Our political system is based on a concept of the public sphere as a place for “democratic deliberation” or a place where citizens discuss and debate issues that affect the public, eventually coming to some kind of agreement or consensus. Our public sphere has never functioned perfectly, but over the past ten years it has been under attack. Rather than using communication for democracy, people now use communication as a weapon. I’ll explain why using communication as a weapon is what John Dewey once called “treason to the democratic way of life” and how two propaganda models, each with different strategies and effects, emerged to control our public sphere. Through this discussion we’ll see that using communication as a weapon is a winning strategy judged by the metrics of attention and engagement, but it’s a losing strategy for democracy.