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propaganda
The Secret to Saving Democracy in the US Is a New Kind of Civics Education
We need a huge pile of money to explain the truth of Trump’s authoritarian overreach to the millions who have checked out from political life.
Jul 05, 2025
Are you part of the newly reinvigorated resistance? Are you someone who recognizes that President Donald Trump is an existential threat to everything wise and decent in this country? Do you believe democracy in the United States is dangling from a high cliff hovering above rocky terrain?
I would bet that every person who reads this article will answer all three questions with a thunderous, “Hell, yes!”
I am right there with you. But here’s the problem: I would also bet that no one who is not already of this mindset will ever read this article. And the same is true, or at least largely true, of hundreds of other articles, books, news reports, speeches, and the like raising the warning of growing autocracy. It is now conventional wisdom that left-wing Americans live in a different-informational universe than right-wing Americans. Progressives generally rely on sources like major media, NPR and PBS, and progressive websites. MAGA enthusiasts rely on hard-right propaganda sources like Fox News, Breitbart, right-wing radio, and, yes, for some the internet ravings of QAnon.
We are talking to ourselves.
This would be expensive. But then, how much is democracy worth to us?
These stark differences in the news consumed by the two groups has led to the left and right existing in two different perceived realities. One sees the world as it is, and the other sees it as portrayed in a far-right fever dream. Realistically, few hardcore MAGA supporters will change their outlook whatever they are told. Indeed, polls suggest that many would be perfectly happy with an autocratic form of government. But given the close political division in the United States, nudging even 1-2% of them into the real world could be enough to save American democracy.
There is, however, a more promising pool of Americans to try to recruit into the fight for democracy. The biggest opportunity isn’t MAGA (although we should still try). The better opportunity to find converts would be from, let’s call it, Team Oblivious.
They are out there by the millions. The term oblivious isn’t employed here as an insult. It’s a descriptor. These are people who pay absolutely no attention to politics or national news because they have absolutely no interest in them. Most aren’t stupid, and at least some would probably be reachable if we could somehow convince them to look up and see what is happening. Before we could do that effectively, however, we would first need to know how and where to talk to them.
The United States is flunking civics. Civics education in schools has been dramatically reduced. When the Founding Fathers spoke of the importance of widespread public education, they didn’t emphasize preparing children for employment as is true today. People like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams supported public education so the young would grow to become part of the informed citizenry necessary for a functioning republic.
Increasing civics education in schools, while important, obviously isn’t the answer to the current menace. We need to act now. Authoritarianism is on the march, and the rule of law is crumbling shockingly fast. It took Donald Trump only a few brief months to completely corrupt the Justice Department—turning it into his personal attack dog. He orders investigations of political opponents at the same time he protects his followers by deep-sixing investigations and abusing the pardon power. He is rapidly politicizing every part of the federal government, firing public servants in what are supposed to be apolitical positions and replacing them with unqualified hacks who will blindly follow him.
The good news is that the resistance is now largely past licking our wounds over Trump’s election and is ready to fight. But there is something else we should do. And that is where, at least in my dreams, a huge pile of money comes into play.
We need a new kind of civics education—and we need it soon.
This new form of civics education would feature a series of brief, professionally produced messages to be posted anywhere and everywhere “members” of Team Oblivious, and to a lesser extent MAGA, can be found. This would sometimes involve expensive media advertising, and at other times free messages such as emails and social media posts.
For this idea to come to fruition, people with the necessary skills (which I don’t have), and some initial funding, would need to create an organization dedicated to spreading the word of the attack against American democracy. Its mission statement could be educating the citizens of the United States about the growing threat to our democracy. The leadership of such an organization would need to be beyond reproach. Complete transparency would be essential as would vigorously auditing of the organization’s funds. I would personally suggest that no effort be made for such an organization to qualify as a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization as that would open it to harassment by government officials answering to Trump.
Once set up, the organization’s first priority would have to be fundraising. Lots of fundraising. This would be expensive.
But then, how much is democracy worth to us?
Any such organization would be wise to consult with experts who can help paint a picture of Team Oblivious (group characteristics not personal information). What are their demographics, what they are interested in, what media do they consume, what social media do they visit, what type of work do they do, and what might move them. The answers would vary with different ages and other differing characteristics. The data would therefore need to be broken down into categories. At the same time, experts on every type of media, online and traditional, should also be consulted to assist in determining the best way to reach as many people as possible.
In terms of the actual messages to be sent, the best starting place would be the warning signs of authoritarianism. This would be combined with showing the many ways in which these signs point at Donald Trump. For example, experts agree that one particularly worrying sign of authoritarian government is the use of police and prosecutors to attack political opponents, something Trump is doing right now. This could be demonstrated in as little as 10 to 15 seconds, driving the point home before boredom grabs the wheel. This could be followed by new messages discussing other signs of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, as well as other relevant topics.
These messages would be spread anywhere and everywhere that Team Oblivious, and to some extent MAGA, can be found. As noted before, this would obviously be expensive, but well worth the cost.
Because if ever America needed an informed citizenry, it is now.
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How Does Copaganda Work and Why Is It Harmful?
Copaganda contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.
May 17, 2025
Copaganda is a specific type of propaganda in which the punishment bureaucracy and the powerful interests behind it influence how we think about crime and safety. I use the term “punishment bureaucracy” instead of “criminal justice system” in this book because it is a more accurate and less deceptive way to describe the constellation of public and private institutions that develop, enforce, and profit from criminal law. The government determines what things are considered a “crime” subject to punishment versus what things are permitted or tolerated even if they hurt people. Then, the government determines what kinds of punishments are appropriate for the conduct it prohibits. Across history and different societies, the definition of crime and how it should be punished has varied depending on who has power and what serves their interests, not an objective evaluation of what causes harm.
The powerful define crime to suit their interests, making some things legal and others punishable. They also decide how what is criminalized gets punished. Should the government execute or cage or whip people who break a law? Should the government mandate a public apology, permit survivors to initiate restorative processes, seize assets, require volunteer work, revoke a business or driver’s license, confine someone to their home, banish them? Should society show them love and give them help? Should society instead invest more in preventing certain harms from happening in the first place?
Having defined crime and punishment, the government also determines which crimes to enforce against which people. “Law enforcement” rarely responds to most violations of the law. It only enforces some criminal laws against some people some of the time.
The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities.
These decisions, too, follow patterns of power, not safety. That is why U.S. police chose for many years to arrest more people for marijuana possession than for all “violent crime” combined. That is why police prioritize budgets for SWAT teams to search for drugs in poor communities over testing rape kits. That is why the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office responded to proposed county budget cuts by threatening to cut the divisions that handle white-collar crimes and sexual abuse. That is why about 90 percent of people prosecuted for crimes are very poor. That is why no senior figures were prosecuted for the 2008 financial crisis or the U.S. torture program after 9/11. That is why police tolerate widespread drug use in dorms at Ivy League universities. That is why most of the undercover police operations in hundreds of U.S. cities target disproportionately Black, Hispanic, and immigrant people instead of other police officers, prosecutors, real estate developers, fraternities with histories of drug distribution and rape, or corporate board rooms with histories of tax evasion, fraud, and insider trading. That is why a playground fight at a low-income school results in a child being taken away from their parents and jailed with a criminal record, while the same fight at a prep school may result in a call to parents for an early pickup that afternoon.
In an unequal society where a few have more money and power than the many, the punishment bureaucracy is a tool for preserving inequalities. It maintains the social order by using government violence to manage the unrest that comes from unfairness, desperation, and alienation, and it crushes organized opposition against the political system. These functions explain why the punishment bureaucracy expands during times of growing inequality and social agitation. Throughout history, those who are comfortable with how society looks tend to preserve and expand the punishment bureaucracy, even though—and largely because—it operates as an anti-democratic force. Those who have wanted to change certain aspects of our society—such as movements for workers, racial justice, women’s suffrage, economic equality, peace, ecological sustainability, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and so on—have tended throughout history to combat the size, power, and discretion of the punishment bureaucracy. Why? Because it is almost always wielded against them.
So, how does copaganda work? It has three main roles.
Job #1: Narrowing Our Understanding of Threat
The first job of copaganda is to narrow our conception of threat. Rather than the bigger threats to our safety caused by people with power, we narrow our conception to crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society. For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined—such as burglaries, retail theft, and robberies—costing an estimated $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. That’s over sixty times the wealth lost in all police-reported property crime. There are hundreds of thousands of known Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, damage to the nervous system, and death. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, about five times the number of homicides. At the same time, most sexual assaults, domestic violence crimes, and sex offenses against children go unreported, unrecorded, and ignored by the legal system. Punishment bureaucrats feed reporters stories that measure “safety” as any short-term increase or decrease in, say, official homicide or robbery rates, rather than by how many people died from lack of health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by eviction or foreclosure, how many people couldn’t pay utility bills because of various white-collar crimes, how many thousands of illegal assaults police and jail guards committed, and so on. Sometimes the rates of various crimes go up and down, and we should all be concerned about any form of violence against any human being. But the first job of copaganda is getting us focused almost exclu- sively on a narrow range of the threats we face, mostly the officially-recorded crimes of poor people, rather than the large-scale devastation wrought by people with power and money.
Job #2: Manufacturing Fear
The second job of copaganda is to manufacture crises and panics about this narrow category of threats. After the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, for example, the news bombarded the public with a series of “crime waves” concerning various forms of crime committed by the poor even though government data showed that, despite some categories of police-reported crime rising and others falling at the beginning of the pandemic, overall property and violent crime continued to be at near-historic fifty-year lows the entire time. As a result of continual news-generated panics, nearly every year of this century, public opinion polls showed people believing that police-reported crime was rising, even when it was generally falling.
Copaganda leaves the public in a vague state of fear. It manufactures suspicion against poor people, immigrants, and racial minorities rather than, say, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, fraternity brothers, landlords, employers, and polluters. Copaganda also engenders fear of strangers while obscuring the oppressive forces that lead to interpersonal violence between acquaintances, friends, and family members. (Police themselves commit one-third of all stranger-homicides in the U.S., but these figures are generally excluded from reported crime rates.) This matters because when people are in a perpetual state of fear for their physical safety, they are more likely to support the punishment bureaucracy and authoritarian reactions against those they fear.
Job #3: Promoting Punishment as the Solution
The third job of copaganda is to convince the public to spend more money on the punishment bureaucracy by framing police, prosecutors, probation, parole, and prisons as effective solutions to interpersonal harm. Copaganda links safety to things the punishment bureaucracy does, while downplaying the connection between safety and the material, structural conditions of people’s lives. So, for example, a rise in homeless people sleeping in the street might be framed as an economic problem requiring more affordable housing, but copaganda frames it as “disorder” solvable with more arrests for trespassing. Instead of linking sexual assault to toxic masculinity or a lack of resources and vibrant social connections to escape high-risk situations, copaganda links it to an under-resourced punishment system. Like a media-induced Stockholm syndrome, copaganda sells us the illusion that the violent abuser is somehow the liberator, the protector, our best and only option.
If police, prosecutions, and prisons made us safe, we would be living in the safest society in world history. But, as I discuss later, greater investment in the punishment bureaucracy actually increases a number of social harms, including physical violence, sexual harm, disease, trauma, drug abuse, mental illness, isolation, and even, in the long term, police-recorded crime. Instead, overwhelming evidence supports addressing the controllable things that determine the levels of interpersonal harm in our society, including: poverty; lack of affordable housing; inadequate healthcare and mental wellness resources; nutrition; access to recreation and exercise; pollution; human and social connection; design of cities, buildings, and physical environments; and early-childhood education. Addressing root causes like these would lower police-reported crime and also prevent the other harms that flow from inequality that never make it into the legal system for punishment, including millions of avoidable deaths and unnecessary suffering that exceed the narrow category of harm that police record as “crime.”
The obsessive focus by news outlets on the punishment bureaucracy as a solution to interpersonal harm draws away resources from investment in the things that work better, along with a sense of urgency for those priorities. It also promotes the surveillance and repression of social movements that are trying to solve those root structural problems by fighting for a more equal and sustainable society. Copaganda thus contributes to a cycle in which the root causes of our safety problems never get solved even though people in power constantly claim to be trying.
As you read the examples collected in this book with the above three themes in mind, ask yourself: what kind of public is created by consuming such news? If we see one of these articles once, we may not notice anything odd, or we may shake our heads at how silly, uninformed, and nefarious it is. But if we see thousands of them over the course of years, and we hardly see anything else, we become different people. It is the ubiquity of copaganda that requires us to set up daily practices of individual and collective vigilance.
Copyright © 2025 by Alec Karakatsanis. This excerpt originally appeared in Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission and please note that it is not available for re-posting elsewhere.
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Mass Media and the Spectacle of the Imperial Presidency
The revolution won’t be televised, but our national decline will be highly pixelated.
May 13, 2025
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the Trump administration has been using television, social media, and AI-generated digital graphics to advance its policies. This particular thought experiment started when my friend and I were watching the evening news. There was Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem prancing triumphantly in front of detainees in the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador where Venezuelan immigrants had been deported. Noem was dressed to kill for the occasion with a designer outfit and a $50,000 Rolex watch. The dynamics of the event were telling. She scolded the detainees like they were 10-year olds caught smoking and, curiously, she did not target gang activity but rather illegal immigration as the cause of their plight.
The prisoners (mostly men) were naked from the waist up, packed into tiny cells, and looked like caged animals. While viewing this quasi-surreal and clearly staged event, my friend turned to me and said: “It looks like Auschwitz.” I will have to say that the unquestionable dehumanization in this image still haunts me. This spectacle alone should’ve struck some variant of fear and loathing into the minds and hearts of every American about how aspects of the immigration crisis are being handled.
Political dialogue has now largely shifted from a platform of reasoned discourse to battles of digital imagery and “optics.”
Thankfully some media pundits got the message. But, in some cases, they appeared more focused on Noem’s watch than the evocative images of dehumanizing treatment. One commenter writing in USA Today looking to win the “too much information” award noted: “The watch that she wears in the video was identified as an 18-karat gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, as first reported by The Washington Post, and reportedly sells for $50,000.” Good to know. The writer went on to say that “except for President Donald Trump, presidents in recent decades have opted for more modest timepieces to avoid being labeled as elitist, according to The New York Times. For example, President Joe Biden was criticized by conservative media for wearing a $7,000 watch to his inauguration.” Also good to know. Eventually, however, the writer did feel compelled to point out that “the juxtaposition of Noem’s luxury accessory and her setting was noted by critics and human rights groups.”
The Power of the Viral Photo Op
The Noem footage appeared to be little more than a calculated video-based photo op. It was apparently designed to demonstrate that the Trump administration was fulfilling its campaign promise to deal with the immigration problem. But it made me think of a larger trend. It seems that, thanks to the pervasiveness of our “global village” and how easily digital tech can be used to shape our collective thinking, political dialogue has now largely shifted from a platform of reasoned discourse to battles of digital imagery and “optics.” The poet Robert Bly has pointed out that, cognitively speaking, television images bypass the parts of the brain involved in rational processing and nest comfortably in the so-called reptile brain where raw emotion dwells, a phenomenon well understood by the advertising industry. The political analysis of Trump’s actions that surfaces in the mainstream media needs to take his admittedly skillful media manipulation into far more serious account.
To understand Trump’s control of the media (and hence the typical voter mindset) it’s helpful to look at the work of the French media theorist Guy Debord. In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord addresses the media-induced degradation of contemporary life where authentic social interactions have been replaced with their mere representation. He posits that “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity.” Here it’s worth noting that Debord was writing this well before the advent of the internet, which added yet another layer to the commodification of societal and political interaction.
The Spectacle of the “Imperial Presidency”
It was the media theorist and prophetic thinker Marshall McLuhan who pioneered the concept of the global village in the 60’s. Decades later, heightened media awareness expanded even more, wrought by a combination of television, the internet, social media, and telecommunications technologies which some refer to as the New Media. This new mediasphere has radically altered our collective awareness while subtly shaping the underpinnings of political dynamics. Its effects on polity and political outcomes are incalculable. While television viewership has been declining for some time, the images generated by television often become viral social media fodder in a kind of endless feedback loop. So, in this sense, television is still a force majeure in our perceptions of accelerating world events.
The televised debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960 has been cited as a political milestone. For the first time in history, the televised image may have helped elect a president. The election of a former television actor, Ronald Reagan, continued on this trajectory. An article by Matthew Wills framed it this way:
“Politics in the United States has always been a performance art,” writes Tim Raphael in his analysis of the branding and image-crafting that now dominate our political system. Throughout his eight years as president, Ronald Reagan had much more positive poll numbers (60-70%) as a person than did his actual policies (40%). Raphael attributes Reagan’s success to the potent combination of advertising, public relations, and a television in every home. (There were 14,000 TVs in America in 1947; by 1954, 32 million; by 1962, 90% of American homes plugged in.)
If Reagan plowed this territory, then Donald Trump, with his many years of experience as a Reality TV star, turned it into an art form. Trump learned to use the media to advance what historian Arthur Schlesinger called “the imperial presidency.” The New Media, in combination with the trajectory of politics as “performance art,” has accelerated this process significantly. As just one example of many, one of Trump’s recent media plays has been to allow television coverage of a two-hour Cabinet meeting. Given in historical terms that this is an unprecedented event, it seems important to ask: Where does what appears to be or is sold as “transparency” cross the line into being mere performative optics? And while the Biden presidency was characterized by Oz-like behind-the-scenes operation in terms of press conferences, speeches, and media events, Trump is quite the opposite. Many of his visits with foreign leaders are attended by the media, staged, and televised. In this sense, while there is nominally more transparency there is also the deliberate use of optics for political advantage.
It’s likely that the meme fodder of Donald Trump’s imperial presidency will only increase in frequency and intensity. This media saturation has a purpose: It creates displacement sucking up available bandwidth in both the media and our own cognitive processing. “All Trump, all the time” is a familiar trope that we will somehow have to learn to live with and correct for. Back in the day, you could spot the occasional bumper sticker that said: “Kill your television.” On one level at least, there was a certain wisdom to that. But the advent of full-blown technocracy now makes it very difficult to turn away from a kind of forced participation in the now all-pervasive digital mediasphere.
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