The essential aspect is it signals the regime is not accountable to truth, reason, logic, or any other principle the populace can organize themselves around and

The essential aspect is it signals the regime is not accountable to truth, reason, logic, or any other principle the populace can organize themselves around and offer any resistance to the planned agenda. Their war is on truth itself. "Narrative," is basically the opportunity to align to power, but absolutely decoupled from reality or truth, as it's by people who believe there is no truth and nothing to believe except narrative and alignment to power. The crazier it is, the more powerful it seems. Absurdity a kind of checksum or proxy for narrative power. Aspirants signal their alignment not by talking points, but by making hallucinatory claims that support the narrative. Writers like Bernays, Cialdini, Sharp, (to say nothing of the post-modernists) all indoctrinated generations of students in universities with this view. I suspect it's not even about political sides anymore, but fundamentally different theories of mind. It's the idea of self as the effect of language and narrative vs. some greater existential experience that language runs over top of. Propaganda is designed to operate on minds of that former type, as if you can sway enough of them, from the perspective of the person wielding it, it really doesn't matter what's physically or concretely, logically true if you have control of perception. That is - provided you can suppress humour, truth, and desire. Nation state politics for a few centuries were about an equillibrium of power within a domain, where now it's all this crazy metacognitive stuff. What a worthwhile description of the tactic, and what a weird world we live in.