"The cognitive scientist George Lakoff, who studies propaganda, calls this a 'truth sandwich' — a lie gets sandwiched between true statements."

"Research shows it effectively corrects a falsehood, because people tend to remember the beginning and end of a statement, rather than what’s in the middle. Mr. Trump’s resistance to masks is... a target for a derisive truth sandwich: 'Wearing a mask is one of the most effective ways to prevent the spread of coronavirus. But you sure wouldn’t know it from the president, who has run around in public without one and mocks people like me who wear them. Is it vanity or that he just doesn’t believe in science? I don’t know, but the science is undisputed: wearing masks saves lives.'"

From "How to Debate Someone Who Lies/Truth sandwiches, ridicule and other tactics for Joe Biden when he faces President Trump" by Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry (NYT).

So, I guess Biden could say that. But wouldn't he have to be wearing a mask? Is Biden going to wear a mask for 90 minutes of debate?!

Here's how that column looked in my browser:



The Biden ad has a picture of Biden wearing a mask! I guess I don't "believe in science" if I "mock" that, but it's ridiculous. It's a photograph!

"First, journalists must understand how propaganda works on the brain and grasp the cognitive science that marketers of propaganda have implicitly mastered: frames, metaphors, narratives and brain basics."

"Second, keep a steely focus on the fact that American democracy is under attack by a foreign power, possibly with collusion from the sitting president’s campaign. This is a crisis. Certain rules don’t apply in a crisis, especially the rule that the press must amplify the president’s words, whatever they are. Third, stop letting Trump control the news cycle. Newsgathering should be a serious affair controlled by editors whose power rivals any politician’s. Stop chasing his tweets and elevating every sideshow. Start every story with truth and the context of what’s really important to citizens in a democracy. More BBC, less TMZ. Fourth, don’t spread lies. Don’t privilege Trump’s lies by putting their specific language in the headlines, the leads or the hashtags. Don’t repeat the lies assuming people will automatically know they’re lies. People need to know the president is lying, but be careful about repeating the lies because 'a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth.' Repetition of lies spreads them."

I am repeating the words of George Lakoff and Gil Duran, "Trump has turned words into weapons. And he's winning the linguistic war/From ‘spygate’ to ‘fake news’, Trump is using language to frame – and win – debates. And the press operate like his marketing agency."

"As long as white children are constructed as innocent, we must continue to demand that children of color are as well."

"Because the idea of childhood innocence carries so much political force, we can’t allow it to be a whites-only club. The problem, however, is that every time we insist that the gates of innocence open to children of color, we limit ourselves by language, a 'frame,' as the linguist George Lakoff would say, that is embedded in racism. When we argue that black and brown children are as innocent as white children, and we must, we assume that childhood innocence is purely positive. But the idea of childhood innocence itself is not innocent: It’s part of a 200-year-old history of white supremacy.... All children deserve equal protection under the law not because they’re innocent, but because they’re people. By understanding children’s rights as human rights, we can begin to undermine the political power of childhood innocence, a cultural formation that has proved, over and over, to be one of white supremacy’s most potent weapons."

From "Let Black Kids Just Be Kids" by Harvard African-American Studies professor Robin Bernstein (in the NYT).

You might want to read that alongside this New Yorker article, which I happened to read earlier today, "The Life of a South Central Statistic/My cousin became a convicted felon in his teens. I tried to make sure he got a second chance. What went wrong?," by Danielle Allen. Excerpt:

A kid from a troubled home, trapped in poverty, without a stable world of adults coördinating care for him, starts pilfering, mostly out of an impatience to have things. In Michael’s first fourteen years, his story includes not a single incidence of violence, aside from the usual wrestling matches with siblings. It could have had any number of possible endings. But events unfold along a single track. As we make decisions, and decisions are made for us, we shed the lives that might have been. In Michael’s fifteenth year, his life accelerated, like a cylinder in one of those pneumatic tubes, whisking off your deposit at a drive-through bank. To understand how that acceleration could happen, though, another story is needed....

"The Democratic Party has a good story to tell, but they don’t know how to tell it."

Says Robert Redford. Ironically, he is telling the story that Democrats keep telling: that they have a good story to tell, but they don’t know how to tell it.

I don't think that is a good story. If only we were better propagandists! It's the soothing, mind-numbing story that George Lakoff has been telling them for years.

"The world will not look kindly on people who put their kids into public school."

Writes Penelope Trunk (in a post titled "Blueprint for a Woman’s Life," which she wrote last August but keeps in her sidebar under the heading "Big Ideas"):

We all know that learning is best when it’s customized to the child and we all know that public schools are not able to do that effectively. And the truly game-changing private schools cost $40,000 a year.

It’s clear is that homeschooled kids will rule the world when Generation Z enters the workplace. So figure out a way to alleviate mommy guilt by homeschooling your kids to get them on that path. You don’t have to do the teaching yourself. You can pay someone. But you need to get your kids out of a system that everyone knows does not work. (Note: I just realized this. This month. And last week, I decided: I’m taking my kids out of school.)

It was interesting reading that right after reading this HuffPo piece by George Lakoff (and a co-author) called "The Wisconsin Blues." The main point is that progressives need better messaging. The conservatives always manage to put things in terms that resonate with people better, don't you know? Anyway, in his effort to improve left-wing propaganda, Lakoff has this about public schools (which I feel like calling government schools):

[D]emocracy begins with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly both for oneself and others. The mechanism by which this is achieved is The Public, through which the government provides resources that make private life and private enterprise possible: roads, bridges and sewers, public education, a justice system, clean water and air, pure food, systems for information, energy and transportation, and protection both for and from the corporate world. No one makes it on his or her own. Private life and private enterprise are not possible without The Public. Freedom does not exist without The Public....

Public schools are essential to opportunity... They are also essential to democracy, since democracy requires an educated citizenry at large, as well as trained professionals in every community. Without education of the public, there can be no freedom.

At issue is the future of progressive morality, democracy, freedom, and every aspect of the Public -- and hence the viability of private life and private enterprise in America on a mass scale. The conservative goal is to impose rule by conservative morality on the entire country, and beyond. Eliminating unions and public education are just steps along the way. Only progressive moral force can stop them.

Discuss!

"Gov. Scott Walker said... he should have done more to prepare the public for his plan to eliminate most collective bargaining for public employees."

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:

"We had not built enough of the case" for the sweeping plan, Walker said...

"What I should have done, from a political standpoint, was build that case sooner"....

"They defined it as a rights issue," Walker said. "It's not a rights issue. It's an expensive entitlement." 

He's saying he let the other side frame the issue, and he should have gotten out in front with his framing. I know conservatives love to read Saul Alinsky and appropriate advice that was originally written to further lefty causes. Now, it sounds like Walker has been reading George Lakoff stuff about "framing":

[T[he progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values, which are traditional progressive values in American politics.

The conservative worldview, the strict father model, assumes that the world is dangerous and difficult and that children are born bad and must be made good. The strict father is the moral authority who supports and defends the family, tells his wife what to do, and teaches his kids right from wrong. The only way to do that is through painful discipline - physical punishment that by adulthood will become internal discipline. The good people are the disciplined people. Once grown, the self-reliant, disciplined children are on their own. Those children who remain dependent (who were spoiled, overly willful, or recalcitrant) should be forced to undergo further discipline or be cut free with no support to face the discipline of the outside world.

Lakoff pushes liberals to get their "frame" into the public's head. Walker is saying he wishes he'd pushed the conservative frame. Walker seemed to assume that people understood the problem the way he did and would — after the election — trust him to do what he thought was needed. He wasn't sufficiently into propaganda, he's essentially saying. To say that, of course, is a form of propaganda (because he's subtly flattering himself). But if the other side is aggressively propagandizing, don't you have to enter the fray and counterpropagandize? You have to keep talking to people, even when you have the power to act quietly and industriously, getting things done.