The Architecture of Epistemic Collapse: Engineering a Post-Truth State

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

— George Orwell, 1984

6.1 Introduction: Epistemic Capture as a Precondition for Autocratic Rule

An authoritarian order cannot long survive in a society with access to verifiable facts. Its power depends not only on the capture of institutions but on the capture of reality itself. The systematic engineering of the information ecosystem, or “epistemic capture,” is therefore not a tangential communications strategy or incidental demolition but a foundational precondition in order for Project 2025’s rearchitecture of American government to live on beyond any specific administration, decoupled from the vagaries of the election cycles, regardless of what party is ostensibly in power, or who sits in the Oval Office. Where liberal democracy requires a pluralistic public sphere, one in which independent journalism, empirical data, and the contestation of ideas serve as guardrails against tyranny, the architecture of P2025 envisions its systematic demolition. This assault on the informational commons is a primary weapon in the slow, internal erosion of democratic life. As Levitsky and Ziblatt have documented extensively, modern democracies rarely die in violent coups; they are dismantled from within by elected leaders who use the very instruments of democracy to subvert it.¹

This chapter deconstructs the mechanisms by which P2025 seeks to monopolize the American information environment, analyzing its strategy through two primary theoretical lenses. The first is Stanley’s concept of “undermining propaganda,” a sophisticated form of political speech that employs a cherished ideal against itself.² In this framework, the language of “free speech” is cynically invoked to protect and amplify disinformation, thereby destroying the capacity for reasoned deliberation that freedom of speech is meant to foster. The second lens is Mercieca’s framework of “weaponized communication,” which describes rhetoric used not for persuasion but as a tool of force, control, and coercion.³ This form of communication is designed to deepen polarization, increase public frustration, and enable leaders to evade accountability for their words and actions.

The ultimate goal of this architecture is not merely to persuade, but to manufacture consent; not to inform, but to condition; not to foster critical citizenship, but to produce compliant subjects. By deploying a relentless “firehose of falsehood,” the regime aims to induce a state of cognitive exhaustion and corrosive cynicism, leading a disoriented public to abandon the search for truth altogether. A populace that cannot distinguish fact from fiction loses its capacity to hold power to account, creating the ideal conditions for an authoritarian project to consolidate its grip. In such an environment, the regime need not suppress all opposition; it need only ensure that the truth is always in doubt, and that its own narrative is the only one that matters because it is the only one that is heard.

The analysis that follows will deconstruct the key tactics of this epistemic assault, from the defunding of public media and the politicization of government reports to the deployment of a “firehose of falsehood,” a war on empirical measurement, and the codification of bias into technology. Each tactic will be analyzed through these complementary frameworks. For instance, the assault on public media will be shown as a classic maneuver to “capture the referees” (complementary to the judicial capture discussed in Chapter 3 and sideline opponents, a structural erosion of democracy that Levitsky and Ziblatt identify, while also functioning as a rhetorical silencing tactic, as described by Mercieca.⁴ Similarly, the politicization of official government reports exemplifies Stanley’s concept of “undermining propaganda,” using the ideal of official reporting to subvert truth, while also serving as a mechanism for turning neutral agencies into partisan weapons.⁵ Together, these lenses reveal a coherent strategy to erode reasonableness, destroy mutual toleration, and weaponize communication for authoritarian ends.

6.2 Creating the Void: The Assault on Independent Media and the Erosion of Mutual Toleration

The first step in achieving epistemic capture is to create an information vacuum by systematically dismantling or delegitimizing trusted, independent sources of news and analysis. This strategic demolition of independent media serves a purpose more fundamental than silencing critics, which, in essence, is a side-effect of the central objective: it is an attack on the institutional infrastructure required for what Levitsky and Ziblatt identify as “mutual toleration,” the norm of accepting political opponents as legitimate rivals who have an equal right to compete for power.⁶ When a shared factual basis for debate is destroyed, opponents are no longer seen as rivals with differing opinions but as enemies inhabiting a separate, hostile reality.

This collapse of mutual toleration perfectly illustrates the manuscript’s central dynamic of the drift–design feedback loop. For decades, the opportunistic drift of partisan media attacking “mainstream” news sources steadily eroded public trust, creating a climate of pervasive cynicism. This erosion created the vulnerability that P2025’s architects are now exploiting with deliberate design: a systematic campaign to defund, capture, and eliminate any institutional media that cannot be controlled. What began as an accident of political rhetoric has now been hardened into the intentional architecture of state-enforced epistemic closure.

The strategy begins with the elimination of public media, a direct implementation of P2025’s blueprint to silence outlets it deems ideologically hostile, followed by a more sophisticated campaign of coercion against the private press. The initial phase is apparent in P2025’s explicit hostility toward public media. The blueprint dismisses PBS and NPR as “leftist broadcasters” and frames their public funding as an injustice forced upon conservatives (P2025, Ch. 8). The proposed method for their elimination is a form of legislative blackmail:

The 47th president can just tell the Congress that he will not sign an appropriations spending bill that contains a penny for the CPB

P2025, p. 247

This is no longer a theoretical threat. In July 2025, Congress acted on this blueprint, voting to eliminate all federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and clawing back over $500 million in annual support. The effect was immediate and catastrophic. On August 1, 2025, the CPB announced it would cease operations, ending its half-century role as a core pillar of American public media.⁷

With the public square partially cleared, the regime turns to a more sophisticated, two-pronged strategy to dominate the remaining private media landscape. The first prong is to coerce existing players into submission through the targeted application of state and economic power. The second, and ultimate, goal is to facilitate the consolidation of a new, vertically integrated media oligarchy under the control of loyalists.

The strategy of coercion is designed to create a climate of fear where it becomes financially ruinous for corporations to platform dissent. The first major casualty of this new reality was the nation’s most-watched and most trenchant critic of the President.

The success of this indirect pressure emboldened the regime to escalate its tactics from veiled threats to open coercion. This was made brutally clear in the takedown of Jimmy Kimmel, where the economic motive for corporate capitulation was unmasked. A key player in this episode was Nexstar, the nation’s largest owner of local TV stations. In August 2025, Nexstar announced its intention to acquire its rival Tegna for $6.2 billion, a deal that required the approval of the Trump-appointed FCC.¹⁰ Nexstar’s CEO explicitly praised the Trump administration’s friendly regulatory environment. With billions of dollars on the line, the company was perfectly primed to respond to a loyalty test from the regime. That test came just weeks later.

While coercion tames the existing media, the regime’s endgame is far more ambitious: to fill the void with a new, fully aligned media oligarchy. This represents the ultimate fusion of the cryptoplutocratic state, where the lines between governance, corporate power, and propaganda dissolve entirely. The central figure in this consolidation is Larry Ellison, the Oracle billionaire and stalwart Trump supporter, who is poised to become one of the most powerful media moguls in American history.

This multi-front war on media (defunding public outlets, coercing corporate self-censorship, and facilitating oligarchic consolidation) is a direct assault on the conditions for “reasonableness” essential for democratic life.¹³ The shutdown of the CPB creates vast “news deserts,” particularly in rural communities where local stations serve as the sole source of trusted news and lifesaving emergency alerts.¹⁴ This is not an unintended side effect; it is a strategic objective. These are often the same communities where political polarization is highest, a vulnerability that demagogues are adept at exploiting.¹⁵

The outcome is a form of epistemic gerrymandering: the strategic starvation of reliable information and the consolidation of propaganda outlets to reinforce the regime’s control over the public mind. This engineered void serves a direct economic purpose for the cryptoplutocratic class. Local public media and fearless national satirists are often the only institutions with the resources or the platform to investigate regional corporate malfeasance, environmental damage from regime-aligned industries, or the corrupt deals that enrich political donors. Silencing these outlets is not just an assault on information; it is a strategy to guarantee economic impunity at every level of society.

6.3 Filling the Void: The State as Propaganda Engine

Once an information vacuum has been created by weakening independent media, the state moves to fill that void by transforming its own communications apparatus from a tool of public information into an engine of propaganda. This allows the regime to mask an undemocratic reality with the veneer of official legitimacy. This process aligns perfectly with Stanley’s analysis of propaganda that “is used to mask an illiberal, undemocratic reality” by co-opting the language and forms of democratic governance.¹⁶

This strategy is operationalized through a two-pronged assault on government-funded media: first, by seizing control of existing broadcasters and second, by corrupting official reports. The most flagrant example is the capture and repurposing of Voice of America (VOA), and abolishing the statutory “firewall” that has historically ensured its journalistic independence (P2025, Ch. 8). This firewall is reframed in the P2025 blueprint as a shield for “anti-American propaganda,” a classic example of “undermining propaganda” where the ideal of journalistic integrity is twisted to justify its opposite: state control. Established in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda, VOA has a statutory mandate to be “accurate, objective, and comprehensive.” Yet, following the court-ordered revival of the broadcaster after the administration’s attempt to shut it down, the official placed in charge of its overhaul, Kari Lake, announced that VOA would be fed content directly from One America News Network (OAN), a hyper-partisan network known for propagating falsehoods. Lake cynically framed this laundering of domestic propaganda through a taxpayer-funded international broadcaster as an “enormous benefit to the American taxpayer.”¹⁷

This move represents a complete inversion of VOA’s historical mission. An institution created to counter foreign disinformation is now being retooled to disseminate domestic disinformation on a global scale. This is a textbook case of what Levitsky and Ziblatt describe as authoritarians turning ”neutral agencies into partisan weapons.”¹⁸ The ideal of a free and independent press is subverted by a state-controlled entity that presents partisan messaging as objective news, destroying the credibility of the institution and blurring the lines between journalism and state propaganda.

The second prong of this strategy involves the corruption of official government reports. In August 2025, the administration released a version of the State Department’s annual human rights report that was fundamentally altered to serve its political agenda. Criticism of allies like Israel and El Salvador was significantly softened, while disapproval of perceived foes like Brazil was escalated. Entire sections on government corruption and the persecution of LGBTQ+ individuals were simply eliminated. The report even took the extraordinary step of listing the UK, France, and Germany as nations where human rights had “worsened” due to their regulations on online hate speech, a move that directly echoed the administration’s own rhetoric against content moderation.²⁰

The State Department’s reporting function, once a source of credible, nonpartisan data, was repurposed into a tool for rewarding friends, punishing enemies, and projecting the regime’s ideology onto the world stage. The report retains its official form, but its substance has been inverted. This is “undermining propaganda” in its purest form: the ideal of human rights reporting is used to subvert the very principle of objective truth that gives such reporting its value.

In both cases, VOA and the State Department report, the form of official, credible communication is retained, but its substance has been inverted to serve the regime. This is “undermining propaganda” in its purest form: the ideal of objective reporting is used to subvert the very principle of truth that gives such reporting its value. This act of self-discrediting has profound consequences, creating a “liar’s dividend” on a global scale. When the world’s leading democracy treats facts as transactional, it becomes exponentially easier for other authoritarian regimes to dismiss any fact-based criticism of their own abuses as mere “Western propaganda,” accelerating a worldwide trend toward a post-truth international order where power, not evidence, determines reality.

6.4 The Firehose of Falsehood: Demagoguery, Cognitive Exhaustion, and the Normalization of Cruelty

The structural capture of government communications and the silencing of independent media are necessary preparations for the regime’s primary offensive strategy: the deployment of a high-velocity, high-volume “firehose of falsehood.” This is the unceasing torrent of lies, fabrications, conspiracy theories, and casual cruelties that emanates from the highest levels of the administration and is amplified by its surrogates. As analyzed by Mercieca, this is communication used as a weapon, designed not to persuade but to “increase distrust,” “increase polarization,” and “increase frustration,” all while allowing the leader to “avoid accountability.”²¹

This strategy is engineered to induce a state of cognitive exhaustion. It inundates the public with so many contradictory and often nonsensical claims that the very act of distinguishing truth from fiction becomes a demoralizing chore. Stanley’s work explains the psychological effect: this firehose is designed to “bypass the rational will” and “erode empathy.”²² By overwhelming citizens, it fosters a corrosive cynicism that leads them to disengage and retreat into the belief that “all sides lie” and that no objective truth is knowable. Through relentless saturation, the regime normalizes the unthinkable. A baseless conspiracy theory or a dehumanizing smear, initially shocking, becomes familiar through endless repetition, and what is familiar begins to feel plausible. Cruelty operates on the same principle, binding supporters together through a shared sense of transgression against the norms of civic decency.

The more brazen the falsehood, the more effectively it functions as an instrument of social sorting. A brazen lie cannot be accepted through reason; it can only be accepted as an act of faith or political allegiance. Therefore, forcing supporters to publicly defend an obvious falsehood, such as those concerning election results or the nature of an impeachment, acts as a powerful loyalty test. This public defense of the indefensible serves to bind the supporter more tightly to the leader and the movement, alienating them from those who still adhere to an evidence-based reality. It transforms political support from a matter of policy preference into a matter of identity and tribal belonging, which is far more durable and resistant to contrary evidence.

This dynamic directly fuels the extreme polarization that Levitsky and Ziblatt warn is a precursor to democratic collapse;²³ a dynamic which reached its horrifying apex in September 2025 with the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The event was a national tragedy, but for the regime and its allies, it was above all a strategic opportunity. The firehose was immediately turned to maximum pressure, transforming a moment of potential national mourning into a tool for division, enemy-manufacturing, and the justification of future repression. The administration’s response provided a master class in the weaponization of tragedy.

The success of the firehose is measured not just in its ability to spread a narrative, but in its power to enforce that narrative’s boundaries. In the toxic environment created after Kirk’s death, any deviation from the officially sanctioned script of left-wing culpability was treated as a subversive act. Mainstream institutions, fearing backlash from the regime and its mobilized base, began policing their own ranks, demonstrating the chilling effect of this strategy.

This campaign to control the present narrative is matched by an equally determined effort to retroactively sanitize the past, ensuring that the official record aligns with the regime’s mythology. The pressure campaign against the Smithsonian Institution is a clear example of this historical revisionism, a form of ad baculum (appeal to force) used to compel compliance.

Finally, this relentless generation of outrage and falsehood serves as a massive distraction engine. A single, inflammatory fabrication, or the weaponization of a national tragedy, can hijack the media cycle for days, providing essential cover for the far more consequential, systematic work of institutional demolition detailed elsewhere in this analysis. The spectacle of the lie becomes the story, obscuring the substance of governance and exhausting the public’s capacity for sustained vigilance.

6.5 Governance by Ignorance: The War on Measurement and the Destruction of Democratic Reasonableness

Beyond spinning information lies a more radical strategy: preventing the collection of data altogether. If a fact is inconvenient, the surest way to neutralize it is to prevent it from ever being measured. This is not simply deregulation; it is a deliberate campaign of epistemic sabotage, designed to leave both the government and the public blind to the consequences of the regime’s actions. This constitutes a direct assault on the capacity for evidence-based governance and public accountability, creating a state of intentional ignorance. This intentional ignorance is the bedrock of the oligarchic economic project. By refusing to measure the long-term public health costs of pollution, the true rate of worker injuries in deregulated industries, or the widening gyre of wealth inequality, the regime makes it impossible to hold its patrons accountable for the public harms from which they profit. The war on measurement is not merely an assault on truth, it is the primary mechanism for externalizing the costs of elite enrichment onto a society that is no longer allowed to keep score.

The assault is systematic and breathtaking in scope. The Department of Health and Human Services has laid off the teams responsible for the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, which tracks the nation’s maternal mortality crisis. The CDC has gutted divisions that monitor fatal injuries and sexually transmitted diseases. The EPA has taken down its EJScreen tool, which maps industrial pollution in local communities, and plans to stop requiring facilities to report their greenhouse gas emissions. The National Weather Service is being forced to reduce weather balloon launches that provide critical data for forecasting.²⁹ This war on measurement is a direct attack on what Stanley defines as “reasonableness,” the core democratic commitment that policies must be justifiable to citizens based on grounds they can accept.³⁰ Without data, such justification is impossible.

The most brazen signal of this strategy came in August 2025 with the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), just hours after the agency released a disappointing jobs report. President Trump publicly dismissed the official data as “phony” and “RIGGED,” offering only “my opinion” as evidence.³¹ This move is a clear example of the “strongman” behavior identified by Levitsky and Ziblatt: a refusal to accept neutral rules and a willingness to punish the “referees” who deliver unwelcome news.³² It sent a chilling message through every statistical agency in the federal government: produce favorable numbers or be purged. This is the ultimate form of evading accountability, a key tactic in Mercieca’s analysis of demagoguery.³³ If the negative consequences of a policy are never measured, the government cannot be held responsible for them.

The war on measurement creates a black hole of information. It is a form of preemptive epistemic sabotage designed to make future democratic restoration and accountability impossible. The immediate effect is to hide current failures. A second-order effect is that it cripples the government’s ability to solve problems; one cannot fight a drug crisis or a maternal mortality crisis without data. The third-order, and most profound, implication is the creation of an irreversible information gap. The data not collected in 2025 can never be recovered. A future, reform-minded administration will be flying blind, unable to even assess the full extent of the damage done, let alone design effective remedies. This is a deliberate strategy to salt the earth, ensuring that even if the regime loses power, its legacy of ignorance and decay will persist, making a return to effective, evidence-based governance extraordinarily difficult. It is a structural codification of incompetence and lock-in of failure.

6.6 Codifying Bias: Engineering a ‘Woke-Free’ Reality through Technology

The final frontier of epistemic capture involves embedding the regime’s ideology into the nation’s technological infrastructure, thereby automating and scaling bias under a false veneer of neutrality at unprecedented scale. The administration’s AI Action Plan, released in July 2025, is framed as a commitment to innovation and “ideological neutrality.” Its centerpiece is a crusade against so-called “woke AI.”³⁵ An executive order directs all federal agencies to procure only AI models that conform to “truth-seeking” principles and, critically, to remove concepts like misinformation, climate change, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) from their risk management frameworks.³⁶

This is a profound act of semantic inversion and a technologically sophisticated form of “undermining propaganda.” It uses the ideal of “neutrality” to implement a system that perpetuates inequality. The plan is built on what Stanley would term “flawed ideologies,” specifically, the flawed ideologies of meritocracy and color-blindness, which hold that systemic biases do not exist and that systems that ignore race or gender are inherently neutral.³⁷ The very tools designed to identify and mitigate algorithmic bias are themselves redefined as a form of bias. As Danielle A. Davis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies argues, this is a “false neutrality.”³⁸ An AI system instructed to ignore race or gender does not become objective; it simply reproduces the existing patterns of a society shaped by historical inequity, and it codifies those patterns as objective truth.

For communities that have long borne the brunt of technological harms, from biased facial recognition in policing to discriminatory algorithms in hiring and credit scoring, this policy is a deliberate choice to look away from lived realities. It ensures that the systems of the future will be built on the uncorrected inequities of the past. This is not just an ideological victory, it is a profoundly economic one. An AI that is officially blind to systemic bias is an AI that will reliably perpetuate the profitable status quo of discriminatory outcomes in lending, hiring, and housing. It provides a veneer of objective, technological neutrality for practices that channel wealth away from marginalized communities and toward the very financial and corporate interests that form the core of the cryptoplutocratic oligarchy. By mandating the procurement of AI that conforms to this flawed ideology, the regime is not achieving neutrality but is codifying its regressive worldview into code.

This strategy represents the privatization and automation of epistemic capture, making it more pervasive and harder to reverse than traditional state propaganda. State propaganda is created by the government and can, in theory, be changed by a new government. However, when the government mandates that private tech companies develop and deploy AI based on a flawed ideology, it effectively outsources the production of that ideology. These AI models, once integrated into every facet of modern life, become a pervasive, decentralized, and semi-autonomous infrastructure of bias. Reversing this is not as simple as changing a government policy. It would require a massive, society-wide audit and re-engineering of countless private-sector systems. The regime thus achieves a durable, long-term victory for its worldview by embedding it in the black boxes of corporate technology, where it can persist long after its political power may have waned.

6.7 Conclusion: Epistemic Collapse and the Democratic Death Spiral

The mechanisms detailed in this chapter (the creation of news deserts, the weaponization of government communications, the erasure of data, the rewriting of history, and the codification of bias) are not isolated tactics. They are interlocking components of a coherent architecture of epistemic capture. This systematic assault on a shared, fact-based reality functions as a primary engine of democratic decay, not merely a symptom of it. By destroying the epistemic commons, the regime directly fuels a “democratic death spiral."

When citizens cannot agree on basic facts, the foundational norms of “mutual toleration” and “institutional forbearance” become impossible to sustain. Political opponents are no longer seen as legitimate rivals with different opinions but as enemies inhabiting a different, incomprehensible reality. This extreme polarization corrodes the soft guardrails that prevent political competition from devolving into a no-holds-barred conflict for power.³⁹

Ultimately, the architecture of epistemic capture is the indispensable shield of the cryptoplutocratic oligarchy. It severs the link not just between the citizen and the vote, but between the citizen and reality itself. By manufacturing a world of phantom enemies and erasing the data that tracks real-world harms, it provides the permanent distraction necessary for elite extraction to proceed unnoticed. This engineered ignorance is the final lock on a system designed for minority rule, creating a populace that is not only unable to hold its rulers accountable but is often unable to even perceive the nature of its own subjugation. Having captured the state and the truth, the regime can now turn to the final frontier: the capture of the individual citizen, beginning with the remaking of education itself.