The Grand Illusion
Sometimes, propaganda is blatantly false; sometimes it’s a mixture of truth and misinformation; and sometimes, what’s perceived as blatantly false is largely factually accurate.
Ted Koppel of CBS News revealed on Sunday, May 24th that Iranians are flooding the internet, and the world, with skillfully rendered, AI-generated, anti-American, and especially anti-Trump media, often featuring AI-rendered Trump Lego figures.
Koppel talked, if via a translator, with one of the individuals behind at least some of the anti-Trump renderings, asking that individual about the assertion that Israel had blackmailed Trump into making the attack on Iran by threatening to reveal Trump’s more direct connections to Jeffrey Epstein. The Iranian, predictably, claimed that the report was, in fact, accurate.
Whether or not that assertion is accurate, the fact that it’s been made public and that the Iranian anti-Trump propaganda has been disseminated so far to near a billion people worldwide are disturbing. Even more disturbing in this context is the fact that roughly half of the Epstein documents remain undisseminated and that much of the material that was disseminated is so heavily redacted as to be unreadable.
Given the stakes of the Iran conflict, the fact that Trump and his administration acted without any long-term plan or strategy and given how unwilling Trump’s Department of Justice is to comply with the court order to disseminate all the Epstein files, merely dismissing the Iranian assertion as false is hardly sufficient to remove the cloud of doubt created by that assertion, particularly given Trump’s long record of misstatement and prevarication and the slavish devotion of the political appointees running DOJ.
Trump’s continuing statements about a pending solution to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are hardly reassuring, particularly given the pace of Iranian rearmament. While the growing threat of Iranian-backed terrorists in the Middle East and Iranian progress in developing a global nuclear threat provide some rationale for the initial February attack on Iran, none of those deal with the question of why the U.S. joined Israel almost immediately for a second attack, especially since it’s clear that Trump has been unable to provide any comprehensive reason for the second attack, beyond claiming that Iran should never be allowed a nuclear weapon.
So…whose claims are true, and to what degree, and which, if any, are blatantly false?
Nice take on this. I’ve long since abandoned my trust in believing, without receipts, what Trump and his two administrations say or have said. There are far too many instances where he has been shown unassailable proof that he said something and he flat out denies it.
Now on the issue of international issues; viz., atomic weapons…there are quite a few countries that already have a weapon in their arsenal. And those weapons are delivery-capable. On this issue for Iran or any future country that may consider arming itself with a weapon, there’s always the two-pronged consideration of capability and desire. I’m not yet convinced that even if Iran had weapon grade uranium that they were in position to ‘weaponize’it, especially into an ICBM capable of actually detonating at a predetermined target. Delivering a truck-born weapon is another story. Remember, most countries have a lot of testing to demonstrate their capability. Even North Korea has had numerous failures in this regard.
The second issue is desirability. To advance along this path a country needs an incentive. And just because Iran ‘hates Israel or the US” doesn’t mean that the necessary incentive is there to pursue this path. Now, being subject to unrelenting air attacks while trying to renegotiate with those same countries and then being threatened with citizen-wide annihilation, that might just present enough incentive to pursue a deliverable nuclear weapon.
GIven a choice between believing Trump or the Iranians, I’d prefer to believe Trump, even though I don’t always agree with him, and on some matters I might have to hold my nose.
Granted that someone squeaky clean and maximally transparent would be harder to say such things about, people have been saying things about Trump that weren’t true for a long time. The Steele dossier and how it was used to inflict as much damage as possible is one domestic (mostly) example of that.
More interesting to me was the case of both pro and anti Trump demonstrations in close temporal and geographic proximity when he was President-elect the first time, that both had Russian sponsorship. That shows that foreign adversary’s objective isn’t for or against any particular figure so much as it is maximizing division and distrust. And way too many of us fall for it. Even someone we strongly disagree with (for some, Trump; in my case, Obama or Biden) doesn’t justify believing foreign propaganda.
Disinformation was a Soviet specialty for decades. The advent of the internet just makes it all the easier for any actor on any side to do likewise.
“[T]he fact that Trump and his administration acted without any long-term plan or strategy…”
I’m pretty sure this was a) just more of the same strategy of flooding the news cycle, keeping anyone from having time to think about much of anything. Greenland, Gulf of America, DOGE, boats in the Caribbean, a lot of it is meant to keep the media, any opposition, and people who think off-balance.
I suspect the other factor is b) Trump loves to look at people getting blown up, especially if they aren’t backing him. A kid in a sandbox, only he has the US military to “play” with.