Watch this first
Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the country. Watch people there explain why they'll keep voting against the programs they depend on. Then scroll down to see who set it up.
Poverty rate in Mississippi, 2024, among the highest in the nation.
Share of Mississippi births covered by Medicaid. Also 48% of children and 74% of nursing-home residents.
Mississippians stuck in the coverage gap because the state refused Medicaid expansion.
Life expectancy in Mississippi, in years.
Trump's 2024 share of the two-way Mississippi vote: 747,744 to Harris's 466,668.
Mississippi adults who identify as Christian; 42% are evangelical Protestant.
Source pendingOne interviewee is widely quoted as saying people would rather go broke and go hungry than give up their moral beliefs. The transcript we have reads differently. Until we confirm the exact words and timestamp, we're paraphrasing.
Your car breaks down tomorrow. The repair is $400. Could you pay it in cash?
The cash share hasn't improved in four years. And it splits hard by education: in 2024, 82% of college graduates could pay cash, versus 29% of adults without a high school diploma.
Federal Reserve, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025 (published May 2026). federalreserve.gov · Education data: federalreserve.gov
So where did your raise go?
Not to you. Since 1979, the gains went to the top.
Growth in annual earnings for the top 1% since 1979.
Growth in annual earnings for the bottom 90% over the same years.
Total growth in the median worker's hourly wage, 1979 to 2025. About 0.6% a year.
How much more a year typical workers would earn if their pay had tracked productivity, per EPI.
Economic Policy Institute, "Wage suppression in 10 charts" (2026). epi.org
One man told you in 1993
"A giant sucking sound"
That's what Ross Perot said you'd hear as American jobs went south if NAFTA passed. He lost the argument in Washington. Then he and economist Pat Choate wrote a whole book laying out exactly how it would happen: Save Your Job, Save Our Country (1993).
More than 30 years later, we can check his work. Here's his scorecard, graded honestly.
Perot predicted (p. 12)
Companies would move factories to Mexico. Owners could save at least $10,000 for every job they moved, and dodge U.S. safety and environmental rules.
By 2010, the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico had displaced an estimated 682,900 U.S. jobs, 60.8% of them in manufacturing. Auto and parts were hit hardest.
Economic Policy Institute, Robert Scott (2011). epi.org
Washington promised
President Clinton promised an export boom to Mexico: 200,000 new U.S. jobs in two years and a million in five, more than would be lost.
Perot predicted (p. 35–37)
Good factory jobs would be replaced by low-wage service jobs, turning America into "a nation of hamburger flippers." He cited Labor Department data showing most laid-off workers in the 1980s never got back to their old standard of living.
The broader trend he warned about happened. Typical pay has grown about a third as fast as productivity since 1979. When China joined the global market after 2001, up to 2.4 million more U.S. jobs were lost by 2011, with the Deep South among the hardest hit.
EPI. epi.org · MIT News, David Autor. news.mit.edu
The overall verdict
Did NAFTA by itself "destroy America"?
Perot nailed the direction: jobs moved, the trade balance flipped, and specific industries and towns were gutted. But Congress's nonpartisan research office concluded NAFTA's net effect on the whole U.S. economy was relatively modest. The bigger blow came later, from China. NAFTA was the template, not the whole story.
PolitiFact summary of the Congressional Research Service. politifact.com
Same rights on paper. Not in practice.
NAFTA's defenders said Mexican workers had protections too. Perot's own book makes the sharper point: the protections existed on paper, but the government controlled who could use them.
On paper
Mexico's Constitution gave workers the right to organize unions and to strike.
In practice
Unions had to be certified by the government, and only unions tied to the ruling party, which had governed for over 60 years, got certified. Independent unions couldn't legally exist. (Perot, p. 45)
Source pendingMexico rewrote its labor law in 2019, allowing independent unions and secret-ballot votes, under pressure from the USMCA negotiations that replaced NAFTA in 2020. Whether enforcement has followed is still being argued.
Attach: USTR USMCA labor chapter and Mexico's 2019 Federal Labor Law reform.
Ross Perot with Pat Choate, Save Your Job, Save Our Country (1993). amazon.com/dp/1562827111
Both parties signed it
A Democratic president pushed it. Republicans delivered most of the votes. Most Democrats in the House voted no.
House vote, November 17, 1993. Passed 234 to 200. Signed into law by President Clinton on December 8, 1993.
Clerk of the U.S. House, Roll Call 575. clerk.house.gov · Congress.gov, H.R. 3450. congress.gov
This wasn't one party's doing. The groundwork was laid two decades earlier, when a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell sent the U.S. Chamber of Commerce a confidential 1971 memo urging business to organize, plan long-term, and pool its money to win the battle for public opinion. We trace that 50-year campaign on our Dark Money page.
Powell memo, primary document. Washington and Lee University Powell Archives
Think you're too smart to fall for it?
That's exactly what they're counting on.
Yale researcher Dan Kahan tested people with strong math skills. On a neutral topic, they read the data correctly. When the same data threatened their political side's position on gun control, the best-at-math people became more polarized, not less. Their brains went to work defending the team instead of finding the truth.
That's why facts alone don't change minds, and why your educated friends believe things that aren't true. It's not stupidity. It's loyalty. And loyalty can be manufactured. (More on our Cognitive Dissonance page.)
SourcedKahan, Peters, Dawson & Slovic, "Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government," Behavioural Public Policy (2017).
ContestedA preregistered replication found the "smarter people polarize more" effect may not generalize. Motivated reasoning itself is well established.
The playbook is 100 years old
The man who wrote it was proud of it.
Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew, helped sell World War I to Americans. Then he sold the same techniques to corporations and called it "public relations." In his 1928 book Propaganda, he argued that an unseen few should shape what the public thinks. He wasn't warning you. He was advertising.
His trick: stop selling the product. Sell a feeling. Cigarettes became "torches of freedom" for women. A company becomes patriotism. A trade deal becomes "free trade." Once a product is a symbol, questioning it feels like an attack on who you are.
Source pendingThe 1929 "Torches of Freedom" stunt for the American Tobacco Company: young women smoking publicly in New York's Easter Parade.
Attach: Larry Tye, The Father of Spin.
Source pendingBernays ran PR for the United Fruit Company, painting Guatemala's elected government as communist before the CIA-backed 1954 coup. He shaped the story; the CIA ran the coup.
Attach: Tye, The Father of Spin; CIA FOIA records on PBSUCCESS.
CorrectedThe "add an egg to cake mix" story often credited to Bernays was Ernest Dichter's research, and food historians say fresh-egg mixes existed in the 1930s anyway. One of the videos above repeats the myth.
Snopes. snopes.com
Read the label, not the name
Nobody votes for more pollution. Everybody votes for "clear skies." Nobody defends tax cuts for the rich. Everybody defends "job creators." Shipping factories overseas became "free trade." The test: cover up the name and read what the thing actually does.
Meet Bernays in his own words on The Man Who Taught the Wealthy How to Control What You Think, and more techniques on our Propaganda page.
How it works on you today
Boost in the chance of voting Republican from watching just 2.5 more minutes of Fox News a week, measured using cable channel numbers as a natural experiment.
In 2003, Fox-reliant viewers who held at least one false belief about the Iraq War, versus NPR/PBS audiences.
How much more likely false stories were to be retweeted than true ones. People spread them, not bots.
Local newspapers lost between 2005 and 2025. 213 counties now have no local news at all.
When the local paper dies, people don't stop reading news. Just over half of people in news-desert counties now get it from social media groups, influencers, and friends. Those sources don't cover the county hospital closing. They cover the culture war.
Paid to make you angry
Bernays was paid by clients. Today, propagandists can be paid by the platform. Platforms that share ad revenue with creators pay for engagement, and nothing drives engagement like outrage. Nobody has to order anyone to lie. The paycheck does it.
We investigated one large monetized political account and sorted every claim about it by reliability: Rage Bait, Please Share.
Source pendingX pays eligible accounts a share of ad revenue based on engagement.
Attach: X Creator Revenue Sharing terms.
For the Record
Every Crisis of Truth page includes the strongest evidence against its own argument. Here it is.
The pay gap depends on how you measure it
EPI is a labor-aligned think tank. Critics such as the American Action Forum point out that adjusting pay with a different inflation index makes the gap much smaller. The gap is real by most measures; its exact size is argued. americanactionforum.org
NAFTA alone didn't do it
The 682,900 figure comes from EPI. The Congressional Research Service found NAFTA's net effect on the overall economy relatively modest, and some economists argue it kept some production in North America that would otherwise have gone to China. Automation and the China shock cost more jobs than NAFTA did.
Social media may not be the main driver
Political polarization grew fastest among Americans least likely to be online: twice as much among people 65+ as among 18–39-year-olds. That points to cable TV and talk radio more than algorithms. PNAS, 2017. And when researchers switched tens of thousands of Facebook users to chronological feeds in 2020, polarization didn't measurably drop, though the study was short and Meta helped design it. Princeton
People choose their news, too
Part of the Fox and Iraq findings is self-selection. The cable-channel study was built to get around that, which is why it's the strongest evidence here. Even so, its largest estimates (a 6-point swing in 2008) are disputed. Gelman, Columbia
Structure explains a lot, not everything
Trade deals, collapsing local news, and organized money shaped the choices people faced. That doesn't mean individual choices don't matter, and it doesn't make the people who disagree with us stupid. It makes them targets, the same as us.
What we refused to print
These claims go viral, sometimes from sources we otherwise use. They didn't meet our standard. Showing them is part of the method.
Graphics calling a current political movement "the same thing" as the KKK and Jim Crow
DeclinedThe historical movements are documented in their own words. Equating them with tens of millions of present-day voters is asserted without evidence. Motive claims stay off this site unless a named source supports them.
"Citizens United shipped our jobs overseas"
DeclinedThe 2010 ruling came after most NAFTA and China-shock losses. It mattered for money in politics, not for the offshoring that came before it. FEC
"Nearly 4 in 10 Americans can't cover a $400 expense"
CorrectedThe 37% who wouldn't pay cash mostly said they'd pay another way, often by borrowing. The accurate hard number is the 12% who couldn't pay at all.
Kroth's lecture: hip-hop, Cosby, car thefts, and unsourced statistics
DeclinedCrediting graduation and incarceration trends to TV shows and rap (the speaker himself calls the causal claim nearly untenable); a 60% car-theft spike after Gone in 60 Seconds (no source found); children-can't-name-Lincoln statistics, McDonald's playgrounds, burger composition (unsourced); "55,000 factories, 6 million jobs" blamed entirely on offshoring (overstated). His Clean Water Act example is also wrong: it's a 1972 law.
Bernays "masterminded" the Guatemala coup
CorrectedHe ran the PR campaign for United Fruit. The CIA ran the coup.
Before you believe it, ask
- What does this policy actually do, not what is it called?
- Who benefits?
- Who pays, and who paid for the message I'm seeing?
- What happened the last time we tried it?
- Is what I believe about the other side even true?
- Does someone earn money when I get angry about this?
Call them. Both parties.
The Capitol switchboard connects you to any member of Congress. Ask them why productivity doubled and your pay didn't. Ask who funds their campaigns.
202-224-3121Then check their donors yourself at fec.gov/data.
The receipts
Don't believe us. Check every one. Links are selectable for copying.
Wages, savings, and jobs
- EPI wage calculator (productivity vs. pay, 1979–2025)https://www.epi.org/resources/wage-calculator/
- EPI, productivity and pay 1948–2013 charthttps://www.epi.org/chart/rap-figure-disconnect-productivity-typical/
- EPI, Wage suppression in 10 chartshttps://www.epi.org/publication/wage-suppression-in-10-charts/
- American Action Forum, critique of the productivity-pay gaphttps://www.americanactionforum.org/research/does-compensation-lag-behind-productivity/
- Federal Reserve, Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2026-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2025-savings-investments.htm
- Federal Reserve, $400 expense data tableshttps://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/sheddataviz/unexpectedexpenses-table.html
- MIT News, David Autor on the China shockhttps://news.mit.edu/2021/david-autor-china-shock-persists-1206
- Autor, Dorn & Hanson, "The China Shock"https://www.ddorn.net/papers/Autor-Dorn-Hanson-ChinaShock.pdf
NAFTA and Perot
- Perot & Choate, Save Your Job, Save Our Country (1993)https://www.amazon.com/dp/1562827111
- EPI, Heading South (2011)https://www.epi.org/publication/heading_south_u-s-mexico_trade_and_job_displacement_after_nafta1/
- EPI, NAFTA's Legacyhttps://www.epi.org/publication/nafta-legacy-growing-us-trade-deficits-cost-682900-jobs/
- PolitiFact, summarizing the Congressional Research Servicehttps://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/sep/24/donald-trump/did-nafta-kill-millions-jobs-donald-trump
- House Clerk, Roll Call 575 (1993)https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/1993575
- Congress.gov, H.R. 3450 actionshttps://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/3450/actions
- Powell memo, primary documenthttps://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/1
- FEC, Citizens United summaryhttps://www.fec.gov/updates/citizens-united-v-fecsupreme-court
Mississippi
- Census Bureau, poverty measureshttps://www.census.gov/library/stories/2026/09/comparing-opm-spm.html
- KFF, Medicaid in Mississippihttps://files.kff.org/attachment/fact-sheet-medicaid-state-MS
- KFF, Medicaid expansion decisionshttps://www.kff.org/medicaid/status-of-state-medicaid-expansion-decisions/
- CDC, Mississippihttps://www.cdc.gov/nchs/state-stats/states/ms.html
- Mississippi Secretary of State, election resultshttps://www.sos.ms.gov/elections-voting/election-results
- Pew, Religion in Mississippihttps://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/state/mississippi/
- Interview videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E48QqcTOXeY
Media, psychology, and propaganda
- Kahan et al., Motivated Numeracy (2017)https://rcgd.isr.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/motivated_numeracy_and_enlightened_selfgovernment.pdf
- Replication of motivated numeracyhttps://researchgate.net/publication/351884215_A_preregistered_replication_of_motivated_numeracy
- Martin & Yurukoglu, Bias in Cable News (2017)https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.20160812
- Gelman critiquehttps://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/24/no-i-dont-buy-that-claim-that-fox-news-is-shifting-the-vote-by-6-percentage-points/
- PIPA, Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War (2003)http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqMedia_Oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdf
- Vosoughi, Roy & Aral, Science (2018)https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap9559
- Medill, State of Local News 2025https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/
- Brennan Center, news desertshttps://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/news-deserts-leave-voters-vulnerable-election-misinformation
- Boxell, Gentzkow & Shapiro, PNAS (2017)https://www.pnas.org/content/114/40/10612
- Princeton SPIA, 2020 Facebook studieshttps://spia.princeton.edu/news/social-media-polarization-and-2020-presidential-election
- Snopes, the cake-mix egg storyhttps://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cakemix.asp
- Harvard Kennedy School, Columbine mythshttps://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/details-are-distraction-newtown-killings
- Kroth lecturehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfo5gPG72KM
- Bernays video essayshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRJAzvi9aEUhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i_Zw1Itv40
- 1984 film excerpthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0wH6YDfCzg