We got more lies on Tuesday morning from the Pentagon press briefing. They’re now up to 17 different rationalizations for the attack on Iran, none of which makes sense.To paraphrase Rod Serling, consider what happened in Minab, Iran.A Tomahawk cruise missile, an American weapon, a weapon that Iran doesn’t own and can’t fire, struck a girls’ elementary school. One hundred and seventy-five people are dead, most of them little girls who showed up that morning to learn to read.And Donald Trump stood in front of cameras and said Iran did it. He lied. About dead children. Without blinking. And his crew backed him up, even knowing it was a lie.And now the corporate media will spend two days on this and then move on to whatever shiny object the White House throws next. That isn’t an aberration: it’s the GOP’s entire strategy. This is who they are and have been since Reagan pioneered the scam: a PR machine front for an iron-fisted oligarchy.I’ve been studying authoritarian movements for 40 years, including in my book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. I’ve written about how Hitler rose to power, how Mussolini consolidated his grip on Italy, how the Confederates took over the American South, how strongmen from Budapest to Brasília have used the same playbook again and again.And the first page of that fascist and neofascist playbook is always the same: “Destroy the concept of shared truth.”Not any particular truth. Not “this lie” or “that lie.” The concept of truth itself. Make people so exhausted, so confused, so beaten down by the constant barrage of contradictions, lies, and naked bulls--- that they give up trying to figure out what’s real. Make cynicism feel like wisdom and encourage your “influencers” to make it cool. Make “nobody knows anything” feel like a reasonable way to understand what’s happening.Because once you’ve done that, once you’ve convinced enough people that truth is just whatever you say no matter how outrageous or transparently false it is, you can do pretty much anything.You can bomb a school full of little girls and blame the victims.You can try to rig an election and, when you lose, call it stolen from you.You can watch a million Americans die and say the virus is just going to disappear.You can claim that tax cuts for billionaires will help average working-class people.You can say that increasing poisons in the air and on our crops will Make America Healthy Again.You can argue that destroying unions will increase working people’s standard of living.You can claim that taking people’s healthcare away “encourages individual initiative” and “independence.”Trump didn’t invent this. But my G-d, has he ever perfected it.Trump also didn’t build this lie machine all by himself. Most of it was built for him, over a period of 50 years, with billions of dollars, by morbidly rich people who never appear on television and never have to answer for any of it.In 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that became the blueprint for the takeover of America by the richest men in the country. Powell told the business community that they were losing America, that universities, the press, and the courts were all turning against “free enterprise,” and that if corporations didn’t fight back systematically and aggressively, capitalism itself was at risk.What followed was one of the most consequential 50-year projects in American political history, every bit as nation-changing and dangerous as the Confederate movement of the 1840s.Think tanks were funded to produce “alternative” academic research that would always reach the “right” conclusions.Conservative media was built from the ground up, from 1,500 AM talk radio stations to Fox “News” to the rightwing takeover of social media, all to create an information ecosystem where Republican voters would never have to encounter an uncomfortable fact.Public schools and Civics classes were defunded and attacked, because an educated citizenry asks too many questions.Local newspapers, the institutions that actually hold local power accountable, were starved out of existence.Charles and David Koch alone spent hundreds of millions of dollars seeding distrust in climate science, in government, in the very idea that collective action could solve collective problems. And they were just the tip of a massive iceberg.This wasn’t an accident; it was a strategy.And that strategy had one ultimate goal: to create a population of Americans so skeptical of institutions, so distrustful of expertise, so certain that everyone is lying all the time, that they’d be willing to believe anything.Donald Trump didn’t create those people. They were created for him by these cynical billionaires.And that means that removing Trump from power won’t dismantle the machine.