If you like what I’m trying to do with Sustain What, hit the ♡ button, and PLEASE share this post NOW with others. Renee Hobbs gives urgently needed advice on recognizing and counterning malicious propaganda.
Updated February 2025 - Given what’s unfolding under Trump 2.0, I thought it worth recirculating (once again) a Sustain What conversation I had in December 2020, as President Trump pushed his “stop the steal” election lies and laid the foundation for the January 6 insurrection. My guest was University of Rhode Island communications professor Renee Hobbs, who teaches propaganda literacy, is the author of a fantastic guide book, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in a Digital Age, and has built a priceless suite of online learning tools to explore and share. Click here for a book excerpt!
She provides a fantastic overview of the range of propaganda strategies, tactics and tools, noting the word should be seen as neutral. There is “good” propaganda. But, boy, there is dangerous propaganda, as well.
Insert, 02/26 - You likely saw the the insane Trump post of an AI-generated fantasy video of a Trump Gaza takeover and makeover (from which the intro gif for this post was clipped). Read this
post for some notable context: The 'Trump Gaza' video isn't just a distraction, it's dehumanising pro-Israeli propaganda with a pedigree. - End insertMind over media
West Coast event: I’ll be holding an onstage conversation with Hobbs at the Bioneers Conference in Berkeley, Calif., on March 28. Come meet us in person!
Emergency mode
A key section of our conversation dealt with the kind of dangerous political propaganda that is in overdrive right now.
I told Hobbs about a conversation I had earlier in 2020 with New York University journalism professort Jay Rosen, when he was warning newsrooms that democracy was in danger in the face of Trump’s nonstop lies and this required new approaches to reporting and presenting the news. Here’s that snippet from Jay, in which he said, “I think we’re facing the biggest propaganda moment in modern U.S. history.”
Keeping in mind what transpired amid the pandemic, and even more so the following January, he was surely right. And here we are again.
In December 2020, Hobbs wholeheartedly concurred with his perspective:
I have a sure sense of urgency. The fire hose of falsehood…actually goes way, way back. That's not a new technique either…. Actually throughout the 20th century, we have faced crises where propagandists had ascendency, where their ideas gained traction, and where only with a relentless pursuit of truth, only with the public activation of moral indignation, only over time can can truly dangerous propaganda be be countered. So we're in that place right now. And we're very vulnerable.
And, yes, here we are yet again. So please listen up and share this converastion.
There’s a (very) rough searchable transcript here. Transcripts can be smoothed out if more of my subscribers chip in financially.
And please explore Hobbs’s fantastic array of open learning resources! There’s a whole section on “meme politics.” There’s a crowd-sourced “rate this propaganda” gallery.
Here’s my full April 2020 conversation with Jay Rosen:
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