The key to selling narratives through social media lies in convincing large numbers of users that what most people believe has changed overnight

D

avid Samuels lays bare in a stunning Tablet magazine article last month how Barack Obama and his aides mastered the new social media universe to give the White House unprecedented ability to shape the dominant political narrative, including, at the most extreme, indirect government censorship of dissenting views (“Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment: How Barack Obama Built an Omnipotent Thought-Machine and How It Was Destroyed”).

That machinery was first developed to sell Obamacare and then the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, followed by Russiagate and, more recently, Covid restrictions.

It is a story that Samuels knows well. He is the author of a much-discussed 9,500-word New York Times Magazine article, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru” (May 5, 2016), based on a dozen hours of taped interviews Samuels conducted with Deputy National Security Director Ben Rhodes, the lead spin doctor behind the sale of the Iran nuclear deal. And having been provided inside access to how the Iran deal was sold, he had no trouble recognizing that the narrative of Donald Trump as a Russian-controlled asset was being sold in the same way.

In that 2016 NYT piece, Samuels coined the term “echo chambers” to describe a process whereby the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs “generated an entirely new class of experts who credential each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or non-credible.” That process was made easier by the rapid decline of the mainstream media, and with it, traditional subject-area gatekeepers to keep the government honest.

In their discussions, Rhodes made no effort to hide his contempt for the press corps. “They literally know nothing,” he told Samuels. Once newspapers maintained foreign bureaus. Now, they call the White House to explain to them what’s happening, Rhodes confided. The average reporter may have an Ivy League degree, but he is 27 years old and his only reporting experience is political campaigns.

The deal was sold on the basis of a series of lies: that American outreach was a response to the election of the “moderate” Hassan Rouhani in the Iran’s 2013 presidential elections, when in fact the main parameters had been hammered out during the presidency of the “mad” Ahmadinejad; that the only alternative to the deal was an all-out war with Iran similar to the ill-fated Iraq war; and, most important, that if it appeared that the Iranians were nearing the acquisition of nuclear weapons, Obama would stop them by military force.

Similarly, the premises of the deal were detached from reality. Securing a free flow of oil has always been at the top of the US’s Middle East interests. How did giving Iran control over crucial straits improve oil security? Samuels wonders in his recent piece. Similarly, as I have pointed out numerous times, why should anyone imagine that an expansionist, theocratic regime would become a force for stability in the Middle East?

ACCORDING TO SAMUELS, what he calls the Obama Democratic Party (ODP) demonstrated that with enough money, it is possible to “create reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc and short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis.”

Especially when combined with control of social media platforms, the machine could be ramped up to censor or diminish dissenting opinions on everything “from the origins of Covid to DEI to police conduct, to the prevalence and effect of hormone therapies and surgery on youths.” Perhaps the most egregious example was the letter of 51 high national security officials virtually proclaiming the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation, which was then used as the basis for banning or restricting factual reports about the contents of the laptop from digital platforms, even though each of those officials had good reason to know that the contents of the laptop were real.

The key to selling narratives through social media lies in convincing large numbers of users that what most people believe has changed overnight. Those positions then become public markers of what all “decent people” — i.e., non-troglodytes and bigots — affirm. Suddenly, “spouses, colleagues, and supervisors at work begin reciting with the fervor of true believers slogans they only learned last week and for which they could not provide the slightest real-world evidence” — structural racism, white privilege, assigned gender, defund the police, stop the genocide in Gaza.

For some, “peer-group pressure and aspirational ambition” led to adoption of the views of the talented politician at the head of the machine. The scaffolding of the machine depended on appeals to how one wants to be seen in the eyes of others. And even those still not convinced in their heart of hearts might nevertheless profess “fealty to the new order in the hope of keeping their jobs and avoiding being singled out for ostracism and punishment.”

Samuels obviously takes a dim view of this social media manipulation. For one thing, it has the potential for creating a huge gap between the underlying reality and invented realities. He remains skeptical that giving young White House aides with MFA degrees (like Rhodes) carte blanche to shape public opinion from their iPhones and laptops is a good idea. And when the power of monopolistic social media platforms is harnessed to national security agencies, the traditional American system of government, in his view, has gone off the rails.

Above all, the effort to substitute “new and better beliefs” for old ones, directed top-down from the White House, teeters uncomfortably toward totalitarianism, in which the “party, which knows what beliefs are right and which are wrong, becomes the superego of humanity.”

UNTIL NOW, MANIPULATION of social media has been almost exclusively a Democratic domain, as the ODP controlled all the major levers of power — or did, at least until Elon Musk purchased Twitter. Even when Donald Trump was president, the FBI was pressuring social media platforms to remove stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which would have been harmful to the Biden campaign.

But toward the very end of his piece, Samuels warns of the danger that the right might use “the same machinery to advance its own wishful imaginings, [including] bemoaning the evils of the Allied side in World War II.”

That last example is clearly a reference to Tucker Carlson and his interview with World War II revisionist Darryl Cooper, whom he introduced as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” (I have already written at length of Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper in “Tucker’s Problem and Ours,” Issue 1029).

Cooper proceeded to place the major part of the blame for the expansion of World War II beyond Poland on Winston Churchill. He has also written that Hitler initially sought an “acceptable solution to the Jewish problem,” without specifying in precisely what ways the Jews are a problem. In September, Samuels published a long piece in Tablet labeling Carlson “America’s conspiracist-in-chief.”

That was only one of many pieces puzzling over the question of “What Happened to Tucker Carlson?” (See John McCormack, The Dispatch, October 1, 2024.) Once, Carlson publicly denounced 9/11 “truthers” for saying “filthy things, with no evidence.” Today, he calls Alex Jones a “friend” and a “prophet” for predicting 9/11. (He didn’t.) That is the same Alex Jones who was hit with a billion-dollar jury verdict in favor of distraught parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, for claiming the shootings were a fake.

In February, Carlson traveled to Russia to do a fawning interview with Vladimir Putin, followed by another episode celebrating the wonders of a Russian grocery store, without once mentioning that the average Russian family spends 29% of its income on groceries, compared to 7% for the average American family.

In 1999, Carlson acknowledged that columnist Pat Buchanan had a tendency to “needle the Jews” and was likely an anti-Semite. He added that anti-Semitism is not “mere bigoty. [Buchanan] believes in conspiracies.” Today, however, Carlson advances as many conspiracy theories involving the Jews as Buchanan ever did.

Last April, he interviewed on his show Munther Isaac, a Palestinian preacher from Bethlehem, who had praised Hamas’s bravery in challenging the siege of Gaza on October 7. (There was no such siege.) In the course of the interview, Carlson wondered why “self-professed Christians in America send money to suppress Christians in the Middle East” by supporting Israel. He ignored the fact that Israel is the only Middle East country with a growing Christian population and that the Christian population of Bethlehem had declined sharply under Palestinian rule.

In another show, Carlson introduced rapper Kanye West as a “Christian evangelist,” while making no reference to his incendiary statements against Jews, many of which were edited out of the show.

Last month, Carlson interviewed far left economist Jeffrey Sachs, another beneficiary of George Soros’s largesse. What attracted Carlson to Sachs, it would seem, is the latter’s hatred of Israel and, in particular, its prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, whom Sachs viewed as the chief architect of Assad’s downfall in Syria. That, of course, is nonsense. The chief support for the rebels who ultimately sent Bashar Assad into exile was Turkey’s leader Erdogan, a bellicose foe of Israel.

For his part, Carlson whined about being constantly told that he should hate Assad, whom he had heard was protective of Syrian Christians and thus entitled to Carlson’s support. He appears to view religions as like sport teams, and himself as a Christian fan. Has he not heard of the mass graves with 100,000 bodies or more left by the Assad regime, or of its use of poison gas on its own population? Of the half a million people killed in Syria’s civil war, and the more than ten million displaced? Does Carlson’s Christianity have nothing to say about any of that?

Sachs even went so far as to accuse Netanyahu of having led President Obama to seek the overthrow of Assad. Has he forgotten that Obama came into office with the explicit intention of “putting distance” between the US and Israel, and treated Netanyahu throughout his presidency with undisguised contempt, including having him wait in the White House basement for an hour while the Obamas supped upstairs?

Far from trying to overthrow Assad, Obama overlooked his own publicly declared “red lines” when Assad employed chemical weapons against his own citizens, and refused to get involved in Syria, which he viewed as an important Iranian asset.

And like his academic predecessors in the fevered marshes of Israel hatred, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of the infamous Israel Lobby, Sachs saddles Netanyahu with responsibility for the second Iraq war.

Unfortunately for him, the facts intrude. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkinson, told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that the Israelis “tried their best to persuade us that we were focused on the wrong enemy [i.e., Iraq]; they were very leery of destroying the balance of power in the Middle East.”

Even Mearsheimer acknowledged in an NPR interview that when the Israelis got wind of American plans for attacking Iraq, they hurried to Washington to argue that Iran was the far greater threat. Finally, all those most closely involved in the planning of the war have testified that President George W. Bush was primarily responding to a request from Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to complete the work of his father in the first Gulf War, and that uppermost in American policymakers minds was “a concern with the long-term stability of the House of Saud.”

The scary part about Carlson’s providing a platform for all manner of Israel haters and anti-Semites is his continuing influence within the Republican Party. He sat in President Trump’s box at the Republican convention. According to multiple reports, he has Trump’s ear sufficiently to have scuttled the appointment of Mike Pompeo, an ardent supporter of Israel, as secretary of defense. And for good measure, last week Trump sent out a tweet of Jeffrey Sachs excoriating Netanyahu and blaming him for dragging the United States into war after war.

Carlson’s malign fingerprints are all over that tweet. Supporters of Israel would do well to attend to the social media narratives Carlson knows how to advance.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1045. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)