America’s War Propaganda

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0:00:07.2 Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:10.5 Trevor Burrus: I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:12.1 Aaron Ross Powell: Joining us today is Christopher Coyne, he’s a Professor of Economics at George Mason University. And Abigail Hall, she’s an Associate Professor of Economics at Bellarmine University. Their new book is Manufacturing Militarism: US Government Propaganda in the War on Terror. Welcome back to Free Thoughts.

0:00:28.5 Chris Coyne: Well, thank you for having us.

0:00:29.5 Abigail Hall: Yeah, thanks so much.

0:00:31.4 Aaron Ross Powell: Lots of stuff gets called propaganda, but what’s the actual definition for our purposes here?

0:00:39.6 Chris Coyne: Well, you’re certainly right that the term propaganda oftentimes gets thrown around, and one of the issues you run into trying to operationalize it for analytical purposes is that you can use it for your purposes and it can become so elastic that everything is included. And so what Abby and I try to do in the book to delineate our analysis is to provide three characteristics that define propaganda, and the first one is that propaganda is purposefully biased or false, so its purpose, the intention of those who are producing the propaganda is to deter people from having access to truthful information.

0:01:24.3 Chris Coyne: The second is that it’s used to promote a political cause, and the third is that it is a bad from the perspective of the targets of the propaganda, because it limits their ability to have information to make informed judgments. And so by presenting or defining propaganda in those terms, we hope to delineate what it is and what it’s not we’re talking about. So not everything government does is propaganda, but a lot of what it does is.

0:01:55.5 Trevor Burrus: But there are certainly some fine lines, one thing I was thinking when reading your book that I, all my work on the drug war, one thing that has always upset me is we had to say, this is your brain on drugs campaign in the ’80s. And you could call that a type of propaganda paid for by the government, or you could call it a legitimate just policy dispute where the government is weighing in on one side, and there’s a lot of those, the CDC, you could say in the pandemic times or more… In earlier times, the CDC has very strong opinions, for example, on privatization of alcohol, and you can call that a policy dispute with the government. So would that be kind of on the line of propaganda or would that also be propaganda?

0:02:36.9 Abigail Hall: So one of the things that’s particularly challenging about engaging in this type of research, and one of the things that we set out to do in the case study portion of the book is to highlight the information that was known to officials at the time. So what you’re talking about within the context of, say, the drug war, for example, there are probably certain cases where we can find some legitimate ignorance or uncertainty in terms of what is actually known at that period versus what is presented, and probably my guess would be other cases too, where we can find some misinformation that fits the definitions that we’ve come up with or the structures in terms of how we define propaganda, and so we have to look at and particularly analyze what’s known at the time versus what is being portrayed.

0:03:27.8 Abigail Hall: And one of the other things too, related to this definition, and something that I’ve been asked several times when talking about our definition is, does only government produce propaganda? And the answer to that question would be “No”. That there are certainly other entities or organizations that could produce propaganda, but one of the things that we do is explicitly limit our focus discussions of government.

0:03:55.7 Aaron Ross Powell: What does propaganda look like in practice? We imagine the buy war bonds posters potentially, or a government person going on TV and telling us that China is a huge threat, but what are the forms that it generally plays out in?

0:04:16.2 Chris Coyne: Well, I think it has varied over time, and varies over time, and some of it, the manifestation of propaganda in some instances is much more kind of blunted in your face, and in other times it’s more kind of covert. And so if you look at the case of the United States, and we talk a little bit about this in the first chapter of the book when we talk about the history of propaganda. You look for instance, during the World Wars, and it was pretty explicit. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson established the Creel Committee or the Committee on Public Information, and the purpose of that committee was to influence public opinion and to gain support for the various aspects of the government war efforts of things like conscription, economic rationing, war bonds as you pointed out, victory gardens and so on.

0:05:06.1 Chris Coyne: World War II, FDR authorizes the Office of War Information. And again, the very purpose of that office was to present information to the populace in a way that would coordinate them around the government’s goals. Some of that information was truthful, some of it was not, purposefully so. Again, during World War II, you have the Writers War Board, which was basically the government trying to partner with writers, and writers in the broadest sense here, so not just journalists, but popular writers, film makers and so on, again, to influence the populace. So then you move on later on, and over time it becomes a little more covert, and certainly the kind of things we highlight are extremely covert.

0:06:00.9 Chris Coyne: And so as you said, it’s not like, you have a minister of information that goes on TV and is blunt about this, instead what you have is the Bush Administration, for instance, putting supposed objective experts on cable news, feeding them talking points and then using those appearances as evidence and support of their actions. And in some sense, the more covert instances of propaganda are more dangerous because they’re harder to identify, and the very purpose of them is to mask what’s going on. And so in some sense, the famous instances of the “I want you” poster and the kind of very famous graphics and imagery from the World Wars is a much more blunt and more readily apparent example of the type of phenomena that Abby and I attempt to examine.

0:06:55.6 Trevor Burrus: The methodology that you are employing is interesting because you’re not… Like Noam Chomsky has his manufacturing consent and a bunch of people I’ve read about propaganda who are not political theorists or maybe critical theorists, sociologists, a wide range of people. So as professional economists, what do you bring to this that’s different than, say, the Noam Chomskys of the world?

0:07:20.5 Abigail Hall: What we love to do is to bring the tools of economics, particularly political economy, and the tools of public choice to understand why it is that democratic societies in particular are likely susceptible to propaganda. So when we talk about democratic societies, or when we talk about government more generally, there is this tendency to assume in public discourse, but also in a large chunk of the literature, that there is this idealized state that is maximizing some social welfare function, that is engaging in behavior that is only going to benefit the citizens, so they do things like engaging in the optimal quantity and quality of foreign intervention, let’s say.

0:08:07.4 Abigail Hall: But what we do here is point out, and we’re certainly not the first to do this, that that idealized model of the state is remarkably flawed. And so as opposed to this conceptualization of the government, in which case there’s no room for anything like propaganda. And we point out that in that model, information is symmetric, so I know what you know and you know that I know, applied to the government. But in reality, that’s not at all the case, political actors are self-​interested, there’s a variety of overlapping principal agent problems, so think about the mechanisms that we like to think work well to discipline politicians, namely the voting booth, we have a really large body of literature that indicates that those checks may not work particularly well.

0:09:02.7 Abigail Hall: Also think about it within the context of politicians and bureaucratic agencies, yet again, these principal agent problems. But then when we’re talking about and where we’re focusing on discussions related to foreign intervention, not only do you have those issues, but then you compound it with the issues related to government secrecy. And so then in addition to those typical public choice problems that people have identified, we then have yet another layer that is effectively inhibiting a variety of groups, whether it’s voters, whether it’s politicians or other oversight bodies, from obtaining and acting upon information that would effectively discipline government in issues related to defense and national security.

0:09:53.4 Aaron Ross Powell: Is this really a problem, particularly a democratic problem though? Because we could imagine saying, “Okay, look, yes, it’s in a democratic system where the people are supposed to have the power, the people need knowledge to make decisions in their own interests, and government secrets or governments misleading us.” Get in the way of that, because now the police is acting upon faulty information or incomplete information, say. But in the real world where governments have to do lots of things to keep us safe, and some of that involves doing things that they don’t want… Not just us, but our enemies or foreign governments to know about. They need to keep secrets. A government with no secret would be less effective.

0:10:44.6 Aaron Ross Powell: And the very nature of representative government is that we pick people who then are going to act in our interest, not do directly what we necessarily tell them to, but act in our interest. And sometimes that might mean potentially misleading us or not telling us the whole story, if it’s the case that if we did know all the information or we were making more of the decisions ourselves, we would choose in ways that weren’t in our interest, so government mislead in order to protect. Is that a plausible story at all?

0:11:23.1 Chris Coyne: Well, certainly at a conceptual level is plausible, and I think it’s certainly a model of the world that many people have in mind, both when they’re talking about the National Security State and the need for the national security state to protect the person and property of the citizenry. I think it’s a model that people have when they talk about or think about democratic politics. And so it’s certainly plausible from that perspective, but then you have to think to yourself, for the same reasons you’ve just identified, I think is the same reason that makes it so worrisome and perhaps problematic. Which is that… And this, of course, goes back centuries, people have recognized this problem of when you centralize power and you give all the guns to a small group of people, and they can use that power to protect you, but they can also turn it against you.

0:12:13.6 Chris Coyne: And so finding resolutions to that paradox of government is crucial, so then of course, the typical solution, as you pointed out, is some form of checks and balances in the form of elected representatives, judiciary and so on. But that assumes, of course, that there is some kind of mechanism, both for voters to communicate their preferences to elect those officials, but also then that officials do their jobs. And again, plausible that those things might happen, but we have a large literature in public choice economics and political scientists of course, outside of public choice have written about this as well, that there are pathologies and democratic politics that result in frictions between voters, voter preferences and electoral outcomes.

0:13:00.2 Chris Coyne: And then of course, we have frictions between elective representatives and the people that they are supposed to oversee. One of them, and there’s numerous, but one of them is that because of the secrecy in the national security state that you and Abby mentioned, the oversight committees in Congress are largely dependent on the members of the National Security State to provide them with the information that they require to oversee them. And so you can see the problem, which is that, of course, those agencies can selectively choose to release information or not release it, they can time the release of information if they do decide to release it in a way that benefits them at the expense of both members of Congress and the public they’re supposed to represent.

0:13:47.3 Chris Coyne: Another issue that Abby and I touch upon the book that I think is really important is this idea of the noble lie or the noble deception. The idea that, as you pointed out, kinda like Jack Nicholson, “You can’t handle the truth”, so you trust us to do it for you, and make those tough decisions. And again, you can see why people might say that. The problem is that once you adopt that kind of thinking, it’s one of the kind of related issues is it flips the relationship, so no longer is our system one where the citizens are driving it, but instead the experts or the political leader driving it, because it is presumed that the citizenry is uncapable of being effective members of electoral politics.

0:14:39.5 Chris Coyne: In addition, once you establish those norms, it’s real easy to start extending them to other things, so you say, “Okay, here’s a crisis situation, people won’t know what’s in their interest, so we’re gonna lie to them.” And then you say, “Okay, well, now there’s another crisis situation, we have a public health issue, so they can’t handle it,” and then we have education, and you can keep going on down the line and pretty quickly you end up not having a democratic system anymore because you’re using the rhetoric of democracy, but it’s really mask in lies.

0:15:09.3 Aaron Ross Powell: You mentioned briefly, the politicians making decisions are dependent upon the information they’re getting from the national security people, and that sounds like they’re gonna be propaganda flowing, not just towards the citizenry, but towards their elected officials. And that makes me wonder when we think about government propaganda, we tend to think of it as the government is propagandising us in a given direction. But is it really more the case that there is just a bunch of people with different interests who call themselves the government and play different roles, and they’re all trying to do things, and so this is… It’s not so much like a directed conspiracy theory, these guys are controlling everything, but just like everyone’s kind of lying and manipulating each other and often to cross purposes.

0:16:07.6 Chris Coyne: Certainly. I’m glad you raise this because one of the things we try to be clear about and careful about is this isn’t some grand conspiracy where everyone in government is sitting down around a conference table and then coordinating on this master plan to push the citizen to do whatever they want, the people in charge one. Instead, what you have is, I think you put it quite well, is a complex array of overlapping and competing interests, and who wins that competition at a point in time is gonna depend. That can change. But again, that’s one of the reasons I think that kind of when people discuss the National Security State and they talk about the national interest in national security, it’s a very poor language, it’s poor language because none of those things exist. There’s no national security or national interest that exist apps in that decision-​making process, and certainly even if we could agree on some set of objectives for the national interest, there’s no reason to believe that array of competing interests is somehow going to achieve that.

0:17:12.0 Abigail Hall: Yeah, just to add on to that very briefly, and I think Chris put it really well, but one of the ways that I explain this to my students when talking about public choice is that there’s this tendency to think about government acting in an aggregate. So you hear something like, “The United States invaded Iraq”, and this conjures up some visual, this anthropomorphic geographic body that just marches across the ocean and invades another country, but that’s really not an appropriate way to think about it because nation states don’t act. It’s the individuals who are engaging in behavior. And so one of the things that we try to do very carefully is discuss what is going on at this individual level, and that very much is our unit of analysis, is what are the incentives facing the individuals in a given circumstance, and then how are individuals who are acting within these institutions either to be the producers or the purveyors of propaganda, but then also the recipients of propaganda. How are they reacting to that as well.

0:18:23.0 Trevor Burrus: Before we get to some of your examples, I find it interesting that as Libertarian economists who have written about democracy in different ways, and Libertarians are known from being sceptical of democracy, you’re kind of supporting it in a way in this book, which is fine, but you mentioned Chris, and I think rightfully so, that if you really go down this line of how is the government essentially crafting citizens and whether that’s okay in a democratic society, you get to things like public education. Not just propaganda from a military standpoint, but just, is public education okay in a democratic society? So in this way, you’re endorsing a standard model of democracy, or is it true maybe that your argument could get to something like public education if you took it further?

0:19:09.5 Chris Coyne: Yeah, so I think you’re right to say that on the one hand, we certainly are in line with critiques of democracy by public choice scholars and others. On the other hand, I would submit that Abby and I, in the framework in our analysis are staunch proponents of democracy, just a different way of thinking about it than people normally think about it. Our model is a citizen-​based approach, so the model is not the government can just say whatever they want and get people to do what they want, it’s citizen-​driven, so citizens have to subscribe and adopt the messaging, they have to be willing to accept it and act upon it.

0:19:50.7 Chris Coyne: But on top of that, in the conclusion, our central conclusion is that the government is not gonna tie their own hands as it pertains to producing propaganda, so ultimately what you need is a citizenry that is informed or at least about the possibility of propaganda, the nefarious aspects of propaganda and willing to push back against it. And so from that standpoint, our analysis who places a very strong emphasis on the importance of democracy, just not the normal voting at the booth, you get people that represent you, the National Security State somehow cares about us and our interest, I certainly think that is all largely incorrect, but at the same time, I think having a free society of self-​governing individuals in a [0:20:41.6] ____ sense is certainly central to our analysis and might then lead us to have broader discussions, even though it’s beyond the scope of what we cover in the book about what security looks like in a free society.

0:20:55.4 Abigail Hall: Right. I think Chris and I place a really heavy burden on citizens to provide the checks on government. As Chris mentioned, we talk about a few potential options for reining in propaganda at the end of the book, but at the end of the day, we come back to the citizenry and particularly citizen ideology, which is a theme that we touch on in our other book, but as well as other things that we bring together, as well as individually. And so in that way, I would certainly agree with Chris that I think we fall very much in line with what public choice scholars have said, but I think in some ways we were very democratic, but place a heavy burden on citizens, which certainly other people have written elsewhere is not always an easy thing, because taking responsibility for your own freedom is potentially scary for a lot of people.

0:21:56.2 Aaron Ross Powell: On that though, how does that fit in with a number of… Chris’s colleagues at George Mason write about rational ignorance and the problems of basically putting a burden on the citizenry and the voters, so are you asking too much of them?

0:22:15.3 Chris Coyne: Well, perhaps, and one solution, of course, to overcome issues of rational ignorance is to change the mechanism through which various goods and services are delivered to overcome the challenges therein. So the challenge, of course, with that and with rational irrationality that my colleague, Brian Caplan has talked about, for instance, is that people do not internalise the full costs and benefits of their decision-​making. In the context of rational organs, people don’t have the incentive to be informed so you can change the incentives, again, that might be, at least in principle, that might be a matter of changing how we think about the delivery of these goods and services. And so again, I don’t wanna speak on their behalf, I’m sure some of them… I know some of my colleagues are certainly more comfortable relying on expertise than I am, what I would call supposed expertise or postulated expertise, because a lot of people like to call themselves experts, but they’re actually nothing of the sort, if you…

0:23:19.0 Chris Coyne: At least from my perspective, think about it, and so I’m much more sceptical of that, but of course, the flip side of that is you take the power out of the hands of voters to overcome those issues, you centralise it in the hands of a security state apparatus then you run to all the standard problems of bureaucracy, of secrecy and so on down the line. And so perhaps one of the takeaways is, there’s no simple solution.

0:23:45.3 Trevor Burrus: A lot of your book focuses on… Most of it focuses on 9/11 and post 9/11 period, although you discussed, as you talk about World War I and World War II to some extent. In this context what we’re discussing now, sort of the behaviour of citizens and the voting, what kind of things… What kind of interesting things does do events like 911 or Pearl Harbor do to people that is in the methodological individualistic sense that is relevant to your analysis?

0:24:16.8 Abigail Hall: So there are a few different things that I think that we could talk about, and not only in this work, but elsewhere, Chris and I draw heavily on the work of an economist and Robert Higgs, particularly his 1987 book, crisis and Leviathan. And in that book, he talks about growth in the scale and scope of government in an episodic sense, and in that case crises play a critical role. So for people who are unfamiliar, the way that Higgs talks about it is you have some growth rate, so government is growing at some particular rate, and then at some time there is a crisis, and when that crisis occurs, there is this call from the citizenry reform government to do something. And so as a result, what Higgs describes is what he refers to as the ratchet effect. So government increases what it’s doing in terms of scale or the size of its activities, but as well as scope, so the portfolio of activities the government is engaged in.

0:25:15.4 Abigail Hall: And with Higgs’ framework, you have this continuation that occurs at some point the crisis evades, so people aren’t as concerned anymore, and then according to this model, you experience what’s referred to as retrenchment, so government reduces its activities. But in this model, the reduction does not return to the original growth rate, so you have this potentially permanent level of worth, so in terms of the things that you just mentioned, Pearl Harbor 9/11, both of these things can be looked at as critical moments in the growth in the scale and scope of government and 9/11, for sure we’re looking at now just passed the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. And one of the reasons that Chris and I chose to focus on the post 9/11 period is because frankly, we have a lot to talk about, there is a lot that’s changed as a result of this particular episode.

0:26:17.9 Chris Coyne: Yeah, I think the other really interesting aspect of this question is that it highlights, I think, a challenge for… A broader challenge for free societies and for systems where there’s some constitution or desired constitution to constrain government, which is that during some crisis situation, however, whatever the manifestation of that is, there’s oftentimes a call for the government to do things because it’s an unusual or extra normal situation, but that’s precisely the time where you want a constitution to have teeth. So constitutions where they’re effective are supposed to bind the hands of government and moments where they might abuse those powers or overstep their bounds, but it’s during times of crisis where there’s usually the strongest pull and perhaps the willingness of citizens to go along with it, depending on the nature of the crisis. And that it poses a real challenge, and then of course, that leads to the dynamics that Abby just traced out with the ratchet effect. And so it’s a hard challenge in one, of course, that people have wrestled with for a long time.

0:27:29.6 Aaron Ross Powell: Can you give us a sense of how bad propaganda was and what forms it took around the lead up to the Iraq War?

0:27:36.8 Abigail Hall: So there’s potentially a lot to discuss there. So in the book, we actually wind up dividing our discussion as it pertains to the war in Iraq in a preinvasion and in postinvasion. And so, in this preinvasion period, we situate ourselves, first of all, within the historical context, so one thing that’s important for people to understand is that the US just didn’t decide to invade Iraq in 2003. And the first Gulf War was not the beginning of that saga either, it goes back much further than that. But in terms of that, what we call the preinvasion propaganda pitch looked like, pretty much when you look at the arguments that the Bush administration was making for invading Iraq, so think about things like weapons of mass destruction or Saddam Hussein having direct connections with Al-​Qaeda. These were things that there was known information that neither of these things were true, and yet the information that was being offered to the public was radically different. So even if you look at opinion polls today, so the most contemporary things that we have, you see that there are still a nontrivial segment of the population that believes that Saddam Hussein was connected to Al-​Qaeda, which is ridiculous because he was a secularist, and so from that perspective that was absurd on its face, and yet that was not the information that was being sold.

0:29:07.7 Abigail Hall: You also, in a more explicit sense, for a concrete example, you would have things like the following, as it pertains to the infamous aluminium tubes, you would have the Bush administration offer information to journalist, the journalist would then imprint these pieces of information, an article citing some source. And then you have people like former Vice President, Dick Cheney, citing the journalist as the original source material. And so you’ve got this circular discussion around this, and this is the information that people are getting even though we know this information is not true. From there we switch and so talking about after the invasion occurs, you find out, okay, well, those weapons of mass destruction that we were promised would be there actually don’t actually appear to exist, and so then we talk about in more detail what the propaganda pitch in the postinvasion context look like. So things about embedding journalists highlighting the problems as it pertains to that, the Bush administration putting “unbiased experts” in various news where of course, they had been offered talking points and the people themselves were working at the behest of the administration, but again, were being portrayed as though they were independent individuals.

0:30:37.5 Aaron Ross Powell: Could we talk a bit more about the media’s role in this propaganda ecosystem? I’m curious whether stuff like the media publishing, basically republishing press releases from or statements, propaganda from government departments or officials is intentional. Does the media intentionally play a propagandist role, or are they just too credulous when it comes to what they hear from the government? And particularly in light of… You mentioned it in passing in, I think the introduction, but Operation Mockingbird, what that was and what that tells us about the media’s role?

0:31:21.7 Chris Coyne: I think it’s a mix. And so I think that… First of all, I think media is a key check on government, a free media, so I wanna say that first, and I don’t think anything we say changes that. If anything, that makes it more important, I think. But I think some members of the media are very willing to go along with what government says. And why are they willing to go along? Part of it might be because they like the person in power, part of it might be… And we’ve quote towards the end of the book by I think it’s Walter Cronkite, where he says, “Look, we’re part of this country too, and when your countries at war, we being journalists and reporters, you support your country, and so of course, we’re gonna tend to be biased towards our country, just like any human being who’s patriotic.” I think is the term he talks up, so there’s that. But the other thing is people need access, you need to have access to political actors, to insiders and so on.

0:32:20.1 Chris Coyne: And so from that standpoint, one of the best things a media person can do to make their careers be a reporter during a war in terms of… Having a career-​defining moment. And so the incentives are such that for some certainly they will tend to go along with what the government says. Now, again, I don’t wanna make it sound, and there’s a tendency to say, well, “Mainstream media is in bed with government,” and I don’t think that’s right. We have numerous instances, of course, of government reporting things during the war, they were reporting things most recently, The Washington Post reporter, Craig Whitlock came out with The Afghanistan Papers, he released them first through The Washington Post, and he has a book out right now. The Afghanistan Papers that they had just come out released when avian I were finishing up, which is why we talk about it in the preface to motivate it, but not in great detail. But if you read those now and you read the book, throughout the Afghanistan War, the US government has lied to the American populace. And so those are instances of media serving what I view as a key function, which is as a check on government.

0:33:22.3 Chris Coyne: And so again, the intention, and I think we’re careful in the book to say this is not that media is always in everywhere, an arm and extension of government. But it can be, and you raised Operation Mockingbird, which was a program that I believe started in 1950, and this was in conjunction or run through the CIA, and it actively attempted to partner with journalists, both domestically and internationally to disseminate propaganda related to the anticommunist efforts of the US government. And so that is a very blunt example of these partnerships, but it doesn’t have to be that way, and I think that contestability in media is very important. Of course, that means there’s a lot of noise, we all know that there’s noise on social media, there’s noise in information in general, but at the same time, the media can play an important role in revealing information about the government’s activities.

0:34:27.0 Trevor Burrus: One of my favorite chapters of your book is your discussion of sports, which has been underexplored, I believe. And it came up to me a lot on fighting on Facebook or Twitter during the great kneeling controversy of Colin Kaepernick, I guess it’s still ongoing, where everyone is freaking out ’cause these are a red-​blooded American sports that are super patriotic, ’cause look at all the military things that are involved and the flyovers, what’s actually going on there?

0:34:52.5 Abigail Hall: So this chapter, I think, and I don’t wanna speak for Chris, but was I think one of the most surprising maybe to research and to write on because I know I learned a lot of information that I hadn’t anticipated. So we started by going and looking at this entanglement or these relationships between sports and government. And this starts back at least as far as World War 1, but if we bring this up to the contemporary sense, people often think about the National Football League or the NFL for instance as being particularly patriotic. So think about your full field flag displays, your surprise homecoming, members of the National Guard singing the national anthem, the laundry list just goes on and on and on. But what a lot of people don’t know is that a great number of those seemingly just displays of patriotism were actually bought and paid for by the Department of Defense, and so the National Football League, the NBA, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, NASCAR, even Major League Soccer in the US, we’re all contracting with the US government to engage in a variety of these patriotic displays, which were referred in a report from the late Senator John McCain and Jeff Lee’s office as “paid patriotism”, which is simply just propaganda by another name.

0:36:25.0 Abigail Hall: And so what Chris and I do is we talk about the functions of patriotism, not just to generate support for the war on terror, and up until this point, we’ve talked about post 9/11 and the war in Iraq specifically, but it’s not just that propaganda is a tool to garner support for a particular policy per se, but also utilised to foster this broader culture of militarism and sport is a particularly effective method through which governments, but the US government in particular, has been able to advance this type of ideology. So you think about the terminology that gets used in both war and sport, so you think about football, talking about blitz and bombs and the linguistic choices that people make.

0:37:19.0 Abigail Hall: And really this idea of collapsing something as complicated as foreign policy into something as simple as a game, that doesn’t really have any kind of meaningful outcome associated with it, but it’s a really effective device for doing that. And so we talk about paid patriotism, but then we also talk about a specific instance of propaganda surrounding former Arizona Cardinals player, Pat Tillman, which is a story that a lot of people are familiar with, at least in broad strokes. Pat Tillman was an Army Ranger who was killed in an instance of friendly fire, and we detail, but there’s a very good book on this by Peter Krakauer talking about this instance in great detail. Where we look at the difference between what was known about Pat Tillman’s death and what was portrayed to the American public, and that those two things are completely at odds with each other. And so we see this discussion of sport as serving a few different functions throughout a quite long period of time. The war on terror just being the most recent incarnation of that.

0:38:40.2 Trevor Burrus: But is it necessarily bad, it’s something I’ve thought about in some context where I deal with in a lot of First Amendment cases the concept of government speech, so the government has concerns about whether or not it’s perceived as endorsing these cases about license plates, personalized license plates and things like this, but the government has a right to speak to some extent. And we have an all-​volunteer military. So aside from explicitly lying, like Abby said, contracting with the NFL to promote your product and say, join up to the army. It’s cool. Is that necessarily bad if there’s not buying involved with it?

0:39:19.1 Chris Coyne: Well, I guess it depends what the benchmark is for good and bad in this case, and of course, something can be legal constitutionally and still have detrimental effects. One of the effects I would suggest is that it creates a culture of militarism. Militarism is the idea of the military, not just necessarily a specific branch of the military, but the apparatus as a whole, kind of having a pedestal in society being viewed as having primary importance for the functioning, for the stability of society, for freedom and so on. And many people hold that view, but of course, there are negative effects to militarism, which is that it makes the military apparatus the main political instrument through which conflicts are resolved, it makes the military, in the eyes of the citizenry necessary for both domestic and international order. From that perspective, it undermines things like, or at least downplays things like the role of spontaneous order, the role of a self-​governing citizenry who are able to figure out ways of resolving disputes unto themselves.

0:40:50.6 Chris Coyne: And I think especially important here are things like the war on terror the war on drugs, because again, you have the rhetoric of a war, but these things are fundamentally different than something like World War I or World War II, irregardless of what people think of those wars. And the reason they’re different, of course, is because there’s no clear enemy there is no clear indication of what success would look like, I don’t know what drugs surrendering or terrorist surrendering would look like. And the entire globe is the battlefield, which means that you, me, everyone else are potential suspects. And when you elevate the military, and again, the broadest sense as the primary means of order of stability of protecting us, you really open a can of worms, then you can quickly see why people say, Well, hey, you should be okay being surveilled and we should be able to access your bank records and your medical records and your phone conversations, because, hey, we’re just doing our job to protect people, that’s what we’re supposed to do constitutionally, and certainly, you want us to protect you. So what’s the matter with that?

0:42:05.1 Chris Coyne: Many people don’t think there’s something wrong with that. I do, and so that’s what I’ve heard. The other thing is, is I think that a lot of the sports stuff, it’s a cheap way for people to pretend that they care about the military, and what I mean by that is like you go to the Redskins game, I’m sitting in Fairfax, Virginia, you’re at the Redskins game, you have your $15 beer, and then what do you do? You clap and applaud some guy that put his life on the line, he’s the one that had to go over and do this stuff, assuming he saw combat, and then you’re pretending like you’re patriotic. And then you go watch the Redskins lose again. So, is that being patriotic? Is that being an engaged citizen, it’s very phony, the entire kind of set up. And so I think that’s another cost as well, I think it undermines what I would consider to be fundamental principles of an engaged citizenry by creating this kind of… Or that you’re doing something by clapping for 30 seconds or a couple of minutes at the beginning of a sporting event.

0:43:11.5 Aaron Ross Powell: At the end of the book, you have a very long list of DoD-​sponsored film products, and flipping through it, some of them seem rather obvious, Black Hawk Down, and although that doesn’t exactly come across as a pro-​military movie, but other ones, Elizabethtown or Bruno can you tell us about how the DoD gets involved in Hollywood and what it’s doing with a movie like Bruno.

0:43:48.3 Abigail Hall: So just like the other chapters, there is a very large and long historical context of involvement between the government and film studios, in fact, this goes all the way back to the film Birth of a Nation, which now people know as obviously a movie about the supposed virtues of the Ku Klux Klan that was filmed using cadets from West Point. And so we detail in this chapter how it is that those entanglements have evolved over a variety of decades, but in a contemporary sense, what has happened is effectively this: If you want to make a movie that involves the military in someway, so maybe it has a fight scene or involves the military in some other capacity, what happens is this, film studios in an effort to remain competitive, want to use equipment that is realistic, they want to do something that’s going to try to cut their costs and help them maintain profitability.

0:45:02.8 Abigail Hall: So what they do is they wind up submitting their script to the Department of Defense, and what they’re effectively doing is they are asking for military support, sometimes this can be done where the film studio will pay otherwise, if they can do things like link up with training exercises, this can actually be done at no cost to the film studio. And in exchange for the support, the DoD, which Phil Straub is the most recent individual who is in this role, it’s not clear who’s replaced him, he’s retired within the last few years, they exchange a say in the editorial process on their films. And so in some cases, this leads to entire lines of the film being cut in terms of plot lines, I mean entire characters that are getting scrubbed or adopting new dialogue.

0:46:00.6 Abigail Hall: This is problematic from our purpose because it effectively limits the narrative or the story that film makers can tell about the military, because Phil Straub was quite candid in what he said about what films they’d support and what films they wouldn’t, which was that they won’t provide support for films that don’t show the military in a positive light. So if you want to make a film that is thoughtful, God forbid critical about what it is that the US military is doing abroad, you’re not able to get support, you are then not as likely to be able to produce a film that is going to be profitable and then those films may not ultimately get made. But as you mentioned, this extends to a variety of different areas, so it’s not just film, it’s also television, and in some cases, places that look very strange.

0:46:51.9 Abigail Hall: So you take like cooking shows, so you’ll see things like Well, wait a second, how could this possibly apply to a cooking show, you think about, Oh, they’re cooking for members of the Navy. And that’s where it applies. We also talk about an example of children shows, so things like Lassie that people grew up from generation to generation, Lassie is also not unscathed by this process as well.

0:47:17.2 Trevor Burrus: It seems that with all the information that people have access to today, in addition to there being, I would call like a heightened level of cynicism compared to say, 1950, in that we’ve read [0:47:32.7] ____, or really familiar with it. We understand the government’s propaganda is routinely, we’ve seen it with places like the Russia and Putin regime… You couldn’t really do, I was thinking about the Captain America movie with the war… People selling war bonds, so the whole part where he’s selling war bonds in that movie, if that happened today, everyone would roll their eyes and say, This is obviously propaganda, or that we’ve seen this before. So can we be more optimistic going forward that increased cynicism and awareness of propaganda will help see through propaganda and make kind of a more informed citizenry.

0:48:11.5 Abigail Hall: Chris may have a different perspective on this, but from where I sit, and one of the things in doing the research for this book is I think actually, frankly, people are not aware at the amount of propaganda that they are consuming. And so you mentioned, say, Russia or the example I always use is like North Korea, where it’s like Kim Jong-​un he hits a hole in one every round of golf he’s ever played in his entire life. That kind of thing. And we tend to associate propaganda with autocracies, but as I think Chris mentioned earlier, it’s this propaganda that we’re looking at now that is in a democratic society where we typically don’t think about this secretive propaganda, but it is exactly that, it’s this not blunt propaganda, it’s the covert propaganda.

0:49:05.7 S44: And so I’ve mentioned for instance, or when I talk to people about the paid patriotism piece, or talk to people about the involvement of the DoD in film, I would say that probably 95% of the people that I have mentioned this to have absolutely zero idea that either of these things have ever been an issue or continue to be something that occurs. And so I think that there’s… Again, maybe Chris is more optimistic than I am, but I think that there’s a tendency for us to actually over-​estimate maybe how much it is that people know about what it is that government is doing and the type and quality of information that they’re receiving.

0:49:50.4 Chris Coyne: I’m an optimist in general, about human beings and about freedom, so I’ll put that in the background. But as several of your colleagues and people you’ve had on the show have talked about, there’s a tendency for the national security apparatus in the United States to engage in massive threat inflation. So you look at John Muller systematic work for years now about the War on Terror, and just looking at the straight up data, like what are the odds of you being subject to a terrorist attack, it’s not like he’s making grandiose claims. Like here’s the hard data. You include 9/11, you exclude 9/11 as an outlier. Either one, it’s really rare.

0:50:35.3 Chris Coyne: And he does all the comparisons, as you all know, with the bathtub and the deer hitting running into your car and what not, but in any case, that is because of the incentives in government, which is to overstate it, part of it is a tendency to not want to be the person in charge when something bad happens, but part of it is, this is where it come up before, some pressures in the broader apparatus are to gain power over our lives. And one of the ways you gain power is to convince people they need your service, and that goes for all government agencies, government agencies create demand for their services and they create demand by convincing legislators and the citizenry that they need them and the National Security State is no different.

0:51:19.4 Chris Coyne: And so from that standpoint, I think cynicism is a good thing, but again, I don’t wanna be too cynical because at the end of the day, my vision of a free society is one where people are able to interact with their fellow people in whatever community they’re in, and to navigate and resolve collective action problems and conflicts. And I would like to see that logic extended more internationally, and so rather than relying on the military instrument as the source of resolving potential conflicts, why not rely on diplomacy first and exhausting all diplomatic possibilities before we turn to the military. Now it’s [0:52:13.5] ____ even now in the state of the world, and now there’s widespread skepticism on some margins because of the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, a lot of people who didn’t care at all for the last 20 years or cared very little now, all of a sudden care greatly about the welfare of people abroad. But even now, it’s not like the military budget is being cut dramatically, it’s not like military engagements are being cut dramatically. Biden was… I think it was in front of the UN was saying, we’re not at war.

0:52:44.4 Chris Coyne: That’s a very odd notion of war, since US troops are literally around the globe on a daily basis in various ways, but again, the primacy of the American military has not changed and is not going to change in the foreseeable future, and I think until that’s the case, many of the issues we identify will persist. And so hopefully, one of the things that our book does is get some people to think about that and what the implications of that are for. Both intervening abroad but also for the fabric of domestic life, and what it means when government is involved in everything, from our sports to our movies to lying to us like blatantly lying about engaging in a war that killed a lot of people, not just Americans, but foreigners as well. And so hopefully people critically think about that and what the implications are.

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0:53:58.1 Trevor Burrus: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.