What's truth got to do with it?

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A typical bullshit story, as David Strom shows in this article, but it’s his conclusion that resonates, because he’s exactly right about what’s going on.

…. [T]here actually is a point to piling up these absurd stories. It's not that the propagandists expect that you will buy that a kindly Social Security worker really died of a heart attack because Donald Trump is mean, or that a mother drowned her child because of his immigration policies. Few people will. 

But the piling up of these stories is supposed to create a stink, and pound the idea that Trump's cruelty is an established fact and that if only he were kinder, bad things would happen less often. 

Where there is smoke, there's fire. The storytellers are creating the smoke, but once people hear enough stories like this, a gestalt is created. The facts don't add up, but a feeling is being created in people susceptible to such things. It's about changing the Overton Window, not convincing people about any one case. 

The same strategy is used all the time. Think of the "climate change is causing wildfires" narrative. Even if you prove EVERY wildfire has an easily explained origin in bad maintenance of power lines or outright arson, that California's forest management is horrific, that LA was unprepared for an easily predicted event, the accumulation of stories creates an impression on the impressionable. 

The facts are irrelevant. The accumulated feelings stick. 

The infuriating thing is that it works. Millions of Americans are suddenly furious that a wife-beating MS 13 gang member with a deportation order got...deported. Not because they know anything about the particulars, but because propaganda arsonists started a fire that spread in people's minds. 

Even a lot of liberty-minded conservatives are incensed over technicalities that would never have occurred to them because the propaganda worked. PROVE that he was a human trafficker. PROVE that he beat his wife. PROVE that he was a gang member. As if that is the standard for deporting an illegal immigrant credibly suspected of all these things, with boatloads of evidence. 

Honestly, you can read the harrowing accounts from his wife about being beaten, and people are still incensed. Tren de Aragua is suddenly the Boy Scouts, too. 

It's absurd, but the fact is that the accumulation of individually absurd stories does have an effect, and that is the point, not making you believe any one story. People get primed for outrage. 

It's sickening.