Cowboy Biker Propaganda

What Red-bubble Slideshows May Show Us


Cowboy Biker Adventures YouTube Channel, AKA YouTube hates my channel


Maybe some of you spend time on YouTube as a diversion, with Happy Bears or Daily Humor or slide shows of vintage photographs or slide shows of…..   Well, the format is great for propaganda distribution.  


Classic propaganda advice is to mix your seditious message or misinformation in with regular news or neutral stuff.  In the typical Youtube slide show, you see the image, read the caption, and before you can say “something isn’t right”, here’s the next slide.
    
I decided I’d test how this mixture of real and slanted bits was done on a couple of slide-shows from Cowboy Biker Adventures. (Who is that channel aimed at, based on the name?)  Maybe a month ago, “someone close” started viewing this channel, and continued, daily.  I had done a short viewing early on, and at that time it looked like a classic mix.  So, a few days ago, I laboriously went through one, and then a few others for a representative sample. I often had to stop and start the video to mark my list.*
    
Here are my results.  You’ll see that the channel has not bothered to mix message slides into a mostly neutral mix:  This is feed for willing viewers.  You probably could have told me.
























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I started with a list of categories I expected, and then added to it.  That’s why there are blanks.  There is obviously some overlap, and I could have marked some slides in a couple of categories, but this is a first pass.


My Perspective on the Results


  There were definitely not as many neutral slides as I expected:  These sets do not fit the classic propaganda model, then.  If I had known, I might not have carried out the test.  But really, it helps to know what people on the other side of the herd are viewing.
    
I think there is a libertarian theme that my marks may not fully show.  The anti-big government fits there.  Anti Gov. also includes a few hits on the courts and on regulation. The anti-capitalist element that I noticed in two video sets concerned low wages.  One of the anti-Dem hits marked some well known names as elitist.  
    


Many of the results could be called “us vs them”—take those, throw in some conspiracy theory stuff and some general anti-liberal stuff, and there you go.  The conspiracy category is a mix of outright lies, misrepresentation, and hard-to-classify stuff.  Anti-science bits and false history stories are common elements.
    
Some of the Christian-category posts give Bible verses to check.  Many are just “believe”. None promote Christ-like virtue or behavior.  Among ourselves, we share a view of many actions and statements from supposedly Christian representatives as hypocrisy.  Why isn’t the outrage at hypocrisy more common in our community? **


What This Means


    You need to look at some of these yourself, with an analytic eye.  I’m not suggesting psychological analysis, but kinda….where do slides reveal feelings we can identify as levers to pry people away from unthinking adherence to the right wing?  Here are a few potential points I see from my limited looking:  the wage issue, social security, and the elitist label.  I had thought to place Christian-ism hypocrisy here, but I’m not sure how to use that as a tool promoting Democratic party aims.
    
There was one slide that caught my eye, saying that the salary of congress members should be changed to the average that social security beneficiaries receive.  Maybe this tells us something about the slideshow creator or anticipated audience.  Protecting Social Security has been and needs to continue being a big Democratic issue that we bring up, at least with those beyond the we-will-live-forever age.  However, for some viewers the slide may just represent the disconnect between the common “us” and governmental “them”.
    
Let’s not let the anger at “the elites”—which may include us educated types—get in our way.  Shift it to the rich and wealth inequality.  (Is there a notable absence of anger with the wealthy in the slides I looked at? …)   The wealth inequality in this country is something we need to harp on.  Particularly in Texas, Republicans have sought to protect wealthy donors from having to pay their fair share of taxes.  Taxes need be more fair.  How many complaints do we hear locally about property tax?  “Make taxes fair again” could be a slogan.
    
From the slides I flagged, the main area I think we can exploit is low wages. We can easily move the thinking from the plight of the viewer to how Democrats work to raise wages.  And this is not a conceptual issue, nor a strictly national one.  We can champion a higher minimum wage for Texans.
    
Where to go from Here


What can you do do with this?  First, consider investing some time in the exercise of listening to, or viewing, insidious presentations such as these to look for chinks in the armor.  Look among the dreck and lies for items that show where we can apply leverage.  (Even on Fox? Too much editorial scrutiny.)  What do these people tell us about themselves that will help us sell our point of view.  Let’s create a list of acupuncture points.


Second, out on a limb, we could repackage a slideshow like this, but insert counter messaging.  Maybe not just repackaging—these CBA pieces have too much hateful stuff.  But with an effort, we could create slideshows with largely fun, neutral slides—just inserting some pictures of mega-yachts, the timeline of minimum wage vs inflation, a headline on Amazon worker abuse, or Cancun Cruz, caught, etc.  Maybe some group could put out a Manly-Trad-husband channel.  This is not a project I could pull off in a weekend.  Ergo, I think CBA represents an effort by more than one guy.  I’ll just ask George S. for some funds. 



How to counter Youtube propaganda?  For myself, I need to find some “thing” to give me an entry to discussing, without doing so in a way that threatens my combatant.  And I need to follow, not just with facts, but with a story that can lead to facts or at least try for a reset.



* If the slide sets are numbered in time order, then someone has edited older ones to bring in new material, I think.


** One wonders if pastors are afraid of being labeled as “Woke” by their congregations, and so not dwelling on teachings relevant to current happenings. Something I read made the point that some churches seem to be preaching a myth of Christian America more than moral lessons from the bible.


P.S. This was written in July.  I checked a few videos, late August, specifically looking for an uptick in number of anti-immigrant images.  I figured I could index the number to the number of neutral images.  I did not find more on immigrants.  I did find more hits to current Democrats in the news, like Adam Schiff.  And more tangential scripture quotations.

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