Noise is the new Censorship

This is an excellent post by Anonymous Liberal on Unclaimed Territory (Glen Greenwald's blog-he's posting at Salon right now). Here's the gist:

There are two ways of keeping the truth from people. You can either withhold it from them (the old model) or you can hide it in plain sight by burying it in a sea of disinformation. This latter strategy has become the new paradigm. Whereas the autocrats of past eras would try to keep the public in the dark by limiting the flow of information, their modern counterparts operate by overloading the public with conflicting information. Damaging facts are countered by flooding the airwaves with contrary assertions and, at the same time, actively working to discredit, vilify, or co-opt any institution that might possibly be viewed as a neutral arbiter of truth (the media, academia, the judiciary, etc.). Whereas the old model sought to control what information people were exposed to, the new model seeks to render people unable to identify the truth, even when it is right in front of their faces.

Sometimes you read something and you just scream "YES"! inside your head. This explains why the right hates the New York Times so much: not because of any liberal bias it might have, but because it aspires to be the sort of respected arbiter of facts that makes their falsehood-spamming tactic more difficult. If there are no such things as "facts" and "arguments", then there's nothing to check the hate, fear, religious fanaticism, and tribalism that the right-wing exploits so well.

Philip's tunnel to nowhere (which trackbacks to the Anonymous Liberal post) has this to say:

What’s fascinating to me is in idea that I first saw mentioned on Andrew Sullivan’s, though I don’t think Andrew was claiming it as original. Conservatives are the new Postmodernists. Everything purporting to be fact-based can be deconstructed and, if coming from the “liberal media”, rejected as inconvenient.

I've commented before on the "postmoderist" attitude towards truth that the latest generation of right-wingers has displayed. But Anonymous Liberal has really hit the nail on the head. Read it.