repeated concussions. Is anyone studying how 24/7 propaganda ruins a human's ability to reason logically?
A substantial minority of Republican voters believe the Kremlin’s propaganda. We see these Kremlin-afflicted people in Congress: House Speaker Mike Johnson, Chaos Queen Marjorie Tayler Greene, and many more. These people also populate the Trump rallies where with nothing to back up their arguments, they say stuff like “Zelensky is a dictator, a Nazi.”
The problem is that they do have “something” to back up their arguments. Relying on the propaganda that leaks non-stop from the Kremlin, which is then backed up by Fox News, Trump, and the rest of the MAGidiots, Republican supporters are proving the existence of a physical deficiency that is reshaping their mental capacities. Nothing good can be said about the brains of people who unquestioningly accept the propaganda and lies of the Kremlin.
“I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base,” the Foreign Affairs Committee chair told[Puck News correspondent Julia Ioffe] Ioffe. “And I have to explain to them what’s at stake, why Ukraine is in our national security interest. By the way, you don’t like Communist China? Well, guess what? They’re aligned [with Russia], along with the Ayatollah. So when you explain it that way, they kind of start understanding it. And unlike 1939, we want to provide deterrence so that we don’t have to send anyone over, and we don’t want Article V invoked. Because the next thing the Russians will do is [attack] Moldova, Georgia, and then part of the Baltics. Or at least provoke a lot. So I just think it’s preventative. “
Referring to his far-right colleagues against supplying aid to Ukraine, [Michael McCaul (R-TX)] McCaul added, “There’s a new wing of isolationism, and that takes you back again to the 1930s. That was not helpful. Now, I understood it — because World War I was very bloody, and Americans were like, “We don’t want to go over to save Europe again.” But had we been involved earlier and provided that deterrence, we could have saved a lot of blood and treasure (Russian Propaganda Has Infected a Good Part of My Party’s Base).”
The people choosing to believe Putin find in him the same “positives” they see in Donald Trump. To begin with, Putin is “Donald’s friend and respects him,” and they believe that if the Biden administration supports Zelensky, then Zelensky is bad. Volodymyr Zelensky was also the “reason,” they think, Trump was impeached the first time.
Then, there is the irrationality of the argument that everything — and as it turns out, they mean everything! — is part of an iceberg-sized conspiracy against Trump. What we see on the top of the water is nothing compared to what lies below the surface, and this is why they accept Putin’s grievance that “everything has always been rigged against a powerful, traditional, and holy Russia.” Putin tells them that he is for the traditional family and against gays and lesbians, and those words ring so Fox-Newsy-true that their little brains melt with adoration.
What many are overlooking is the detrimental effects of the eternal lie. Fox News has spent 26 years reshaping minds that seemingly were already open — weakened — to their fantastical narrative. When it comes right down to it, Fox News needed to alter brains to guarantee its yearly number one position. Unspun truth does not sell as well as manufactured truth, and so Fox has spent millions making shit up and selling it as reality. The brains that now regard all of this as truth were eventually altered, and suddenly, the white lie wasn’t enough to feed the cravings — just like the mind of an addicted person. The one snort, shot, or sip no longer silences that inner voice for inputs.
In Russia, however, there has never been truth, and Russians are born into the lie. I won’t go into it now, but you can’t imagine how frustrating it is when trying to talk about any historical event with someone born and educated in Russia. Everything they know about the past 120 years is filtered through the Soviet and post-Soviet reality. Any time you provide enough information and facts to them to prove why a certain opinion they have is not right, they will scoff it off as: “Well, we can’t really know. I mean, were you there?” Clearly, I wasn’t a fly on the wall when Molotov and Ribbentrop signed the Nazi and Soviet pact of non-aggression — which most Russians deny ever happened — so when I say, “No, I wasn’t present,” they feel liberated as if my “facts” are really just opinion.
In the case of Russians, as I said, they are born into this way of thinking. It is taught in schools, and the narrative is peddled around tables at home. Americans, however, should not be prone to this nonsense, but thanks to the shameless commercialization of the right-wing brain, half of our country is disabled and needs help.
According to the Boston University CTE Center, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a degenerative brain disease found in athletes, military veterans, and others with a history of repetitive brain trauma. CTE is caused in part by repeated traumatic brain injuries, which include concussions and nonconcussive impacts. In CTE, experts believe a structural protein in neurons called tau misfolds and malfunctions causes adjacent proteins to misfold and sets off a chain reaction where this malfunctioning tau slowly spreads throughout the brain, killing brain cells (What Is CTE?).
We have all lost loved ones to the Fox News disease. These Foxified loved ones are not capable of hearing anything that does not align with their off-the-wall conspiracy theories. Everything for them is something. A question as simple as “What time is it,” can lead them down the rabbit hole.
They need help and so do the rest of us.