Hey everybody. This is James Lindsay.

You are listening to the New Discourses podcast, and it's time to talk about propaganda.

I think this is an extremely important topic.

I mean, some of you will have heard the recent New Discourses podcast that I did, that we are the fake news now,

where I talked a little bit about the different ways, I guess,

that not just that there's propaganda and fake news or whatever you want all over social media,

but also that we participate in it, that we are the purveyors of a great deal of the fake news

now that, say, CNN and the big networks are less reputable.

And this podcast kind of builds on that, but I want to get into not just propaganda,

but agitation and propaganda, agit prop.

The original concept for this podcast was just to do a bullet about

agit prop, which I'll probably do subsequent to this now. But the idea is that there's a lot to

propaganda. There's kind of two sides to propaganda. Agitation and propaganda are put together.

This is that term, like I said, agit prop. And if you actually read

Lenin, as we'll discuss, or you read a lot of the different communist literature, or in fact,

if you read the Nazi literature, you see that there's this call for agitation and propaganda.

And they're not quite the same thing. So I decided when I started to look into this to arrange for a bullet that it'd be worth talking about the bigger picture.

But the, let me just like I like to do a lot of the times, give you the punchline up front,

totally deviating from the notes I made for you, taking away all of my artful planning here.

The big punchline with this and what will be the thrust of the Bullets episode about this is that agitation and propaganda are two sides of a coin that are kind of everywhere.

We live in this propaganda-rich environment.

They're not the same thing.

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