Some "technique" thoughts on the Trump conviction

Starting with a real sin, repetition as propaganda, overcriminalization

This is not a piece about how Trump’s conviction affects his election chances in November, or what comes next, or even so much about the trial - but per the latter, I would highly recommend you read Guy Benson’s piece “On the Trump Verdict” in TownHall. It really brought home to me what a contrived process the whole thing was, a bunch of corrupt men diving through legal books to find anything they could use, really, to punish Trump for winning the 2016 election, and help ensure he doesn’t win another one.

But a few macro thoughts, if I may:

Silence the opposition by starting with a real sin

The Left regularly employs this tactic where they start with a real sin, and then blow it all out of reasonable proportion. Because if there is a real sin at root, they know that will immediately silence about half of the conservative opposition, people will not be willing to defend someone who sinned. So, in this case, Trump paid money to a porn star (not, by itself, even a crime, actually), but nobody wants to defend that, so whatever happens to him now, the opposition will be relatively muted. In the end they might be executing someone for stealing a jolly rancher, but if you dare speak up against that, you get the “OH, SO I GUESS YOU’RE OK WITH STEALING THEN” response. This is not at all what you meant, of course, but they will yell it loudly and repeatedly and make it impossible for you to mount a rational case amidst the noise, which is the point.

If you’re thinking, “but shouldn’t the Left be subject to the same danger?”, no, they aren’t. Because if you do accuse a favored target of a real sin, the response is to completely ignore the sin itself, and accuse you of really acting out of sexism/racism/whatever, put you immediately back into the mode of having to defend yourself. So that in the end we get things like, and remember this really happened, a Democratic congresswomen who resigns because of an inappropriate relationship with a staffer, who tells everyone she was really only attacked because of sexism, and then she literally goes on the progressive conference circuit as a heroic victim. She should have just disappeared in shame and disgrace, but she spun the story as if she was bravely fighting oppression.

Repetition is the technique of the propaganda today

The major technique of the propaganda today is repetition. It isn’t particularly sophisticated, but it works. They’re going to win on stamina, they’re going to tell the lie twenty times for every one time you tell the truth, so they win. We thought (some people thought, anyway) that the World Computer would make everyone super well-informed, but (fairly often, anyway) what has actually happened is that he with the loudest megaphone determines the “facts”.

And so - and I’ve seen 1500 people say this now, which is good, means we’re figuring it out - a big point of this whole affair was just to get that word, “felon”, which allied media can now repeat 5000 times before the election. All the details about what happened in the trial will be forgotten, if they were ever known, and that’s fine, they got the word they wanted. It’s already happening.

Or here, Frank McCormick pointing out that George Floyd, having been sentenced to prison eight times, was never referred to by Politco as “felon”, as Politico now goes out of its way to use that word about Trump.

So people got their marching orders. Occasionally those orders are even made explicit.

You’d hope the fact that they are so predictable would at least make it easier to break people out of the propaganda matrix.

Yes, we do have an overcriminalization problem

Solzhenitsyn makes the point that under communism, the “worst” criminals were the political criminals, because they actually threatened the regime. Simple thieves were not a big deal, and could even be useful, since private property wasn’t really supposed to be a thing. But opposing the regime, even in a small way, was a route to the gulag.

And so I feel somewhat that we are now under communism¹. I agreed with the old Left that we had an overcriminalization problem, particularly for non-violent offenses. And perhaps today’s Left sort of agrees… as long as we’re talking about rapists and murderers and stuff. But if you’re an old woman who committed the “crime” of praying in front of an abortion clinic, you should die in prison. Of course you should, look how dangerous you are. Much more dangerous (to us) than a rapist.

And so people have pointed out that the prosecutor in the Trump case had an extensive history of reducing felonies in his jurisdiction down to misdemeanors.

But then for Trump, that same man searches high and low to turn a bookkeeping offense into, we shall see, perhaps something deserving of extensive jailtime. Yes Virginia, we have an overcriminalization problem - oppose the regime and it’s “give me the man and I will find you the crime”. (And, on a related note, there are simply too many, and too many vague, laws on the books. That is what makes the whole scheme possible.)

I can’t help but recall that the Left spent decades telling me how flawed the US justice system was (and again, sometimes I agreed). They have now pivoted very quickly to “look, he was convicted by a jury, so that settles it. What are you, some kind of Justice Denier?” Stop your “attacks on the justice system” already, we never did that.

That is all.

1. Actually over time I’ve come to see communism less and less as an economic system per se, and more as a system of state control and associated popular mindset. So I have much less objection to referring to various people as “communists” who really, OK, don’t much care whether we get that economic system or not, but definitely want that system of surveillance and control.