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Anne Applebaum is sounding the alarm.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and historian published an 8,000-word piece in The Atlantic this week, warning about “the new propaganda war” and the dangers disinformation poses to the free world. The cover piece — excerpted from her forthcoming book, “Autocracy Inc.” — spotlighted how autocratic forces across the globe, including Donald Trump in the U.S., are waging sophisticated information wars “to discredit liberalism and freedom.”
The efforts, Applebaum stressed, are having the intended corrosive impact on the public discourse, warping the way in which people view democratic governments and the principles in which they stand for. In Applebaum’s eyes, the deployment of propaganda by authoritarians — and authoritarian wannabes such as Trump — is one of the most profound issues of our time.
“I think it is at the center of one of the worst crises for American democracy this century, certainly in recent decades,” Applebaum told me by phone Tuesday. “If we can’t agree on what happened yesterday, then how do we write legislation about it? If we don’t share the same reality in the democracy, then how do we debate how we should organize our world?”
“It’s incredibly undermining to democracy,” she added. “Democracies rely on people having a shared perception of the world.”
Which is why, Applebaum said, those who hunger for power seek to destroy the very notion of truth. Applebaum explained that Vladimir Putin’s Russia “pioneered” the “firehose of falsehoods,” a tactic that Trump has employed in the U.S. and others have used across the world to seize and maintain power.
“The idea that if you lie connately and repetitively all the time, is that you make people feel that they don’t know what is true,” Applebaum told me. “They don’t believe journalists. They don’t believe independent ombudsman. They don’t believe institutions or science. And it’s a very useful thing to dictators.”
Indeed, it’s easy to see how Russia’s propaganda war has had enormous benefit for the Putin-led country as it simultaneously wages its kinetic war on Ukraine. Notably, the narratives the Russians have sowed into the public discourse have been echoed by popular American commentators who have influenced the public and made it incredibly difficult for Congress to pass legislation providing necessary aid to Ukraine.
What makes the situation in the U.S. differ from other countries, however, is that the disinformation is not flowing from state-controlled media. There is no RT, Sputnik, or Xinhua. Instead, Trump wields an army of free and willful collaborators — people and institutions who lie on his behalf, choosing to serve as propaganda vessels.
Instead of being ordered by force into action, these outlets and pundits have been incentivized by a broken information economy that algorithmically rewards them for spreading dishonest ideas, outright falsehoods, and dangerous conspiracy theories. Trafficking in lies has enriched and empowered people like Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Steve Bannon, and an entire platoon of right-wing media figures.
“It’s a voluntary network,” Applebaum acknowledged. “And it shares Trump’s goals. It makes people distrust and dislike traditional sources of information. Presumably, it’s done with the idea that they will be the beneficiaries. If people no longer believe doctors and newspapers and universities, then what are they going to turn to? They’re going to turn to other sources of information. Maybe that’s Steve Bannon’s podcast — and that’s then good for Steve Bannon.”
Everyone else, of course, bears the cost.
Bizarrely, though, despite the clear toll that the lies promoted by Trump and his propaganda servants are taking on American society, the legacy news media continues to largely turn a blind eye to the story. You won’t find evening news anchors like David Muir, Lester Holt, and Norah O’Donnell regularly covering the destructive lies unleashed upon the public by MAGA Media. Outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post inexplicably decline to even identify networks such as Fox News as “right-wing” in their news reporting.
And yet, it’s not possible to actually understand the biggest issues of our time without understanding the propaganda pipeline poisoning the information well. It is not possible to understand why Congress struggled to pass Ukraine funding without knowing how figures such as Carlson helped spread Russian propaganda to the masses. It is not possible to understand why most of the country does not believe the election results without understanding the role MAGA Media played in undermining the elections system. It is not possible to understand why Trump continues to hold a firm grip over the Republican Party without understanding the propaganda machine at his disposal.
When I asked her why the establishment press is not more aggressively covering the story of our time, Applebaum, however, appeared stumped.
“I don’t know why it’s not covered more,” the celebrated writer candidly told me. “It seems to me to be one of the very central issues of modern society.”
