In Nazi Germany, the people believed, right up to the bitter end, that they were going to win the war.  They did so because all the news they got was from state-controlled media.

In North Korea, until very recently, most people thought that, even though they were starving to death, the people in South Korea had it much worse.  Once again, they believed so because the state controlled the media and fed them lies.  Only with the availability of illegal cell phones from China did the people start to learn just how good life was elsewhere.

During the Cold War, citizens of the Soviet Union believed that Americans lived in poverty.  After all, didn't all the papers say so?

Today in America, we have a similar situation.  While the government doesn't control the media, the leftists do.  The Americans who listen to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and all the networks are being systematically lied to.  As a result, those Americans have a false view of what is really going on – just like their predecessors in North Korea, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union.

Those Americans who trust the mainstream media (MSM) incorrectly "know" that Trump colluded with Russia.  They don't know that Hillary paid the Russians for dirt on Trump or that all the investigations into the supposed collusion by Trump have found not a jot of evidence.

The MSM are why so many Americans believe that 25% of Americans are gay rather than the real value of around 2%.  In entertainment, gays are grossly overrepresented, and MSM coverage rarely discusses either the true nature of the gay lifestyle or the actual number of people who suffer from same-sex attraction.  Clearly, if one in four Americans is gay and the gay lifestyle is just like the heterosexual lifestyle, supporting a version of "marriage" that includes same-sex couples is not that strange.

MSM propaganda ensures that most Americans don't know that abortion is legal in America for any reason up to the point of birth.  People also don't know that Jesse Jackson called abortion "genocide against blacks" and that black women are three times as likely to abort their unborn children as white women are.

The only reason why people don't recognize Democratic policies as racist is MSM propaganda.

Think about it.  Around 3,500 blacks were shot in Chicago, called Chiraq by black Chicagoans, last year, but that's rarely mentioned in the news.  On the other hand, the MSM had wall-to-wall coverage when a white police officer shot a black thug in self-defense.  Note that both Obama and his black attorney general agreed that the shooting was justified and that that wasn't given wall-to-wall media coverage.

Because of this sort of "reporting," many Americans think the real problem in America isn't out-of-control crime in black neighborhoods in Democrat-run cities, but that the police are out hunting innocent blacks on a regular basis.  The real story is that the Democrats who run Chicago don't care about blacks.  Can you imagine what the Democratic mayor of Chicago would be doing if 3,500 white people had been shot there last year?  What could be more racist than not caring that blacks in Chicago are less safe than American soldiers in Iraq?

Perhaps the fact that those blacks can't get a decent education.  For decades, the public school system has failed inner-city blacks.  That's why conservatives are calling for school choice – so blacks can have a chance to get a decent education.  We know that school choice works because those blacks who can make the huge sacrifices to afford to send their kids to Catholic or other private schools see their kids getting a good education.

Yet the media don't cover that.  Rather, they cover Democrats who say school choice is somehow racist.  The media also don't mention the huge contributions the Democrats get from the teacher unions.  As a result, those Americans who get their news from the MSM don't know that Democrats have been working against getting poor blacks a decent education for decades.

One key aspect of the propaganda machine is that Republicans are always shown in a bad light, and Democratic scandals are minimized.  We all remember the MSM trying to make us think Bill Clinton was impeached because of his sex scandals and not because he lied under oath in order to minimize his risk of having to pay a settlement for sexually harassing an Arkansas government employee.  Similarly, a Democratic senator was on trial for seven weeks recently for corruption, and the MSM ignored it.  When a Republican senator was on trial years ago, there was extensive coverage.

Perhaps the poster boy for MSM #FakeNews propaganda is so-called global warming.  There is an incessant drumbeat of stories about how man is causing the Earth to warm so much that catastrophe will result.  The fact that all the computer models are wrong and disagree with the data and that even those scientists – who are not 99.7% of all scientists – generally don't believe that the warming we see will result in disasters is never reported.

The media don't really cover the fact that the infamous Paris Accords allowed China and India to massively increase their CO2 emissions.  If global warming is an existential crisis, why can we allow those countries to massively increase their contribution to our impending doom?

From this tiny subset of the media's propaganda effort, it's clear that we're being manipulated in two ways: by presenting lies as truth – global warming is a fact – and by not reporting the truths that are inconvenient for leftist's positions – such as the scientific fact that human life begins at conception.

The left knows that without its propaganda, it will lose in the court of public opinion.  The American people opposed the Republican tax cuts because the MSM propaganda machine constantly lied that only the rich would get tax breaks.  But as more and more people saw that they directly benefited from the tax cuts, both because they would pay less in taxes and because companies passed on their lower costs to their employees in terms of higher wages, polls showed that people changed their position and supported the Republican plan.

Hence, leftists know that they must keep the truth from the people just as the dictators who ran Nazi Germany, North Korea, and the Soviet Union knew they had to keep the truth from their people at all costs.

Because the American people will reject leftists when they see the truth, leftists are working hard to shut off all forms of communication that aren't part of their propaganda efforts.  That's why Facebook and Twitter censor honest news and hype the propaganda of the MSM.

Interestingly, the disunity in America that the media complain about is due to the propaganda they spew.  If all Americans had the truth, there would be a lot less conflict in this country.  For example, the vast majority of Americans favor restrictions on abortion, but many of them aren't supporting change because they've been lied to about the fact that abortion is currently legal for any reason at any time.  If they think the restrictions they support are the law, why call to change the law?

The reality is that America is not as disunited as it appears.  If we can remove the vast leftist propaganda machine and give the American people the truth, we'll find that they tend to agree on most key issues.

Take this opportunity to help wake your friends who have are trapped in the web of media lies.  They'll eventually thank you.

You can read more of Tom's rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious, and feel free to follow him on Twitter.