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This sounds just like you, Hate! Your tactics exactly,
What makes Putin’s brand of propaganda unique is that it’s not designed to win over converts; it’s not built to ‘prove’ a point. The goal is to create confusion and raise doubts, often through a stream of contradictions and lies. Using the Kremlin’s firehouse approach, so much confusion is created so often via a multitude of media platforms, it becomes impossible to navigate the deliberate fog. Putin has buried Russia in that misinformation morass for more than two decades.
This isn’t traditional Beltway spin, where partisan players tease out and extend the facts in order to make a preferred point. It’s a sophisticated, KGB-influenced brand of postmodern propaganda that deftly mixes facts with fiction, with constantly shifting storylines, to the point where it’s not possible for most Russian news consumers to discern the truth. They stop even trying. Collective passivity is the goal.
“At the heart of this mind-set is the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth or even facts,* because everything is spun or disguised to reflect advantageously on one group or another,” Vanity Fair noted in a seminal piece from 2017 about Trump’s early embrace of Putin’s propaganda playbook. “This dark internal logic allows for the Kremlin propaganda machine's single greatest achievement: to rub out all distinctions between truth and lies, so that facts, conspiracies, reality, and fabrications are all pulled down into the same indistinguishable muck.”
The result? The dense fog of unknowability. “Once you've successfully swamped truth, you're no longer accountable for your actions,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Mike Mariani.
* Hate's mantra..."Subjectivity is truth"
