2016, The Gift That Keeps Giving: Brian Anse Patrick Dies

Brian Anse PatrickBrian Anse Patrick died of cancer unexpectedly (for us) at age 62, of cancer. I ended up at the lunch table with him at the law seminar in Louisville this year, and if he was terminally ill, he certainly didn’t look or act it. I had met him several times at the law seminar, but I don’t think he was a reader, and never remembered meeting me previous years. But he was always really glad to meet someone who read his books and would strike up a conversation enthusiastically on those topics. His real area of academic expertise was propaganda.

Please, if you’re a 2A academic scholar, I would strongly encourage you to go into hiding until next week. We’ve already lost Don Kates. Now this.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. Brian Anse Patrick on the NRA Annual Meeting
  2. Brian Anse Patrick on “Living for 32”
  3. The State of Internet Gun Reviews

3 thoughts on “2016, The Gift That Keeps Giving: Brian Anse Patrick Dies”

  1. I had to review Patrick’s “Ten Commandments of Propaganda”:

    Here are Brian Patrick’s 10 rules:

    1. Control the flow of information. (Stay tuned to us. All other media are enemies.)
    2. Pivot off existing values and beliefs of the audience – grease a slippery slope.
    3. Disambiguate to make choice easy. Paint all differences in black and white.
    4. Invoke group pressure to help shape beliefs and behaviors.
    5. Cognitively penetrate: First notice; then remember; then absorb; and finally repeat.
    6. Distance propaganda from its source. Co-opt (or invent) trusted intermediaries, etc.
    7. Accommodate information needs and habits. (Press kits make it easy, etc.)
    8. Address psychological, spiritual, and social needs. (Give “ciphers” a cause – believed to be a major motivator recruiting ISIS converts on-line.)
    9. Personalize your heroes; de-humanize antagonists, as needed.
    10. Dispense truth, logic, facts, & science – carefully. (If a finding is favorable, tout the science; if it isn’t, call it junk science.)

    The most interesting thing to me has always been, how we all seem incapable of detecting when those rules are being applied to us, by people we believe to be our friends.

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