It is absolutely true that there was a vast amount of misinformation being spread about Covid-19. We also know that hostile foreign nations, such as Russia and North Korea, have routinely injected massive amounts of misinformation into the national conversation via social networking sites and other vectors.
But whilst the history of Covid-19 misinformation is critically important to understand [given that it has cost the lives of a quarter-million citizens and counting], there's a bigger, more dangerous picture here.
As Rudy Giuliani famously said on live TV, "
Truth Isn't Truth!".
The bigger problem here is that if you can take a significant part of the population and persuade them that provable facts are wrong, that scientists are wrong, that evidence is irrelevant, then you are actually creating a malleable population that is ripe for catastrophic manipulation. President Trump isn't the first person to describe the press as "The Enemy of the People" - the same refrain has been used by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, to name just two.
The moment that you can persuade that slice of the population to ignore the facts, an entire country can suffer the consequences.
For just one example, consider the idea of "free at the point of use" healthcare - the sort enjoyed by many western nations, including France, Germany and the UK. In the United States, we are told that this sort of thinking is "socialist nonsense". But look at it from a purely economic perspective: in order for the United States to pay for "free at the point of use" healthcare would be from general taxation, i.e. income tax and corporation tax.
Who would stand to pay "more" if that model were adopted? Multi-millionaires and billionaires, that's who. So... roll out a massive disinformation campaign to declare that "free at the point of use" healthcare is somehow "socialist" and "bad". But the scary thing is to think about all those people in the country who earn less than say $5 million a year who think that it is bad - the very people who stand to gain the most and yet have been persuaded by misinformation that it would be a bad idea. In other words, even though "free at the point of use" healthcare would be a significant benefit to the vast majority of Americans, it is being peddled as "socialist" and "un-American" - by the relatively small number of billionaires who would stand to pay the most, through general taxation, if it were implemented. In other words, being opposed to "free at the point of use" healthcare and "sucker" are starting to look remarkably similar...
Most of the time, these sorts of truths are hidden behind impenetrable walls of misinformation. Now and then, however, the truth leaks out. Like when President Trump admitted that
if the Republicans made it easy for the Democrat majority in some states to vote [i.e. by not jerrymandering districts, by allowing postal voting], then there would never be another Republican President. In other words, a Republican President admitted that free and fair elections could be utterly harmful to the minority Republican government...
We've reached a point where the scale and audacity of the lies is stretching credulity. Yet the scary thing is how many people continue to believe the lies, who want to believe the lies.
I watched President Trump's 2016 campaign carefully and one of the things I thought he was most incredibly successful at was tapping in to a vein of public sentiment that said, "If you're having a tough time, if you're being abused by 'The Man', I'm here to tell you that I can stop it. I'm here to tell you that it's not you that's at fault..."
It was a masterstroke. With one statement he set up a construct in which the listener could project their own grievance on his loosely-worded issue and see themselves; relinquish their own responsibilities for their circumstances by having someone to 'blame it on The Man' for them, then set himself up as the only viable solution.
A misinformation masterclass. We should all be afraid.
