Propaganda Identification
and other survival tips
Maybe you’ve read George Orwell’s novel, 1984, and you’ve heard the term “doublespeak.” Even if you haven’t, you’ve heard examples of doublespeak all your life. Words that seem to communicate but actually work to deceive. In the book, the regime in power uses the slogans, “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and “Ignorance is strength” to train the public to accept versions of reality that contradict what they can observe with their own eyes.
In the latest really dumb example of this, the White House pays $15 million on two no-bid contracts to renovate the Reflecting Pool, calls it blue when it is green, says it’s crystal clear when it has algae problems, and blames vandals instead of the contractors who fucked up the job. It’s a level one litmus test for idiots. The kiddie version of doublespeak, for fans who like water features and state fairs and don’t wanna think about politics.
For those of us who pay attention to policy, there’s a more hardcore kind of doublespeak:
It’s such a trip reading federal government websites these days. Like reading the word GOLD spelled out in letters sculpted from shit. Like pressing the up button and your elevator going down. Up is down and bad is good and nothing is what they say it is.
It feels like you’re crazy but I think the crazy feeling means that you’re still sane and there’s still hope for you. Because you are reading propaganda, straight up lies, and that should make you upset.
Only if immigrants are horrible, dangerous criminals can it be true that arresting and deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants is a good thing. Only if immigrants are terrible threats to public safety can it be great that ICE arrested 10,000 people in the last five days of June. This administration campaigned on a promise of mass deportation, and though it is totally unserious about delivering most of its campaign promises, like keeping America out of war, it keeps Stephen Miller, who is actually serious about mass deportation, in charge. The government must therefore produce a mighty stream of propaganda to get people to believe that immigrants are horrible, dangerous criminals, aliens walking among us. In a world with 42 million refugees, many of whom were terrorized by American bombs and American foreign policy, Trump has also decided that the only refugees that can resettle in the United States are white South Africans. The sum total of all this is ethnic cleansing, masking as immigration policy and homeland security.
Once an administration is faced with dissent and opposition, it has two ways to go. It backs down and finds another way. Or it cracks down hard. What we are seeing this year is a surge in ICE arrests without the hoopla of city sieges that characterized last year and the beginning of this year. In the face of widespread dissent, the government backed down and found a different way to do the same dirty deeds, hoping the public won’t notice. And it cracked down hard on a group of people who protested an ICE facility on July 4 last year, convicting them of terrorism and giving them the harshest sentences possible.
Among these so-called terrorists was a tattoo artist who didn’t even go to the Prairieland protest. His wife, who did go, got seventy years in prison. For moving a box of political zines – zines! little handmade, photocopied booklets – Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to thirty years in prison.
While this case was being decided, the Justice Department announced a $1.7 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate Trump allies who felt they had been wrongly targeted by the Biden administration. Hundreds of January 6 insurrectionists applied for the funds. The gangsterism of the Trump administration has degraded the First Amendment to payouts for pals and stitches for snitches.
The more blatant the government’s wrongs, the heavier the propaganda gets on its websites:
The strategy is simple. You put the key words known to have an effect on people in bold type. You repeat the same sentence or phrase. (This is amazingly effective. It took me several reads to notice that the big heading and the little heading are exactly the same. I should try that sometime.) For readers who just scan the news, they see the words terrorist, Antifa, attack, sentenced. That’s all they need to take in that something bad happened and it was taken care of. This again is an infantilization of the public, engineered to soothe and deflect and create a false sense of security and dependency. To be fair, this is not just a Trump tactic.
“Terrorist” has been a boogeyman word for as long as I can remember, used by our government to justify doing very bad things to people. This became clear and rampant after 9-11. Twenty five years later, it’s still being used. But now the propaganda has been updated with the addition of the word Antifa, which directs the forever war on terror inwards at Americans who have the audacity to stand up against this regime. When Trump issued an executive order last September designating Antifa a terrorist threat and domestic terrorist organization, a lot of people ridiculed it. Because there is no organization called Antifa. And the things that Antifa is against, as a movement and a philosophy, are all the bad things: fascism, Nazis, white supremacists, racists.
The Reflecting Pool is stupid. Many of the words that come out of Trump’s mouth are stupid. But words matter. Words issued from the seat of power can destroy lives. The Prairieland protesters are now political prisoners, made examples to intimidate the rest of us.
The unseating of Trump and all his allies is necessary to undo the wrongs of this administration. A lot of things have to line up to make that happen. Winning elections, changing corrupted systems (the Supreme Court, for one). Holding the criminals to account. While they are in power, they are going to fight with all the tools they have, including cheating, because they have no respect for the rules. And they are going to tell every lie imaginable, because they have no respect for the truth.
What the Prairieland sentences tell me is that this regime is scared of regular people standing up to it. What requires courage is accepting that this regime hits harder when it is scared, and to keep at what you’re doing.
You’re not alone. Ethnic cleansing is not going to be so easy in a country that has transformed since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a whole lot of us immigrants here, and in general, we’re not leaving.
To withstand the daily onslaught to your sanity, you need to put on your bullshit-canceling headphones while you engage. Think of Odysseus getting past the Sirens, except the song’s not beautiful, just crazy-making. Let us keep going. With courage, with consistency, and with caution.
Some updates:
On the subject of not being alone, here’s a conversation I got to record with one of my favorite living public intellectuals, Viet Thanh Nguyen, back in March. We recorded it at Baldwin & Co., one of my favorite bookstores and gathering places for author talks.
In conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen at Baldwin & Co., March 13, 2026 I have a picture book coming out August 1! It’s called Ride / Đạp Xe, and it’s a bilingual children’s book written by the poet and community organizer Bao Phi and illustrated by me. This is our second book together. Our first was A Different Pond, which won all kinds of awards, and nearly ten years later Bao and I are both older, wiser, and better at what we do, so you should order a book or two and gift it to someone in your life or recommend it to your local library. I’ll keep you posted about an August or September event in the Bay Area, and plan a New Orleans event for this fall when the weather gets cooler.
Bao Phi, editor Kristen Mohn, and me at the Capstone booth at ALA in Chicago, June 27, 2026.
