The firehose of falsehood still spews Missed some things while on the road over the weekend. Something about an aborted revolt in Russia, was it? Jay Rosen’s comment on Anne Applebaum’s essay at The Atlantic made me look. Russian citizens along the Wagner Group parade route to Moscow came out to gawk, shake hands, and take selfies with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenaries. “Nobody seemed to mind, particularly, that a brutal new warlord had arrived to replace the existing regime,” Applebaum writes: The response is hard to understand without reckoning with the power of apathy, a much undervalued political tool. Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin’s Russia has been designed in part for this purpose. The constant provision of absurd, conflicting explanations and ridiculous lies—the famous “firehose of falsehoods”— encourages many people to believe that there is no truth at all. The result is widespread cynicism. If you don’t know what’s true, after all, then there isn’t anything you can do about it. Protest is pointless. Engagement is useless. “Resistance is useless!” as a young Vogon spaceship guard bored with the mindless tedium might shout. But hey, the machismo, that uniform, and the low-slung stun-ray holster! Or if you are Steve Bannon, two shirts.…