What if they gave a propaganda party and nobody came?

| 3:00 pm EST December 22, 2024
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Donald Trump may have won the election by a razor-thin plurality, but he’s losing the propaganda war. Americans are now voting with their feet. For example, Elon Musk’s social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, is continuing to bleed users at the rate of 7 million per month. Americans are defecting principally to Bluesky. (And please feel free to follow me there at @raharrington.bsky.social. I will follow you back.)

Moreover, politicians are slowly waking up to the fact that the legacy media is no longer where it’s at. Joe Biden recently gave a thirty minute interview to Ben Meiselas of the Meidas Touch Network, a YouTube channel with three and a half million subscribers — and rapidly climbing. Other YouTube channels along with Meidas Touch, such as Brian Tyler Cohen, David Pakman and Luke Beasley, are becoming serious competition for eyeballs with everybody in the fading mainstream media from CNN to Fox News.

What’s going on here? People are getting tired of Trump’s bullshit. Many Americans who voted for Trump actively dislike him and, as a result, don’t like his propaganda mouthpieces either. They voted for Trump because they naively hoped that he could make things better for them. They don’t find him or his water carriers entertaining.

Also, Trump-friendly social media platforms are becoming unbearable. Twitter (X) is a case in point. Serious commentary and informed users are becoming overwhelmed by increasingly crazy conspiracy theories and toxic trolling behaviour. Consequently, important commentators are taking their business elsewhere. One of my favourite climate scientists, Katharine Hayhoe, moved from X to Bluesky. I moved with her.

Increasingly, terms and conditions are enforced on X only if violators are left-leaning. For example, YouTube commentator David Pakman reported language such as “I’ll kill you Jew fag!” and was astonished to find that such language is no longer regarded as a TOS violation in the Twittersphere!

Trumpism brings chaos and even MAGAheads find chaos tedious. It certainly isn’t conventionally entertaining. This is having a knock on effect for the ultimate efficacy of the Trump message. Additionally, younger users are no longer watching television. They watch their phones and are coming to their politics, if they come there at all, by way of YouTube and Tik Tok. So TV watchers are a dying breed by definition.

In short, being force-fed content you didn’t ask for and don’t like won’t cut it as an effective propaganda tool. As far as social media is concerned, Republicans are losing the competition for hearts and minds. This trend is going to make it harder for MAGA to get its toxic message out, a message that many people are getting thoroughly sick and tired of in any case. It will also make it harder for Trump to rule the country. Trump may be using the Hitler playbook, but Hitler in 1933 had one major advantage over Trump in 2025: he wasn’t commonly hated by members of his own party.