This article was first posted in 2022 but recently updated.

For those of us who study propaganda critically, and seek to do this all-important work as public intellectuals, these last two years have been uniquely challenging, and even dangerous, forcing us into a painful double bind.

On the one hand, we have never had so much to work with, nor has there ever been a greater need for our peculiar expertise. Whereas in the "democratic" West, propaganda used to be most evident as an intensive episodic practice, flaring up in wartime, in political campaigns and following immense state crimes like JFK's assassination, 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks (among other national traumas engineered by governments), the propaganda blasting all of us non-stop today is no longer national, or merely multinational, but global; and the former intermittency of those most awful crises, with decades going by between one trauma and the next, has given way to a mind-numbing strategy of serial bombardment — one cataclysmic fuss after another (with, sometimes, one within another), as under openly totalitarian rule.]

Thus, throughout 2020 — Year One of the now-endless Covid crisis — we were inescapably suffused with terror of "the virus," and thereby bullied into locking down (despite the scientific fact that lockdowns do more harm than good), while also masking all the time, and everywhere, and "social-distancing" as well (despite the scientific fact that neither practice "slows the spread" of any respiratory virus). While masking was imposed, ostensibly, to make us less afraid of Covid-19, it only made us more afraid of one another, and so compounded that disabling fear with a ferocious anger at all those not wearing masks (despite the scientific fact that masks would not prevent transmission of "the virus" even if the entire global population wore them all the time).

As propagated fiercely by the media — both corporate and "alternative" — throughout 2020, that sanctimonious division of ourselves into benevolent maskers and self-centred "anti-maskers" was just a pestilential variant of the "red"/"blue" divide that the media, with very few exceptions, had already fiercely propagated since the rise of Donald Trump; and that incapacitating tribalist division deepened, in mid-2020, with the George Floyd incident, and the emergent cult of BLM, whose blurry mission against "white supremacy" was suddenly and ostentatiously extolled throughout the media worldwide (George Floyd's beatification being yet another stroke of global propaganda, the same big graphic of his quasi-tragic face popping up at rallies as far afield as France, Ghana and Japan), and anomalously hailed by Jeff Bezos, Mitt Romney, Jaimie Dimon, Bill and Melinda Gates, Nancy Pelosi, and other wealthy players not notable for their concern about black lives (on the contrary).