How to spot propaganda

I was quite impressed by this 36 minute video with Sharyl Attkisson as she discusses how the propaganda system works and how to spot it.  I think it is worth one's time.  In fact I think all propaganda needs to be recognized and rejected, not just that done by the left.  For example, "king of debt" Trump called Obama's economy "a big fat bubble" during his election run and then went on a massive propaganda spree after he got elected saying that it was the greatest economy ever.  No, this is not the greatest economy ever.  It is the biggest economic bubble ever.  It is the biggest systemic threat to the USA as a going concern ever.  Has it brought a lot of prosperity??  Hell, yes.  

But it is unsustainable prosperity. It is like the beautiful spirit from the Ark of the Covenant which the Germans released in this clip from the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark" which then turns into an ugly demon of death.

 

 

Before he joined the federal reserve, Alan Greenspan proclaimed fake money (i.e. fiat currency) to be "the shabby secret of the welfare statists".   If you have not read that short essay lately you must refresh your mind with it at your soonest convenience.  In summary, Greenspan noted that:

• Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale. 
•  In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
• This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

Of course after he flipped over as a member of the federal reserve to side with the very statists that he had derided earlier, all of this honesty stopped and then Greenspan began his own little propaganda program that became known as fed speak or greenspeak.

Something is either true or it is not.  The truth should be spoken boldly, not cowering for fear of what others might think.  Wise people will reject false ideologies no matter who puts them out.