Data and Propaganda

The most effective propaganda isn’t designed to make you trust it. It’s designed to make you think things are this bad. A lot of the time, propaganda isn’t trying to convince you with facts. It’s trying to wear you down. It either makes you feel too tired to fight, or it pushes you to think, “Maybe I should meet them in the middle.”

Take “government fraud” as an example. They will throw out an absurdly large number—like claiming millions of people over 150 years old are collecting Social Security checks. It’s such a baseless claim that it likely isn’t true. But once that number gets planted in your head, it still changes how you think. You start telling yourself, “Okay, maybe it’s not millions, but there must be a lot of fraud.” That’s how propaganda gets ingrained in you. It doesn’t need you to fully believe it. It just needs you to feel like some part of it must be true.

This works especially well on social media, because many people naturally try to stay “in the middle.” So when propaganda pushes an argument to an extreme, it shifts the center of gravity. Even if you reject the extreme claim, you may still move in their direction without noticing. You end up thinking, “It’s not that bad, but it’s definitely not good.” And that alone is already a win for them.

The second part of propaganda is exhaustion. Even if you don’t believe it, the constant repetition makes you tired. And for any administration or movement, they don’t actually need you to support them. They just need you to stop resisting. When you feel worn out and stop pushing back, the result is the same as if you supported them.

In fact, if you actively agree with them, that still means you’re paying attention. You’re engaged, and you can still be influenced, persuaded, or pulled into debates. But the best outcome for them is when you don’t care anymore. If you tune out and stop caring about politics, they can do whatever they want with less resistance.

So propaganda isn’t only about making you believe a lie. It’s about planting an idea so deep that you feel like “there must be something there,” and about exhausting you until you stop caring. They know we don’t trust them. They know they’re lying. But they keep going anyway, because the goal isn’t trust. The goal is to make you tired, make you numb, and make you give up.

That’s the purpose of an endless propaganda campaign.