An endless firehose of lies abetted by a compliant media
By 
Hannah Arendt in the year Hitler came to power
Attorney General Pam Bondi on “the real constitutional crisis:”
“He was overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming majority of the United States citizens to be our commander in chief and that’s what he’s been doing,” Bondi said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Just since January 20, we’ve had over 170 lawsuits filed against us. That should be the constitutional crisis right there.”
The quote is from a CNN story, and it was followed by this graph:
Bondi’s claim is false. Donald Trump failed to gain a majority of the votes in last November’s election, and the margin of his victory was one of the smallest in presidential electoral history. When a CNN reporter confronted her with these facts, Bondi responded that she had been referring to an overwhelming majority of white male Protestant evangelical voters.
OK I made all of that up. There isn’t a word in the story about the unambiguous fact that Bondi was lying about the margin of her boss’s electoral victory. A flagrant lie by the nation’s chief law enforcement officer — such lies are breaches of her professional obligations as a licensed attorney — is simply allowed to stand totally unchallenged. Thus does the gaslighting of the American public continue apace.
The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
Hannah Arendt in 1951.
Rupert Murdoch & Co. treated this insight as a business plan rather than a warning to the future.