Author: Ben Nigrin

Co-founder and acting president of Bipartisan Disagreement.

In one of my recent pieces, I wrote about how we all participate as “weapons” or “soldiers” of some sort in the new cold war of narratives and perspectives. As the Ukraine invasion has become the Ukraine War, we have had our first opportunity to see how such a cold war might affect U.S. diplomatic and security choices. The U.S. has smartly kept its public warfare to the economic sector. Perhaps this is in part because of our increasingly isolationist sentiment towards military involvement elsewhere in the world (especially concerning Russia), but it is likely more so due to increased concern for optics. Thankfully, it seems like this has worked. By carefully positioning itself as the “good” actor in the eyes of the international community, the Biden administration was able to avoid goading the conflict beyond Russia’s aggression. This exposed Russia’s actions as obviously and completely unprovoked. 

Even still, propagandists have sought to paint the U.S. as a partial aggressor. Most recently, this has manifested in obsession over Biden’s (questionably) accidental mention of his desire to see a “regime change” in Russia. This is admittedly extremely stupid of Biden. However, to suggest that this is somehow the red flag that the U.S. is trying to make this war happen a day longer than zero days is ludicrous. This propaganda is just another part of a long stream of claims put together by enemies of our state to attempt to instantiate their narrative as the truth. Other examples of propaganda include the claim that the U.S. was operating bio-labs in Ukraine and that Ukraine was a Nazi state that needed liberation from its occupying Nazi military. This propaganda is oftentimes presented in such a familiar way with such familiar rhetoric and colloquialisms that it has begun hard for some Americans to detect misinformation. Other times, it simply piggybacks on existing narratives in a creative and self-serving way to trick consumers into letting their guard down (in other words, people are used to a certain topic and don’t give it much thought). Even worse, the propaganda has been echoed by some influential right-wing outlets, raising concerns of treason and further blurring the line of credibility.

All of this is to say that we have a problem — an education problem. It is our Achilles heel in the new age of information warfare. I don’t mean that in a “we need more people in cybersecurity!” way; I mean it in the sense that free speech isn’t going anywhere in the U.S., and we will need to confront the power of certain narratives sooner or later. Thankfully, we can assume that the technology gap between older and newer generations can account for some of the dissonances in understanding. Still, younger generations are just as susceptible to propaganda as older generations (not to mention that Gen Z produces most of the misinformation it consumes). How can we tackle such an intangible and complex problem? That is beyond my pay grade at this point in my life, but someone better get to it soon, or else we risk losing some of our population to gripping propaganda conspiracy webs.