How to Manufacture Consent for Genocide
A case study from New York’s recent 17th congressional district primary
The administrator of NY-17’s congressional Facebook group restricted my access to post this week, and classified Palestinian civilian deaths as spam.
Zero notice. No warning. No explanation. So I went to his Facebook page to contact him directly, to talk neighbor-to-neighbor and try to understand what was going on.
I was absolutely shook when I saw a “Greater Israel” map as his profile cover.
“Greater Israel” is a biblical territorial vision depicting Israeli expansion into Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, the West Bank, and Gaza. It includes the term “Amalec”—the same term that Benjamin Netanyahu used in 2023 to justify the military assault on Gaza, which the UN’s Independent Commission of Inquiry cited as evidence of genocidal intent.
As UNC religion scholar Motti Inbari told NPR in 2023, the biblical commandment is “to completely destroy all of ‘Amalek’—including babies, including their property, including the animals—everything.”
The concept of ‘Amalec’ is invoked by religious nationalists to frame the indigenous peoples of the Levant—Palestinians, Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrians—as the eternal enemy that must be destroyed.
But this man, whose cover photo depicts the expansion of Israeli territory into five sovereign nations through what international law defines as war crimes, is deciding what we are allowed to discuss in a shared community group.
So I asked him about it.
“With respect to my support for Israel, it will not be an issue in this election as both candidates more or less have identical positions,” he said. “If you want to discuss issues with Israel v Hamas, there are thousands of other venues for you to do that.”
Facebook group search is wonky, so it may be buried, but it appears that my posts have been deleted. Luckily I took a screen grab of my “second strike,” the so-called spam that got me restricted. I was responding to a post in which Steve asked the community what issues matter to NY-17 voters.
I’ve pasted the rules in their entirety at the bottom of the page. But it appears Steve restricted my access, claiming I violated rule #4–No Spam.
Interestingly, the rules don’t mention Palestine anywhere. Huh. Why wouldn’t they want people to know they are suppressing that particular topic?
“When you joined the group, you agreed to follow the rules,” Steve said. “If you don’t want to follow the rules, you don’t have to stay in the group.”
His rules. His narrative. No accountability.
The Mechanisms of Narrative Control
This is not the bias of one man. This is a mechanism. I know this because I too am a media professional, Steve, and I want to make sure everyone else sees what is happening here.
This playbook works precisely because most people don’t know what to look for.
Propaganda doesn’t usually look like propaganda. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t come with a villain twirling a mustache. It comes dressed as common sense, community standards, and neutral moderation. The most effective information control is the kind the audience never notices—because they’ve been misled to believe there is none.
Communications scholars call it “manufactured consent” to describe how institutions shape what a community believes is the acceptable range of opinion, not by lying to them, but by controlling what information they’re allowed to encounter in the first place.
You don’t tell people what to think. You control what they think about.
There’s a related concept called “agenda setting,” the documented power of media gatekeepers to determine not what people believe, but what questions they even ask.
The person who controls the agenda controls the conversation.
Steve Epstein taught communications at Columbia University. He knows these concepts. They are not abstract to him. They are his professional toolkit.
Once you see it you cannot unsee it. And honestly it is not even subtle.
STEP ONE: Capture the dominant community space, but present it as neutral ✅
Find or create a forum where your target community can gather (this is easy enough to do with a modest marketing spend). Make it look organic. Make it feel like a neutral public square. In NY-17, that’s a Facebook group with nearly 30,000 members who joined to discuss their congressional race. Appoint yourself and allies as administrators. Nobody voted for you. Nobody consented to your editorial framework. You are not transparent about your biases. You’re just there, at the center of the conversation, before anyone thought to ask why.
STEP TWO: Write intentionally vague rules so they can mean whatever you need ✅
This is the critical infrastructure move. The rules must appear reasonable—no harassment, no spam, stay on topic. But “spam” and “on topic” must remain undefined enough that administrators can apply them selectively.
The vagueness is not accidental. It provides the cover of plausible deniability for every act of suppression. You’re not censoring. You’re just enforcing community standards.
STEP THREE: Quietly restrict members asking inconvenient questions ✅
Don’t ban them outright, which creates martyrs and generates screenshots. Instead, use the platform’s built-in moderation tools to require post approval for specific members. They can still see the group. They think they can still participate. They write their posts and submit them and wait. And wait. The posts never appear. Eventually they give up and go away.
This is what communications scholars call “censorship by proxy,”achieving the effect of censorship while maintaining the appearance of an open forum.
It is quiet. It is deniable. It is effective.
STEP FOUR: Define the acceptable conversation based on your political ideology ✅
Both candidates support Israel. Therefore Israel is not a relevant issue in this race. Therefore any discussion of Palestinian civilian deaths—confirmed as genocide by the United Nations—is by definition off-topic. Therefore it is spam.
The Overton window, which is the term for the range of ideas a community considers acceptable to discuss, has been moved. Not by argument. Not by persuasion. By administrative fiat. By one man with a Greater Israel map as his cover photo deciding what 30,000 of his neighbors are allowed to talk about.
When I told Steve I didn’t see how I had broken any rules, he told me: “We consider talking on issues that are irrelevant to the outcome of the election in New York 17 CD to be a form of Spam.”
Let me translate that out of administrator-speak.
An issue that 77% of Democrats care about? Irrelevant.
An issue that is making and breaking congressional campaigns across New York City right now? Irrelevant.
An issue that has produced a UN finding of genocide, an ICJ ruling of plausible genocidal acts, and the largest progressive primary upsets in New York history? Irrelevant.
Tens of thousands of children dead? Spam.
Chilling.
There is nothing in the group’s written rules that says Palestine cannot be discussed. The rule I broke does not exist in writing. It exists in Steve Epstein’s personal support for Israel.
This is not a community standard. This is a man’s ideology dressed up as one. And it is being enforced on 30,000 of our neighbors by a former Assistant Professor of Communications at Columbia University and former VP of Multimedia at Simon & Schuster—a man who has spent his entire career studying, teaching, and practicing exactly how to control a narrative.
He knows what he’s doing. He told me so himself. Unfortunately for Steve, so do I.
Now zoom out with me. Because this is where it gets important.
Democratic Majority for Israel PAC, an organization founded explicitly because polling showed Democrats and young voters were moving away from unconditional support for Israel, endorsed Cait Conley for NY-17 as part of their 2026 Majority Project.
This is the same organization that spent over $2 million attacking Bernie Sanders, crushed Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated progressive after progressive who dared to condition military aid to Israel, and exists for one explicit purpose: to keep the Democratic Party pro-Israel against the direction of its own base.
It is my opinion that Cait Conley’s campaign is following the same script as John Fetterman.
The candidate is approved by the PAC. The money follows. The narrative gets locked down. And the voters are handed a choice that was made for them months earlier by people whose primary loyalty is to a foreign government’s military campaign.
And our very own grassroots, local candidates are crushed.
Then, in the dominant Facebook group where NY-17 voters think they are having a free and fair discourse, Palestinian civilian deaths are classified as spam.
NY-17 voters, whose majority views on Palestine are being suppressed in their own community forum, deserve to know the full picture of what is happening in this race.
77% of Democrats believe Israel is committing genocide.
84% of Americans support a ceasefire.
65% of Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis.
These are not fringe positions. These are democratic majority positions. And they are being suppressed by a man whose personal brand is advocating for Israel’s siege on Palestine and Lebanon to expand to more sovereign nations, which has been explicitly condemned by the UN, the ICJ, and just about every human rights organization on earth.
Here’s what we can do about it:
If you are a member of the NY-17th Congressional group — share this post there. Tag your neighbors. Tag your friends in the group. Make it impossible to ignore.
Demand that Steve be relieved from his moderation powers.
Demand that new admins be established, people with genuine editorial integrity.
Demand that the group rules be applied objectively and transparently to everyone.
Demand full disclosure on how all three admins enforced their personal political views during the primary.
And ask yourself the hardest question: In a House race where an AIPAC-adjacent lobby handpicked the candidate specifically to counter the Democratic base’s growing support for Palestinian rights, and the dominant voter forum is run by someone who has classified Palestinian civilian deaths as spam — who benefits from this arrangement? How did it come to be, and what is the cost in human life.
A final word on how I am showing up in this fight.
I practice nonviolent confrontation. I believe that how we fight is inseparable from what we are fighting for. What I am targeting is not a person. It is a pattern. It is a structure. It is a set of choices made by the administrators of a community space that tens of thousands of our neighbors thought was unbiased.
Those choices have consequences for democratic discourse in this district and I am naming them publicly because the public deserves to know.
I hold no hatred toward the individuals involved. It mostly just makes me sad that anyone can endorse a genocide, let alone one that has been found to intentionally target children.
But I am holding them accountable. The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that the most powerful form of action is one that comes from a place of clarity rather than anger.
I am angry, you can ask my husband, but I am choosing to let the facts speak rather than the fury.
The receipts are real. The pattern is real. The stakes are real.
As for the other two moderators—I have been in conversation with them. They have been formal and polite, then radio silent. A little more careful than our friend, Steve.
But I can’t help wondering whether they endorse their colleague’s views and the way he has been enforcing them in our shared community space.
Because (it is my opinion that) these people would rather lose to Mike Lawler than lose control over Palestinian discourse in NY-17. They’d rather let America fall into the hands of MAGA than surrender their stranglehold on a narrative that serves a genocidal agenda.
And that makes me wonder where exactly their loyalties lie.
I have questions about their involvement in shaping the narrative around Cait Conley’s so-far unconditional fealty to Israel. And I have questions for Colonel Conley herself. But we will get to all of that.
This is not easy for me. I am afraid. I have seen what Israeli extremists do to people who threaten their “greater Israel” plan. And I have my own family to protect.
So please spread the word. This only works if we all stand together.
NY-17 democratic voters who don’t want to fund genocide anymore have been played. And I stumbled upon the receipts.
I’m just shocked by how brazen they are about it—Icarus, but make it genocide.
Even as a mother at the risk of her life, watches over and protects her only child, so with a boundless mind should one cherish all living things.
Love,
🧿 Alexandra Cain, M.Div 🧿
