Republicans Have Weaponized a Closed-Loop Lie Machine That’s Ruining America

If we understand it, we can expose it; if we expose it, we can end it

How can MAGA cultists be convinced to believe things that are easily disprovable; indeed, blatantly ridiculous? From “Obama was actually born in Kenya” (Trump’s ticket to the White House) to “Hillary is running a child sex ring out of a Washington DC pizza parlor” to “Italians used satellites to change the votes cast in the 2020 election from Trump to Biden”, many of the GOP’s favorite conspiracies are patently, obviously, and laughably absurd.

Mainstream media (and Democrats) keep asking: why can’t these people see the reality right in front of their faces?

Here’s why.

We humans are pretty simple creatures. Our brains are highly-evolved goal-seeking organs that are usually thinking about one of four things: food, safety, sex, or social status. We are naturally motivated to pursue things we believe will help us achieve these goals and to avoid things we believe will hinder these goals. Psychologists call this approach-avoidance motivation, and it is fundamental to how we live our lives.

Unfortunately, we are not naturally drawn toward what is true or what is real.

Our assessments of truth and reality are filtered through (and often distorted by) these more basic motivational drives. We naturally pursue things we believe will bring us pleasure and avoid things we believe will bring us pain. We do not naturally pursue truth and avoid lies.

These natural propensities make us vulnerable to lies and misinformation about what is true and real, because what is true and real may not be what we want to be true and real.

We are particularly susceptible to lies that seem to confirm what we already believe. And if what we already believe is also a lie, then our belief system — our basic understanding of how our world works — is essentially a Tower of Lies, one built upon another. As each new lie gets added, we become more and more invested in the belief system as a whole. And we become less and less motivated to even consider the possibility of disproving any part of it. It now gives us pleasure, a sense of cognitive closure (and an absence of cognitive dissonance). We don’t want to change it.

So, if we already believe Democrats are horrible monsters, it’s easy to accept the additional belief that they are also running a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor. We don’t subject that additional belief to much cognitive scrutiny because it just “makes sense” in that it aligns with everything else we think we know about Democrats. So we just accept it.

MAGA cultists don’t ask “is it crazy?” They only ask “is it possible, given what I already believe?”

The question I want to consider here is: How do Republicans manage to get their followers into this state of blind acceptance of whatever lies or conspiracies they want them to feed them?

How to Build a Closed-Loop Lie Machine

I believe the Republican Party in America has figured out how to weaponize this chink in our cognitive armor to make it very difficult, perhaps impossible, for its most avid followers to rise out of the muck of lies and fake enemies it has created for them. Here’s how this Lie Machine operates:

First, you create a media bubble within which you (and only you) can control what information reaches your followers

This task was extremely difficult and expensive just a few years ago, but it has become infinitely easier today, thanks to the rise of cable news and social media. As if by magic, you can now blast Fox News directly into millions of households (not to mention gyms, bars, and doctors’ offices) and rely on Facebook and Twitter algorithms to guarantee that your followers see only what you want them to see, and nothing else.

Second, you use your media bubble to condition your people not to believe or trust anything they see or hear outside the bubble

This is the real purpose of the bubble — not to be an advocate for your policy preferences, but to fuel hatred and distrust of your opponents. This allows you to create a blanket delegitimization of all alternative information that might reach your followers. You decry “fake news” and attack scientists, teachers, government agencies — any individual or institution that might provide information that contradicts your carefully cultivated lies.

Third, you feed your self-serving lies to your now captive audience of followers

You’ve effectively isolated them from any information that might cause them to question the lies you want them to believe. As for what these lies are, and why it’s so important to propagate them, we’ll get to that in a moment.

Fourth, you wait for your followers to start echoing back the lies you’ve been telling them

This is a key step. You use your media bubble to promote a lie about, say, an “invasion at the southern border.” You and your allies repeat it over and over. Then, when your people start expressing concern over the “invasion at the southern border,” you’re ready to move on to the next step.

Fifth, you now declare that your lie needs to be taken seriously because “people believe it’s true”

This is where you close the loop. It’s really quite clever. You create the lie. You promote and reinforce the lie within your media bubble. You get your people to believe the lie. Then you claim the lie must be taken seriously because people believe it’s true.

Bingo! Your lie has become a legitimate concern of national political discourse

This is how it breaks out of your insulated media bubble and into the mainstream media stream and general public awareness, where it now must be debated as a legitimate “position” that needs to be “considered” against “alternative positions.”

Once one lie makes its way into the mainstream media, other lies can be added on top of it. Each lie appears to validate the prior lies upon which it stands. Together, they form the Tower of Lies discussed above. To loyal Republican followers, this Tower of Lies begins to be seen as their tower of truth. They become even more dependent on your stream of lies to make sense of the world you are presenting to them.

An Obvious Question

Why go to all this trouble? Why spend years building an incredibly sophisticated Lie Machine that just drags your followers deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole of delusion, misinformation, fear, and loathing?

Why not use your powerful media bubble to spread verifiable truths about how much you are improving the lives of your followers?

The answer, I believe, is quite simple.

Republicans have to lie to their MAGA base because they don’t actually serve their MAGA base.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Republicans juggle two essentially incompatible constituencies: the plutocrats whose interests they really serve, and the MAGA culture warriors whose fears and prejudices they manipulate to stay in power.

Republican elites have nothing in common with their “deplorable” MAGA followers. But they need those MAGA votes. They have chosen to get those votes not by representing and advancing the interests or concerns of MAGA voters, but by making sure those voters remain as angry, fearful, and distrustful of the opposition as possible.

Republicans’ strategy for holding power in America boils down to one thing: convincing their followers that voting for a Democrat is equivalent to voting for Satan.

As long as they can keep their voters distracted and focused on the enemy, those voters are less likely to notice that the party they are voting for is actually making their lives worse, not better. And since the idea that Democrats are the spawn of Satan is utter nonsense, just like the idea that Obama was born in Kenya, Republicans need the Lie Machine to sell it. And so far, Rupert Murdoch and his stable of American Traitors at Fox News are more than happy to provide the necessary media bubble to make the whole system work.

How to Break the Lie Machine

Once you understand how the Republican Lie Machine works, and why it must work the way it does, you can identify its weak spots and potentially dismantle it.

Interestingly, you cannot break the Lie Machine by citing evidence or facts. This is a fool’s errand, one mainstream media often insists on pursuing. The reason it doesn’t work is because any contrary “facts and evidence” will never penetrate the bubble. They are pre-defined as lies and deceptions, and therefore are dismissed before they can even be considered.

To break the Republican Lie Machine, you must pop the media bubble that sustains it.

Popping the media bubble means suing Fox News into bankruptcy, eliminating the accountability exception enjoyed by today’s social media platforms, and imposing financial and legal costs on those who lie for political gain, just as we impose costs on businesses that lie for financial gain.

Tide® is not allowed to say other detergents turn your laundry grey. Republicans should be held to at least the same standard when they lie about Democrats, or about minorities whose only sin is favoring the Democratic Party.

If Republicans want to inject a constant stream of lies into American political discourse, they need to be held accountable for the resulting damage. If they can’t prove their lies are true, they need to be punished for libel, commensurate with the level of damage inflicted.

Democrats should be happy to hold themselves accountable to the same standard. Unless they also want to lie constantly to the American people, they should not be worried about creating significant penalties for such behavior.

The notion that politicians should be immune from libel laws is obsolete. Republicans’ weaponization of their Lie Machine should cause Americans to abandon neutrality regarding political speech and start holding politicians accountable for the damage produced by the lies they tell the American public.

Finally, a more vigilant mainstream media can disrupt the Republican Lie Machine at its fifth step, where it seeks to carry its lies over to the general public. This is the point where, for example, a Ted Cruz might say Congress should not certify the 2020 election because voters in Republican states have “expressed concerns” about voter fraud.

The media should hold Senator Cruz accountable for explaining where those voter concerns came from and why they should be taken seriously. If the reason for the concerns is because Senator Cruz and his party and media allies have been telling voters they should have those concerns, without providing any tangible evidence backing up the claim (and ignoring 60 failed court cases demonstrating it’s false), then that’s the story the media should be telling, not the story Senator Cruz wants to tell about how the certification process should be stopped because we haven’t yet answered voters’ legitimate questions about voter fraud.

Mainstream media needs to learn that when a political party circulates a lie or conspiracy among its followers, and then claims the lie or conspiracy must be taken seriously because too many people believe it’s true … well, that’s not evidence, it’s sophistry.

Some major media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post are getting better about spotting this particular kind of circular logic by Republicans and their allies, but awareness of this tactic needs to spread much more widely across state and local news outlets as well, if we are ever to render the Republican Lie Machine inoperative.

I argued two years ago that America needs to imagine its future without the toxic presence of the Republican Party. That need is more critical today than it has ever been.

The Republican Party is no longer a legitimate American political institution because it no longer considers itself constrained by the principles of the American Constitution.

Republicans have abandoned the three necessary requirements for participating in America’s Constitutional Republic: compromise, tolerance, and evidence-based reasoning. They have abandoned compromise for ultimatums, threats, and brinksmanship. They have abandoned tolerance for hatred and bigotry. And they have replaced evidence-based reasoning with their closed-loop Lie Machine.

We must vote the Republican Party out of power before its Closed-Loop Lie Machine destroys democracy as we know it. To do that, we must pop the rightwing media bubble within which the Republican Party has trapped its followers. To kill the Republican Lie Machine, we must expose its workings to the light of day.