Robert Scheer Quotes

Democracy allows rhetoric, false empathy and emotion to pummel rational thinking - so it's no wonder so many politicians thrive in it.

Propaganda today relies for the most part on repetition of catchwords that leaders wish listeners to accept on their face value without critical scrutiny, suppression of information that debates those catchwords, and rationalization of their cause to foment passions in the interest of the state or party.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought

The planned use of information targeted at specific audiences using any media available to achieve desired outcomes that primarily benefit the source

If people tell an untruth long enough and loud enough, they begin to believe it themselves.

Trump, in the crinkling of an eye, senses better than anyone the insecurity of people, that nobody knows whether anything is good or bad until they are told, and he is quite willing to tell them immediately.

We Liberals like to think our thoughts aren't controlled. We pride ourselves on our independent thinking. We know we shouldn't believe everything we read. We realize the media is skewed, we know it's owned by a small group of people, we realize it's biased, etc.

No matter the candidate, every detail in a campaign is carefully and strategically framed for our consumption. The devil is in them.

Fear is hugely contagious. Used skillfully by politicians looking to manipulate voters, it can become toxic and capable of infecting more than just a few.

Progressives and conservatives alike lean, unconsciously, towards particular conclusions, and then scrabble around to rationalise those conclusions to themselves.

Every liberal position is built on a fallacy.

I do think the strategy of Trump, and now the Republican Party, is to eviscerate the idea of objective truth.

The fake news is - I mean, as a tool of warfare - has been there for decades and decades and decades. It was never very well done until, really, the Ukraine, though I would say that the Russians used to complain about fake things to say the State Department.

We're learning a tremendous amount of propaganda from television and the Internet.

Public policy is designed by spin doctors who aim to keep our heads below the water. The public good is not a consideration, and their self-serving agendas prevail over common sense.

It is, after all, impossible in the modern world to shield everyone from nonsense and stupidity.

Yes, academia is often in the brainwashing business and revisionist history is alive and well.

Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.

Everywhere you look, there's someone doing your thinking for you and telling you what to think and when to think of it.

I guess many of us are just prone to see what the other side is up to, maybe to reinforce our own worldviews and feel confident that our ideology is right and theirs is wrong.

The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.

I never believe any politician talking about popular culture.

Part of the problem is that if anybody has a gut reaction about an issue, they can go online and have it backed up. That said, they can also find support for their ideas in the mainstream media - because when the mainstream media gives a so-called balanced view, it's often misleading.