Michelle Malkin detects 4 steps essential to creating such an outcome:

Step 1: "Find an expert with an impressive-sounding academic title to legitimize shoddy advocacy propaganda."
        
In this case, "meet Brian Levin," Malkin advises. "He's the one-man band behind something called the "Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism" at California State University, San Bernardino. The 'center' (that is: Levin) claims to be 'nonpartisan' and 'objective.' But he is a former top staffer of the militant, conservative-smearing Southern Poverty Law Center, which was forced to apologize earlier this year after including famed black neurosurgeon and GOP 2016 candidate Ben Carson on its "extremist watch list" of hate groups. . . ."

Step 2: "Enlist gullible, lazy, biased, and complicit journalists who recycle the 'expert's' sweeping pronouncements as proven facts, backed up by other ideologically vested advocacy group spokespeople. . . ."

Step 3: "Attack the messenger. After I published a lengthy post on my blog outlining an epidemic of Muslim hate-crime hoaxes at colleges, mosques and businesses dating back to 2001, Levin took to Twitter to accuse me of 'smears.' The facts, which the rest of the media failed to inform readers about while hyping Levin's work this week, speak for themselves (see michellemalkin.com)."
        
Step 4: "Classify this article as 'hate' and any media outlet that publishes it as a 'hate group' so that other journalists shun the truth and continue perpetuating the hoax."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how a garden-variety extremist propagandist can organize false impressions to fundamentally transform the people and politics of the USA.

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