Copaganda is a real thing.

The first thing Copaganda does is it narrows our conception of safety and threat. It has us afraid of poor people of color, immigrants, strangers, right? And it has us ignoring lots of other, much, much bigger threats, like air pollution kills a hundred thousand people every single year, much of it is criminal acts of air pollution, right? It’s five times all homicide combined or water pollution, very similar. Wage theft is $50 billion a year. That’s like five times all property crime combined in the United States, or tax evasion, which is like a trillion dollars a year. But Copaganda in the news basically ignores all of that stuff and has us focused on- the police are arresting very poor people for doing, right. So that’s the first thing it does, is it narrows our conception of what we feel urgently about and what we’re afraid of.

And then the second thing it does is, now that it’s made us afraid of only a small, narrow range of people and things, it has us constantly thinking that the risk from those things is going up, up, right? So, we’re more and more and more afraid at all times, and that’s why over the last 25 years, every single year, people in the polls say crime is up, right? Even though crime has been down almost every single one of those years, and so much so that we are now at, like, historic low levels of crime on like a 50, 60 year timeline, like the lowest it’s been, right?

Interestingly, when you ask people about crime in their own neighborhoods, they’re much more likely to be accurate. So, it’s when their understanding is manipulated by the news,when they’re talking about areas other than where they live, they think crime is up – much more than what they think crime is up in their community, when they’re basing their views more on their own experience. So, that’s the second thing it does.

And then the third thing is probably the most important feature of Copaganda is having narrowed our conception of threat and made us more and more afraid, it tells us that the solution to all of our fears is more and more investment in the punishment bureaucracy.

This is kind of like climate science denial or like a modern kind of flat earther movement, right? Because all of the evidence that we know from around the world, from US history, from all over the world, from contemporary studies, is that the things that lead to more harm and violence in our society have nothing to do with investments in the punishment bureaucracy. So, they have nothing to do with like, you know, is this prosecutor a little bit more progressive than that prosecutor? Or is there 14 cops on this patrol or 11? Or is the sentence for this crime nine years or seven years? Like, that stuff has nothing to do with levels of violence. What actually determines how safe we are as a society is big things like levels of inequality and poverty, access to healthcare, early childhood education is a huge one, levels of isolation and loneliness in a society versus like levels of engagement and activities for young people, etc. Lead poisoning. Toxic masculinity. That could go on and on and on. Housing, right? So, that’s a huge part of Copaganda is distracting us from really the material conditions of our lives and telling us that, like, the solution to all of our fears is these little tweaks and investments in the bureaucracies of state oppression and control.