We Need to Talk About Manufacturing Consent
It's insidious, and it's happening right now
Why do citizens support atrocities?
It’s one of those age-old questions that people often ask, usually over drinks or in the aftermath of watching documentaries about the Holocaust. It’s difficult to imagine being able to support genocides and human rights abuses when they’re happening right before your eyes.
It isn’t easy to imagine anybody being okay with it, much less willing to participate.
It’s easier to assume that only a psychopath or a monstrous, sadistic person would throw their support behind a policy of mass murder. You’d have to be a twisted person to go along with a clearly defined, clearly demonstrated genocide, right?
No sane person would ever do such a thing.
The thing is, as much as it might be easier to think that, it simply isn’t true. We’re all capable of going along with horrific things, even crimes against humanity. We just have to be conditioned to accept it, first.
It has to be normalized. We have to get to the point of seeing it in the news, and shrugging our shoulders because it’s not unexpected. We might even see it as a good thing if the indoctrination is strong enough.
See, genocides don’t come out of nowhere. The Holocaust didn’t pop into existence whole cloth, with an order to commit mass murder just spontaneously crossing the table and Hitler signing off without any prior discussion.
Genocide is a process; a step-by-step, very gradual process.
The first step in that process is to convince the public to view the targets of that genocide as a threat. You have to dehumanize them and make them out to be a danger to the public that everybody should fear.
The first deaths in any genocide are almost always the result of stochastic terrorism rather than a state-sponsored act by military or law enforcement.
The first murders will come at the hands of an angry mob, long before the jackbooted thugs march onto the scene.
A couple of years ago, I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.
To this day, it remains one of the most harrowing and chilling experiences of my life. The article I wrote about the experience resonated with a lot of people. I begged people to visit, insisting that even though it’s painful and difficult to look at the horrors of the Holocaust, we should all do it anyway.
To quote myself:
Studying the Holocaust and the crimes of Hitler’s Germany can be an emotionally draining exercise. I can’t blame people for wanting to focus their sights on more positive and uplifting stories.
But I firmly believe everybody should visit one of the memorials at least once. We should all read about the Holocaust at least a little bit. I’m all in favor of wanting to preserve one’s mental health, but this is one event in history that we cannot afford to skip over. —Never Forget: Looking Back on the Holocaust
Remembering and internalizing the horror is how we prevent it from happening again.
Do you remember that old parable about a frog sitting in a pot of water? If the temperature rises slowly enough, the frog won’t notice until it’s too late to hop out. It’ll boil alive before it ever sees the danger.
But what if the frog could see the thermometer? What if it could see the degrees marked out, and watch the line of the gauge creeping its way up? I think if the frog was aware of what was happening, it would probably choose to get out of the water.
Knowledge is a shield.
That’s why fascists don’t want you to have it.
There’s a reason why shutting down the media or taking full control over it is one of the first steps taken by authoritarian governments. They want to be the arbiters of what gets published and who knows what.
It’s the same reason that they go after education systems. They don’t want an educated, knowledgable populace that understands the full horror of what’s going on.
Trump once said he loves the poorly educated. This is why. Ignorance isn’t bliss; it’s the death knell of liberty.
The process of convincing the masses to accept atrocities is a simple one, but it requires dedication and a long-term strategy. You have to build it up, one brick at a time, upon a carefully laid foundation.
Once that foundation has been built, you can expand upon it. Once you get the walls built, you can drop the pretense and begin framing the roof.
It doesn’t happen all at once. And if there are multiple targets, there will be multiple plans of attack.
Take, for example, the Trump administration’s furious loathing for transgender people. The original foundation of their current actions is the idea that ‘trans ideology’—a nonsense term, as being transgender is just a descriptor, not an ideology—is a mental illness, a denial of reality.
There’s an extremely bigoted and untrue claim that transgender women are a threat to cisgender women’s safety that most legislation is built upon.
This rhetoric has been building over many years; it started, as these moral panics often do, with the idea that children were being targeted by predators. Then, it expanded to transgender people posing a sexual threat to cis women. Then it shifted to a threat to women’s identity instead; if ‘men’ can call themselves women, then ‘woman’ is not a real category.
That’s when it expanded to include women’s sports. First with the idea of an unfair advantage, then to the idea that ‘men’ would present as women for the purpose of stealing women’s sports victories from them and putting them down.
That created an image of transgender women as liars and thieves, deceptive and dangerous. Transgender men rarely even come up in conversation, but they’re usually presented as confused ‘women’ who have been manipulated into rejecting their gender.
It’s sexist as hell, and just plain wrong.
Transgender women are women, transgender men are men. Non-binary and genderfluid people are valid. They’ve always existed, and always will.
This foundation has been built up over decades of slow, consistent framing. Pushing the Overton Window, little by little, until transgender acceptance was degraded to a low enough point for a dangerous escalation.
Now that the house is halfway built, the Trump administration has jumped once again. Quoting from the recent Executive Order titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness”:
Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false “gender identity” divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service. Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.
It began with an appeal to science and protecting children. A bullshit appeal with no basis in fact, but still.
Now, it is about selfishness, dishonest, dishonourable and undisciplined lifestyles. The pretense has been dropped. This is not about protecting anybody; it’s about hating transgender people, full stop.
This is how you prepare your people for atrocities. This is how you manufacture consent.
It’s the same thing Trump is doing towards Canada; claiming publicly that we’re a drain on America’s resources, that they’re subsidizing us, and that we treat them ‘very badly.’
He’s talking about how much we would love to be Americans—and so would the Greenlanders, of course— and that we’d be better off with better protections, healthcare, and lower taxes.
All of which, I hope I don’t need to explain, is an out-and-out lie.
He’s trying to convince his followers that annexing us against our will is in our best interests, and the right thing to do.
It’s the same rhetoric you see towards immigrants.
Mexico is sending rapists, criminals and people from insane asylums to invade the great country of America. Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs. COVID-19 was the ‘China virus.’
Bad genes, poisoning the blood of America. Trump literally used eugenics as a justification for his actions. He was barely a half-step away from a direct Hitler quote.
But if you look at what his supporters are saying online, they love it. They agree with him. They parrot his talking points like they’re established facts, divine orders from the Lord on high.
He has them convinced that he is protecting their country; everything he does is for the greater good, and they want him to go even harder. Then they act shocked when their spouse is rounded up and deported, or they lose their job because of his policies, or they find out that their kids’ schools are losing funding.
He manufactured consent, but it wasn’t real consent. Real consent requires you to have all of the information before you agree to something. These people were fed a grift and they fell for it.
It didn’t matter that the real information was available—being shouted into their ears from millions of desperate mouths. He had them convinced that it was all lies, and the only trustworthy source was his own puckered lips.
He’s using exactly the same tactics that Hitler used in the lead-up to the Holocaust. It began by stoking public outrage and scapegoating marginalized groups, rounding up dissenters, and then mass deportations. The mass murder only happened later, when deportation became too expensive and difficult.
Oh yeah—and the Nazis targeted transgender people early on, too. They were one of the first targets of the regime.
The point is, if you’ve ever wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany, and how you would have reacted to the fall of democracy and Hitler’s rise, you can stop wondering.
You’re looking at it. Whatever you’re doing now is what you would have been doing then. Now that we’re here, you get to make a choice. What side of history do you want to be on?
The most magical thing about consent is that it can be revoked.
Solidarity wins.
Consent. With the congress in near lockstep with the executive, and the courts giving them a pass, people are already behind the curve and falling away fast. Pretty soon, consent won't matter anymore. With each passing week, I wonder when the passive voters will realize where we are headed and finally make a concerted effort to head it off. It doesn't look very good right now. I wonder how long before Trump gets serious about Canada. At the end of the thirty days?
I am glad to see that Canada is scrambling hard to move their trade away from the U.S a lot more but I'm afraid it may be too little, too late. I think trump knows this as well. Which is why he is moving fast in all directions. I think he knows that he has to cement things in place as quickly as possible and dare anyone to remove him. It's much harder to remove someone or something than to block it in the first place and they know this. Watch out, Trump is just getting started.