Today is a great day – Amy McGrath has announced she is running for Senator in Kentucky. The people of Kentucky and the Senate and the United States at large will be lucky to have her. Check out her announcement video too!

This post isn’t about her though. It’s about the negative propaganda website that also launched today, Wrong Path McGrath, and the various smear tactics within. I hope that readers will enjoy this post and be better armed against propaganda where ever they may see it.

I say Wrong Path McGrath launched today but truthfully I am not sure. I looked up the website registration info from the ICANN WHOIS website and the site was initially registered and configured April 2nd, 2019, and all the other registration information is anonymous. However, we know from visiting Wrong Path McGrath that the site is paid for by the McConnell Senate Committee.

I wonder how many websites Team McConnell registered that day? Unfortunately, the disbursements page on the FEC site won’t be updated until roughly July 15, 2019, so we won’t be able to take an educated guess until we get the data about how much Team McConnell paid Domains by Proxy, LLC. For now we’ll just have to amuse ourselves knowing that e.g. Team McConnell spent $13,197.37 paying the fine folks over at Mailhaus to send physical mail while some sucker called the “U.S. Postmaster” actually paid Team McConnell $112.00 in the same period.

Back to Wrong Path McGrath – let’s take a walk through the website using my iPhone. This first image is what you will see when you first load the website:

Pretty terrifying alright! This isn’t particularly impressive rhetoric but more or less nails the basics – it’s good little rhyme as the slogan and that picture is straight out of a scary story book for kids. Let’s keep scrolling and see whose in that picture just below the fold:

This is getting more effective. The first image is a link to the video Team McConnell made and the chosen thumbnail is awesome negative propaganda. In short, the goal is to associate Amy McGrath with both Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are themselves often in negative propaganda, typically being portrayed negatively as “socialist”. This technique in propaganda is known as transfer and while its certainly not cutting edge it’s very effective.

Which is a great segue to the other technique used in this image – simple name calling, and/or arguably labelling. Amy is “too liberal” for Kentucky which as propaganda helps readers make a conclusion without examining the pertinent facts of the matter, which in this case is what are the actual positions and policies this candidate Amy McGrath seeks to promote. Overall, this AOC + Warren transfer plus this name calling combine to create the (false) message that McGrath is one of the most liberal of the liberals.

Let’s keep scrolling, eh?

Name calling / labelling – check. She is “radical left” and a “radical liberal”.

Transfer – check. Time to associate Amy McGrath with Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi because its important to make sure all your bases are covered as some people might hate more seasoned Democrats while others might hate the progressives from the previous screenshot.

Let’s be really bold and click on that Twitter share button:

Yeah, that’s a pretty tight social media integration. “Radical left” with a fortunate line break and “too liberal” both are name calling, and the slogan is involved again too.

Back to the website, just below the social media buttons there is a button to “get the facts” which leads you to this wonderful page, shown in these four thumbnail images:

These are all just quotes out of context, which is a pretty popular propaganda technique. More over, and I’m not sure what specific technique of propaganda this is, the overall effect is to strip Amy McGrath of explaining her platform and instead the propaganda tells you what the platform is… using these quotes out of context.

The final bit of the website is a “news” page, which looks like this:

It appears to be basically just a bunch of cherry picked articles from the past few years about Amy McGrath. But its much worse than that – these articles don’t link to external websites nor do they have author bylines – so while they could be cherry picked articles its unclear if they even have any basis in reality. Moreover, “fact checking” from this basis is pretty darn impossible and the actual content of the “articles” are essentially the longer form versions of the quotes out of context and other subjective analysis. This is propaganda posing as independent news articles.

The scariest part of this website? This is how some non-zero amount voters will learn about Amy McGrath and I doubt many of them will keep their thinking caps on and resist this negative propaganda.