By Liam DeBoer | BlendrNews.com

Watching people trust state-sponsored media after admitting they’ve been lied to time and time again feels like watching someone with Stockholm syndrome—finding comfort in the very captors who abuse their mind in the first place.

The cycle is bizarre and almost pathological: outraged when the lies are first exposed, followed by amnesia when the next crisis arrives. Author Michael Critchton called this the “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.”

The idea is simple but unsettling. When you read about a subject you know well, you quickly see that the reporting is riddled with errors, distortions, and half-truths. You shake your head, thinking these people don’t know what they’re talking about, yet when you turn the page to a subject you don’t know, you forget the lesson and trust the same media without hesitation. It’s a mental reset that allows propaganda to thrive.

The recent track record is damning. During the pandemic, mandates and policies were declared unquestionable science, only to be quietly reversed or “updated” when reality caught up. In 2020, the Hunter Biden laptop story was dismissed as Russian disinformation by nearly every major outlet, until years later those same outlets admitted it was real.

In Canada, the world was told about mass unmarked graves at residential schools, sparking nationwide mourning and outrage. Excavations have since revealed no bodies, but the false claim was enough to ignite church burnings and political theatre.

Step back a decade, and you find the Libya intervention. Western leaders and media insisted that Gaddafi was about to commit genocide in Benghazi. The claim collapsed under scrutiny, but it justified NATO’s bombing campaign, leaving Libya a fractured state with open slave markets.

Go back further still, and the pattern only deepens. The US sold the public on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, a fabrication that led to a catastrophic war. A generation earlier, the Gulf of Tonkin incident gave Washington its pretext to escalate in Vietnam, despite later revelations that the attack was exaggerated or non-existent.

In the 1930s, New York Times reporter Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for covering up Stalin’s famine in Ukraine, assuring readers there was no actual famine as millions starved.

The lesson is clear. Propaganda works because we allow ourselves to forget. Until we break free from Gell-Mann amnesia, we’ll keep trusting the very institutions that have made a habit of lying to us.

Originally published on Instagram @liam.out.loud