Mass Media Propaganda Is Enemy #1: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
The most Orwellian tool of our rulers which does the most damage and affects the most lives is not surveillance, nor police militarization, nor government secrecy, but domestic mass media propaganda. It's also the most overlooked. It's good to protest the other mechanisms of authoritarian control, but propaganda is enemy number one.
You don't need the ability to spy on dissident groups if you can control public thought enough to prevent those groups from forming in the first place. You don't need the ability to quash public uprisings if you can propagandize people away from rising up at all. And they can. And they do.
The ability of the plutocratic class to manipulate public thought at mass scale is the single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society. It warps the entirety of our political spectrum, all our thinking, all our discourse, and what we perceive as normal. And you just don't see people fighting it. The ACLU isn't protecting people's mental sovereignty from the manipulations of sociopathic government-aligned oligarchs. People aren't taking the media-owning class to the Supreme Court for brazen election interference. People aren't taking to the streets protesting it. But they could.
In terms of the effect it has on society, no control tool comes remotely close to advancing as many interests of the powerful against the interests of the people as domestic plutocrat-sponsored propaganda. Nothing will change until people start noticing and resisting this.
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Theories about elite conspiracies to shore up more control over the population tend to greatly underestimate how much control they already have.
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Wanting the US government to have a "competent leader" is like wanting a serial killer to be skilled at evading detection.
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A new report says China will overtake the US as the world's biggest economy by 2028. This is the real reason they need you to hate China right now. Mentally replace all their carefully manufactured narratives with this.
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The Democratic Party's inability to seize on this obvious opportunity and turn "We want to give you money and they don't" into an election-winning platform would be odd... if the Democratic Party's primary function was to win elections. But it isn't. The Democratic Party's primary function is to kill all leftward movement in the United States to ensure Americans remain too poor and powerless to interfere in the operation of the empire.
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The Democratic Party is what leftism would look like if you stripped it of every single thing that could possibly inconvenience plutocrats, intelligence agencies, or the military-industrial complex in any way.
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It's not just that Democrats will ignore all the evil things Biden is going to do, it's that they ignored all the most evil things Trump did while in office as well. It's not merely a partisan thing: they really do just see murdering foreigners as normal American presidential stuff.
A lot of Biden criticism is going to consist of "If Trump had done this Democrats would be screaming!" And it will just be false; they wouldn't. Not if it advanced the interests of oligarchs, war profiteers, or sociopathic intelligence agencies. We know this because they didn't.
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As things heat up with Iran again please remember that there is never, ever any reason to treat unproven US claims about aggressions by an unaligned nation with anything other than derision and dismissal.
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First show me verifiable proof that the accused nation did what the US government says. Then show me proof that what was done wasn't a valid response to what the US is doing. Then show me proof that interventionism would help. Then fuck you, because you won't do any of the above.
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People who say the world is controlled by space reptilians have more credibility than reporters from high-profile news outlets who uncritically repeat unproven government claims about aggressions by unaligned nations.
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It will never not infuriate me that when the time came for women to start claiming a human-sized amount of space in our society, the solution we came up with was for us to start acting more like men. Which was the exact opposite of what the world needs.
"We want equality, so let's jump into the capitalism game men invented and the political game men invented and the war games men invented and prove we can be just as insane and destructive as any man."
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Cynical closet shitlibs can make anything sound woke. Regime change in Syria. Cold war escalations against Russia and China. Assange smears. Attacks on Glenn Greenwald's marriage. Anything. A little cleverly-diddled lefty jargon and suddenly it can be leftist to support the CIA.
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When humans first showed up it was the strong brutes who led the tribe. Later on it became the clever manipulators who led, because they could manipulate the strong brutes into doing their bidding. Now the manipulators are working on making even their brute armies obsolete via technology, so it will just be clever manipulators at the top and everyone else at the bottom. This is the real revenge of the nerds.
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The way to get what you want is to keep courageously jumping down inner rabbit holes of self-exploration, learning what makes you tick, clearing your illusions and healing your psychological wounds. Also, you'll wind up wanting completely different things from when you started.
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Re China: As a furious American, I honestly bear no ill will whatsoever toward China. But I do believe US corporations and investors should be tried for and convicted of treason for the past 20 years of handing off US technology -- most of which was developed with taxpayer funding -- and offshoring jobs and (perhaps most importantly) industrial capacity to China while hollowing out much of the middle of the US.
Sadly, this repeats a common pattern in global capitalism, but the question arises: Why repeat capitalism's most pernicious patterns? No American would have voted to effectively attach US-made rocket boosters to China's rise, and yet this is what's happening. So if the US is to prove truly exceptional in any way as it so often boasts and fails to prove in any constructive way, it will come down to a contest to determine which prevails -- capitalism or democracy.
And capitalism right now is in the driver's seat, not least because (as you note) of its iron grip on the media.
Caitlin, if you haven't already come across the writings of Ray McGovern, you will want to. Here is his New Year 2020 piece: https://raymcgovern.com/2021/01/01/what-i-learned-last-year/