Circular Propaganda
The Linchpin of Leftism
By guest contributor Sky and Sea.
Circular propaganda is the reason progressivism is alive and the reason it will die. It is doomed to succeed.
Circular propaganda occurs when every group member thinks of himself as a propagandist, and the other members are also targets of his propaganda. Every group member is simultaneously a propagandist and a target. If you are progressive or formerly progressive (like myself), this description might just click for you: it is an observable part of leftist culture.1 Once you see it, it becomes obvious.
For example, a progressive friend of mine said that he had listened to the police dispatch recording for the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, and the police were clearly in the right, but he didn’t want to tell other leftists because it would hurt the movement. My friend apparently did not consider whether other leftists were also covering for, say, Trayvon Martin or George Floyd.
Circular propaganda is not an echo chamber. Within an echo chamber, if an ingroup member sees something wrong, he will tell others, and the truth can spread from within the “chamber.” Within circular propaganda, if somebody sees something wrong, he refuses to spread that news. Echo chambers have one wall facing outward. Circular propaganda creates walls around every member.
Like a monkey’s paw or The One Ring, it is destined to succeed and destined to fail.
My purpose is to show the extent of circular propaganda in progressivism and demonstrate how it works. To do this, I use three interconnected extreme cases. In extreme cases, every ingroup member knows the truth, but it is rarely acknowledged.
The three examples are:
The case of Hillary robbing Bernie Sanders of the nomination in 2016.
The case of Joe Biden’s mental state c. 2019–2024 and the apparent shadow government.
The case of the Democratic Party’s refusal to release the Epstein Files and the later (supposed) revelation that Trump is a pedophile.
And the pattern is:
The news comes out. The Left instantly recognizes that the event is tremendously important but inconvenient.
Since there is a critical election coming up, a silent pact is made not to talk about the topic until after the election.
The election is over, but few bring up the topic. The impact of the news is suspended in limbo. This limbo allows the news to be selectively absorbed later.
I wasn’t particularly political in 2016, but I passively supported Bernie Sanders. Bernie supporters were highly suspicious about the primaries. They believed it had been rigged.
Luckily, the interim DNC chair Donna Brazile also supported Bernie, so she decided to investigate. After Hillary won the primaries, Brazile discovered that Hillary had bought out the DNC and had been in control of it since before the primaries. Upon this revelation, the interim chair (of course) didn’t inform the public. Instead, she called Bernie, told him what happened, and asked him to support Hillary even more, because Trump needed to be defeated. After the call, she broke down in tears, “not out of guilt, but out of anger. We would go forward. We had to.”
I wish I were editorializing, but the full details are somehow more ridiculous.2 Read them3 straight from that DNC chair here.4
The Brazile case is just normal circular propaganda. The extreme case occurred when every Bernie supporter got involved in the propaganda. Today, most younger leftists believe that Bernie would’ve won the election in 2016. We believed something similar back then, too — we believed that Hillary stole the presidency from Bernie and fumbled it into Trump’s hands. However, before the election, Trump still needed to be defeated, and after the election, we were still pushing the Russia collusion story. So we bit our tongues about the Hillary debacle.
Four years later, after January 6, 2021, we were told that Trump had tried to steal the election. Then, in 2024, we had the Biden debacle:
From 2019 to 2024, the Right repeatedly questioned Biden’s mental acuity, citing numerous incidents and the lack of unscripted appearances. As Jake Tapper later revealed, the Biden administration was covering up his deterioration.5 They could only keep up the facade until the disastrous presidential debate against Trump, on June 27, 2024,6 which ended Biden’s campaign (after some additional shenanigans,7 whose details we still do not know today).
This bombshell made the American public highly suspicious that the upper echelons of the Democratic Party were happy to run a mentally deteriorating puppet candidate. Furthermore, given the President’s mental state, it was doubtful that he was running his administration. Everybody, including the Left, suspected that we were living under a shadow government.
As the Right hounded the Left with follow-up questions, leftists collectively decided to pretend that nothing happened and focus on Kamala. After Kamala lost, Jake Tapper, with Alex Thompson, published Original Sin: Joe Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.8 Tapper, lead Washington anchor for CNN and co-moderator for the Biden–Trump debate, explains how Biden’s administration thought, confirming America’s suspicions that they were willing to install a shadow government:
Some Biden aides were in denial, but others knew that the president might not last through another four years and made peace with it. Beating Trump mattered more.
“He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years — he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while,” said one longtime Biden aide. His aides could pick up the slack. “When you vote for somebody, you are voting for the people around them too,” the aide argued.
Notably, we quite literally do not vote for the people around the President — we don’t even know who most of them are (with the exception of maybe the Vice President — but as Tapper makes clear, Kamala’s team was separate from Biden’s). Of course, every leader will have aides and advisors, but we were obviously not voting for a nearly-dead President whose oligarchy of nameless “aides” are the actual executives. If that’s what we were voting for, they wouldn’t have needed to cover it up.
Tapper tries to frame the Biden administration as though it weren’t already a shadow government, but the truth reveals itself in the details:
“They shielded [Biden] in every meeting,” Cabinet Secretary Number Three recalled. “They always wanted to keep him happy. They would say, ‘Don’t say that. Don’t tell him that.’ They always wanted to shield him from bad news.”
…
Cabinet Secretary Number Two said they hated “the scripts” for the cabinet meetings. “You want people to tell you the truth and have a real dialogue, and those meetings were not that.”
…
Alumni of the Obama administration noticed the difference. Obama would hash it out with deputies and mid-level aides. Biden, by contrast, mostly met with the Politburo and his top national security aides… They noted that they sometimes spent more time on strategizing how to present the decision to Biden than on the substance of the decision itself. Some tried to find workarounds to speed up the process. They would make the decision binary or sneak smaller items into the daily presidential brief in hopes that Biden would just say yes.
It reads like eunuchs steering a puppet emperor.
After Tapper’s revelations, the Right attempted another round at getting answers from the Left. The Left maintained their radio silence, intending to memory-hole this disaster.
Meanwhile, the single most bipartisan issue during the election was the release of the Epstein Files. Trump announced that he would release them, and the Democrats didn’t make a similar promise. The Left refused to discuss why not. Later, in 2025, they came to believe the Epstein Files revealed that Trump was a pedophile.
Some of you are groaning. These talking points about Bernie and Biden are well-worn. We’ve all heard them before — but that’s my point. I can’t emphasize this enough: literally everybody knew, but it didn’t matter. America knew that the Biden debacle was the story. However, leftists knew that if it became a household topic, Kamala would have no chance… so the topic disappeared. Poof.
Down the memory hole it went. I haven’t heard the Biden debacle mentioned in at least six months. I would call the memory-holing a success. And so even though everybody knew about it, we never absorbed it.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a Zoomer progressive. It’s 2024, and you’re out protesting. Somebody begins to chant that famous slogan, “Protect Our Democracy.” You join in. Eight years ago, you were a Bernie supporter, but your memories from that time are fading.
But as you are chanting, you remember what just happened two weeks ago — oh yeah… there’s that Biden debacle that we’re not talking about. For good reason, of course. We can’t let Trump win, after all.
So maybe we’re not really “protecting our democracy,” but more like “protecting our shadow government.” Sure, it’s a shadow government, but at least it’s our shadow government. Five minutes later, you’ll barely remember this caveat. This is by design. After all, your movement is putting the Biden debacle in the memory hole, and it’s working.
This is how circular propaganda layers itself. If you (as a Zoomer progressive) hadn’t also been propagandized into half-forgetting what happened to Bernie, you would realize this isn’t “our” shadow government. “Protecting our democracy” is actually more like “protecting our enemy’s shadow government.”
The layers also work in the opposite direction: the Left loves accusing Trump of trying to steal the 2020 election. A progressive in 2025 may briefly realize that Hillary actually succeeded in stealing one in 2016, but he could comfort himself by saying that was nine years ago. If he realized the Left had tried to elect a shadow government in 2024, he might not feel so comforted, but he is unlikely to have both realizations in a row.
When you live within circular propaganda, you can still realize uncomfortable truths, but it doesn’t matter because the lies are multilayered. Furthermore, since you are literally conspiring with your group to deceive yourself, the multilayered lies are self-repairing. You can pierce a layer, but when you aren’t paying attention, the hole will repair itself.
Let us return to our attempt at empathizing with progressives. The protest is long over. It’s months later now. You’re scrolling leftist social media, which is currently telling you that the Epstein Files reveal that Trump is a pedophile.
In another moment of clarity, you realize that the movement had its hands on this evidence for years. During the election, the Left already suspected that Trump was in the files, but the White House refused to release them. They would rather protect the pedophile conspiracy than stop Trump. But this moment of clarity is fleeting, and it never meets your prior realizations, which you have long forgotten.
In the minds of most younger leftists, the phrase “protect our democracy” should be “protect our enemy’s pedophile co-conspirator shadow government.” To be clear, I don’t know if Trump is a pedophile, but that was what progressives believed; all you need to do is connect the dots already in their minds.
There are two opposite reactions to this state of affairs. First, “How could something so normal lead to this?” Second, “How could progressives see this as normal?” Let’s answer both at once.
Let me ask for yet a bit more empathy for progressives. In 2024, America understood that whatever just happened with Biden was the question. Simultaneously, America understood that the Left had no chance if we spent time answering it. The answer was obvious: exchange honesty for power. Boot up the circular propaganda.
And really, we don’t even need to boot it up, because it’s already on. It’s just an ambient part of progressivism. I am describing the extreme case of circular propaganda where everybody is aware of it but incapable of actually thinking about it. The less extreme cases are like the Kenosha,9 Trayvon,10 or Floyd11 examples. Or climate change, poverty, drugs, LGBTQ, immigration, and so on. (The Floyd footnote leads to full body cam footage of the incident.)
If every leftist sees himself as a propagandist, then a leftist admin aide is an admin propagandist, and a leftist climate scientist is a climate propagandist. The same applies to every other kind of leftist “expert.” Everybody propagandizes everybody else.
Circular propagandists never seem to give it a system-level analysis. A normal propagandist (not a circular one) supposes himself to be wiser than the propagandized. When you propagandize somebody, you pollute his information pool — you pollute his ability to make decisions for himself.
This actually makes a sort of sense. If you know better, you’re the mastermind. Take a benign example: Santa. Parents will “propagandize” their children about Santa, but this is fine because the parents genuinely know better.
It makes no sense for everybody to be the mastermind. If everyone is both propagandist and propagandized, then everybody is polluting everybody else’s information pool, and nobody can see clearly.
The fact that nobody actually needs to lie helps to make their actions feel normal; they can just turn a blind eye. The climate propagandists stay quiet and, like the Kenosha case, the rest of the movement will run wild with claims about racist police murdering blacks or how Manhattan is about to become Atlantis.
Recognizing this aspect of the Left’s culture is one reason I am no longer a leftist. I often heard that the Right doesn’t “live in reality” — a laughable (though true) statement, coming from circular propagandists.
Circular propaganda is the linchpin of leftism. It holds together the contradictory mess of beliefs that is the ideology.
Conservatives have traditionally attributed the silence of progressives to social coercion. This is partially true, but the reason the coercion exists in the first place is that circular propaganda is part of being a team player. Naturally, those who aren’t team players will be ostracized. The social coercion is normal; it is the expectation of mutual deception that is not.
I cannot spell out its full implications here. The three cultural mechanisms the Right does not understand about the Left are: “Everything Is Friend–Enemy,” “Circular Propaganda,” and “Rhetoric Is Reality.” “Everything Is Friend–Enemy” was the topic of my last essay, “A Play Where They Don’t Know They’re Actors,” and “Rhetoric Is Reality” will be the topic of my next. I will withhold my full set of conclusions until after we understand all three, but I can make one point without more context:
The Right’s reaction to leftist hypocrisy has been to scoff. My reaction is closer to a grimace. On a battlefield, your opponent’s irrationality is his weakness. But on a rhetorical battlefield, where your aim is to convince your opponent, his irrationality is his strength. If your opponent can ignore all contrary evidence, he becomes invincible.
You don’t want to be the owner of a monkey’s paw, but if you happen to be his enemy, don’t act surprised when a school bus somehow materializes above you and crushes your legs.
I have seen circular propaganda on the Right, though it hasn’t gotten to the extreme case.12 This is both good and bad. It is good for obvious reasons. It is bad because the extreme case symbolizes power, unity, and recognition of friend–enemy political reality.
When you’re a circular propagandist, everything makes sense. “We’re all working to progress the movement. So what if I need to cover up some inconvenient truths?” A movement fully consumed by circular propaganda is doomed to succeed. It will chug forward at full speed… right off a cliff. And even as it plummets, everybody will be saying that everything is fine. We can scoff, but if we are in the same vehicle as the leftists… I suppose we can scoff on our way down.
Jubilee, “Progressives vs Moderate Democrats | Middle Ground,” uploaded to YouTube on January 19, 2025.
Most of you have not been flies on the wall for conversations between leftists. Well, now you can be. Give the video a watch. What you’ll notice is that the two groups have very few disagreements on ideas, and almost all of their disagreements are on “optics.” It’s not about what is true; it’s about what would look the best. This video also happens to contain leftists talking about how Bernie would have won if the DNC hadn’t stolen the primaries, and when discussing why Kamala lost, they conveniently skip over discussion of the Biden debacle.
Brazile also privately didn’t trust the polling (but apparently also kept quiet about this). Furthermore, she says it was quite difficult for her to figure out what was really going on in the DNC. How does the DNC chair not know how the DNC is financially run? This affair boggles the mind.
Donna Brazile, “Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC,” Politico Magazine, November 2, 2017.
Michael Sainato, “Court Concedes DNC Had the Right to Rig Primaries Against Sanders,” Observer, August 26, 2017.
“Tapper and Thompson Discuss Book Claiming Biden’s Inner Circle Hid Signs of Decline,” PBS NewsHour, May 22, 2025.
Wall Street Journal, “Full Debate: Biden and Trump in the First 2024 Presidential Debate,” streamed live on YouTube on June 27, 2024.
Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald): “The Party of Democracy sits around guffawing at how anti-democratic and vote-free and secret was their process for choosing and then imposing the new Democratic presidential nominee on the country.” August 23, 2024.
This clip is an incredible 30-second encapsulation of how circular propaganda works. Yeah, it is “really amazing how unified everybody is” about “defending our democracy” after we sweep all the undemocratic stuff we do under the rug. I don’t even get to “the switch,” and the 2024 skipping of the primaries, and Biden dropping out via Twitter.
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again (New York: Penguin Random House, 2025).
Rob Montz, “The Broken Boys of Kenosha: Jacob Blake, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the Lies We Still Live By,” uploaded to YouTube on November 18, 2022.
Joel Gilbert, “The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America,” uploaded to YouTube on April 26, 2020. This person’s level of “investigative journalism” is frankly deranged.
Alpha News, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” uploaded to YouTube on November 22, 2023.
This documentary starts with a stitched-together video of Floyd’s arrest from the various police officer body cams. You can skip to 1:30. Notably: Floyd resisted arrest for about ten minutes before being forced to the ground; he was saying, “I can’t breathe,” before that point; and he had more than a lethal dose of fentanyl in his system.
To be clear: the normal cases are like the Kenosha, DNC chair, and Tapper cases. These are individuals or cabals deciding to cover something up. The extreme cases are like the Bernie, Biden, or Epstein cases, where entire movements collectively cover something up. You can find the normal cases on the Right, but not the extreme ones (which is not necessarily something to celebrate).