The Villainization of America: Why the Story We Tell Ourselves Matters
America's failures are real. This documents the operation that uses them to build a permanent indictment, who built it, who funds it, what it costs.
Tag: Propaganda
Propaganda is storytelling with a client, and the techniques are worth knowing from both ends. This tag collects reviews and essays on propaganda films, disinformation and persuasion machinery.
Critical ThinkingThe Emasculation of America: What Bezmenov Described and Nobody Acted On
A national security argument. Documents the sixty-year Soviet operation to target American masculinity and degrade national capacity. Not a culture war book.
Cold WarYuri Bezmenov and the Four Stages of Subversion
In 1984 a former Soviet propagandist described four stages for taking a country apart: demoralize a generation, destabilize its institutions, manufacture a crisis, normalize what follows. He said the first stage was already finished in America.
AprilHate Week
Hate Week comes from Orwell's 1984. Why the novel stays relevant decade after decade, and what writers can learn from fiction that became a permanent warning.
Book Reviews1984
The novel that gave us Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, and the memory hole, a towering dystopia of totalitarianism, surveillance, and the war on truth itself. A masterpiece of political imagination whose warnings have only grown more relevant, and one of…
Book ReviewsNineteen Eighty-four
Big Brother. Doublethink. Thoughtcrime. The memory hole. Orwell gave us the vocabulary for tyranny, and the words have outlived most of the books written since. A lesson in carrying a political argument through one man's experience without ever lecturing, grim…
1920sBattleship Potemkin (1925)
Eisenstein's 1925 Soviet propaganda film. The Odessa Steps sequence remains the most-imitated montage in cinema.
1990sStarship Troopers (1997)
Starship Troopers is one of the most misunderstood films of the 1990s and one of the most accomplished political satires in mainstream science fiction. The adaptation is loose in ways that have generated decades of argument.
2010sSnowpiercer (2013)
Bong directed and co-wrote with Kelly Masterson. The film made approximately eighty-six million dollars worldwide on a forty million dollar budget.
1940sSergeant York (1941)
Sergeant York is a propaganda film that happens to also be a great film. The film came out in July 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor, and it pushed America toward war.
1970sWizards (1977) Review
Wizards is one of the substantial adult animated productions of the late 1970s and one of the most distinctive Ralph Bakshi feature productions. He had directed Fritz the Cat in 1972, Heavy Traffic in 1973, and Coonskin in 1975 before…
Book ReviewsAnimal Farm
The animals overthrow their human master, declare all animals equal, and within a few years are ruled by pigs who walk on two legs. Orwell's short, savage fable of a revolution betrayed is one of the most perfectly built political…