Epistemic breakdown is a fancy way of saying “destruction of a shared reality.” As a recent essay pointed out, that destruction is politically useful.
We’ve just seen an example in the administration’s propaganda about the murder of Renee Good. “Don’t believe your lying eyes”– believe the “revised” reality we offer instead. But that example is a small part of a sustained assault.
If–like so many Americans–you’ve found the administration’s attacks on science and education mystifying, the essay offers a frightening and detailed explanation.
If you can convince a large segment of the population that experts cannot be trusted, institutions are corrupt, objective truth doesn’t exist, and loyalty matters more than evidence, then power no longer depends on performance or results. It depends on identity and obedience.
Science, especially, has characteristics that the author notes are fatal to authoritarian politics: it produces falsifiable claims that can be tested, and if found to be wrong, require us to update our beliefs. Science is also institutionally distributed. No single leader controls it. Like most scholarship, it requires peer review and subsequent replication. And–importantly–research undermines what the essay calls “charismatic authority.” Scholars and data don’t demand loyalty.
Authoritarian movements cannot survive in an environment where people accept that some claims are simply false, expertise matters, and reality constrains power. So science isn’t debated, it’s delegitimized.
Anti-vaccine rhetoric is particularly effective because vaccines sit at the intersection of government authority, personal autonomy, fear of harm, complex science, and immediate bodily stakes. That makes them ideal for narrative manipulation.
Anti-vax rhetoric accomplishes several things simultaneously: it reframes public health as tyranny, converts inconvenience into persecution, turns expertise into elitism, casts personal feeling as equal to evidence, and creates an “us versus them” moral divide.
Once that framing is accepted, any future policy can be painted the same way: climate action, election integrity, court decisions, civil rights protections.
The essay makes a further point that is hard to believe, given the sheer incompetence and lunacy on display in this administration: the author claims that the lies are often “deliberately obvious.” The objective is a demonstration of loyalty; those who accept the blatant lies prove their loyalty. Those who reject or dispute them self-identify as outsiders, as people who cannot be trusted. As the author points out, this is a tactic used in cults and authoritarian regimes. “The lie becomes a bonding ritual, not a claim about reality.”
When propaganda and lies are understood in this way, it becomes clear why “fact-checking” doesn’t work.
The endless cycle of “Trump said X, but actually Y” doesn’t expose the strategy, it amplifies it. Every fact-check is free publicity. Every debunking is another news cycle. The lie has already done its work by the time anyone “corrects” it.
From a power perspective, this strategy delivers a base that cannot be peeled away by evidence, immunity from scandal or failure, a permanent grievance engine, justification for extraordinary measures, and a population conditioned to accept coercion “in defense of freedom.”
It also creates an enemy class: scientists, journalists, doctors, judges, educators. Once labeled as corrupt, they can be ignored, sidelined, or purged.
The essay provides a long list of the way the strategy has been–and is being–employed, and it will look very familiar to those of us who have been blindsided by assertions that are self-evidently bonkers: vaccines don’t work, elections have been rigged, public schools are indoctrinating our children, etc. etc.
Historians are just beginning to trace the way in which the Right has developed and pursued this strategy over the past 50 years. (The essay includes a timeline, and it names names.) It didn’t start as a coherent plan, but it developed into one over time. As the timeline shows, the destruction of Americans’ shared reality wasn’t random or accidental–it was built systematically “by specific people making specific moves at specific times, each building on what came before.”
The author breaks the history down into segments: the blueprint, the think-tank infrastructure, the merging of religion and politics, the building of the political machine, and so on. You really need to click through and read the lengthy essay in its entirety–it explains what the author calls the “parallel reality structure” we now inhabit–built by a stolen Supreme Court and nurtured by constant norm destruction, media capture, and Project 2025.
When courts enable rather than restrain, legislatures normalize rather than confront, executives reward loyalty over law, media profits from distortion, and capital hedges instead of resists, elite-led correction becomes structurally improbable.
For U.S. democracy to survive, enough ordinary Americans need to make authoritarianism too costly.
I know it’s long, but read the whole thing.
Well, with temps barely approaching positive numbers for the next two weeks, we’ll have plenty of extra reading time. 😉
I fully understand the AI conversations because I’ve been doing that myself, primarily to break down the murder of Charlie Kirk, which I now have altered to the sacrifice or martyrdom of Charlie Kirk for the right-wing cause. If he were allowed to move TPUSA toward the evolving America First, the entire right-wing cause would be disrupted. Most obviously, once you dig in, there is the Israeli component and billionaire Zionist donors. Breaking away from Israel could not be allowed to happen.
If you look at this indoctrination, which I now believe it is, it has moved into our public school system. I know Vern understands this, but Abbott and Paxton in Texas are pushing the TPUSA’s public school clubs in every school in Texas.
The governor claims that public schools are indoctrinating kids into left-wing ideology, so he’s eliminated any clubs that promote anything resembling progressive causes. The LGBTQ+ clubs have been eliminated, while right-wing clubs are forced, and any teacher who speaks out against it gets referred to TEA (Texas public schools agency) for discipline.
So, while Abbott and his cronies across the country claim the “public schools are indoctrinating our children,” it’s really the right-wing that is truly indoctrinating our kids. They decided that young people’s minds are more impressionable than college kids, so they are subtly shifting from college campus programs to K-12.
p.s. From what I’ve learned so far, Indianapolis and South Bend are the financial and legal nexus of the dark money movement. South Bend is like the center of Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society dark money corridor. The ten Cease and Desist letters sent to social media influencers investigating TPUSA and their unethical (maybe illegal) financial loops came from South Bend.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
This book, Orwell’s “1984”, Huxley’s “Brave New World, “It Can’t happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis, “The Plot Against America” by Phillip Roth. All good books to read, curled up by a fire in a warm house on a cold weekend. I will read this essay today.
I may have posted before, but it seems to lways be pertinent these days:
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Apologies to Hans Christian Andersen
There was an Emperor named Donnie who was so exceedingly fond of new clothes, his golden hair, and his equally golden toilet that he spent all his money on. He cared nothing about his subjects except to show off his new clothes. and his Executive Orders.
Every day many strangers, most of whom wore those attractive red hats in hand, came to town, and among them one day came two swindlers named Vladie (Putin) and Elon They let it be known they were weavers, and they said they could weave the most magnificent fabrics imaginable. Not only were their colors and patterns uncommonly fine, but clothes made of this cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was not a loyal follower or who was unusually stupid. Donnie paid Vladie by giving him dibs on Ukraine but Elon paid Donnie a large sum of money(read bribe) to start work at once.
They set up two looms and pretended to weave, though there was nothing on the looms. “I’d like to know how those weavers are getting on with the cloth,” Emperor Donnie thought, but he felt slightly uncomfortable when he remembered that those who were unfit for their position would not be able to see the fabric.
“I’ll send my lackey, J D, to the weavers,” the Donnie decided. “He’ll be the best one to tell me how the material looks, for he’s a sensible man and no one does his duty better. “So J D went to the room where the two swindlers sat working away at their empty looms. “Heaven help me,” he thought as his eyes flew wide open, “I can’t see anything at all”. But he did not say so.
All the town was talking of this splendid cloth, and the Donnie wanted to see it for himself while it was still in the looms. Attended by a band of chosen men, among whom were his two old trusted officials Mikey (House Speaker Johnson) and Stevie (Asst Chief of Staff Miller) he set out to see the two swindlers. He found them weaving with might and main, but without a thread in their looms.
“Magnificent,” said the two officials already duped. “What’s this?” thought Donnie. “I can’t see anything. This is terrible!
Am I a fool? Duh! His whole retinue; Mikey, Stevie and Margie (Taylor Green), all joined together in exclaiming, “Oh! It’s very pretty,” and they advised him to wear clothes made of this wonderful cloth, especially for the great procession he was soon to lead. “Magnificent! Excellent! Unsurpassed!” Donnie gave each of the swindlers a pretty red hat to wear with MAGA embroidered on the front.
Then The Donnie himself came with his noblest noblemen, and the swindlers, Vladie and Elon, each raised an arm as if they were holding something. They said, “These are the trousers, here’s the coat, and this is the mantle,” naming each garment. “All of them are as light as a spider web. One would almost think he had nothing on, but that’s what makes them so fine.”
“Exactly,” all the noblemen agreed, though they could see nothing, for there was nothing to see.
Then Donnie undressed, and the swindlers pretended to put his new clothes on him, one garment after another. “How well Your Majesty’s new clothes look. Aren’t they becoming!” He heard on all sides, “That pattern, so perfect! Those colors, so suitable! It is a magnificent outfit.”
Then the minister of public processions announced: “Your Majesty’s Swasticar is waiting outside on the White House lawn.”
So off went the Donnie in procession. Everyone in the streets and the windows said, “Oh, how fine are Donnie’s new clothes! Don’t they fit him to perfection? Nobody would confess that they couldn’t see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.
“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child, Jasmine (Crockett, United States Representative from California) said.
“Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?” said kind old uncle, Bernie (Sanders, US Senator from Vermont). And one person whispered to another what the child had said, “He hasn’t anything on. Little Jasmine says he hasn’t anything on.”
“But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last.
Emperor Donnie shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever. And the people laughed.
How depressing. These right-wing idiots could barely wait for the greatest generation to die off before installing their cave man ideology and destroying democracy as we know it. Is that how we evolved, socially? Really?
Are we evolving or devolving? The so-called authoritarian “philosophy” is not much more than cave-dwelling communities led by the alpha male and his collection of sycophants. It seems that Rebecca Costa was right about that: We’ve evolved socially/economically, but our brains are really still wired to that of the 200,000 year old “communities” of small tribes. It sure looks like creatures like Trump, Miller, Bessent, Lutnick, Vance, et. al., are truly primitive in their outlook for the “benefit” of 340 million cave dwellers.
David, Nice parody, but Jasmine Crockett is from Texas, not California. She is clearly the antithesis of anything and everything Abbott/Paxton. Talk about swindlers …
Todd, you’re right about Texas public education. Trump has given Abbott permission to come out of this fetid closet and show the nation what a monster he is and always has been. I left Texas and public education in 2008, but could see the beginnings of the dumbing down there. Churches led the way in many of the rural settings where voting for a Democrat was simply not considered.
Ich bin ein Minnesotan!
No, not “mystifying,” just blatant politically motivated BS. And, the major media outlets are mostly being kind to the Emperor, not wanting to risk anything. For far too many people, it is working as hoped for.
The timing for all of this, and the presence of dumb, sick, Donnie to carry the water for the Heritage and Koch folks is just sadly amazing.
Did Newt Gingrich have any idea of how this might/would play forward, when he kickstarted the newest Newspeak?
According to today’s news, our illustrious Gov Braun is putting TP USA in all our schools and universities. It’s fine. I’m sure everything is fine. = (
I had to go back to a “dorm rap” early 60’s the last time I engaged in informed debate on the question: how do we know what we know? It was the very first time I was curiously introduced to epistemology. 60 years later, curiosity strikes again. Just to have clarity, I looked in the commons. “Epistemology is the study of knowledge acquisition. It involves an awareness of certain aspects of reality, and it seeks to discover what is known and how it is known. Considered as a branch of philosophy, epistemology addresses cognitive sciences, cultural studies and the history of science.”
No wonder the lost man child in the White Pen House surrounded by evil foster parents is obsessed with chronic tantrums.
Having read the essay at the heart of today’s posting, I am chilled.
This is all a response to FDR’s “New Deal,” which the right found to be an abomination, and have worked, mostly quietly to destroy.
I read the whole thing.
All the reading I have done and all the news I have followed for years bear it out 100%.
From time to time, I have asked politically aware of friends if they knew of the Lewis Powell memo. At most one or two of them did. Very discouraging.
Mitch D., you nailed it.
God forbid that government should work for all its citizens.
This should be the message of the Democrats.
Anne,
I included the entire Powell “memo” in my book, “Racing to the Brink: The End Game for Race and Capitalism.” I published it in 2012. Today, it would be a visionary tome. It accompanied one of the dozens of essays I wrote/modified for the River Cities Tribune in Marble Falls, TX.
I would argue that the history goes back much earlier, that is to the fifties when Robert Welch teamed up with Fred Koch, two rich guys with too much money. They began spending their considerable money to influence government.
Fred made sure his beliefs would be carried forward by his sons Charlie, David, and Fred. Fred wasn’t gung ho enough, so Charlie cut him out and he and David went on to to start Americans for Prosperity (AFP). Note that the Americans they referred to were themselves and their cadre of rich friends.
Meeting in secret annually, Koch and friends have pledged financial support to plans approved by the group. Such plans include giving huge amounts of cash to mid sized universities. The goal was to establish conservative think tanks and eventually take over the administration of the university. That allowed them to create conservative leaning educational institutions AFP eventually led to the Heritage Foundation and subsequently to Project 2025.
covid test, seems up here in NoDak, we have anti everything. especially covid. i put on a hog feed on laborday weekend,for the hiway const workers who didnt go home, many are from other states and work here in the summer. the nieghbors are always invited,all 95% trumpers, and make no mistake. during the labor day weekend during covids peak, there was talk hey,i just got over covid, it didnt make me whatever,,, many just admitted, we dont believe in that goverment hoax, as they,came to my free BBQ with no regards who, they would infect. like it really didnt matter. glad i got mine. since then i found a few who got covid, didnt believe in RNA science etc. who are now, having heart issues, breathing issues and some have been out of work or got hospital treatment for the after causes of covid. they didnt care at all if they spread it or gave it to others. now some are paying the price,along with those who didnt want covid.