The red wave ebbed into a pink splash.  The Democrats are crowing and claiming victory while Republicans look for scapegoats.  But what can you expect when it isn't a level playing field, and the non-socialist team is fragmented?    

During the 2022 campaign, I chuckled while seeing ads where the same Democrats who voted for all of Biden's destructive programs tried to sound reasonable while calling all the Republicans "extremists" for opposing programs that were destroying the economy, the police, and the military.  Well funded Democrat ads ran all day, far outpacing Republican ads.  At the same time, most news programs and TV shows had a relentless Democrat slant.  Social media (socialist media?) stories were even worse.    

The two sides weren't equally matched and operated differently.  In addition to seeing some of the same voting and ballot irregularities that were present in 2020, we saw many of the same problems with Republicans that we've seen for years.  These included:  

• Republicans still don't stay on track with simple, consistent messages.  
• Republicans don't fight as a team.   
• Republicans still play nice and often don't fight back.  

On the other side:  

• Democrats have simple messages that are repeated ad nauseam.  
• Democrats continually attack by pairing themes with recent news stories.
• Democrats (and their surrogates) use every opportunity to push their talking points and bash opponents.
• And as my dad always said — the Bolsheviks never break ranks.  

The real problem for Republicans is that they still don't understand what they are up against.  They are still fighting the Democrats with a 1950 mentality, where political campaigns began a month or two before the elections and people were expected to be gentlemen.  Republicans don't understand the totalitarian-style long game the Democrats have been playing for decades (and its effects are cumulative).

One of the main reasons Trump was popular with Republicans in 2016 was because he actually fought back.  Many "get-along" Republicans as well as the Democrat media hated him for that.  He was liked because didn't follow their rules, and the media still don't understand that.  They're still looking for the reason he was popular — and continue to get it wrong.  

Additionally, in 2022, many Republican candidates had to fight three opponents: their political opponents, the news media, and the "get-along" Republicans.  For instance, just before the 2022 election, some GOP leaders cut funds for campaigns in key Senate battleground states.  It's as though the Republicans didn't want to win — and then they blamed Trump.   

Democrats, on the other hand, play to win and have almost complete information dominance.  They have control of not just most news channels, but most day and nighttime TV programming as well.  Democrats use this to attack and demonize Republicans.  And it's been going on for a long time.  For example, in the 1992 movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of the students said, "They had this look in their eyes, totally cold, animal. I think they were Young Republicans."

The little digs over decades were and are designed to demonize any non-Democrats and condition people to accept Democrat/socialist talking points.  Then, before each election, all the old anti-conservative talking points are revived and paired with new ads attacking Republicans.  

This brings us to trying to understand what propaganda (disinformation) is, where it came from, and how it is used.    

One of the first to codify and use modern propaganda theory was Hitler (although he was influenced by Gustave Le Bon's writings in the 1890s).  The Soviets came to the game rather later, as when they took over Russia, it was a backwards country with mostly illiterate peasants.  In the beginning, they relied primarily on posters and papers.

In later years, the Soviets combined propaganda, denial, deception, disinformation, and reflexive control (R.C.) into programs to slowly change people's minds over long periods of time.  R.C. is easy to understand.  If you control the information people use to make their decisions, you can control the decisions they make.  U.S. liberals have taken this concept to heart.  

The Nazi and Bolshevik methodologies have since merged and are used in concert today.  For instance, in 2002, Mohammad Shirazi wrote a book about the concepts and application of psychological warfare and propaganda for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Command Staff College.  Early in the book, he stated that psychological warfare was the most destructive and dangerous form of warfare because it targeted people's minds in an attempt to affect thinking, reasoning, and behavior.  It is, he said, aimed at weakening the will of the target audience and is intended to lead them to both defeat and submission.  In his book, Shirazi mentioned Joseph Goebbels sixteen times and Hitler eleven times — which tells you what propaganda model the Iranians (and likely other modern terrorists and politicians) are using.    

Hitler's methodologies are simple and effective, and they are still used today.  Like modern propagandists, you can see he thought very little of the people he was trying to influence.  He also said that the truth did not matter — only victory.   

• All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.  
• The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly — it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.  
• The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.  In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.  
• I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.

In 1924, Hitler wrote: "Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."  This quote came to mind after the 2022 election, when half the nation voted for more crime, drugs, violence, corruption, homelessness, social decay, and lawlessness when other options were offered.  Why?  Because of the propaganda theme: "Orange Man Bad."  Interestingly, MAGA Republicans were all repeatedly, compared to Hitler while liberals used Hitler's tools.  

For the most part, there was no response to Democrat attacks.  There were no widespread Republicans ads highlighting the filth, drugs, and hopelessness the liberals brought to Democrat-led American cities.  Nor did they mention Biden's dementia or his monetary connections to the Chinese Communists.  Any press criticizing the Bidens or the Democrats was immediately dismissed as Russian-style disinformation.

In the end, it comes down to what U.S. journalist Donald Marquis once said: "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you.  But if you really make them think, they'll hate you."  R.C. propaganda makes it easy for the masses to not think but think they did.  That's the plan.

Marquis's statement explains why liberal university students mindlessly use their First Amendment rights to demonstrate against the First Amendment, freedoms of religion, speech, and press — and in favor of government control of what you (and they) can say, write, or think.

Image via Max Pixel.