The Method to Their Madness

by Diane Joy Schmidt

Perhaps the brain fog is beginning to clear. On Saturday, June 14, while quite a few less than 200,000 turned out to watch Trump's parade in DC, almost 2% of the country, more than 5 million, turned out for "No Kings Day" rallies and protests. For months we had been struck dumb hearing 'we're doing this to eliminate waste and inefficiency' while watching the government take a wrecking ball to the country. We should have been able to laugh at the absurdity of it all but seemed unable to.

I wonder if that was the result of cognitive dissonance: 'In essence, propaganda leverages cognitive dissonance by creating a conflict between beliefs and reality, then offering a narrative that resolves that conflict, often at the expense of truth and critical thinking.' *

Chess master Garry Kasparov has explained its use in Communist Russia's propaganda playbook, "The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."

In Heather Cox Richardson's June 5th "Letters from an American" daily Substack newsletter, she revealed the motives behind the push by the current administration to decimate the government and install incompetents in leadership roles. There is indeed a method to that apparent nonsensical madness. Richardson writes:

... "But, while billionaire Elon Musk was the figurehead for that group [DOGE], it appears his main interest was in collecting data. His understudy, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, appears to have determined the direction of the cuts, which did not save money so much as decimate the parts of the government that the authors of Project 2025 wanted to destroy.

Vought was a key author of Project 2025, whose aim is to disrupt and destroy the United States government order to center a Christian, heteronormative, male-dominated family as the primary element of society. To do so, the plan calls for destroying the administrative state, withdrawing the United States from global affairs, and ending environmental and business regulations. […] 

Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) told Vought: “Be honest, this is never about government efficiency. In fact, an efficient government, a government that capably serves the American people and proves good government is achievable is what you fear the most. You want a government so broken, so dysfunctional, so starved of resources, so full of incompetent political lackeys and bereft of experts and professionals that its departments and agencies cannot feasibly achieve the goals and the missions to which they are lawfully directed. Your goal is privatization, for the biggest companies to have unchecked power, for an economy that does not work for the middle class, for working and vulnerable families. You want the American people to have no one to turn to, but to the billionaires and the corporations this administration has put in charge. Waste, fraud, and abuse are not the targets of this administration. They are your primary objectives.”

The use of the government to impose evangelical beliefs on the country, even at the expense of lives, also appears to be an administration goal. Yesterday, the administration announced it is ending the Biden administration’s 2022 guidance to hospital emergency rooms that accept Medicare—which is virtually all of them—requiring that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act they must perform an abortion in an emergency if the procedure is necessary to prevent a patient’s organ failure or severe hemorrhaging. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients. The Trump administration will no longer enforce that policy. Last year, an investigation by the Associated Press found that even when the Biden administration policy was being enforced, dozens of pregnant women, some of whom needed emergency abortions, were turned away from emergency rooms with advice to “let nature take its course.” ...

Let us be hopeful that this destructive nightmare we find ourselves in ends soon and that our better angels within and amongst us lead us out of the narrows to a better place.

Editor's Note:

• 'In essence, propaganda leverages cognitive dissonance by creating a conflict between beliefs and reality, then offering a narrative that resolves that conflict, often at the expense of truth and critical thinking.' Source: Google Gemini AI, which came up with this definition with the prompt, 'Cognitive dissonance in propaganda' and which also pointed to this article: https://wszystkoconajwazniejsze.pl/nicolas-tenzer-how-propaganda-takes-advantage-of-our-cognitive-dissonance/.

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