How Trump and the Far-Right Media Broke America's Mind

We are witnessing one of the biggest, most brutally effective psyops in modern history.

by Ben Cohen

Merriam Webster’s definition of a ‘psyop’ is ‘a military operation usually aimed at influencing the enemy's state of mind through noncombative means’.

Those noncombative means include targeting “the emotional and mental state of the enemy” by bombarding them with an “array of communications media—including radio and TV broadcasts, loudspeakers, newspapers, magazines, leaflets and even comic books”.

Over the past nine years, we have witnessed one of the biggest psyops in American history. It wasn’t orchestrated by the US military, or even the US government. Instead, it was a highly coordinated effort between far-right media entities, the Russian government, and the Murdoch media. This psyop was aided by a highly lucrative network of far-right ideologues, Alt political commentators, and finally a billionaire who turned Twitter into an amplifier of right-wing conspiracy theories.

The result of this ongoing psyop is the normalization of fascism, and the demonization of the only political party capable of preventing it.

The Breitbart effect

The Columbia Journalism Review conducted a fascinating study in 2017 that showed the far-right, pro-Trump website ‘Breitbart’ had a dramatic influence on the conservative media during the 2016 election cycle:

Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.

The study found that Breitbart effectively captured the pro-Trump audience, then fed them conspiracy theories about the mainstream media to wall them off from reality:

Pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.

Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media. Rather than “fake news” in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it.

Fox News and other right-wing media outlets initially pushed back on Trump’s extremism, but over time the Breitbart became the “center of a distinct right-wing media ecosystem, surrounded by Fox News, the Daily Caller, the Gateway Pundit, the Washington Examiner, Infowars, Conservative Treehouse, and Truthfeed.”

Tucker Carlson became a key figure in the pro-Trump media ecosystem after Trump’s election, becoming the number one host on Fox News and pushing far-right propaganda on a daily basis. Like Breitbart, Carlson cleverly weaved partial truths into grand conspiratorial narratives that became increasingly extreme and fascistic.

The far-right takeover of the conservative media system meant that Americans had to choose their reality bubble — the dysfunctional but reality based mainstream media, or the pro-Trump reality adjacent media. A lucrative cottage industry of Alt commentators also sprung up (initially known as the “Intellectual Dark Web”) that included people like Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Russell Brand, Bret and Eric Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro. These characters built huge YouTube and podcast empires by gaming social media algorithms with viral, provocative content:

Russell Brand’s Youtube channel

The Covid pandemic

The Covid pandemic saw an even greater acceleration of the media’s balkanization. Conspiracy theories spread on social media like wildfire, and the Alt media industry capitalized on its profitability. By attacking the “mainstream media” and claiming a shadowy networks of liberal elites were trying to control the population, influencers cashed in on the nation’s paranoia. Figures like Tucker Carlson acted as intermediaries between Alt conspiracists and the mainstream media, questioning mainstream narratives while promoting baseless conspiracies by “just asking questions”.

Tucker Carlson with Covid conspiracy theorist Dr. Robert Malone

The net effect of this was to severely undermine public trust in government during a lethal pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The far- right and Alt media networks spread disinformation without repercussion, and even forced Donald Trump to undermine his administration’s efforts to get people vaccinated. Serious studies have shown that hundreds of thousands of Americans died due to disinformation spread by Trump and the far-right/Alt media ecosystem.

Elon Musk pours gasoline on the fire

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in April of 2022, he turned the most politically influential social network into a major propagator of conspiracy theories and disinformation. This reflected his own terrifying descent into far-right ideology after one of his children came out as trans. The Independent reported that Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson believed that “the transition of his child had a profound impact on Musk’s world view, with the rejection of him as a father triggering his descent towards fringe conspiracies and setting him on a trajectory towards becoming a leading figure in the culture war.”

Musk was then further “radicalized by his own social media platform”, spending hours every day spreading far-right culture war propaganda to his 200 million plus audience.

When Musk publicly came out in support of Donald Trump after the first assassination attempt in July of this year, he pledged to use Twitter and his considerable financial resources to get him elected. Since then, Twitter (or ‘X’) has turned into one of the most dangerous threats to American democracy since the Civil War. Musk and thousands of far-right activists are using the network to propagate baseless conspiracies at a truly frightening pace. There are posts about rising crime in Democratic cities (crime is actually falling), Democrats shipping in illegal immigrants to vote in elections (they aren’t), and widespread voter Democratic fraud (that doesn’t exist). In Musk’s paranoid world, Democrats are censoring free speech, and he and Donald Trump are the only people trying to stop them (this despite Musk censoring journalists he doesn’t like, and suppressing stories that portray Trump negatively).

They have, for lack of a better phrase, flooded the zone with shit, and made a lot of it stick. Republicans now genuinely believe there is a concerted effort by liberals to commit voter fraud. They think crime is rising, and believe millions of illegal immigrants are committing violent crimes and voting in elections to get Democrats elected.

If you follow Musk’s timeline over an extended period of time, you can begin to see just how far gone he is. The Guardian spent a day tracking Musk’s frenetic, conspiratorial tweets that started at 8:00am in the morning and continued until 3:11am the next day (before starting up again at 8:01am). From baseless attacks on the media to corresponding with far-right racists, Musk’s online activity is a sign he is not just a social media addict, but a victim of its toxic algorithm too. Musk has created a hellscape of his own making, and he cannot escape.

Unfortunately, most of his followers can’t either.

Fascism in America

The far-right media, Alt influencers, and Elon Musk have now achieved something far beyond the dreams of most militaries around the world. They have sanitized fascism in a liberal democracy, and now stand to elect a man who tried to overthrow the US election in 2021.

After January 6th, no one, including even the most diehard MAGA cultists, wanted to be near Donald Trump. He was a toxic force in politics having refused to accept the election result and brought violence to the nation’s capitol. But the Trump friendly media brought him back to life, and here we are just four days out from the election facing the prospect of another Trump term.

We know from Trump’s previous administration and his own words what he plans to do when in office. He will rip apart environmental protections, pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, defund and destroy public education, gut Obamacare, and weaponize the justice department to go after his enemies. He will round up millions of suspected “illegals” and throw them into detention camps without trial or oversight. Trump will go after his enemies in the media and use the government to enrich himself, just as he did before. He will continue radicalizing the courts, rig elections, and claim fraud when MAGA Republicans aren’t elected. Ukraine will be left to Putin to carve up as he sees fit, and America will stand on the side of dictators like Viktor Orban, Kim Jong Un, and every other strongman Trump has a “personal relationship” with. Recently, Trump has also promised he will let anti-vax conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. “go wild on medicines” in America.

This is now a very real possibility because the far-right media has convinced millions of Americans that the Democrats are “just as bad”. They believe Democrats are the party of war, mass censorship, and wokeism, so are prepared to elect a fascist to stop it. It is one of the most coordinated, sinister and brutally effective mind hacking campaigns in modern history, and Americans have less than a week to stop it.

With a soundly beaten Trump, the MAGA media complex will unravel. There can be no cult without the cult leader, and a humiliated Trump will finally mark the end of this sordid chapter in American history.

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