In November of 2007, with support from George Soros’ Open Society Institute, Live from the New York Public Library presented the conference, “There You Go Again: Orwell Comes to America.” The conference brought together noted journalists, linguists, political consultants and others to discuss the practice of deceptive political speech in the arena of public discourse today, or as the conference referred to it, “propaganda and the new face of American politics.”
The title itself was a blend of the quote made famous by Ronald Reagan in his 1980 presidential debate retort to Jimmy Carter, and George Orwell’s writings and their application to media in politics today.
George Soros presented a session at the conference that in hindsight draws some striking parallels to what we have been witnessing in politics and the media today. When viewed consecutively in their entirety, the three videos in which Soros makes his presentation are compelling and bring clarity to where so much of the rhetoric on the left has been bred over the years.
It starts with Soros’ description of how propaganda has taken root in American politics and replaced truth with strategic deception. Yet, considering the blatant manipulation of the truth in so many of today’s news stories, it reads more like a psy-ops manual for the left-wing media, labor unions and community organizers of today:
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… the techniques of deception have been really perfected since [the book] 1984. It’s partly the advertising industry that has really, sort of; it’s a commercial use that was eventually transferred to politics. And actually, the art of deception has become a science… The two key findings of cognitive science [are] that reason and emotion are intricately interconnected, that in fact, there is no reason without emotion, and you can actually overcome reason by appealing to the emotions. And there you have of course the television, which appeals to the emotions much more directly than the linear written word. So the appeal to the emotions is easier than it used to be.
…Another element I think is that because of this industry of, [the] communications industry, we have become very used to pre-packaged thought. And so we actually use only information that is pre-packaged for us. And when it has been used in politics, there is now a packaging industry. And it does have some similarities to the institute where Winston, the hero of 1984 worked, the Ministry of Truth.
I don’t think I could have described this example any more accurately than in the blatant propaganda campaign against Arizona Senate Bill 1070, the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.” Whether you agree with the law or not, one cannot ignore that fact that this legislation is highly emotionally charged. But it need not have been. Requests from a state to the federal government to secure its volatile border should have been met with reason. When those requests were repeatedly met with indifference, Arizona’s response was one well within reason. But for solely political reasons, the left has taken what was founded in reason, and replaced it with something that is instead fueled entirely by emotion, for its own political gain. Just as Soros said, television appeals more directly to the emotions than the linear written word. This explains perfectly why the left has been able to take a bill that admittedly no one on that side has read, and then egregiously manipulate the truth, and turn it into pre-packaged thought. Make the public believe that immigrants will be racially profiled, stopped and arrested for being in the country illegally, then it becomes an emotional issue.
Even though the law is very clear in writing and in stating that this is not the case, the end result is simple propaganda that appeals to the emotions and plays itself out repeatedly on television: Arizona is racist.
And how about stories like the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case? Here you have a clear cut case of voter intimidation that was reported to the authorities in 2008 and bumped up to the DOJ for action. Once action was taken and the case made it to a hearing, the defendants were a no-show, essentially guaranteeing a win by default. Just as the case was in its sentencing phase, the DOJ actually downgraded the sentence for one defendant and dropped the case altogether against the others, one of whom is an elected member of the Philadelphia Democratic Committee.
Despite the entire incident being captured on video, most media treated the story as a non-event. And even after a key DOJ attorney on the case resigned and became a whistleblower, citing racially biased changes in policy, most mainstream media outlets have continued to ignore the story. Left wing blogs have attacked the story as a “phony” and “manufactured scandal” on the part of FOX News.
The response sounds like a very familiar tactic. As a media outlet, you typically cover a story if it’s got substance and another outlet is reporting on it; but in Soros’ world, only outlets that share his political views are news outlets. In that case, as a Soros media outlet, if you simply ignore the story then it doesn’t exist. Listen to it in Soros’ own words:
And while you have pluralistic media, you have a parallel method of propaganda which parades as pluralistic media. FOX News is a prime example of that. And because it parades as a mainstream media, it’s accepted as a mainstream media. And deliberate untruths are accepted as one of the pieces of information that you have to consider. So you have FOX News which is ‘Fair and Balanced’ and that of course is Newspeak. And then you have the mainstream media that tries to be fair and balanced, and therefore information coming from Newspeak sources is accepted as one of the ideas that have to be presented. And you have a number of institutes that deliberately manufacture such information.
…political debate is actually more concerned with manipulating the truth than establishing, getting at the truth. And there’s a certain personal irony in this for me, because I had made the same discovery 50 years ago when I developed the concept of Reflexivity. And in that concept I was arguing that thinking plays a dual role. On the one hand, we want to understand reality, that’s the cognitive function, on the other hand we also want to change reality to our benefit, and I call that the participating function. And I use this two-way feedback mechanism to very good effect in financial markets because I realized that in fact, you can manipulate reality, by manipulating people’s perception of reality.
You’ll notice today that when ignoring a story doesn’t cut it, the left turns to manipulating people’s perception of it. Or manipulating people’s perception of the commentator or of the entire outlet itself.
So this is the task that confronts us to regain our sanity and our position in the world. Now, how can we achieve it, that is the challenge. And I think here, Orwell and Newspeak could be very useful. Because I believe that the only way to protect ourselves against deliberate deception is by recognizing it, so bringing it into consciousness, focusing on it, instead of allowing it to invade us at the periphery. And naming it, calling it its name – Newspeak.
I actually tried to analyze various forms of deliberate deception and I studied the literature of the right wing, about me. And I identified some of these techniques. Transference is one of the most powerful ones. Imputing to your opponent your own motives. Extremist – calling me extremist. Then there is the conspiracy theory, which is, uh, and guilt by association, not a very favorite. And then I gave a list in the book. But that may be a little bit too elaborate, because calling it transference, people wouldn’t understand what you’re talking about. I think just calling it just simply Newspeak. The same way as you’ll recall the famous debate between Reagan, I think it was Reagan and Carter, and Reagan said, “there you go again”. It was very, very effective. And so I think we should try to do the same thing. And when we are confronted with the propaganda and the War on Terror, we just say, “there you go again”.
One last coincidence to note about this conference and these videos. Collaborators of this conference included the graduate schools of journalism at Columbia University, UC Berkeley, and the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Interestingly enough, these are some of the same schools that were the subject of Academia-Gate – a Big Journalism exposé that revealed the solicitation of “paid activists” to create research papers intentionally designed to silence opposing viewpoints. A May 20, 2010 email from a committee calling itself the “Cry Wolf Project” drew on all the same themes:
We therefore need to construct a counter narrative that demonstrates the falsity or exaggeration of such claims so that the first reaction of millions of people, as well as opinion leaders, will be “There they go again!” Such a refrain will undermine the credibility and arguments of the organizations and individuals who use such dire social and economic prognostications to thwart progressive reform.
This conference wasn’t the first time Soros gave a public presentation on this sort of subject matter. While he’s been writing and speaking about these beliefs of his about America since well before George Bush was in office, he’s done so publicly beginning around 2001 at many college campuses, international venues, and even at Google headquarters with CEO Eric Schmidt. So much of what we hear from the left today is scripted not from George Bush, but from George Soros, the self-proclaimed student of propaganda.
Perhaps it’s time we started addressing Soros’ rhetoric with his own tactics whenever we hear it from the left. “There you go again…with your Newspeak.”
Full transcript of all three videos:
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