“The President has no interest in people who weren't planning to vote for him. This is evidence that we don't matter — because if we did matter, we'd get different messages.”
This is a blunt, provocative conclusion that challenges the assumption political leaders govern for all citizens, framing selective propaganda as proof of deliberate civic exclusion.
Nick Call
“If you ask me who benefits most from this tone in US propaganda, my feeling is that it benefits China — because it makes the Chinese look like the adults in the diplomatic room. And that will have tremendous appeal just by doing nothing. China will have tremendous appeal to the countries of the global south, even to former partners of the United States in Europe who are appalled by this kind of unpredictable messaging and unpredictable behavior that goes along with it.”
This contrarian take argues that America's own communication strategy is inadvertently handing China a geopolitical soft-power victory without Beijing having to do anything at all.
Nick Call
“If you've got clips from Gladiator, clips from Braveheart — those films are about opposition to totalitarians, about people who fight against evil emperors and evil kings — to see them edited to pump up people who are endorsing an authoritarian approach to foreign policy, rather than a voice of the more vulnerable, is bizarre. And I suppose shows how we are beyond irony.”
A stinging cultural critique pointing out the deep contradiction in using anti-authoritarian cinema as pro-war propaganda, landing a blow that's hard to dismiss.
Nick Call
“To break your enemy's will to resist — to project images of your strength so overwhelming that the enemy hastens to surrender or to compromise. That's a very old element in communication in wartime.”
The framing of psychological warfare as a communication discipline rather than a purely military one challenges audiences to reconsider where the battlefield truly is in modern conflicts.
Nick Call