Has this nation devolved into tribes, a Lord of the Flies situation? Is the Enlightenment, the Founder’s vision, is civilization itself out the window to he replaced by the vicious factionalism of warring groups of political predators? Tucker Carlson poses the query.

Carlson: So there’s a difference between lying and propaganda, and it’s worth knowing what it is. All propaganda is lying, but not all lying is propaganda. So what’s the difference between the two?

Here’s what lying is. Think about the moments in your own life when you have lied. Most of the time you do it because you have done something that you’re ashamed of and you’re hoping nobody’s going to find out. When you’re caught as inevitably you are caught, you shade the truth. So someone says to you, you’re drunk. You say, No, I’m not. I’ve only had three beers, but actually you had eight beers. You’re lying. That’s what lying is.

Propaganda is very different from that. Propaganda is not a shading of the truth. Propaganda is a complete inversion of the truth. You’re drunk. Somebody tells, you know, I’m not your reply. You’re the one who’s drunk. You’ve had eight beers. It’s shameful. And I’m disgusted by your drunkenness. That’s a propaganda looks like it’s the mirror image of reality is the exact opposite of the truth. And it is always delivered with ferocious aggression.

Propaganda tends to bewilder people to confuse them when they first hear it. It’s so completely and obviously untrue. What is this, you think? And yet for that very reason, because it’s so ridiculous, so absurd. Propaganda tends to be effective. People assume that lies that bold have got to be true. Something about the human brain reaches that conclusion and always has. And that’s why propaganda has always been a feature of society, especially now it’s why we’re now swimming in propaganda. January 6th was an armed insurrection. They screamed, Russia is the real threat. The 2020 election was perfectly fair. COVID is more dangerous than opioids, no really, it is. It’s all true. We can give you countless examples of this in action, and you would recognize every one of them…

So this way of looking at the world intentionally denying reality for the sake of a desired outcome is often called postmodernism. But that’s not quite right. In fact, this is pre-modern. This is an instinct older than civilization itself and in fact, a challenge to civilization itself. This is the kind of thinking that leads to tribalism. Tribalism is the belief that my team is always right and your team is barely human. Tribalism has been around for as long as people have been around. It’s never gone away. It just lurks beneath the surface of societies, all societies. One of the main goals of any civilization is to suppress tribalism so that we can live together without killing one another. So you should be concerned when it reemerges in public and boy has it.