When you imagine media in a dictatorship, you probably think of something dull and gray. Maybe a Soviet state-television program, extolling the annual harvest. Perhaps a smudgy newspaper photograph of Chairman Mao or General Pinochet, surrounded by blocks of turgid prose.
But if that is your mental picture, then your imagination is out of date. Nowadays, authoritarian propaganda can be varied, colorful, even mesmerizing. Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator, used to perform on television for hours, singing, chatting, and interviewing celebrities. On one recent day, the website of Komsomolskaya Pravda—formerly the organ of the Soviet youth movement, now a mouthpiece of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin—offered stories ranging from clickbait about “the beautiful women who lure Muscovites into dating scams” to an alarmist account of how Ukraine is “being turned into a training ground for the EU army.”
The point of these efforts is not merely to misinform, but to build distrust. Modern authoritarian regimes often offer not a unified propaganda line, but rather contradictory versions of reality, and in many different forms: highbrow and lowbrow, serious and silly, sort of true and largely false. The cumulative effect is to leave citizens with no clear idea of what is actually happening.
For the first time in our history, the Department of Defense has been carefully preparing to offer Americans something similar: not information but entertainment, scandal, sycophancy, and jokes. Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that all news organizations at the Pentagon sign a document agreeing to some new restrictions on reporters’ movement—and more important, prohibiting journalists from publishing information that contradicts official accounts, a stricture that some believed risked criminalizing ordinary journalism. Several dozen reporters left the building, including from The Atlantic but also representatives of Newsmax and Fox News. Many had years of experience, as well as deep knowledge of military budgets, logistics, and technology. Now their replacements are arriving, and they are indeed different. Although they are widely described as “right wing,” as if they were conservatives, most are conspiracy theorists, domestic and foreign propagandists, and others with little institutional knowledge.
One of the new outlets covering the Pentagon, for example, is LindellTV, the streaming service founded by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, who spent millions of dollars trying, unsuccessfully, to prove that China hacked the 2020 election (and who, as he once explained to me, would accept no evidence to the contrary as true). LindellTV is already invited to press conferences at the White House, where one of the outlet’s “reporters” asked earlier this year whether the president’s staff would consider releasing his fitness plan. Donald Trump looks “healthier than he looked eight years ago,” she said, and asked, “Is he working out with Bobby Kennedy, and is he eating less McDonald’s?”
Another new face is Tim Pool, now the owner of something called Timcast Media. Pool previously worked for Tenet Media, a company that was secretly funded by RT, Russian state media. Pool has insisted that the did not know that the company received Russian money, although there were plenty of clues, including messages time-stamped in a way that indicated they came from Moscow, as well as encouragement to make videos that backed up absurd pro-Moscow narratives (that a terrorist attack at a Moscow shopping mall, for which the Islamic State overtly claimed responsibility, was really carried out by Ukrainians, for example).
Pool’s team and LindellTV will be joined by The Epoch Times, which is linked to the Falun Gong religious movement in China. The outlet is perhaps best known for promoting QAnon conspiracy theories as well as false accounts of the 2020 election. Accompanying it will be the Gateway Pundit, a site that unsuccessfully filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to thwart a lawsuit by election workers whom it had falsely accused of fraud. One America News Network, The Federalist, and representatives of Frontlines, a publication of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point network, will also be part of the new press corps. None has a reputation for expertise in military affairs.
These outlets might, of course, produce pro-Trump propaganda. But more important, they will produce confusion. At a time of multiple international crises, at a moment when the United States is about to engage in some kind of military action in Venezuela, as the National Guard is being sent to American cities against the will of American governors, the Pentagon’s official positions will be relayed by Timcast, The Epoch Times, LindellTV and the Gateway Pundit, which means that many people simply won’t believe Pentagon statements at all.
This appears to be the Trump administration’s preferred model, not only in the Pentagon but in the White House and everywhere else: Keep the public off-balance. Tell jokes, lies, and amusing stories or publish sinister AI-made videos, not in order to get Americans to believe government statements, but in order to make them distrustful of all statements. If they aren’t sure what the U.S. military is really doing, then they won’t object. If people don’t believe anything they read anywhere, then they won’t be motivated to argue, to discuss, or even to engage in politics. Modern authoritarian propaganda, of the kind we are about to receive from the Pentagon and perhaps other government agencies, isn’t designed to produce true believers or mass movements. It’s designed to produce apathy.
In a world where more and more people get their information from ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek and Gemini, this information fog could grow worse over time, creating permanent misunderstandings or historical vacuums. One study has already shown that these AI chatbots frequently link to Russian state media and produce false information about Russia’s war on Ukraine. But Americans might not have to wait for AI to write false histories before we feel the consequences. If the public, our allies, our adversaries, and eventually the military itself no longer believe what the Pentagon is saying, then the Pentagon might find it faces obstacles to its credibility, and to its operational capability, much greater than those once posed by investigative reporters with access to the building.
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