Fake news

“Fake news” functions in the book less as a neutral description of inaccurate reporting than as a weapon in a struggle over political reality. Its sharpest formulation is a paired rule: criticism of Donald Trump is classified as “Fake News,” while praise of Donald Trump is classified as “True News.” The expression therefore becomes a test of allegiance, revealing how the book presents contemporary politics as a contest between competing systems for naming truth.

Definition and Immediate Use

The expression is introduced through the question “What News?” and then reduced to two contrasting formulas: “Media Criticism of Donald Trump = ‘Fake News’” and “Media Praise of Donald Trump = ‘True News’.” In this construction, the phrase does not identify a demonstrably false report. It identifies a report by its relationship to Donald Trump. The same media institution or form of reporting is implicitly judged differently depending on whether it attacks or affirms him.

That arrangement gives “Fake news” a distinctly rhetorical force. It reverses the ordinary expectation that news should be evaluated through evidence, verification, and public accountability. The book instead depicts a political environment in which information is sorted according to whether it confirms a prior belief. The phrase marks the collapse of a shared standard: what one faction calls false is what another faction treats as necessary truth.

Media, Ownership, and Manipulation

The expression belongs to a broader account of media power. George Carlin’s critique, quoted in the book, argues that wealthy owners control corporations, political institutions, judges, and major media companies, and therefore control much of the news and information available to the public. In that framework, “Fake news” cannot be separated from ownership. The question is not only whether a story is accurate, but who owns the channels through which it is circulated and whose interests those channels serve.

The book connects this media criticism to Edward Bernays and the development of public relations. Drawing on Century of the Self, it argues that capitalism adopted Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious and that corporations and governments learned to appeal to and manipulate unconscious fears and desires. Advertising then becomes a parallel information system: it targets desire, encourages consumption, and maximizes profit for the Ownership Class rather than promoting the audience’s well-being. “Fake news” thus appears within a larger political economy in which public opinion can be engineered, desire can be directed, and information can be treated as an instrument of power.

Taxation provides a further example of the information asymmetry that the book associates with elite control. It observes that television contains many programs about murder but almost none about financial scandals, and argues that the Ownership Class has no interest in exposing taxation or the special arrangements available to the super-rich, banks, and corporations. The phrase “Fake news” consequently resonates with the book’s suspicion that some subjects are made visible while others are rendered boring, frightening, or effectively unspeakable.

Ideology and the Hidden Message

The book’s discussion of They Live gives “Fake news” a visual and ideological analogue. The film imagines a shadowy elite that has engineered an economic collapse, reduced the working class toward enslavement, and broadcast a hidden signal into the population. That signal creates a false consciousness, conceals the elite’s alien identity, and implants subliminal messages. An underground Resistance seeks to “hack the signal” and awaken the masses.

The book explicitly interprets the film as a denunciation of yuppie followers of Ronald Reagan and of unrestrained capitalism, rather than as a story about Jewish control of the world. Slavoj Žižek’s reading is used to describe the special sunglasses as a critique of ideology: they reveal the order beneath propaganda, glamour, and the appearance of freedom. Within this analogy, “Fake news” names one part of the hidden signal. It is not merely a false sentence but a public vocabulary that can camouflage domination while presenting itself as information.

Historical and Political Stakes

The expression is also tied to the book’s account of political polarization. The text describes the Trump insurgency as “The Confederacy: The Sequel,” presenting it as a return to far-right conservative rule based on racism, white supremacy, and ultra-plutocracy. It further compares the political program to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged made real. These historical and literary analogies intensify the meaning of media conflict: reporting about Donald Trump is treated as part of a larger battle over whether an elite order will be challenged or restored.

The same polemical structure appears in the book’s treatment of slavery and capitalism. It argues that the Confederacy regarded slavery as an acceptable mechanism for maximizing profit and extends the metaphor into the present by calling every capitalist employee a slave and “employee” a euphemism for “slave.” It then calls for a new Abraham Lincoln to end the Confederacy as a mental entity by defeating the ideology of unrestrained predatory capitalism. In such passages, “Fake news” belongs to a vocabulary of moral and historical combat: information is not presented as detached from institutions, class power, or the struggle to define freedom.

The book also invokes Abraham Lincoln’s “house divided” argument and Thomas Jefferson’s call to refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. These references turn contemporary media disagreement into a crisis of national direction. The issue is no longer simply whether a particular article is reliable. It becomes a question of which side controls the public story, which historical analogy governs interpretation, and whether the country is moving toward oligarchic rule or collective emancipation.

Significance and Limits

“Fake news” is therefore a compact expression of the book’s theory of ideological conflict. It links partisan loyalty to media judgment, media judgment to ownership, ownership to propaganda, and propaganda to the manufacture of consent. The phrase also dramatizes the book’s concern that citizens may mistake a managed appearance of choice for genuine freedom, even as elites shape the information environment in which political choices are made.

At the same time, the book’s own use of the expression is highly polemical. By reducing criticism of Donald Trump to “Fake News” and praise to “True News,” it exposes the logic of partisan labeling but also reproduces a binary structure in which information is sorted through political camps. Its historical comparisons, including the equation of the Trump movement with a renewed Confederacy, work primarily as moral and mobilizing analogies rather than as demonstrations that every feature of the periods is identical. The expression’s importance lies precisely in this tension: it is presented as evidence of a broken public sphere, while its force depends on the same adversarial struggle over who may declare reality true or false.