Some ruminations on that Signal chat.

The news outlets seem to be focused particularly on the incompetence indicated by the leaked Signal chat involving Trump’s top advisors having an emoji-filled discussion about how and when they were going to bomb Yemen. The story is that having such a top-secret chat on a messaging app and accidentally inviting the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine to join all indicates scary levels of incompetence among the leadership of the world’s preeminent military power. And this is obviously true.

But there are other stories that this incident speaks to, that aren’t being as widely analyzed in the news. Which is the fact that these top advisors seem to have fully immersed themselves in a form of self-deception, and it is not an act. They are, apparently, not playing the part of being deluded nationalists, they are actually fully delusional. They didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, they seem to have been raised on it, and now they’re swimming in it.

Hearing about how they discuss the geopolitics they’re apparently responding to, they seem to actually believe that NATO is a defensive organization, that the US is somehow protecting Europe, that the US has been taken advantage of by Europe, and that the US has regularly been engaged in a form of self-sacrifice through the practice of being the world’s policeman, which seems to involve the thankless task of protecting shipping lanes for the benefit of Europeans.

It’s just one example of the type of conversation that presumably must take place often, that the public isn’t privy to. But just being privy to this one conversation seems to very much bolster the observation many of us made a long time ago, that this new crop of far right leaders in the US seems different from many of those from previous generations, in that they appear not to be using propaganda as a tool to get the public to support their duplicitous policies, but they believe the propaganda themselves.

We in the US live in a society governed by money, which is obvious to any reasonable observer of how things work in the US. But at the same time, we can all hear politicians from both parties regularly rejecting such basic observations out of hand, claiming they govern on behalf of the public, rather than the corporate elite, even though they accept massive amounts of corporate donations and then proceed to do things like cut taxes on the rich and eliminate regulations and oversight bodies that get in the way of corporate profits.

We’ve never had much democracy in the alleged fatherland of modern democracy. It’s always been rule by the rich. We’ve never had much free speech in the home of the First Amendment. It’s always looked good on paper, but not been effectively enforced in practice, when the speech involved is critical of the establishment.

The propaganda has always been patently false. But increasingly, it seems, it is internalized and believed as factual by the heirs to the creators of the propaganda machine. This Signal chat is evidence of a degree of self-deception, of a sort of blowback of the propaganda machine, that seems somehow even more alarming than if these advisors were lying and knew they were........

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