I always get people telling me, “Capitalism just means free trade.”
No it doesn’t, that’s just some stupid nonsense libertarian types started saying a few years ago. Capitalism means what the Marxists who coined and popularized the term have been saying it means since the 1800s: the owners of the means of production exploiting workers by paying them a fraction of the wealth they generate. Capitalism is a system which financially coerces those who have nothing to sell but their labor to sell it to the owners of the means of production, necessarily at a price that is far below the amount of value they generate and with no influence over the industries they are powering with their work. It is inherently exploitative, and leads to corporations with no human interest pursuing profit at all cost even at the expense of the ecosystem we all depend on for survival.
Even those who support capitalism understand this distinction if they’ve done a tiny bit of research outside their partisan echo chambers. You don’t get to just change someone else’s definition of words to defend your belief system from their criticisms; that’s not a thing.
By distorting this definition, supporters of capitalism can object to its critics with “This isn’t real capitalism, because trade and finance are regulated by corrupt governments.” No it’s capitalism. Real capitalism is not just entirely compatible with the corruption of capitalist governments but an unavoidable component of it. Saying “It’s not capitalism that’s the problem, it’s crony capitalism” or “It’s not capitalism that’s the problem, it’s corporatism” is the same as saying “It’s not my chain smoking that’s the problem, it’s my emphysema!” One inevitably leads to the other.
Only narrative says I should be able to use my socioeconomically advantaged position to hire workers who exponentially multiply my wealth for a fraction of what it costs me to pay them. Capitalist narrative, created and promulgated for generations by those who benefit from it.
❖
A system which financially coerces those who have nothing to sell but their labor to work for companies for a fraction of the value they generate is violent. It is aggression. It is simply legalized theft. The only reason this isn’t obvious to everyone is centuries of capitalist propaganda, and if people ever manage to free their minds from that indoctrination and begin moving to redistribute the wealth the capitalist class has stolen, guess what will happen? Armed forces will be deployed to kill them until they stop. This is on top of the global war on communism that has been going on for generations. The entire thing is violence, and is held in place by violence.
❖
Malignant narcissists don’t typically seek out therapy, partly because they’re wired to assume they’re perfect and partly because our current systems reward the tendencies of malignant narcissism. We are ruled by untreated malignant narcissists who were elevated by this system.
❖
It’s a pretty interesting coincidence how western news media just happen to keep discovering reasons why censorship of internet platforms is gravely necessary in a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by global narrative control.
❖
The most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election wasn’t a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control. All the other bullshit since then has followed from this.
This was when the belief among mainstream journalists became widespread that internet censorship is needed and that it is their duty to manipulate public opinion. Another 2016 WikiLeaks drop in 2020 would never have been reported on by the mass media, as evidenced by their response to the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Now we’re seeing an increasing homogenization of online information as the media class cheers on censorship in the name of fighting Russia, white supremacism, Covid misinformation, and in the name of protecting US elections, while the media acts weirder and weirder. The way the entire mass media jumped right on board the Russiagate narrative instead of asking what’s true, for example, or the way many questionable claims about Covid which have since been invalidated were asserted with adamant aggression; this all followed from that moment.
And now we’re watching cold war escalations continually ramp up against Russia and China, and the mass media are forcefully and uncritically pumping all US government narratives into public consciousness. The 2016 reshaping of their values lubricated the way for this.
❖
“You only criticize the US and its allies, not Russia or China!”
Focusing one’s criticisms on the world’s most powerful and destructive government requires no defense. It’s not weird that I do it, it’s weird more people don’t. Those who want to hear criticisms of Russia and China are advised to switch on the nearest television.
It’s such a dumb complaint.
“It’s so strange and suspicious that you only focus on the worst impulses of the globe-spanning power structure which is vastly more destructive than any other in existence instead of yelling about the same governments as every billionaire media outlet throughout the entire western world.”
Durr.
❖
Remember when moral panic was a specific thing that would happen once in a while instead of western civilization’s general continuous state of existence?
❖
Our rulers always have to choose between bread and circuses or accelerationism; they’re either choosing to keep the people mollified and distracted while stealing a little or to risk provoking revolution by stealing a lot. Right now they’re picking the latter. Interesting choice.
When you look at it that way you realize that even when something horrible is happening it could also be leading to something very healthy. They’re walking a delicate tightrope walk while trying to keep their greed from consuming them. They’re not really in control here.
_________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
The US government is reportedly close to securing a deal with Pakistan that will ensure its ability to continue military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, the nation where the Biden administration proudly “ended” a decades-long war.
“The Biden administration has told lawmakers that the US is nearing a formalized agreement with Pakistan for use of its airspace to conduct military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, according to three sources familiar with the details of a classified briefing with members of Congress that took place on Friday morning,” reads a new report from CNN.
“The briefing comes as the White House is still trying to ensure that it can carry out counterterrorism operations against ISIS-K and other adversaries in Afghanistan now that there is no longer a US presence on the ground for the first time in two decades after the NATO withdrawal from the country,” the report reads.
The Biden administration has told lawmakers that the US is nearing a formalized agreement with Pakistan for use of its airspace to conduct military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, sources say https://t.co/GVhXajXE6Q
So as has been obvious for months the US empire will still be retaining military control over a key geostrategic region adjacent to Iran and China, will still be enriching the military-industrial complex by raining explosives upon human beings on Afghan soil, and will still be continuing George W Bush’s “war on terror” scam. It just won’t come with the bad cosmetics of maintaining a ground troop presence.
After all the Biden administration’s proud self-fellating fanfare for “ending” this war, it turns out it was nothing more than a slight formatting adjustment.
Cool withdrawal, bro.
As we discussed after Biden took office, this is the modern model of US warfare; a de-emphasis on Bush-era Hulk Smash ground invasions in favor of drone warfare, missile strikes, starvation sanctions, proxy wars, staged coups, special ops, and cold war maneuverings. Constant footage of flag-draped coffins coming home during Bush’s wars caused a PR nightmare for the empire from which it still hasn’t fully recovered, but technological and strategic advancements has made such bad publicity largely a thing of the past. Troops deployed overseas are now far more likely to die by their own hand than by combat.
The goal of the empire is to be able to topple governments and dominate the globe without incurring a negative perception among the inhabitants of the US and its client states. It has been doing this with a combination of (A) shifting to more “light touch” interventionism which doesn’t garner as much negative attention as full-scale ground invasions and (B) a global perception management campaign of historically unprecedented scale and sophistication.
Ideally the imperialists want to be able to dominate the planet with economic sanctions and the occasional strategic drone strike combined with mass-scale psychological manipulation. It is not a coincidence that nations where they are unable to do these things at will are the nations we are most aggressively propagandized against.
The empire isn’t getting less tyrannical, it’s just getting better at public relations. The need for critical thinking and alternative perspectives has never been higher.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
At the same time, virulent Russiagater Julia Ioffe has published an anonymously-sourced article proclaiming that the Kremlin is responsible for this mysterious alleged ailment.
In an article for Puck News titled “Havana Syndrome: A Cold War Saga in Biden’s Washington“, Ioffe reports that anonymous sources at the Walter Reed Military Medical Center have told her that this strange affliction now has so many victims among US government employees that the facility is at capacity, and that Russia is to blame for it.
Ioffe writes:
“The intelligence community is increasingly convinced that the Russian government is behind these attacks. Russia has extensively studied and invested in the technology, and, in the spring of 2017, just as the attacks in Havana were ramping up, Putin personally pinned a medal on the breast of a young scientist for his advances in using directed energy and microwaves on signals systems and living cells. Russia certainly has the motive: Putin still thinks America is Russia’s biggest enemy and poking the country in the eye is a worthy end in and of itself. Plus, there’s that location data, placing F.S.B. officers in the same Taiwanese hotel where a senior C.I.A. official was hit.
“But there still isn’t enough evidence to make a public declaration. ‘They believe the hypothesis more but don’t have a smoking gun,’ said the person familiar with the investigation.”
There are now so many cases of Havana Syndrome that Walter Reed is at capacity. The U.S. government has started outsourcing cases to other hospitals
To get a sense for the integrity of the sourcing in Ioffe’s report, here’s an actual paragraph from the article with emphasis added by me:
“Burns has also convened a panel of intelligence officials to try to find whoever is behind these attacks. A spokesperson for the Agency told me that the C.I.A. is ‘bringing an intensity and expertise to this issue akin to our efforts to find Bin Laden.’ She added, ‘We will keep doing everything we can to protect our officers.’ People familiar with the inquiry tell me that the political will behind this is palpable. As one source told me, ‘Whereas before you might have said that the folks working on the issue spent half their time trying to convince people that something happened, that kind of distraction has dissipated to a large degree, which is very helpful.’”
This kind of sourcing would make a UK gossip rag blush.
Here’s another delightful bit:
“I think we’re beyond the point of anyone being able to question whether it’s a real thing,” a senior administration official told me.
Ah well if an anonymous government official tells Julia Ioffe that Havana Syndrome is real then hot damn that’s good enough for me.
Apart from anonymous individuals, Ioffe also cites a “retired” CIA officer named Marc Polymeropoulos, who attests that he himself came down with a case of Havana Syndrome that was so bad it forced him to “retire”.
Ioffe writes:
“As we talked, I couldn’t square two things: Marc’s retirement and his age. He had just turned 50, and, by his own account, he had been on the up-and-up at the C.I.A. Why had he left so soon?I asked him… But Marc’s answer surprised me: Havana Syndrome. He told me, off the record, that he had been ‘hit’ while visiting Moscow and that the attack had undermined his health so badly that he physically couldn’t work anymore. A promising career in an organization he loved, and had come of age in, was over.”
Oh wow the “retired” CIA spook had to “retire” because he was afflicted with a condition which just so happens to advance CIA cold war hysteria about a CIA-targeted nation, and how he’s spending his “retirement” telling cold war propagandists about it.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee is marking up a bill this week to sanction whoever “directed or carried out” Havana syndrome attacks lol
Havana syndrome is a mysterious illness whose symptoms include vertigo, nausea, and billions of dollars in new cold war military spending.
It’s just so interesting how Russia keeps attacking America in unverifiable and invisible ways that only the US intelligence community can see. First it was plot hole-riddled claims that Russian hackers attacked American democracy in 2016, and now it’s invisible microwave beams from secret Kremlin ray guns. Someday soon we may turn on the news to see footage of an empty Capitol Building while a reporter solemnly tells us that it has just been stormed by GRU agents injected with invisibility serum.
I’m old enough to remember when the US war machine needed actual, physical events to justify the advancements of its military agendas, like planes crashing into buildings. Nowadays those agendas are justified by invisible, unverifiable allegations for which the evidence is always classified.
Believing that Kremlin operatives are attacking the brains of US government employees with ray guns which cause mild hangover-like symptoms is no less crazy and baseless than the claims by internet crackpots that the Covid vaccine contains 5G mind control nanobots. Literally the only difference is that one has been endorsed by the mainstream US political/media class while the other has not.
When a poor person says spies are attacking their brain with microwave beams it’s called paranoid schizophrenia. When a US government operative says it, it’s called Havana Syndrome.
____________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Power is the ability to control what happens. The more control you have, the more powerful you are.
That’s why power is like crack for the ego. Egos are all about control; obtaining safety and security so as to ensure the survival and success of one particular human organism. The impulse to exert control over our surroundings is why our recently-evolved brains create egos in the first place.
The more tightly clenched the ego, the greater the desire for control. This can manifest as trying to dominate one’s family and romantic partner with greater and greater totality. It can manifest as starting a cult. It can manifest as trying to shore up massive amounts of wealth. And it can manifest as the pursuit of power.
Those who rise to positions of power tend to be those who’ve placed the pursuit of it above all else, or to have been trained since birth to prioritize power by the powerful families they’re born into. This is especially true in the giant globe-spanning power structure that is loosely centralized around the United States.
The loose alliance of plutocrats and government agency insiders who rule this giant empire pursue power above all else. For all the historically unprecedented power these imperial oligarchs have, it’s still not enough for them.
Their objective is to control everything that happens in any nation on earth; to ensure that everything that occurs on this planet serves them and their interests. That’s what absolute power would look like.
The imperial oligarchs wish to rule our world as Greek gods from Mount Olympus. If any population on earth disobeys them, they want to be able to cause sweeping famines in that nation, or rain down fire upon them from on high. They want to be able to control not just how all humans behave, but how they think as well.
And, for the most part, they absolutely can do this. The drivers of empire can inflict famines upon entire populations by imposing starvation sanctions upon them using their control over international financial systems. They can rain down fire upon any disobedient population using the most powerful military force ever assembled. They can control the way we think, act, spend, consume, and vote to ensure it serves their interests, and their control over our minds is continually advancing.
But they don’t have total control over those things everywhere on earth. To find where they lack this control, you need only ask yourself which parts of the world the imperial propaganda machine most aggressively tells you you must oppose.
China and Russia have not been absorbed into the globe-spanning empire, and because they are relatively strong compared to the weaker nations the empire likes to target, the imperialists don’t have much control over what happens there. Their control is not strong enough to starve their populations on a whim. They could not rain down fire upon those nations without risking their own lives and assets. They cannot exert control over how those populations think and behave.
For a healthy human being, this lack of control would not present as a problem. For a human being that is infected with a tightly clenched ego and an insatiable thirst for power, this lack of control is seen as a direct existential threat.
So we are bombarded with propaganda about how horrible China and Russia are, for the exact same reason adherents to religions have historically been indoctrinated with beliefs about how horrible heretics and apostates are.
These gods are jealous gods. They do not tolerate unbelievers. Lands which do not worship them are the badlands, the lands of the heathens, the lands of the condemned.
That’s all we’re looking at with the nonstop mass media shrieking about Russia and China. Not a truthful representation of reality. Not warnings about a dire threat to our lives. Just inflamed egos screaming fire and brimstone sermons at their flock about the land of infidels and idolaters.
Free people do not worship these gods. Free people do not heed their dogmas. And a truly free world will have evolved beyond any tolerance for people with the power parasite in their minds.
_______________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Colin Powell, creator of the viral anti-war meme featuring himself holding a stage prop while lying to the United Nations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, has died at the age of 84.
Over the years Powell’s meme has been an invaluable asset for opponents of western military interventionism and critics of US propaganda narratives about empire-targeted nations, serving as a single-image debunk of any assertion that it is sensible to trust the claims US officials make about any government that Washington doesn’t like.
In online discourse the Powell meme makes the perfect response to anyone regurgitating an unsubstantiated claim about a government that has been targeted for disobeying the dictates of the US empire.
“We must remove Assad by any means necessary because he’s killing Syrians with poison gas!”
Oh yeah? Boom. Powell meme.
“Russian hackers are attacking our democracy!”
Boom. Powell meme.
“Iranian nuclear weapons program!”
Boom.
“Uyghur genocide!”
Boom.
“Maduro narco terrorism!”
Boom.
It stops the conversation in its tracks, using a single image that doesn’t even contain any words. Now the conversation is about what it should be about: the indisputable fact that US officials lie. They lie brazenly. They lie even if it can lead to the deaths of millions of people. Any narrative about any empire-targeted government that is backed by US officials must be presumed false unless and until it has been backed by mountains of independently verifiable evidence.
Other memes have emerged in recent years to criticize the absurdity of western war propaganda which are not without their own charm, like the “Really makes you feel like you’re part of history” one and all its variants:
Or the one about Republican bombs vs Democrat bombs:
But nothing has ever emerged that rises to the level of efficacy and utility as the simple image showing Colin Powell lying to the entire world about a government the Bush administration wanted to destroy.
Powell’s deceitful performance was after all picked up and parroted as “irrefutable” proof about Saddam Hussein’s WMD operations by the very same mass media institutions which tell us we must ramp up aggressions against other foreign governments on equally insubstantial claims today. It was a pivotal moment in the propaganda war the US-centralized empire was waging upon our minds to convince us that it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid.
Powell’s other contributions to the world include covering up and participating in war crimes in Vietnam, facilitating atrocities in Central America, and destroying Iraqi civilian infrastructure in the Gulf War. But it’s hard to dispute that his greatest lasting legacy will be his immortal reminder to future generations that there is never, ever a valid reason to trust anything US officials tell us about a government they wish to bring down.
Powell’s contribution to the war effort has been considerable. But as time grinds down the tall spires of artificial insanity that the powerful are continually imposing upon our species, when all is said and done his contribution to the anti-war effort will have been greater.
Be sure to remind everyone of Powell’s sociopathic facilitation of human slaughter often and loudly in the coming hours. Public opinion is the only thing keeping western war criminals from The Hague, after all, and those war criminals are keenly aware of this fact. At times like these, they suddenly become highly invested in making sure that regular people “respect the dead,” not because they respect any human alive or dead, but because they cannot allow the death to become an opportunity to amplify and change public opinion about their egregious murderous crimes.
There is a giant narrative management exercise that will be playing out over the next few days. Be sure to enthusiastically disrupt it with the truth.
__________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
This one goes out to all of you who still “trust the science.”
Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He was a public relations pioneer, one of America’s most innovative social engineers, and the author of a 1928 book brazenly entitled Propaganda. In 1929, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to persuade women to take up cigarette smoking. His slogan, “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet,” exploited women’s fear of gaining weight (a concern purposefully manufactured through previous advertising and/or public relations work by Bernays and others).
While Lucky Strike sales increased by 300 percent in the first year of Bernays’ campaign, there was still one more barrier he needed to break down: smoking remained mostly taboo for “respectable” women. This is where some watered-down Freud came in handy. As Bernays biographer Larry Tye said, he basically wanted to take his uncle’s works and “popularize them into little ditties that housewives and others could relate to.” With input from psychoanalyst A.A. Brill, Bernays conjured up the now legendary scheme to re-frame cigarettes as a symbol of freedom.
“During the 1929 Easter Parade,” explains New York Times reporter Ron Chernow, “he had a troupe of fashionable ladies flounce down Fifth Avenue, conspicuously puffing their ‘Torches of Freedom,’ as he had called cigarettes.” As Chernow reports, Bernays augmented this successful stunt by lining up “neutral experts” to “applaud the benefits of smoking, all the while concealing the tobacco company’s sponsorship of his activity.” (I strongly suggest you re-read that last sentence and comprehend its relevance within today’s Big Pharma context.)
Bernays was also concealing his knowledge of tobacco’s deleterious effects. “As he hypocritically seduced American women into smoking, he was trying to wean his own wife from the nasty habit,” Chernow continues. “His daughter Anne Bernays, the novelist, recalls that whenever he discovered a pack of his wife’s Parliaments, ‘he’d pull them all out and just snap them like bones, just snap them in half and throw them in the toilet. He hated her smoking.’” (I strongly suggest you also re-read that last sentence and comprehend its relevance within today’s Big Pharma context.)
It’s no wonder so many of today’s Americans — all across the ideological spectrum — are so easily and willingly duped by fake news, deep fakes, and clickbait. In the era of social media and a 24-hour news cycle, we are now exposed to more propaganda than ever before. Bernays’ PR progeny continues refining and honing their skills. They keep us passive, distracted, and divided — but still inherently trusting those in power. Most Americans are thusly trapped inside news feed algorithms that serve as echo chambers to create and reinforce flawed opinions.
We are the intended result of a century-long social experiment — but now they have artificial intelligence to more efficiently program and condition us. We’ve willingly surrendered our ability to discern fact from fiction. Even worse, we’ve surrendered our desire to discern fact from fiction. Pro tip: Nothing will change until we truly open our minds and recognize that we are being lied to.
• (Thanks to Joe from Maine for many of the images that appear in this article)
The billionaire CEO of the multibillion-dollar corporation that recently purchased the news media outlet Politico has said that its newly acquired employees will be required to support Israel and the capitalist world order.
In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German publisher Axel Springer, said that Politico staffers will be required to adhere to a set of principles which include “support for a united Europe, Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, among others.”
“These values are like a constitution, they apply to every employee of our company,” Mr. Döpfner told WSJ. People with a fundamental problem with any of these principles “should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly,” he said.
I mean, how refreshing is that? How often does a billionaire corporation buy up a media property and just straightforwardly tell you they’re going to be using it to push propaganda? They even say what the propaganda will be. It makes you feel like your intelligence is being respected.
German publisher Axel Springer, Politico's new owner, said support for Israel, for a united Europe and a free-market economy 'are like a constitution, they apply to every employee of our company.' Those who disagreed 'should not work for Axel Springer' https://t.co/WInT6lGvdk
Supporting global capitalism and defending the Israeli apartheid regime are both very standard positions promoted by all billionaire media outlets in the western world; they just aren’t normally honest enough to tell you that. Normally they pretend to be an objective free press reporting truthfully about what’s going on in the world; their executives do not customarily come forward to explain the specific establishment biases its reporters will need to promote if they don’t want to be fired. That sort of thing normally happens a lot more subtly.
Can you imagine if Jeff Bezos had purchased the Washington Post in 2013 and been open about the fact that billionaires need to buy up narrative control to protect the status quo upon which their sprawling kingdoms are built? If he’d just come right out and announced ahead of time all the ugly plutocratic propaganda his outlet would be promoting on his behalf? I think that would have been far better than the feigned objectivity we normally get from these people.
Döpfner is reportedly worth over a billion dollars, and Axel Springer is worth an estimated $6.8 billion. He is married to the daughter of a former management board member of Deutsche Bank. So propagandizing the public in favor of “a free-market economy” as opposed to a centrally planned economy or an economy built to benefit the needful and the environment is a no brainer.
Döpfner has called himself a non-Jewish Zionist, and has long called support for Israel “a German duty.” While I am sure there are better ways for Germany to atone for its past than to back a racist apartheid ethnostate which imprisons a persecuted ethnic and religious demographic in an open air concentration camp to the geostrategic advantage of today’s genocidal imperialist western power based in Washington DC, the transparency is refreshing to hear from someone who will be manipulating public thought on such matters going forward.
[Thread] The Washington Post presents itself as an adversarial newspaper.
But it consistently defends the interests of the wealthy and powerful (including its owner Jeff Bezos).
And I just think that’s wonderful. If the Germans can spread some of their world-renowned frankness throughout the operation of mass-scale plutocratic propaganda, we’ll all be better off for it.
As soon as someone rises to a certain level of wealth, they very often begin buying up narrative control in the form of media outlets, conveniently placed advertising in news media, PR firms, online platforms, funding for think tanks and NGOs, “philanthropy“, and other ways of manipulating how people think at mass scale. This is because if people weren’t trained how to think about things, they would never consent to allowing so much of the world’s wealth and power to go toward so very few people who are so consistently ill-suited to rule the world for the benefit of everyone.
Plutocrats who fail to manufacture the consent of their subjects have historically wound up with their heads in baskets. That’s why they work so hard to manipulate the way the public thinks, acts and votes, and that’s why our society is as messed up as it is.
______________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
The mass media have become so blatantly propagandistic that US intelligence operatives are now openly employed by news outlets they used to have to infiltrate covertly.
NATO and military institutions are studying and testing new forms of mass-scale psychological manipulation to advance the still developing science of propaganda.
A transparently fake “whistleblower” is being promoted by the US political/media class to manufacture support for more internet censorship and shore up monopolistic control for institutions like Facebook who are willing to enforce it.
I do reporting on some really disconcerting topics, but the research I did for this is some of the most terrifying I've done in my years as a journalist:
NATO is developing “cognitive warfare,” waging a “battle for your brain,” to “make everyone a weapon”https://t.co/z40x6k96OW
The powerful work so hard at such endeavors because they understand something that most ordinary people do not: whoever controls the dominant narratives about the world controls the world itself.
Power is controlling what happens; absolute power is controlling what people think about what happens.
If you can control how people think about what’s going on in their world, if you can control their shared how-it-is stories about what’s happening and what’s true, then you can advance any agenda you want to. You’ll be able to prevent them from rising up against you as you steal their wealth, exploit their labor, destroy their ecosystem and send their children off to war. You can keep them voting for political institutions you own and control. You can keep them from interfering in your ability to wage wars around the world and sanction entire populations into starvation to advance your geostrategic goals.
This status quo of exploitation, ecocide, oppression and war benefits our rulers immensely, bringing them more wealth and power than the kings of old could ever dream of. And like the kings of old they are not going to relinquish power of their own accord, which means the only thing that will bring an end to this world-destroying status quo is the people rising up and using the power of their numbers to end it.
Yet they don’t rise up. They don’t because they are successfully propagandized into accepting this status quo, or at least into believing it’s the only way things can be right now. Imperial narrative control is therefore the source of all our biggest problems.
And they’re only getting more and more aggressive about it. More and more forceful, less and less sly and subtle in their campaign to control the thoughts that are in our heads.
Many of those who have this realization see it as cause for despair. I personally see it as cause for hope.
They work so hard to manufacture our consent for the status quo because they absolutely require that consent; history shows us that rulers do not fare well after a critical mass of the population has turned against them. And they’re working harder and harder to manufacture that consent, even as extremely influential people begin questioning whether we’re being deliberately deceived about everything.
They used to look like someone using a bucket to bail out water from a leaky boat. Now they look like someone treading water, barely managing to get their mouth and nose high enough to take gasps of air.
They’re working harder and harder because they need to.
The fact that the propagandists have to work so hard to keep our society this insane means the natural gravitational pull is toward sanity. They have to educate us into crazier and crazier ways of thinking from the moment we go to school until we die, because otherwise we’ll collectively awaken and shake off their shackles.
It takes a lot of educating to keep us this stupid.
You think you’re struggling? You should see the people trying to manufacture consent for a status quo that is both plainly insane and self-evidently unsustainable. They’re the ones doing all the heavy lifting in this struggle. They’re the ones fighting gravity.
Hope is not a popular position to take in a world that is being abused, exploited and being driven mad by manipulative sociopaths. Which is understandable.
But I just can’t help it. I look at how hard they are struggling to keep the light from bursting in and driving out the darkness, and I can’t help but think, “Those poor bastards can’t keep that up much longer.”
____________________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
It’s trippy how a government that’s been democratically elected by free people behaves in exactly the same way you’d expect a government to behave if it was run by corporations.
❖
I just cannot understand how we keep failing to solve the world’s problems using a system of making as much money as you can while paying your workers as little as you can and offloading as many of your costs onto the biosphere as possible.
❖
What’s funny about Joe Rogan is he clearly didn’t start off with an oppositional relationship to the mainstream media; that opposition was thrust upon him by the mass media constantly lying about him and smearing him for having a large audience without conforming sufficiently to establishment groupthink.
This was the most significant part of the Rogan-Gupta exchange, and it's not getting enough attention. The media class' open disdain for Rogan is turning him further and further against them, and now it's got him asking if western media run propaganda for US foreign policy. pic.twitter.com/26bEeaNJvZ
So now you’ve got someone with a massive platform who nobody can control openly asking if the public is being propagandized by the media about nations targeted by the US-centralized empire. If he keeps chasing that rabbit, things could get very interesting and/or very ugly.
❖
Propaganda is the answer to most important political questions. Why are things so fucked? Propaganda. Why do people keep supporting corrupt parties and voting for corrupt assholes? Propaganda. Why is there no antiwar movement? Propaganda. Why don’t the people rise up? Propaganda.
❖
What is the functional difference between a regime which directly censors the internet to prevent dissent and a regime which works with Silicon Valley plutocrats to control information via algorithms and has institutional safeguards which prevent dissent from having any effect?
❖
You don’t actually have “free speech” in your country if there are mountains of institutional roadblocks set up to prevent anyone from using their speech to effect meaningful political changes. It doesn’t matter what you’re allowed to say if it doesn’t matter what you say.
“I can say whatever I want in my country!” Yeah you can say whatever you want on a desert island too, and because your status quo is locked in place in countless ways it will make the exact same amount of difference.
❖
Wikipedia is just as aggressively manipulated by imperial narrative managers as news media and social media. Whoever controls the narrative about the world controls the world itself.
❖
The financial elite hate crypto not because crypto itself poses a threat to their empire, but because its existence is destroying trust and belief in the “realness” narrative of money among regular people. Bitcoin is imaginary, but it’s worth real money. Why? Because money is also imaginary.
The complexity of the markets is absolutely essential in controlling the narrative around why a few live like kings while the rest work like slaves just to keep a roof over their heads. You, regular person, are not meant to understand it. Because if you did it could not continue.
If you define crypto as shares it makes it clear that shares don’t need to be based in any kind of physical reality in order to create “value” in a market-based system. Crypto as currency makes it clear that currency doesn’t need the trade of a national economy to back it.
Crypto shows that it’s all made up, this whole psychopathic numbers game where the digits on your bank app dictate whether you live or die, or the digits on spreadsheets dictate whether we avoid near-term extinction or not, it’s all made up. And we can change it whenever we like.
I’ve always hated Monopoly. What a tedious, vindictive waste of a perfectly good afternoon. I am so pissed off that we’re going extinct over what essentially is just a global game of Monopoly that virtually none of us want to play.
❖
In the escalations between the US and China, one is the aggressor and the other is acting defensively. You can tell which is which by asking yourself how the other would react if the situation was reversed. If China started doing this to the US there would be war instantaneously:
People say “That military presence is to protect China’s neighbors from Chinese aggression.”
Look up all the USA’s murderous interventions in Central and South America. China would be far more justified setting up a military presence to protect nations like Cuba and Venezuela. Yet it doesn’t. This means between the US power alliance and China, Washington is the aggressor and Beijing is acting defensively in response to that aggression. The reason western news media do not report on these escalations in this way is because western news media is propaganda.
When you’re used to being in power a movement toward equality can feel like a personal attack. Marginalized groups being elevated gets turned into “There’s a war on white men!” China refusing to let the US rule the world gets turned into “China’s trying to take over the world!”
❖
That there would be a second cold war was guaranteed after the success of the first one. If your empire succeeded in attaining global hegemony in a game of subversion and manipulation which happened to greatly enrich your military-industrial complex, why wouldn’t you do it again?
I mean sure you’re gambling the life of every terrestrial organism every day you roll the dice on brinkmanship with nuclear-armed nations, but you wind up sitting pretty if your gamble pays off and the world doesn’t get incinerated. It’s a no-brainer for people with no brains.
❖
Seems like every country on earth gets compared to Nazi Germany except the imperialist one that’s been slaughtering people by the millions to conquer the world because it believes it’s exceptional.
❖
If: ✅ Police come to your doorstep ✅ To question you about social media posts ✅ And interrogate you about protest activity
Things are so deeply, deeply fucked in so very, very many ways, and they are getting worse so very, very fast. And because status quo narrative control is so effective, hardly anyone is even aware of this. If humanity makes it out of this mess alive, it will look like a miracle.
But also, there is so very, very much we do not understand, and humans have so very, very much untapped potential we simply haven’t woken up to yet. There is plenty of room for future miracles to be hiding in all that space.
We are where we are because of our collective conditioned behavior patterns. Any movement away from our self-destructive patterning will necessarily come from an unpatterned direction, and will therefore be unexpected and unanticipated. That’s why it will look like a miracle.
We go on because we go on. Because our heart keeps beating and our lungs keep inhaling, and because the human organism is deeply hardwired to desire life, and because life is beautiful and delightful. We fight on because what the hell else are we going to do?
❖
As power-driven agendas of global conquest give rise to international propaganda wars that are increasingly turning our information ecosystem into white noise and indecipherable gibberish, people may soon cease looking outside themselves for truth and begin looking within.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Friends of Socialist China formed out of what we saw as a dire need to gather all information, original and otherwise, to counter the misinformation being spread about China. We didn’t include the word “socialist” in our title for gimmick or display but rather to send a firm message of respect and admiration to the Chinese people’s socialist path. In many ways, the propaganda war against China possesses a dual mission: the ramping up of a dangerous U.S.-led New Cold War against China and the demonization of the socialist mode of development.
Netflix will begin streaming a brazen hatchet job on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for its American subscribers on October 24th, just three days prior to a significant court date in Assange’s fight against extradition from the UK to the United States on October 27th.
“You can stream We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks on Netflix starting Sunday, October 24, 2021, at 12 AM PT / 3 AM ET,” Netflix Schedule reports.
We Steal Secrets was a “documentary” that is now so outdated beyond its 2013 release that one of its central characters, Chelsea Manning, is referred to by a dead name throughout its entirety. Why choose this specific moment to release it?
Well it doesn’t make much sense at all, if the timing wasn’t deliberately geared toward damaging Assange’s reputation in the nation whose government is trying to extradite him for exposing its war crimes. Assange’s October court date was set way back in August and Netflix didn’t announce it had scheduled to begin streaming this film until two weeks ago.
Three days before a crucial court hearing – as Julian Assange fights against extradition to a US super-max prison – Netflix is showing Alex Gibney's execrable propaganda film We Steal Secrets. I wrote a post detailing its smears at the time of its release https://t.co/lJJUoerJDqhttps://t.co/BMpNrg2h4i
After all, We Steal Secrets was so egregious in its spin that not only did WikiLeaks supporters like World Socialist Website and journalist Jonathan Cook pan it as a smear at the time, but WikiLeaks itself went to the trouble of publishing a line-by-line refutation of the mountains of propaganda distortion heaped on the narrative by filmmaker Alex Gibney.
“The title (‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’) is false,” WikiLeaks writes at the beginning of its response. “It directly implies that WikiLeaks steals secrets. In fact, the statement is made by former CIA/NSA director Michael Hayden in relation to the activities of US government spies, not in relation to WikiLeaks. This an irresponsible libel. Not even critics in the film say that WikiLeaks steals secrets.”
“Gibney’s latest release—We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks—is something else again,” World Socialist Website wrote in 2013. “The 130-minute feature is a political hatchet job against Julian Assange and dovetails with the media and US government campaign against the WikiLeaks web site. Whether Gibney has shifted to the right or simply revealed the fatal limitations of his liberal ‘oppositional’ views is a matter for a separate discussion. In any event, his newest work is an effort at disinformation.”
“The job of a good documentarist is to weigh the available material and then present as honest a record of what it reveals as possible. Anything less is at best polemic, if it sides with those who are silenced and weak, and at worst propaganda, if it sides with those who wield power,” critiqued Jonathan Cook at the time.
This would not be the first time Netflix has helped circulate narratives that advance the interests of the US empire, or the second, or the third, having already run blatantly propagandistic “documentaries” advancing imperial interests in nations like Ukraine, Russia, Egypt, and multipleonesaboutSyria. Netflix has also signed deals with the Obamas and with British royalty.
So they’re not exactly looking out for the little guy, which from a company worth an estimated $229 billion should come as no surprise.
Still, such open facilitation of the world’s most powerful government in its campaign to imprison a journalist for inconvenient journalistic activity is a special kind of reprehensible. If there is a healthy humanity in the future, it will look back on the worldwide smear campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks with horror.
_______________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
We live in a far less free society than most of us think.
It looks like we’re free. We don’t get thrown in prison for criticizing our government officials. We can vote for whoever we want. We can log onto the internet and look up information on any subject we’re interested in. If we want to buy a product we have many brands we are free to choose from.
How free is that? How free is your speech if there are myriad institutional safeguards in place to prevent speech from ever effecting political change?
It doesn’t matter what you’re allowed to say if it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter if you’re allowed to call the oligarchic puppet put in office by the last fake election a dickhead. It doesn’t matter if you’re allowed to Google any information you want only to find whatever information Google wants you to find.
What is the functional difference between a regime which directly censors the internet to prevent dissent and a regime which works with Silicon Valley plutocrats to control information via algorithms and has a system in place which prevents dissent from having any meaningful impact?
There is none.
Canada’s military “relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war”, “shaping” & “exploiting” info “to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages” https://t.co/qr9nRlT0lH
We live in a profoundly unfree society that is disguised as a free society. Western liberal democracy is just totalitarianism dressed in drag.
And it’s only getting worse. Propaganda is a still-developing science.
Last month Ottawa Citizen reported that the Canadian military used the Covid outbreak as an excuse to test actual military psyop techniques on its own civilian population under the pretense of assuring compliance with pandemic restrictions.
Some excerpts:
“Canadian military leaders saw the pandemic as a unique opportunity to test out propaganda techniques on an unsuspecting public, a newly released Canadian Forces report concludes.”
“The plan devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, also known as CJOC, relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war. The campaign called for ‘shaping’ and ‘exploiting’ information. CJOC claimed the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.”
“A separate initiative, not linked to the CJOC plan, but overseen by Canadian Forces intelligence officers, culled information from public social media accounts in Ontario. Data was also compiled on peaceful Black Lives Matter gatherings and BLM leaders.”
“’This is really a learning opportunity for all of us and a chance to start getting information operations into our (CAF-DND) routine,’ the rear admiral stated.”
“Yet another review centred on the Canadian Forces public affairs branch and its activities. Last year, the branch launched a controversial plan that would have allowed military public affairs officers to use propaganda to change attitudes and behaviours of Canadians as well as to collect and analyze information from public social media accounts.”
“The plan would have seen staff move from traditional government methods of communicating with the public to a more aggressive strategy of using information warfare and influence tactics on Canadians.”
So they’re not just employing mass-scale psychological operations on the public, they’re testing them and learning from them.
And we can probably assume that anything which may have been learned was also shared with the government agencies of other NATO members.
Western governments in the NATO military alliance are developing tactics of “cognitive warfare,” using the supposed threats of China & Russia to justify waging a “battle for your brain” in the “human domain,” to “make everyone a weapon”
“NATO is spinning out an entirely new kind of combat it has branded as cognitive warfare. Described as the ‘weaponization of brain sciences,’ the new method involves ‘hacking the individual’ by exploiting ‘the vulnerabilities of the human brain’ in order to implement more sophisticated ‘social engineering.’
“While the NATO-backed study insisted that much of its research on cognitive warfare is designed for defensive purposes, it also conceded that the military alliance is developing offensive tactics, stating, ‘The human is very often the main vulnerability and it should be acknowledged in order to protect NATO’s human capital but also to be able to benefit from our adversaries’s vulnerabilities.’”
“In a chilling disclosure, the report stated explicitly that ‘the objective of Cognitive Warfare is to harm societies and not only the military.’”
“The study described this phenomenon as ‘the militarization of brain science.’ But it appears clear that NATO’s development of cognitive warfare will lead to a militarization of all aspects of human society and psychology, from the most intimate of social relationships to the mind itself.”
“In other words, this document shows that figures in the NATO military cartel increasingly see their own domestic population as a threat, fearing civilians to be potential Chinese or Russian sleeper cells, dastardly ‘fifth columns’ that challenge the stability of ‘Western liberal democracies.’”
“Naturally, the NATO researcher claimed foreign ‘adversaries’ are the supposed aggressors employing cognitive warfare. But at the same time, he made it clear that the Western military alliance is developing its own tactics.”
In 1917, a young Edward Bernays was asked to help the American war effort by applying his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious to a new German technique called “propaganda”. Thus began the current war: https://t.co/BqeaYIAic2
In a 2017 essay titled “The War on Sensemaking“, writer Jordan Greenhall made an observation that I have thought about ever since: that the science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for more than a century now, and has necessarily advanced scientifically just as much as other fields in the military have.
“In 1917, a young Edward Bernays was asked to help the American war effort by applying his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious to a new German technique called ‘propaganda’,” Greenhall writes. “The technology of war moves quickly. In the span of one and a half centuries, the last war leapt from long rifles to repeating rifles to gatling guns all the way to Little Boy. The warfighters of the current war haven’t dawdled. The wars of culture, meaning and purpose have seen innovation on an ‘exponential technology curve.’ The artisanal efforts of Bernays and Goebbels have been left far in the past by modern methods.”
Think about how many technological advancements there have been in the military over the last century. Our rulers have been refining their methods of manipulating our sensemaking abilities to their advantage throughout that entire time, and only a small minority of us have even begun to realize that that manipulation is even happening. We’re just learning to play checkers while they’re mastering 3-D chess.
I don’t have any solutions to this problem other than to spread consciousness of the fact that it is happening. Propaganda only works if you don’t understand (A) that it is happening to you and (B) how it is occurring, and a basic awareness of the fact that there’s a globe-spanning campaign to manipulate human thought to the advantage of the powerful is the first step toward having that understanding. Having the humility to understand that you yourself can be manipulated and deceived is the second step.
My hope is that humanity will transcend its psychological susceptibility to manipulation and move into a healthy relationship with mental narrative as our adapt-or-die precipice draws nearer. But time will only tell.
____________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
“To protect Taiwan we must be prepared to go to war with China.”
~ Imperialists who just lost a war to the Taliban
❖
I’m genuinely disturbed at how many people would be willing to fight a world war over Taiwan’s governmental preferences. The power and effectiveness of the imperial propaganda machine never ceases to amaze me.
❖
The astonishing amount of pushback I’m getting for my very sane and normal “Let’s not fight World War Three over Taiwan” position makes it abundantly clear that many people don’t truly understand that starting a war means you have to actually send actual human beings to go fight that war.
The correct response to someone who supports going to war if China attacks Taiwan is “Are you enlisted?”
The correct response when they inevitably answer “no” is “Then shut the fuck up.”
❖
People who are fine with the idea of increasing aggressions between nuclear-armed nations simply haven’t thought hard enough about what nuclear war is and haven’t learned enough about the many different ways it could occur. It’s a comfort held in place by compartmentalization.
❖
The decision to go to war with China would be the single most important and consequential decision ever made in human history. You’d have to weigh it against millions to billions of deaths. Defending Taiwan’s preference of government clearly wouldn’t weigh enough to justify that cost.
❖
The empire's greatest weapon is not its military, but its propaganda machine.https://t.co/z9Balij66M
The empire’s greatest weapon is not its military but its propaganda machine. There’s simply never been anything like the global narrative control provided by the western news media, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. The military fights wars, the propaganda machine wins them long before they start.
A lucid and well-informed examination of the world’s problems will keep bringing you back to this one fundamental issue: that Earth’s inhabitants are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale into organizing themselves in ways that serve the powerful instead of the people.
❖
Congratulations to those who were awarded the same highly esteemed Peace Prize as Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger.
It’s very cute how we all think that everyone else is gullible except for us. Even assuming that is true is already very gullible.
❖
Humans are not inherently fucked up, we’re just traumatized and manipulated by an abusive system into doing fucked up things. Very few of the ugly behaviors we see in people would exist if we had conscious and compassionate systems in place for organizing ourselves in this world.
Everyone gets that it’s wrong to blame an entire group on the misdeeds of a few of its members, but few people seem to apply that same logic to humanity as a whole. All our systems are dominated by the worst among us, simply because they’re sociopathic enough to climb to the top.
Really it just boils down to the fact that the majority don’t understand how sociopaths’ minds work or how to counter them, and that the trauma of preceding generations keeps giving rise to sociopaths. I think the initial trauma stretches back to our evolutionary ancestors who literally spent their lives running from giant monsters who were trying to eat them. Our nervous systems still operate that way today, even though those monsters are long gone.
If we could just catch a break for one or two generations to heal that trauma, I think we’d be fine. But we keep passing our trauma on to new generations because the worst among us keep thwarting everyone’s attempts to set up conscious systems.
❖
To compensate for the fact that it won’t ever give the left any economic concessions the empire has been loudly amplifying some concessions on racial and sexual justice, so now even though nothing really changed you still get rightists saying politics moved “too far to the left”. This gives the propagandists a couple of different tools: it keeps discourse tied up on issues that will never hurt the agendas of any plutocrat or warmonger, and feeds into the culture war dynamics which facilitate us-vs-them propaganda tactics.
Propaganda is the foundation of all our problems, and the us vs them dynamic is the foundation of propaganda. If humans can awaken in a visceral, experiential way to the reality that all is one we can inoculate ourselves against propaganda and begin moving toward health together.
__________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
All embarked, the party launched out on the sea’s foaming lanes while the son of Atreus told his troops to wash, to purify themselves from the filth of the plague. They scoured it off, threw scourings in the surf and sacrificed to Apollo full-grown bulls and goats along the beaten shore of the fallow barren sea and savory smoke went swirling up the skies.
— Homer, The Iliad (1.365-370)
The Biden administration’s announcement that Americans employed in companies with over 100 employees would be compelled to take an experimental gene therapy in explicit violation of the Nuremberg Code has opened a new front in the biofascist assault on democracy. Businesses and government agencies that fail to enforce this mandate will potentially face draconian fines. Should the oligarchy succeed in completely weaponizing health care, vaccine passports would undoubtedly become both pervasive and mandatory, but as Tucker Carlson pointed out during one of his recent monologues, it is also likely that dissidents would be handed over to the Cult of Psychiatry. This is not an uncommon practice in police states, and the pathologization of dissent has been ongoing in the West for quite some time now.Only through knowledge, compassion, and camaraderie can the forces of neo-Nazi medicine be outflanked. The days of medical Armageddon are upon us.
As the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and its European counterpart unequivocally demonstrate, the Covid vaccine program is causing tremendous harm and should have been terminated many months ago.Even the efficacy of the vaccines is very much in doubt, as evidenced by soaring Covid case numbers in some of the most vaccinated places on earth, such as the Seychelles (see here and here), Israel (see here, here, here and here), Gibraltar and Iceland. As physician assistant Deborah Conrad pointed out in her interview with The HighWire, VAERS is so dysfunctional that many doctors and nurses are only vaguely aware of its existence.
Addressing the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Joseph Mercola, MD, writes on Mercola.com:
In a June 29, 2021, interview, Fauci called the Delta variant ‘a game-changer’ for unvaccinated people, warning it will devastate the unvaccinated population while vaccinated individuals are protected against it. Alas, in the real world, the converse is turning out to be true, as the Delta variant is running wild primarily among those who got the Covid jab.
As Dr. James Lyons-Weiler and other experts without ties to industry have noted, coronavirus vaccines have long had a poor safety record. Indeed, when scientists attempted to create a vaccine for SARS-CoV-1 the laboratory animals all died due to pathogenic priming.
The vaccine mandates are causing middle class professionals to quit their jobs in droves, from highly trained fighter pilots, to large numbers of nurses leading to maternity wards being shuttered. In what is reminiscent of the anthrax vaccine (administered to the military despite the lack of both informed consent and FDA approval), army doctors are now observing serious adverse events in formerly healthy soldiers. The Covid vaccine drive has surpassed even the psychopathy of the Nazi doctors, as it would have been inconceivable to senior physicians in the Third Reich to give all of German society an experimental vaccine.
In an incident that underscores how delusional the mass media has become, WXYZ-TV in Detroit, an ABC affiliate, reached out to people on Facebook for stories of Americans who died of Covid because they delayed getting vaccinated, but were instead inundated with thousands of stories of people who were killed or seriously injured by the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) gene therapies.
Not only has a two-tier society emerged where the unvaccinated are being denied the right to work, attend university, eat out, go to sporting events, and enjoy the performing and visual arts; but another two-tier society has also emerged, one which has been evolving for quite some time now: the mega rich – for whom none of these draconian rules will apply – and everyone else. Video from a Democratic Party fundraiser hosted by Nancy Pelosi in Napa Valley has emerged showing affluent liberals rubbing shoulders unmasked while their brown servants wear masks. Masks and social distancing were apparently not required at the recent Met Gala in New York, where celebrities get to hobnob, have shallow conversations, and show off their outlandish costumes while millions of their countrymen wallow in unemployment, hopelessness, and despair.
And it would seem that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio (whose real name incidentally is Warren Wilhelm Jr.) is not the only one who delights in imposing punitive measures on those who opt for the control group, with museums and concert halls enthusiastically embracing the heinous practice. The Guggenheim has even written on their website in conjunction with their vaccine requirement that “We focus on safety so you can immerse yourself in art.” (Thankfully, I have a lot of art books).
What will transpire if the mandates remain in place? Will our leaders order their minions to shut off the water of the unvaccinated? Will workers and students be compelled to take an experimental AIDS vaccine or submit to weekly testing? These injunctions are unethical, discriminatory, and unconstitutional, as they transform inalienable rights into privileges which must be earned by participating in a dangerous medical experiment. Restaurants in Manhattan, which have some of the highest commercial rents in the world, are naturally reluctant to enforce these regulations, yet run the risk of being snitched on by Branch Covidian undercover operatives.
Such an incestuous relationship has formed between the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID and the pharmaceutical industry, that going to the websites for these agencies invariably yields information that mirrors what is posted on the drug company websites. There is robust science indicating that natural immunity is stronger than vaccine-induced immunity. There is likewise compelling evidence that face masks do more harm than good, yet these facts continue to be ignored by the presstitutes – a gaggle of clowns also on industry payroll.
When reporter Emerald Robinson asked White House principal deputy secretary Karine Jean-Pierre how doctors were testing for the Delta variant, Jean-Pierre became defensive, demanding that we stop asking questions and follow “the experts.” They know best after all, who when not registering vaccinated deaths as unvaccinated and artificially inflating the Covid death toll, are busy turning the country into a nation of opioid, heroin (the two are inextricably linked), fentanyl, barbiturate, benzodiazepine, and psychotropic drug addicts. (American doctors even once prescribed cocaine and heroin). Speaking at the Washington National Cathedral, our imaginary president, Dr. Fauci, said that he was sympathetic to Brits and Americans who are accustomed to certain post-Medieval rights and freedoms, “but now is the time to do what you’re told.”
The FDA “approval” for the Pfizer Covid vaccine attempts to conflate EUA investigational agents with FDA-approved drugs, as FDA has not approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, which is still in use, but the Pfizer Comirnaty Covid vaccine, which isn’t even available. The FDA has argued that the two vaccines are indistinguishable from one another and that they can be used interchangeably, which is absurd. Any drug under the auspices of an EUA is by law experimental and cannot be mandated. Senator Ron Johnson wrote a letter to FDA Acting Commissioner Woodcock requesting clarification on this preposterous state of affairs.
It is curious that Hydroxychloroquine is somehow safe as a maintenance drug for lupus, yet suddenly becomes dangerous when used to treat SARS-CoV-2, even if only taken for a very short period of time. Here is the website lupus.org:
Given the drug’s many and varied beneficial effects and its excellent long-standing safety profile, most rheumatologists believe that Hydroxychloroquine should be taken by people with lupus throughout their lifetime. [Italics added]
The FDA temporarily authorized the use of Hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 in March of 2020, but only with hospitalized patients. The FDA notice read as follows:
Hydroxychloroquine sulfate may only be used to treat adult and adolescent patients who weigh 50 kg or more and are hospitalized with COVID-19, for whom a clinical trial is not available, or participation is not feasible.
As Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Dr. Peter McCullough, and others have noted, Covid protocols using Hydroxychloroquine and other zinc ionophores are most efficacious early in the disease process. In other words, the FDA denied permission for doctors to use a medication for outpatient care where it has been shown to significantly reduce hospitalization and death, but allowed the drug to be used for hospitalized patients where the disease has often spiraled out of control, thereby setting the drug up to fail. Dr. Simone Gold has argued that the prevalence of Hydroxychloroquine in Africa, where it is frequently obtainable as an over-the-counter drug for malaria treatment and prophylaxis, has played a significant role in protecting the continent from Covid.
So eager were the Branch Covidians to torpedo Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for SARS-CoV-2 that they conducted dangerous and unethical trials where patients were deliberately overdosed and given toxic quantities of the drug, likely causing some of the trial participants to die, and causing even far more deaths when public health agencies around the world advised (or in some instances, ordered) doctors to stop using a life-saving medication as a treatment for COVID-19.
Writing for The Defender, the newsletter for Children’s Health Defense, Jeremy Loffredo points out that in addition to threatening the profits of the mRNA vaccines, Hydroxychloroquine posed a threat to the profits of Gilead, the manufacturer of Remdesivir:
Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, dozens of new studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine and its first cousin, Chloroquine, against Covid. These studies occurred in China, France, Saudi Arabia, Italy, India, New York and Michigan. However, such proof of Hydroxychloroquine’s benefit to patients with Covid has posed an existential threat to Gilead sales throughout the Covid outbreak.
Having had their fill of demonizing Hydroxychloroquine, the presstitutes and pharmaceutical sock puppets turned their vitriol on another unpatentable drug, Ivermectin. Described as “a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honoured distinction” by the journal New Microbes and New Infections, Ivermectinhas played a critical role in combating onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness. Writing for The Lancet, Michel Boussinesq, MD, PhD, points out that “Ivermectin has been widely used for 30 years to combat onchocerciasis and is rightly considered a wonder drug.” In African countries where Ivermectin is regularly taken as an anti-parasitic Covid deaths have been negligible. Elaborating on this point, Kenyan doctors Stephen Karanga and Wahome Ngare pointed out in a Klartext podcast that due to Ivermectin’s effectiveness in treating Covid they weren’t worried about SARS-CoV-2; their real concerns lay with car accidents, HIV, and malaria.
Meanwhile, the FDA refuses to even acknowledge that Ivermectin can be used in humans, tweeting “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” (Yes, those are some of the smartest people in the world). This villainy is not without precedent, as millions of Americans were prescribed highly addictive opioids as opposed to safer and more inexpensive over-the-counter pain medications. The sacking of Canadian emergency physician Dr. Daniel Nagase, who was found guilty of saving the lives of his Covid patients with Ivermectin, underscores the fact that the elites will stop at nothing to prolong the pandemic.
In addition to fomenting the cult-like notion that a vaccine is a magical elixir for which no risk-benefit analysis is needed, the media has played a critical role in deceiving hundreds of millions of people around the world into believing that Covid is equally dangerous to all patients irregardless of age and preexisting conditions. This, in turn, has led to Black Death levels of hysteria, as evidenced by unvaccinated locals in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh being forced to wear placards displaying the skull and crossbones.
Physicians who attempt to treat Covid early using Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) and Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) protocols are being vilified as quacks and snake oil salesmen, while doctors who are killing staggering numbers of people through a combination of nontreatment and dangerous experimental drugs are hailed as heroes. In many ways, this is the essence of biofascism: care patients desperately need is denied them, while dangerous care is imposed through coercion – both monstrous violations of the oath to do no harm.
It is not uncommon for physicians to prescribe FDA-approved drugs to treat conditions that are different from what the drug was initially intended for. This is referred to as “off-label use” or “off-label prescribing.” How will a high-risk patient who contracts Covid benefit from masks, social distancing, lockdowns and vaccines (even if they were safe and effective)? They need something that will ward off the inflammatory phase of the disease and keep the ventilator at bay. This suppression of early treatment options has failed to escape the attention of the Indian Bar Association, which has sought criminal charges against WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan for making fallacious claims about Ivermectin to protect the Church of Vaccinology.
A passage from the Rome Declaration, established at the Rome Covid Summit, and signed by over 10,000 doctors and scientists, states the following:
WHEREAS, thousands of physicians are being prevented from providing treatment to their patients, as a result of barriers put up by pharmacies, hospitals, and public health agencies, rendering the vast majority of healthcare providers helpless to protect their patients in the face of disease. Physicians are now advising their patients to simply go home (allowing the virus to replicate) and return when their disease worsens, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary patient deaths, due to failure-to-treat;
WHEREAS, this is not medicine. This is not care. These policies may actually constitute crimes against humanity.
In the Age of Faucism, everyone who arrives at an American emergency room is being given a PCR test, and if it indicates that they have the virus (not unlikely considering the prevalence of false positives), their loved ones are summarily kicked out of the hospital, they are put into isolation, given drugs of dubious safety and efficacy, and even intubated. Dr. Jane Ruby has referred to these Covid obsessed hospitals as “the new ovens.” Furthermore, physicians are being threatened with revocation of their licenses should they be found guilty of “spreading misinformation” – a practice also commonly referred to as informed consent.
Hitler’s physicians were fond of euthanizing the mentally ill, and it would appear that their heirs are equally enamored with the practice, as the mentally handicapped have been vaccinated by force and with armed police present in Los Angeles. Children in Toronto have been given the experimental jab, without parental permission, and in exchange for free ice cream, while irate parents were prevented from entering the grounds. Not to be outdone, whistleblowers from Aegis Living, an assisted living facility for the aged, have reported that residents have been “chemically restrained” and injected with the investigational mRNA biologicals without their knowledge. As Dr. Lee Merritt said in a talk with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, “We have a whole society doing what we tried the Nazi doctors for.”
As evidenced by the CDC vaccine schedule (a growing list of mandates coupled with liability protection for the manufacturer), and the fact that parents can be charged with “medical neglect” should they object to their children being placed on psychotropic drugs, the American public school system has long been in the grip of late-stage biofascism. To add insult to injury, toddlers are now being forced to wear masks and the mRNA biologicals are being injected into minors. Children’s Health Defense has reported that “Pfizer’s Covid vaccine could be rolled out to babies as young as 6 months in the U.S. this winter — under plans being drawn up by the pharmaceutical giant.”
Convinced that anyone who questions the veracity of the liberal media and the public health agencies is a “conspiracy theorist” (really a euphemism for “mentally ill”), neoliberals have already crossed the Rubicon and taken up the truncheon of authoritarianism. Undoubtedly, the official Covid narrative is deranged. Yet is it any more inane than “Trump’s white supremacist insurrection,” “Russia invaded Ukraine,” “the Russians hacked the election,” “Trump is Putin’s puppet,” and NATO was compelled to bomb Libya to smithereens “to save Benghazi?”
Trapped in a vortex of amnesia and unreason, the neoliberal has been hoodwinked into believing that whatever the medical mullahs say is “the science;” and whatever the liberal media says is incontrovertible, irrefutable, and infallible; i.e., “reality.” Fauci’s contradictory statements, particularly with regard to the virulence of COVID-19 and his stance on masks, fail to diminish their fervor as they cannot even remember what they had for breakfast, let alone the tens of thousands of Americans killed by Vioxx or the over 400,000 Americans that lost their lives to the opioid epidemic.
The liberals of the 1960s, who genuinely believed in the Nuremberg Code, would have regarded the Branch Covidians with contempt. What a pity that the ranks of these medical brownshirts are dominated largely by those who once idolized the likes of Bobby Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, yet now wallow in a pitiable state of moral and intellectual bankruptcy. It is true that conservative publications, such as The Washington Post, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal are parroting similar propaganda with regard to Covid. However, as evidenced by Tucker Carlson’s show, the conservative media no longer speaks with one voice. Moreover, millions of conservatives no longer believe in the infallibility of the conservative media as liberals continue to believe in the infallibility of the liberal media.
Ultimately, the Branch Covidians are the offspring of a union between a corporatized health care system that has grown increasingly hostile to informed consent, and a liberal class that stopped thinking when Bill Clinton was inaugurated and has come to regard senior officials in the liberal media and the public health agencies as gods. The mass psychosis of the Branch Covidians is inextricably linked with the mass psychosis of neoliberalism. Without the latter the former would have about as much societal impact as the Hare Krishnas.
The Nazis divided humanity into the subhumans (Jews, Roma, political prisoners, and Slavs); the humans (allied European fascists and the Japanese); and the supermen (the Germans, or Aryans). For quite some time now, the American health care system has been mired in a multi-tier system which divides patients up into similar categories. In light of this boorishness, teaching hospitals have long been instructing trainees that care is to be doled out depending on what kind of insurance plan patients have. Privileged patients are granted the right to choose their own doctor while the less fortunate are confined to narrow networks. Humans are permitted to meet with an attending physician while the Untermenschen are sent to resident clinics. Unbeknownst to Nazi doctors, both past and present, there is no bioethics on-off switch. In what was foundational to the Blitzkrieg but could also explain their increasingly deranged decision making, much of the German military during World War II was regularly taking Pervitin, the predecessor to crystal meth, and doing so with the support of their own doctors.
As the forces of darkness become increasingly desperate, liberals drown in an ocean of madness and sociopathy. Hypnotized by an oligarchy they have deified, while believing that they are still marching with Martin Luther King singing “Kumbaya My Lord” and “We Shall Overcome,” this faux-left movement bears a closer resemblance to the Democratic Party of the 1860s than the Democratic Party of the 1960s. Indeed, if the Branch Covidians succeed in destroying the citadel of informed consent, only one form of government will reign in the United States: slavery.
Taiwan has been in the news a lot lately, and it’s really bringing out the crazy in people.
The mass media have been falsely reporting that China has been encroaching on Taiwan’s “air defense zone”, which gets stretched into the even more ludicrous claim that China “sent warplanes flying over Taiwan”. In reality Chinese planes simply entered an arbitrarily designated area hundreds of miles from Taiwan’s coast it calls its “Air Defence Identification Zone”, which has no legally recognized existence and contains a significant portion of China’s mainland. This is likely a response to the way the US and its allies have been constantly sailing war ships into disputed waters to threaten Beijing.
As Moon of Alabama reports, US warmongers inflamed this non-controversy even further by feeding a story to the press about the already public information that there are American troops in Taiwan training the military there, citing “concern” about the danger posed by China.
This past weekend, warships from six countries entered the South China Sea. Nearly all came from the other side of the world.
Chinese aircraft also briefly entered the "Taiwan ADIZ" — an air defense zone unrecognized by international law.
Now headlines are blaring about President Tsai Ing-wen responding to this non-event with the announcement that Taiwan will “do whatever it takes to defend its freedom and democratic way of life.” Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott just visited Taipei to advocate that “democracies stand shoulder to shoulder” with Taiwan against China. The CIA has announced the creation of a new spy center that will focus solely on China, which CIA Director William Burns says will “further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century: an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”.
A recent poll says that now more than half of Americans would support sending US troops to defend Taiwan from an invasion by the mainland, plainly the result of the aggressive propaganda campaign that has greatly escalated public hysteria about China. In Australia the mass media are cranking out unbelievably insane 60 Minutes episodes ridiculously pushing the idea that China may attack Australia and that Australians should be willing to go to war to protect Taiwan. I’ve been having many disturbing interactions with people online who emphatically support the idea of the US and its allies going to war with China over Taiwanese independence.
This is clearly nuts, and anyone who buys into this line of thinking is a brainwashed fool.
This isn’t some kind of complicated anti-imperialist issue, and it has nothing to do with which side you take in the debate over what government Taiwan belongs under. The US and its allies engaging in a full-scale war with nuclear-armed China over Taiwan is a prospect that should be vehemently opposed out of simple, garden variety self-preservation.
Obviously if Beijing decides to launch a military assault on Taiwan in its bid to reunify China that would be a terrible thing which would cause a lot of suffering. I don’t think that will happen unless western powers push Taipei into declaring independence or otherwise upset the delicate diplomacy dance in some major way, but if it does happen under any circumstances that would be awful.
But Taiwanese independence is not worth fighting a world war that could kill millions, and potentially billions if things go nuclear. This should be extremely obvious to everyone.
War proponents will reference Hitler, as they literally always do whenever there’s talk of war against someone the United States doesn’t like, arguing that China taking Taiwan would be like the Nazis invading Poland after which they’ll just keep invading and conquering until they are stopped. But there’s no evidence that China has any interest in invading Japan, much less Australia, still less everyone else, or that it has any ambitions on the world stage beyond reunification and securing its own economic and security interests.
The idea that China wants to take over a bunch of foreign lands, make you live under communism and give you a social credit score is the same kind of foam-brained bigoted othering which told previous generations that Black men want to take over your neighborhood so they can have sex with your wives. It’s the sort of belief that can only find purchase in an emotionally primitive mind that lacks the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand that not everyone wants what you have.
The jarring amount of pushback I’ve been getting for my very sane and moderate position that we should not be willing to start World War Three between nuclear powers over Taiwanese independence makes it abundantly clear that many people don’t truly understand that starting a war means you have to actually send actual human beings to go fight that war. All the big brave warrior men bloviating about the need to stand up to China know they’ll never find themselves on the front line of that conflict because they’re too old, but they’ll happily send my kids and the kids of countless of other mothers to go and fight in it. It’s like a video game or a movie to them.
Propaganda has made us so compartmentalized and detached from the realities of the horrors of war. If people could really see what war is and what it does, truly grok deep down in their guts how their own governments are inflicting those horrors on people right now, they’d fall to their knees in anguish and never again advocate for such things. No sane person would support a war of this scale if they truly understood what it would mean.
__________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Liberal pundit Keith Olbermann shared a video the other day where he ranted about people who don’t want to take the Covid vaccine with such emotional vitriol that spittle flew from his mouth and drool poured down his chin. I found it hard to watch, partly because it’s always uncomfortable to see someone come apart like that and partly because it made me realize that I’ve probably spent the last few years making fun of a media personality who has some actual diagnosable psychological disorders.
Rather than lay out what he thinks are the best arguments for taking the vaccine as most of his peers have been doing, Olbermann instead spouts vituperations about what “cowards” and “snowflakes” unvaccinated people are.
“They’re afraid!” Olbermann screams over and over again, as though being afraid of something makes you some sort of monster. As though we’re not all afraid of something, whether it be the vaccine or the virus or being alone or the fact that thawing arctic permafrost is pouring methane into the atmosphere. This commonality should draw us closer together, but here it’s being used for partisan us-vs-them theatrics which drive us further apart.
Us-vs-them frameworks are used constantly to manipulate people into espousing various narratives, and narrative manipulation is the underlying source of all of humanity’s problems.
Today’s world is dominated by a unipolar power structure loosely centralized around the United States government. It is comprised of many nations which are ostensibly independent, but, since they move in near-complete alignment with each other on all international issues of major importance, this power structure can effectively be called an empire. This empire sets the economic, environmental and military policies which are causing all the ecocide, war and nuclear brinkmanship we see driving humanity toward its destruction today.
The empire’s greatest weapon is not its military but its propaganda machine. There’s simply never been anything like the global narrative control provided by the western news media, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. The military fights wars; the propaganda machine wins them long before they even start.
When you use the military to eliminate opposition, everyone knows it happened. When you use propaganda to eliminate opposition, people aren’t even aware you did it. They think it was their own idea to suddenly become super concerned about Saddam or Putin or Maduro or whomever or to go along with this or that power-serving agenda. Beyond the hard, concrete realities of war and militarism there’s a whole other war being fought on a far greater scale and of far greater consequence, and most people don’t even know it’s happening: the mass-scale psychological manipulation of the entire human species.
This is why human behavior looks so irrational when taken together. Why are we fighting all these wars, engaging in nuclear brinkmanship and destroying the biosphere when we know intellectually these are bad things? It’s not because humans are inherently destructive, it’s because a few destructive humans manipulate the rest of us into doing destructive things using propaganda.
A lucid and well-informed examination of the world’s problems will keep bringing you back to this one fundamental issue: that Earth’s inhabitants are being psychologically manipulated at mass scale into organizing themselves in ways that serve the powerful instead of the people.
Most propaganda is based on us-vs-them framing; support the oligarch-controlled Democratic Party because Republicans are bad, support the oligarch-controlled Republican Party because Democrats are bad, those evil Muslims/Russians/Chinese want to hurt us, that evil dictator over there is doing things which we good freedom-loving people cannot allow, etc. A tremendous amount of energy goes into feeding into these us-and-them frameworks to keep the propaganda engine running efficiently.
Manipulative narcissists, cult leaders and propagandists all do this, and they do it because it is effective. A video titled “The science behind ‘us vs. them’” by Big Think does a good job of breaking down how deeply hardwired the human brain is to think in terms of an “in” group who we like and an “out” group who we don’t like, citing numerous experiments which have shown this to be true around the world.
“What becomes clear when you look closely is it is virtually inevitable that we divide the world into ‘us’es and ‘them’s and don’t like ‘them’s very much and don’t treat them well,” explains neuroendocrinology researcher Robert Sapolsky. “But we are incredibly easily manipulated as to who counts as an ‘us’ and who counts as a ‘them’.”
“We could be manipulated by all sorts of ideologues out there as to deciding that people who seem just like us really aren’t, they’re really so different that they count as a them,” Sapolsky adds.
“We turn the world into ‘us’es and ‘them’s, and we don’t like the ‘them’s very much and are often really awful to them, and the ‘us’es we exaggerate how wonderful and how generous and how affiliative and how just like siblings they are to us,” says Sapolsky.
Can you see how easy it would be for someone who understands this aspect of our psychology to exploit it to seed propaganda in our minds? Set up a “them” side who we distrust and an ‘us’ side who we trust, and any information which comes from the “us” side will slide in unchecked by critical thinking.
If you can split the population into two sides and control the “us” narratives of both of them, you can easily insert propaganda narratives into most of the population. If Rachel Maddow is in your “us” team you’ll desire increased cold war aggressions against Russia, if Tucker Carlson is on your “us” team you’ll want more escalations against China, both of which happen to advance the interests of the aforementioned empire. As does the status quo both sides promote in their own ways.
People Don't Understand How Unfree We Already Are
"The biggest and most widespread blind spot among those who oppose totalitarian control by the powerful is the assumption that it has not already been achieved."https://t.co/Oq1if82Zcc
This happens constantly, throughout the empire all around the world. Fake “us”es and “them”s are set up for us by powerful manipulators, and our receptiveness to the “us” side allows the manipulators who control it to continually feed narratives into our minds about what’s going on in the world.
Power is controlling what happens. Real power is controlling what people think about what happens.
I don’t know exactly what’s going on with this virus and the vaccines; sometimes it seems like I’m the only person on the internet who doesn’t. But what I do know is that the intensely heated polarization over this issue on both sides feeds into the us-vs-them dynamic where power-serving propaganda about any subject can easily flourish. This benefits someone, and it ain’t you.
Humanity’s problems are made possible by mass-scale manipulation, and mass-scale manipulation is made possible by us-vs-them beliefs. If people weren’t being aggressively manipulated into consenting to the status quo they would have used the power of their numbers to end the status quo a long time ago. Divide-and-conquer isn’t just useful because it prevents people from unifying against their oppressors, it also pours rocket fuel in the oppressors’ propaganda machine.
What’s interesting is that humanity does have within itself the potential to dissolve its us-vs-them cognitive habits and thereby render the propaganda machine ineffective. The phenomenon commonly called spiritual enlightenment consists of a shift in perception which causes the sense of separateness to fall away, making it clear on a deep, experiential level that we are one, not just with all people but with the entire universe. You still have your own ideas, disagreements and preferences when it comes to politics and society, but the sense that anyone is some kind of “other” separate from you and yours falls away.
So there just happens to be a potentiality within us all that could solve all our problems if it were to somehow become unlocked at mass scale. Every species eventually arrives at a point where it must either unlock a potentiality within itself and adapt to a changing situation or go extinct. It looks like we are arriving at this point currently, and that collective enlightenment is the potentiality we will need to unlock if we’re to turn away from our trajectory toward doom.
And that will either happen or it won’t. I personally don’t think it’s some random aberration that this potentiality which sages have been writing about for millennia just so happens to be exactly what we need at this particular juncture with this particular collective psychological dilemma. But if I’m wrong and humanity does go the way of the dinosaur, it would be a damn shame if we didn’t at least hold hands on our way down.
___________________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Battles in the US Congress that erupted again this week, holding up an extra $1bn in military funding for Israel, underscored just how divorced from reality the conversation about US financial aid to Israel has become, even among many critics.
For 48 hours last month, a small group of progressive Democrats in the US House of Representatives succeeded in sabotaging a measure to pick up the bill for Israel to replenish its Iron Dome interception missiles. The Iron Dome system was developed by Israel, with generous financial backing from successive US administrations, in the wake of the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Today, it ostensibly serves to protect Israel from short-range, largely improvised rockets fired intermittently out of Gaza.
Supplies of the Iron Dome missiles, each of which cost at least $50,000, were depleted back in May, when Israel triggered widespread confrontations with Palestinians by intensifying its settlement of Palestinian neighbourhoods near Jerusalem’s Old City and violently raiding al-Aqsa Mosque. Palestinian militant groups fired large numbers of rockets out of Gaza, which has been blockaded by Israel for the past 15 years. Iron Dome intercepted the rockets before they could land in Israel.
The group of progressive Democrats, known popularly as the Squad, scotched an initial move by their congressional leadership to include the $1bn assistance to Israel in US budget legislation. But the money for Iron Dome was quickly reintroduced as a stand-alone bill that passed overwhelmingly, with 420 votes in favour and nine against. Two representatives, one of them the prominent Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, voted “present” – counting effectively as an abstention.
This week, the furore moved to the Senate when Rand Paul, a strong Republican critic of US foreign aid, refused to nod through the bill and thereby give it unanimous assent. It will now need to go through a more complicated legislative process.
The latest funding for Iron Dome comes in addition to the $3.8bn Israel receives annually from the US in military aid, which has made Israel the biggest recipient, by far, of such largesse. Putting the new tranche of Iron Dome aid into perspective, it is twice what Washington contributes annually to Nato’s budget.
The previous administration, under former President Donald Trump, turned US funding for Nato into a big domestic controversy, arguing that the US was shouldering too much of the burden. But there has been barely a peep about the massive military bill the US is footing for Iron Dome.
Debate stifled
The Squad’s main achievement in launching its brief blocking move was to force out into the open the fact that the US is paying for Israel’s stockpile of missiles. Like the House leadership, the Israel lobby had hoped the money could be transferred quietly, without attracting attention.
What little debate did ensue related to whether Israel really needs US military assistance. A few commentators asked why Washington was kitting out one of the richer countries on the planet with missiles in the midst of a pandemic that has hit the US economy hard.
But the lobby quickly stifled a far more important debate about whether the US should be encouraging Israel’s use of Iron Dome at all. Instead, US funding for the interception missile system was presented as being motivated solely by a desire to save lives.
In attacking Paul’s decision to block the bill, the biggest pro-Israel lobby group in Congress, AIPAC, argued this week that his move would “cost innocent lives, make war more likely, and embolden Iran-backed terrorists”.
It was precisely the claim that the Iron Dome is defensive that appeared to push Ocasio-Cortez, usually seen as one of the few US politicians openly critical of Israel, into a corner, leading to her abstention.
Images from the House floor showed her tearful and being given a hug by another representative after the vote. She later attributed her distress in part to how Iron Dome funding had a polarising effect at home, noting that the House bill was a “reckless” move to “rip our communities apart”.
That was an apparent reference to factional tensions within the Democratic Party between, on one side, many Jewish voters who back what they see as Israel’s right to defend itself and, on the other, many Black and Hispanic voters who think it is wrong for the US to financially support Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
Some saw her indecision as evidence of her ambitions to run for the Senate, where positions critical of Israel would be more likely to damage her prospects of success.
Expiring in silence
In Israel, and in Jewish communities beyond, the conversation about US support for Iron Dome is even more detached from reality. The nine US representatives who voted against were roundly castigated for willing the deaths of Israelis by voting to deny them protection from rockets fired from Gaza. In predictable fashion, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, called those who voted against “either ignorant or antisemitic”.
But some liberals took the argument in a different, even more fanciful direction. They called the Squad “hypocrites” for voting against the $1bn funding, arguing that Iron Dome missiles not only save Israelis, but Palestinians too. One Haaretz commentator went so far as to claim that Palestinians were actually the main beneficiaries of the Iron Dome system, arguing: “The fact Israel has a defensive shield against rocket attacks makes a wide-scale military operation with thousands of – mainly Palestinian – casualties less likely.”
Of course, there is the small question of whether Israel has indeed been “forced” into its attacks on Gaza. It is precisely its military superiority – paid for by the US – that has freed it to carry out those massive attacks, in which large numbers of Palestinians, including hundreds of children, are killed, rather than negotiate an end to its decades-long occupation.
Just as in life, bullies resort to intimidation and violence because they feel no need to compromise. But even more to the point, Iron Dome is central to Israel’s efforts to keep Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza, entirely subjugated and stripped of any power to resist.
With Israel patrolling tiny Gaza’s land borders and coast, sealing off the enclave from the rest of the world, Palestinians have few options to protest their slow starvation – or to gain attention for their plight. Israeli snipers have fired on Palestinians staging unarmed, mass protests at the fence caging them in, killing and wounding thousands. The Israeli navy fires on or sinks Palestinian boats, including fishing boats, in Gaza’s waters if they stray more than a few kilometres from the shore.
Iron Dome, far from being defensive, is another weapon in Israel’s armoury to keep Palestinians subdued, impoverished, corralled and silent. For those claiming to want peace in Israel-Palestine, the extra funding for Iron Dome just made that prospect even less likely. As long as Palestinians can be made to slowly expire in silence – their plight ignored by the rest of the world – Israel is free to seize and colonise yet more of what was supposed to become a future Palestinian state.
Systems of domination
But there is another reason why Ocasio-Cortez should have voted against the Iron Dome resupply, rather than tearfully abstaining – and that is for all our sakes, not just the sake of Palestinians.
The US foots the bill for Iron Dome, just as it does for most of Israel’s other weapons development, for self-interested reasons: because it helps its own war industries, as Washington seeks to maintain its military dominance globally.
With western populations less willing to sacrifice their sons and daughters for the sake of modern wars, which seem less obviously related to defence and more transparently about the control of key resources, the Pentagon has worked overtime to reframe the public debate.
It is hard to disguise its global domination industries as anything but offensive in nature. This is where Israel has played a critical role. Not only has Israel helped to develop weapons systems like Iron Dome, but – despite being a nuclear-armed, belligerent, occupying state – it has leveraged its image as a vulnerable refuge for the long-persecuted Jewish people. It has been able to make more plausible the case that these domination systems really are defensive.
In recent decades, Israel has developed and tested drone technology to surveil and assassinate Palestinians, which has proved invaluable in the US and UK’s long-term occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel’s latest “swarm” technology – making drones even more lethal – may prove particularly attractive to the Pentagon.
Israel has also been the ideal partner for the Pentagon in testing and refining the battlefield use of the new generation of F-35 fighter planes, the most expensivemilitary product in US history. Uniquely, Israel has been allowed to customise the jet, adapting its capabilities in new, unforeseen ways.
Bowing to US hegemony
The F-35’s ultimate role is to make sure major rival airforces, such as Russia’s and China’s, are elbowed out of the skies. And Israel has been at the forefront of developing and testing a variety of missile interception systems, such as Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow, which are intended to destroy incoming projectiles, from short-range rockets to long-range missiles.
Last December, Israel announced it had successfully launched Iron Dome interception missiles for the first time from the sea. Reports noted that the US arms maker Raytheon and the US defence department were involved in the tests. That is because, behind the scenes, the US is not only paying for the development and testing of these systems; it is also guiding the uses to which they will be put. The Pentagon has bought two Iron Dome batteries, which, according to Israeli media, have been stationed in US military bases in the Gulf.
The US has its own interception systems under development, and it is unclear which it will come to rely on most heavily. But what is evident is that Washington, Israel and their Gulf allies have Iran in their immediate sights. Any country that refuses to bow to US global hegemony could also be targeted.
US interest in these missiles is not defensive. They are fundamental to its ability to neutralise the responses of rivals to either a US military attack, or more general moves by the US to dominate territory and control resources.
Just as Palestinians have been besieged by Israel for 15 years, the US and Gulf states may hope one day to deal a knockout blow to Iran’s oil exports. Washington would be able to ignore current concerns that Tehran could retaliate by firing on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz or on hostile Middle Eastern capitals. If Iran’s missiles can be intercepted, it will be incapable of defending itself against increasing economic or military aggression from the US or its neighbours.
Less safe world
Following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer, there has been plenty of naive talk that the US is seeking a diminished role in the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Ultimately, the US is seeking global dominance at arm’s length – through a combination of long-range military power, cyber warfare, robotics and artificial intelligence – that it hopes will lift the restraints imposed by American casualties and domestic opposition.
Israel’s playbook with regards to Palestinians is one that elites in Washington trust can be exported to other corners of the globe, and even outer space. Interception missiles lie at the heart of that strategic vision, as a way to neutralise and silence all resistance. This is why no one who cares about a less violent, exploitative and dangerous world should be indifferent to, or neutral on, congressional funding for Iron Dome.
Missile interception systems are the face not of a more defensive, safer world, but of a far more nakedly hostile, aggressive one.
“Money has begun flowing into companies intending to monetize psychedelic therapy as new research has increasingly shown that blowing one’s mind can alter it for the better,” reads a new article for the Los Angeles Times titled “Money is pouring into psychedelics. Meet the mystical hedge fund investor bankrolling the boom.”
“This scientific and commercial excitement rests on research showing that psychedelics can supercharge mental health treatment for PTSD, depression, anxiety, addiction, and other chronic ailments of the mind, enabling patients to dive deep, confront their traumas and — a rarity for mental illnesses — return healed,” the article reads. “That goes for synthetic chemicals such as MDMA and ketamine as well as plant-derived drugs such as psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), the South American plant brew ayahuasca, and the West African root-derived substance iboga.”
LA Times’ Sam Dean shares the personal journey of hedge fund investor Sa’ad Shah and his involvement in what has become a multibillion-dollar psychedelics industry long before even the legal infrastructure necessary for such companies to turn a profit is in place. We learn of Shah’s experience with ayahuasca, his interest in mystical traditions and personal growth, and his conviction in the shift that has for the last few years been known as the psychedelic renaissance.
And then, about halfway down the article, we get to the actual meat of the matter:
“Shah welcomes big pharma and big institutions to enter the fray in the interest of spreading the chemical gospel far and wide. He sees the financial and therapeutic potential for psychedelics not in the cannabis model, which would make psychedelics broadly available for retail purchase, but in the pharmaceutical mode — psychedelics as prescribed drugs, with patent rights, administered in medical settings.”
That “with patent rights” bit right there is behind the so-called psychedelic renaissance we’ve been hearing so much about: “favoring the FDA regulatory route over the Oregon route,” as a psychiatrist cited in the article put it. It’s being driven not by the need to free human consciousness from the prohibition-induced coma it’s been under since the sixties so that we can collectively navigate through the many existential hurdles our species is fast approaching with wisdom and insight, but by the agenda to make rich people even richer by forcefully controlling psychedelic substances via the pharmaceutical industry.
"[A] psychedelic renaissance has bloomed in the business world. Money has begun flowing into companies intending to monetize psychedelic therapy as new research has increasingly shown that blowing one’s mind can alter it for the better." @SamAugustDeanhttps://t.co/vvVtoAh7bj
And I’ll take it a step further and say that the recent mainstreaming of psychedelics is also due to the fact that the abusive nature of capitalism is causing a widespread mental health crisis that our rulers have a vested interest in preventing so the slaves will keep turning the gears of the machine.
Terence McKenna once said, “Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
But this is changing. We’re now seeing support for psychedelic use from the same plutocratic class and its corporate media who always work to maintain the status quo upon which their kingdoms are built. Netflix has released multipledocumentariesextolling the benefits of hallucinogenic substances for personal growth and healing. Every few days there’s a new mainstream article or news segment about the latest study showing the undeniable mental health benefits of this or that psychedelic substance for this or that psychological ailment.
So what changed? The situation changed. Global capitalist institutions are acutely aware that western civilization is in the midst of a mental health crisis that only looks likely to get worse, with depression, anxiety disorders and substance abuseskyrocketing on myriadfronts for years. The increasingly widespread use of antidepressants has not led to an overall decline in symptoms and prevalence of mood disorders in the US, Australia, Canada, England and other wealthy countries. In America young people have been growing progressively more depressed and anxious for over 80 years, and no one knows why.
Crazy
They'll make you poor, then shame you for being poor, then push you into a job that keeps you poor at a billionaire megacorporation.
They'll make you crazy, then shame you for being crazy, then sell you the cure for crazy at eighty bucks a pill.https://t.co/vI8ljB5sQ9
I would guess that continually pummelling people’s minds with messaging that they are inadequate if they don’t look a certain way, own the right products and make enough money is bad for their psychological health.
I would guess that hammering people with bootstrapping fallacies and telling them that they’re the problem if they can’t keep their head above water in a system that’s rigged against them drives people a bit crazy.
I would guess that a nonstop barrage of mass media propaganda shamelessly lying to people and telling them that everything’s fine when it clearly isn’t and that endless human butchery by the military is perfectly normal takes a toll on their psychological well being.
I would guess that a population growing poorer and poorer and having more and more of its power taken away from as serfs under a corporate oligarchy would be alienating and depressing.
I would guess that working long hours at meaningless gear-turning for an amoral corporate machine while being inundated with artificial mainstream culture manufactured in Hollywood, New York and Langley is soul-destroying.
So our mental health is deteriorating, the solutions that our systems have been offering are not working, and in fact it’s likely that the deterioration of mental health is due primarily to the abusive nature of those very systems. But the capitalism machine still needs workers, and those workers won’t turn the gears if they can’t get out of bed in the morning.
So desperate measures have been called in. Give the gear-turners tightly controlled doses of psychedelics, enough to get them functional but not enough to awaken them to the reality of their enslavement, and hopefully you’ve built some systemic scaffolding which enables their minds to put up with the relentless mass-scale psychological abuse that the status quo requires.
And made a massive fortune in the process. There’s a lot of money to be made selling cures for the psychological wounds inflicted by the very system which enables that sale.
“May the small candle of consciousness in the void that is humanity, never go out” @elonmusk
This is why nearly all of the chatter we are seeing about psychedelics is about fixing people’s psychological problems instead of helping them to attain self-actualization, transformation, transcendence and enlightenment. It’s not about waking people up, it’s about turning them from broken cogs into useful cogs. It’s not to free them from the machine but to help them better serve it, while also serving the interests of clever pharmaceutical investors.
Psychedelics are useful not for the hallucinations they provide but for the hallucinations they remove. At the shallower end of the pool they can help dispel the psychological illusions which feed into our depresion, anxiety, and PTSD. At the deep end they have the potential to remove our fundamental hallucinations about ego, mind, separation, and consciousness. The gamble appears to be premised on building a high fence to keep everyone playing in the shallow end of the pool, where they are useful.
But, as people often point out to me whenever I highlight this, that plan can easily backfire. You’re not dealing with something mundane and predictable here, you’re dealing with the most uncharted terrain in human consciousness. There’s a lot of wiggle room for miracles in that space.
If psychedelics were anything other than a threat to the status quo they wouldn’t have been banned for half a century and the CIA would still be dosing the public with LSD. It will be interesting to see how this thing unfolds. Maybe this time they finally bit off more than they can chew.
___________________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Again, you can’t shuttle through the headlines, the so-called news, without having spasms and fits. You will not get journalists doing shit to really go after the capitalists, uh? Baby food. And these transnational Wall Street thieves, these stockholding companies, not even a slap on the wrist. So, if I as an unjabbed person goes into a public place, and then the rabid fascists find out, they then can call the cops, do a citizen’s arrest, and take my ass down, zip ties and all. But, do these billionaires and multimillionaires get hog-tied or frog-marched into court, and have their ill-gotten profits used for a reparations fund for all those babies? Dream on:
Baby food manufacturers allowed products contaminated with heavy metals to remain on store shelves — even after dangerous levels of the toxic chemicals were detected in their products. That’s according to a new congressional report released Wednesday, which found baby food makers Gerber and Beech-Nut failed to recall infant rice cereals tested to have arsenic levels above FDA limits.
This is how these felons roll, these dirty rotten propagandists, the smoke and mirrors crowd, the polluters, all those elites and money grubbers:
Going from baby food to land, forests, indigenous rights, we can see more putridity of the White Savior Civilizations (sic) facilitating the land rapists and the water polluters. This is not outrageous in Can/Klan/Ada?
In Canada, a judge has ended an injunction granted to logging company Teal-Jones, which the court says was used to crack down on activists at the Fairy Creek watershed blockade in a way that violated their civil liberties and infringed on press freedom. Police have arrested over 1,000 land defenders, often violently, as they fight to protect the remaining trees in Vancouver Island’s ancient forests. The First Nations-led protest is Canada’s largest act of civil disobedience. Click here to see our coverage of this issue
It’s a simple formula, a simple illustration of how syphilitics the ruling class is, and here, “David Graeber’s bestselling book Debt: The First 5000 Years revolutionised our understanding of the origins of money and the role of debt in human societies. But intellectual revolutions take time, and David’s sudden and untimely death left this revolution unfinished. David’s widow Nika Dubrovsky has established ‘The Fight Club’ to keep David’s unique way of challenging conventional wisdoms alive. Each ‘Fight’ will pit leading advocates of different visions of how society functions against each other. The inaugural fight, to mark the first anniversary of David’s death, is a debate between the renowned economists Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and Michael Hudson, author of And Forgive Them Their Debts. Thomas Piketty wrote the preface to the tenth anniversary edition of Debt: the First 5000 Years. Michael Hudson’s anthropological research into the origins of money and debt in ancient Sumeria was the basis of much of David’s analysis in that book. Join us for an unmissable encounter between two celebrated and highly influential economic thinkers as they debate: what is money and what is debt? What are the most serious problems of today’s finance-capital economies? And what are the best remedies?”
Finally, the new brisk and slick predators, those capitalists, those impact bond folk, the algorithms, the mining of our minds, bodies, dreams, aspirations. Wrench in the Gears, a long one, with lots of sources to click on to enhance Alison’s work:
This past week someone sent me a paper on augmented cognition. As I read it, a number of pieces clicked for me about earlier research I’d done into executive function. I wanted to preserve the thread, so I captured it in the screen shots below. Follow along to see how grit and resiliency intersect with Metaverse navigation and soul theft.
Also, this week Philadelphia School Superintendent William Hite briefed the Federal Reserve. Listen carefully to hear him setting up human capital bond markets in ed-tech, social emotional learning (SEL), nutrition, and tele-health via public-private partnerships with “philanthropic” predators.
This is accepted behavior, accepted “follow the science” bullshit; accepted state paid for university research; accepted elite school work and disgust? This is what Americans cannot handle:
So, how can lead in Flint’s water be a big deal? Arsenic in baby food? Arresting protestors in Canada? Think about how polluted media are, how broken universities are, and how confused and full of Collective Stockholm Syndrome the public is. This last comment is pretty telling:
Note: I try and keep the plates spinning in Newport-Lincoln County, where I live, write and work. So, this piece came out in the rag, The Newport News Times, a Wednesday and Friday newspaper sucking wind for sure, but still, a newspaper. This is what the community standards can take, so after this piece, I’ll comment, take out the machetes, and blaze through what it really means, Banning Books (ideas/curricula/discussion/debate/protest/public displays/thinking) .
I cut my teeth in El Paso as a graduate TA teaching English – writing, composition, remedial reading, literature – in the early 1980s. That’s when librarians were robust, gutsy and on the front lines of free speech. They helped develop library materials and organize talks around Banned Books Week (September 26 – October 2).
I also peddled stories and books as a fiction writer, and I was the Sunday book reviewer for the El Paso Times. My raison d’être was to make sure my writing and everyone else’s was made available to me, my students and my colleagues.
Throughout the next forty years, I’ve headed up talks and readings celebrating diverse voices and works from people outside the Eurocentric dominant force in our traditional K12 and higher education arenas. Books by Caribbean, Mexican, South American, Central American, Native American, Iranian or Ethiopian writers were not just curiosities. For many of my students, reading Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie or Zora Neal Hurston created a deep and long-lasting interest in their own cultures, in education, in lifelong reading and in bringing into focus the power of their own identifies reflected in others’ writing.
This year’s banned book week is tantamount to motivating as many people as possible to understand active and passive censorship.
There are entire lists of books removed from high school libraries. There are all kinds of books that are targets of school boards, parents groups, religious groups and political advocacy committees. As a writer, I know my published words are not always appreciated by a variety of readers. I write with many hats on, and in that capacity, I am able to cross the Rubicon many times: from poetry, to fiction, to essays, to polemics, to blogs, to traditional journalism, and more.
I’ve faced down bigotry and hate for books I have put on my syllabi. I have had people walk out of my readings and those of more important people like Winona LaDuke or Tim O’Brien. Walking out is one’s right, and so are bigoted diatribes.
However, stopping the publication of books and demanding books be removed is not a right. I was teaching at a state community college in Washington when I faced a student who demanded I give her an alternative text for – The Fight Club. Ironically, we looked at various themes in that book, and the writer, Chuck Palahniuk, was coming to town and opening himself up to talking with my students.
That English class included other books that got under the skin of other students and/or their parents (mind you, this was a college class, not a religious school). Bringing writers to campus and having students read their books is part and parcel what educators must do to open minds and create critical thinking.
College deans, department heads, provosts and even presidents must protect that right of freedom to read.
Yes, students in high school have a right to have a history teacher assign Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Or a film teacher has a right to assign her under-18-year-old students, I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes to delve into filmmaker Raoul Peck’s work.
Reading Fahrenheit 451 and then comparing Raymond Bradbury’s work to François Truffaut’s 1966 version or the 2018 adaptation directed by Ramin Bahrani is vital to learning. Today, cancel culture rests in identarian politics.
Misinformation campaigns around the 1619 Project or what “critical race theory” are ongoing. This muddies the water of opening up critical thinking skills for both educators and students.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman posits the future would look similar to the one depicted in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World. Postman explains that the only way to avoid this fate is to see and question what we’re seeing rather than blindly trusting the media.
Others predict a world unfolding closer to 1984, the George Orwell’s classic. Others might choose to riff with and analyze Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. All those books have been put on some school district’s banned book list: driven by a fervor seated in xenophobia, lack of understanding of what literature is, and deeply held conservative beliefs.
Cancelling out books is akin to burning them. We all know where that led the world. This year’s theme — “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.”
+–+
All right, then, end of the Op-Ed for the newspaper that is in a pretty typically odd community, though Newport does have that “dichotomy”: lots of professors and researchers at the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Sciences center, and the NOAA team posted here, and, those people from Oregon who have a few college degrees who ended up with summer homes here, now turned into full-time homes AND then the service economy, the logging industry, the fishing industry. You have to look at that, too, which is the divide in America, partially self-directed, and certainly directed by the elites, the billionaire class, the military-media-propaganda overlords.
When you see red vs blue, when you see cultural wars and the religious zealotry of the Christians, and when you have K12 so flagged and flogged, so vapid of real learning, real community- based learning, real critical thinking, then we get these divides. And, while the beautiful people, the managerial class, those in the upper income brackets far away from us, in the 80 Percent, well, they may have some Buddhist retreat or outward bound or special science camp to send their young ones, the reality is they especially, and those of us in the 80 percent, have adults and then youth and then each new brood epigenetically forced into sheeplehood and ignorance of who the enemy is, as Ralph Nader put down here:
If you think elementary, middle, and high school students know too little history, geography, and government, try asking them about the corporations that command so many hours of their day, their attention, what they consume, and their personal horizons.
Howard Zinn published A Young People’s History of the United States (2009), to go with his best-selling pioneering work, A People’s History of the United States (1980), but he didn’t do justice to all the modern corporate controls of just about every facet of American life, including educational institutions.
Today, school children are engulfed by corporate apps and software, textbooks biased toward the corporate definitions of an economy, and myths about “free markets.” For years free school materials and videos produced or sponsored by business groups, including the coal and nuclear industries, have flooded elementary classes. Our report: Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools by Sheila Harty (1979), documented this mercantile assault on education. Students even take tests designed by corporate institutions. (DV– “Teach Youngsters about Corporatism’s Harms”)
Yes, this lack of disclosure and exposure around how curricula and school junk and colleges and university endowments are predicated on what the rich, the powerful, the gigantic, the corporations, the MIC want included and not included in teaching, books, materials, etc., it might even been worse than that.
To the left of this piece is a list of DV-recommended books. I’ve read many, and I’ve written two of them. Few people I know, however, read books, and those they do, are insipidly bad, soap opera porn, feel good and how to do/be/see/eat/cook/make money books.
Fiction, and hardcore deeply researched and lived books on China, on Mexico, on all those countries that are shit-holes in the eyes of Biden/Trump/Lesser Evils, they aren’t read by the so-called managers of democracy, the administration, the honchos-as appointed to all those governmental positions. The books aren’t read by the generals or the CEOs.
The books on really the core of the problems globally and locally are not read by the people who need to be taken to the woodshed for a real tutelage of the mind by the people who live in, say, North Korea, and know the language and have books with 80 pages works cited and endnotes.
The Zuckerberg, the USA Today, the ticker-tape of Fox-UnNews and CNN (Clinton/CIA UnNews Network) and then all the followers in media looking for less gray, fewer second and third page jumps, they are part of the problem of killing knowledge, curiosity, deep thinking and robust public arena smart dialogue.
Echo chambers, sure, the have always been there, especially if you end up in groups like the Chamber of Commerce or any group that pushes a group-think and allegiance to a narrow (usually pro Capitalist/pro Business/pro USA/ pro Empire mentality.
It only gets worse, this banned books concept. The reality is that the Newport News Times would NEVER run a piece, a long one, on people (let’s give them degrees and long titles and decent worldviews) who might be looking into lockdowns, the legality of lockdwons/lockups, the origin of DARPA jabs, the history of USA bio-poison-toxin weaponry research). NEVER.
Putting my byline on that too, as a journalist, would subject me to threats, death threats, deplatforming, and probably termination. I’d not get gigs teaching (there are not many) at the local community college. Even if I wrote the piece as traditional long-form journalism, pulling in too-man-to-count experts on virology, on vaccines, on medical procedures, on the history and politics of medicine and bioweaponry research and the illegal doings of the Big Pharma. Nope.
So, that is a form of banned books, vis-a-vis the gatekeepers, those community standards, all those aspects of Edward Bernays and Josef Goebbels concocted 9 Forms of propaganda, the one that marketers really utilize, BandWagon.
I’ll list more of those techniques below. But, again, it is what isn’t taught, what isn’t allowed, what isn’t debated, what isn’t filmed/acted/written about that is what signifies as a ban. Think of all the books that were written, and alas, those are now gone, gone, gone.
The person who controls the spigot, the information channels, the medium for the messages, controls the narrative. Having Americans unlearn all the bad things, all the insipidly racist, retrograde, misogynistic, xenophobic, anti-people of color shit that comes across the desks of teachers, educational planners, curriculum designers and then into the folders and Google Chromebooks, that is a huge task.
Bad habits die hard, or long.
We need a 12-step program for re-centering this generation so they can breed the next and they the next of real thinkers. And I am not just come fly on the wall, or Pollyanna. I have fought hard in the colleges and universities and newsrooms and social work domains for a real sense of social justice, but also deep knowledge based thinking, and what I have come across is the dumb-downing of everything.
Sure, we can listen to Henry Giroux and Chris Hedges, but again, they’re two elites in their fields (millionaires with a small “m”). They never interview or have on their shows lesser known or unknown people on who might set the record straight.
While Hedges goes after/attacks the celebrity culture, he is still colonized by it in some form, always going to the person with laurels and with titles and books.
Yes, this a good interview, but I guarantee few like me will watch is, and the elites will never watch it:
Then, sure, Giroux and Hedges get to some facts, but again, they go for the Republican Party and the Conservatives and Rightwing Racists as their whipping posts.
They are far from knowledgeable around how poorly placed those Democrats are, those mandate fuckers, all those incredibly bad nightmarish Democratic Governors are.
CH: Welcome to On Contact. Today, we discuss the age of manufactured ignorance with the scholar, Henry Giroux.
HG: Power, when it’s invisible, becomes all the more powerful, to use that term. But I think there are two issues here for me about neoliberalism in relation to your question, that are really central. One is it operates off the assumption that there’s no such thing as social problems, that there are only individual problems. And this notion that we’re ultimately and individually responsible for everything that happens to us literally depoliticizes people because it makes incapable of translating private issues into larger, systemic considerations. So there’s this question of this really putrid notion of market-based individuals, and this inability to translate and bring together, and connect issues that would give people a full understanding of the world in which they live in, what they may be able to do about it. Particularly as it affects their everyday lives.
Yes, so much more could be written about what isn’t in the curriculum, how British Petroleum (BP, the new marketing tool after the blowout of millions of gallons of crude in the Gulf of Mexico — Deep Horizon, anyone?) designed the geology and other sciences curriculum in California. Monsanto gives money to Washington State University, so you think those departments are going to have an easy time of challenge Round-up and GMOs?
Come on — I was in Spokane, wrote about this stupidity, and alas, this is a form of censorship that takes place and never makes the news like Michael Pollan did:
A book chosen by a Washington State University committee as appropriate food for thought for all incoming freshmen will not be distributed at summer orientation after a member of the board of regents raised concerns about the work’s focus on problems associated with agribusiness.
WSU’s president said the decision to halt the “common reading” program was related to the university’s financial crisis.
In “Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” author Michael Pollan discusses the social, political, moral and environmental implications of the food people eat.
A selection committee picked the book for this year’s WSU common reading program, which provides freshmen with a work that crosses academic disciplines and can be incorporated into study throughout the year. (source)
UPDATE: Washington State University reinstates freshman reading of ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’
Imagine, all those books taken off the shelves of public libraries. This is not just a ban To Kill a Mockingbird moment.
This is not silly, either, and Banned Books week does what it does, for sure, but, again, would Ward Churchill be invited to campus to read from one of his books, or the essay that got him un-tenured?
…what I think we’re witnessing fifty years on is consolidation of precisely the kind of entity extolled by then-U/Cal Berkeley president Clark Kerr in his 1963 book, The Uses of the University. For those unfamiliar with the tract, Kerr likened what he preferred to call “multiversities” to governmentally/corporately-owned factories—albeit, “knowledge factories”—wherein managers such as himself employed to oversee a worker force—the faculty—whose job it was to convert raw material—that is, students—into the finished product or products desired by the owners, all with maximal efficiency. Sound familiar? (Churchill)
The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 377 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2019. Of the 566 books that were targeted, here are the most challenged, along with the reasons cited for censoring the books:
George by Alex Gino
Reasons: challenged, banned, restricted, and hidden to avoid controversy; for LGBTQIA+ content and a transgender character; because schools and libraries should not “put books in a child’s hand that require discussion”; for sexual references; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint and “traditional family structure”
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin
Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, for “its effect on any young people who would read it,” and for concerns that it was sexually explicit and biased
A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss, illustrated by EG Keller
Reasons: challenged and vandalized for LGBTQIA+ content and political viewpoints, for concerns that it is “designed to pollute the morals of its readers,” and for not including a content warning
Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg, illustrated by Fiona Smyth
Reasons: challenged, banned, and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content; for discussing gender identity and sex education; and for concerns that the title and illustrations were “inappropriate”
Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack, illustrated by Stevie Lewis
Reasons: challenged and restricted for featuring a gay marriage and LGBTQIA+ content; for being “a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate young children” with the potential to cause confusion, curiosity, and gender dysphoria; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint
I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas
Reasons: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content, for a transgender character, and for confronting a topic that is “sensitive, controversial, and politically charged”
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Reasons: banned and challenged for profanity and for “vulgarity and sexual overtones”
Drama written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier
Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and for concerns that it goes against “family values/morals”
Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
Reasons: banned and forbidden from discussion for referring to magic and witchcraft, for containing actual curses and spells, and for characters that use “nefarious means” to attain goals
And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson illustrated by Henry Cole
Reason: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content
And so it goes. Imagine all the ideas stopped and flailed and all the books never written but should have been written. Imagine all the ignorance peddled by marketers, publishers, media, government, corporations. Imagine all the harm done with these lies. Wars and genocide, started and perpetrated because of knowledge and thinking bans. You think Turkey wants the Armenian Genocide in their k12 history books. Israel and the Nakba in their books? The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing in those Japanese books? Right!
Planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence used to be taught by yours truly around the consumer/retail war, the Story of Stuff. Planned and perceived obsolescence is now really agnotology, and the erasing of people, the caste systems being set loose and the Fourth Industrial Digital Gulag Revolution. No little newspaper like the one in my county will deal with these topics. Why should it when the reality is giant schools like WSU try a ban, or the papers of record, the big ones, throughout the land, to include the NYT and WaPo are in so many ways rotten to the core, in the service of the Military Congressional Industrial Complex and the billionaires and giant corporations.
Onward, to the propaganda, those Mad Men/Mad Women and the USA and EU and Capitalists Murder Incorporated!
Note: I try and keep the plates spinning in Newport-Lincoln County, where I live, write and work. So, this piece came out in the rag, The Newport News Times, a Wednesday and Friday newspaper sucking wind for sure, but still, a newspaper. This is what the community standards can take, so after this piece, I’ll comment, take out the machetes, and blaze through what it really means, Banning Books (ideas/curricula/discussion/debate/protest/public displays/thinking) .
I cut my teeth in El Paso as a graduate TA teaching English – writing, composition, remedial reading, literature – in the early 1980s. That’s when librarians were robust, gutsy and on the front lines of free speech. They helped develop library materials and organize talks around Banned Books Week (September 26 – October 2).
I also peddled stories and books as a fiction writer, and I was the Sunday book reviewer for the El Paso Times. My raison d’être was to make sure my writing and everyone else’s was made available to me, my students and my colleagues.
Throughout the next forty years, I’ve headed up talks and readings celebrating diverse voices and works from people outside the Eurocentric dominant force in our traditional K12 and higher education arenas. Books by Caribbean, Mexican, South American, Central American, Native American, Iranian or Ethiopian writers were not just curiosities. For many of my students, reading Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Sherman Alexie or Zora Neal Hurston created a deep and long-lasting interest in their own cultures, in education, in lifelong reading and in bringing into focus the power of their own identifies reflected in others’ writing.
This year’s banned book week is tantamount to motivating as many people as possible to understand active and passive censorship.
There are entire lists of books removed from high school libraries. There are all kinds of books that are targets of school boards, parents groups, religious groups and political advocacy committees. As a writer, I know my published words are not always appreciated by a variety of readers. I write with many hats on, and in that capacity, I am able to cross the Rubicon many times: from poetry, to fiction, to essays, to polemics, to blogs, to traditional journalism, and more.
I’ve faced down bigotry and hate for books I have put on my syllabi. I have had people walk out of my readings and those of more important people like Winona LaDuke or Tim O’Brien. Walking out is one’s right, and so are bigoted diatribes.
However, stopping the publication of books and demanding books be removed is not a right. I was teaching at a state community college in Washington when I faced a student who demanded I give her an alternative text for – The Fight Club. Ironically, we looked at various themes in that book, and the writer, Chuck Palahniuk, was coming to town and opening himself up to talking with my students.
That English class included other books that got under the skin of other students and/or their parents (mind you, this was a college class, not a religious school). Bringing writers to campus and having students read their books is part and parcel what educators must do to open minds and create critical thinking.
College deans, department heads, provosts and even presidents must protect that right of freedom to read.
Yes, students in high school have a right to have a history teacher assign Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Or a film teacher has a right to assign her under-18-year-old students, I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes to delve into filmmaker Raoul Peck’s work.
Reading Fahrenheit 451 and then comparing Raymond Bradbury’s work to François Truffaut’s 1966 version or the 2018 adaptation directed by Ramin Bahrani is vital to learning. Today, cancel culture rests in identarian politics.
Misinformation campaigns around the 1619 Project or what “critical race theory” are ongoing. This muddies the water of opening up critical thinking skills for both educators and students.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman posits the future would look similar to the one depicted in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World. Postman explains that the only way to avoid this fate is to see and question what we’re seeing rather than blindly trusting the media.
Others predict a world unfolding closer to 1984, the George Orwell’s classic. Others might choose to riff with and analyze Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. All those books have been put on some school district’s banned book list: driven by a fervor seated in xenophobia, lack of understanding of what literature is, and deeply held conservative beliefs.
Cancelling out books is akin to burning them. We all know where that led the world. This year’s theme — “Books Unite Us. Censorship Divides Us.”
+–+
All right, then, end of the Op-Ed for the newspaper that is in a pretty typically odd community, though Newport does have that “dichotomy”: lots of professors and researchers at the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Sciences center, and the NOAA team posted here, and, those people from Oregon who have a few college degrees who ended up with summer homes here, now turned into full-time homes AND then the service economy, the logging industry, the fishing industry. You have to look at that, too, which is the divide in America, partially self-directed, and certainly directed by the elites, the billionaire class, the military-media-propaganda overlords.
When you see red vs blue, when you see cultural wars and the religious zealotry of the Christians, and when you have K12 so flagged and flogged, so vapid of real learning, real community- based learning, real critical thinking, then we get these divides. And, while the beautiful people, the managerial class, those in the upper income brackets far away from us, in the 80 Percent, well, they may have some Buddhist retreat or outward bound or special science camp to send their young ones, the reality is they especially, and those of us in the 80 percent, have adults and then youth and then each new brood epigenetically forced into sheeplehood and ignorance of who the enemy is, as Ralph Nader put down here:
If you think elementary, middle, and high school students know too little history, geography, and government, try asking them about the corporations that command so many hours of their day, their attention, what they consume, and their personal horizons.
Howard Zinn published A Young People’s History of the United States (2009), to go with his best-selling pioneering work, A People’s History of the United States (1980), but he didn’t do justice to all the modern corporate controls of just about every facet of American life, including educational institutions.
Today, school children are engulfed by corporate apps and software, textbooks biased toward the corporate definitions of an economy, and myths about “free markets.” For years free school materials and videos produced or sponsored by business groups, including the coal and nuclear industries, have flooded elementary classes. Our report: Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools by Sheila Harty (1979), documented this mercantile assault on education. Students even take tests designed by corporate institutions. (DV– “Teach Youngsters about Corporatism’s Harms”)
Yes, this lack of disclosure and exposure around how curricula and school junk and colleges and university endowments are predicated on what the rich, the powerful, the gigantic, the corporations, the MIC want included and not included in teaching, books, materials, etc., it might even been worse than that.
To the left of this piece is a list of DV-recommended books. I’ve read many, and I’ve written two of them. Few people I know, however, read books, and those they do, are insipidly bad, soap opera porn, feel good and how to do/be/see/eat/cook/make money books.
Fiction, and hardcore deeply researched and lived books on China, on Mexico, on all those countries that are shit-holes in the eyes of Biden/Trump/Lesser Evils, they aren’t read by the so-called managers of democracy, the administration, the honchos-as appointed to all those governmental positions. The books aren’t read by the generals or the CEOs.
The books on really the core of the problems globally and locally are not read by the people who need to be taken to the woodshed for a real tutelage of the mind by the people who live in, say, North Korea, and know the language and have books with 80 pages works cited and endnotes.
The Zuckerberg, the USA Today, the ticker-tape of Fox-UnNews and CNN (Clinton/CIA UnNews Network) and then all the followers in media looking for less gray, fewer second and third page jumps, they are part of the problem of killing knowledge, curiosity, deep thinking and robust public arena smart dialogue.
Echo chambers, sure, the have always been there, especially if you end up in groups like the Chamber of Commerce or any group that pushes a group-think and allegiance to a narrow (usually pro Capitalist/pro Business/pro USA/ pro Empire mentality.
It only gets worse, this banned books concept. The reality is that the Newport News Times would NEVER run a piece, a long one, on people (let’s give them degrees and long titles and decent worldviews) who might be looking into lockdowns, the legality of lockdwons/lockups, the origin of DARPA jabs, the history of USA bio-poison-toxin weaponry research). NEVER.
Putting my byline on that too, as a journalist, would subject me to threats, death threats, deplatforming, and probably termination. I’d not get gigs teaching (there are not many) at the local community college. Even if I wrote the piece as traditional long-form journalism, pulling in too-man-to-count experts on virology, on vaccines, on medical procedures, on the history and politics of medicine and bioweaponry research and the illegal doings of the Big Pharma. Nope.
So, that is a form of banned books, vis-a-vis the gatekeepers, those community standards, all those aspects of Edward Bernays and Josef Goebbels concocted 9 Forms of propaganda, the one that marketers really utilize, BandWagon.
I’ll list more of those techniques below. But, again, it is what isn’t taught, what isn’t allowed, what isn’t debated, what isn’t filmed/acted/written about that is what signifies as a ban. Think of all the books that were written, and alas, those are now gone, gone, gone.
The person who controls the spigot, the information channels, the medium for the messages, controls the narrative. Having Americans unlearn all the bad things, all the insipidly racist, retrograde, misogynistic, xenophobic, anti-people of color shit that comes across the desks of teachers, educational planners, curriculum designers and then into the folders and Google Chromebooks, that is a huge task.
Bad habits die hard, or long.
We need a 12-step program for re-centering this generation so they can breed the next and they the next of real thinkers. And I am not just come fly on the wall, or Pollyanna. I have fought hard in the colleges and universities and newsrooms and social work domains for a real sense of social justice, but also deep knowledge based thinking, and what I have come across is the dumb-downing of everything.
Sure, we can listen to Henry Giroux and Chris Hedges, but again, they’re two elites in their fields (millionaires with a small “m”). They never interview or have on their shows lesser known or unknown people on who might set the record straight.
While Hedges goes after/attacks the celebrity culture, he is still colonized by it in some form, always going to the person with laurels and with titles and books.
Yes, this a good interview, but I guarantee few like me will watch is, and the elites will never watch it:
Then, sure, Giroux and Hedges get to some facts, but again, they go for the Republican Party and the Conservatives and Rightwing Racists as their whipping posts.
They are far from knowledgeable around how poorly placed those Democrats are, those mandate fuckers, all those incredibly bad nightmarish Democratic Governors are.
CH: Welcome to On Contact. Today, we discuss the age of manufactured ignorance with the scholar, Henry Giroux.
HG: Power, when it’s invisible, becomes all the more powerful, to use that term. But I think there are two issues here for me about neoliberalism in relation to your question, that are really central. One is it operates off the assumption that there’s no such thing as social problems, that there are only individual problems. And this notion that we’re ultimately and individually responsible for everything that happens to us literally depoliticizes people because it makes incapable of translating private issues into larger, systemic considerations. So there’s this question of this really putrid notion of market-based individuals, and this inability to translate and bring together, and connect issues that would give people a full understanding of the world in which they live in, what they may be able to do about it. Particularly as it affects their everyday lives.
Yes, so much more could be written about what isn’t in the curriculum, how British Petroleum (BP, the new marketing tool after the blowout of millions of gallons of crude in the Gulf of Mexico — Deep Horizon, anyone?) designed the geology and other sciences curriculum in California. Monsanto gives money to Washington State University, so you think those departments are going to have an easy time of challenge Round-up and GMOs?
Come on — I was in Spokane, wrote about this stupidity, and alas, this is a form of censorship that takes place and never makes the news like Michael Pollan did:
A book chosen by a Washington State University committee as appropriate food for thought for all incoming freshmen will not be distributed at summer orientation after a member of the board of regents raised concerns about the work’s focus on problems associated with agribusiness.
WSU’s president said the decision to halt the “common reading” program was related to the university’s financial crisis.
In “Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals,” author Michael Pollan discusses the social, political, moral and environmental implications of the food people eat.
A selection committee picked the book for this year’s WSU common reading program, which provides freshmen with a work that crosses academic disciplines and can be incorporated into study throughout the year. (source)
UPDATE: Washington State University reinstates freshman reading of ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’
Imagine, all those books taken off the shelves of public libraries. This is not just a ban To Kill a Mockingbird moment.
This is not silly, either, and Banned Books week does what it does, for sure, but, again, would Ward Churchill be invited to campus to read from one of his books, or the essay that got him un-tenured?
…what I think we’re witnessing fifty years on is consolidation of precisely the kind of entity extolled by then-U/Cal Berkeley president Clark Kerr in his 1963 book, The Uses of the University. For those unfamiliar with the tract, Kerr likened what he preferred to call “multiversities” to governmentally/corporately-owned factories—albeit, “knowledge factories”—wherein managers such as himself employed to oversee a worker force—the faculty—whose job it was to convert raw material—that is, students—into the finished product or products desired by the owners, all with maximal efficiency. Sound familiar? (Churchill)
The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 377 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2019. Of the 566 books that were targeted, here are the most challenged, along with the reasons cited for censoring the books:
George by Alex Gino
Reasons: challenged, banned, restricted, and hidden to avoid controversy; for LGBTQIA+ content and a transgender character; because schools and libraries should not “put books in a child’s hand that require discussion”; for sexual references; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint and “traditional family structure”
Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin
Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, for “its effect on any young people who would read it,” and for concerns that it was sexually explicit and biased
A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss, illustrated by EG Keller
Reasons: challenged and vandalized for LGBTQIA+ content and political viewpoints, for concerns that it is “designed to pollute the morals of its readers,” and for not including a content warning
Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg, illustrated by Fiona Smyth
Reasons: challenged, banned, and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content; for discussing gender identity and sex education; and for concerns that the title and illustrations were “inappropriate”
Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack, illustrated by Stevie Lewis
Reasons: challenged and restricted for featuring a gay marriage and LGBTQIA+ content; for being “a deliberate attempt to indoctrinate young children” with the potential to cause confusion, curiosity, and gender dysphoria; and for conflicting with a religious viewpoint
I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas
Reasons: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content, for a transgender character, and for confronting a topic that is “sensitive, controversial, and politically charged”
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Reasons: banned and challenged for profanity and for “vulgarity and sexual overtones”
Drama written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier
Reasons: challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and for concerns that it goes against “family values/morals”
Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
Reasons: banned and forbidden from discussion for referring to magic and witchcraft, for containing actual curses and spells, and for characters that use “nefarious means” to attain goals
And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson illustrated by Henry Cole
Reason: challenged and relocated for LGBTQIA+ content
And so it goes. Imagine all the ideas stopped and flailed and all the books never written but should have been written. Imagine all the ignorance peddled by marketers, publishers, media, government, corporations. Imagine all the harm done with these lies. Wars and genocide, started and perpetrated because of knowledge and thinking bans. You think Turkey wants the Armenian Genocide in their k12 history books. Israel and the Nakba in their books? The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing in those Japanese books? Right!
Planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence used to be taught by yours truly around the consumer/retail war, the Story of Stuff. Planned and perceived obsolescence is now really agnotology, and the erasing of people, the caste systems being set loose and the Fourth Industrial Digital Gulag Revolution. No little newspaper like the one in my county will deal with these topics. Why should it when the reality is giant schools like WSU try a ban, or the papers of record, the big ones, throughout the land, to include the NYT and WaPo are in so many ways rotten to the core, in the service of the Military Congressional Industrial Complex and the billionaires and giant corporations.
Onward, to the propaganda, those Mad Men/Mad Women and the USA and EU and Capitalists Murder Incorporated!
The biggest and most widespread blind spot among those who oppose totalitarian control by the powerful is the assumption that it has not already been achieved.
We’ve been so busy watching out for the next overtly totalitarian dictatorship that wants to put the jackboot on our necks we never noticed the covert totalitarians sliding the shackles around our minds.
Everyone thinks about the abusers who beat their spouses, but not the abusers who dominate their spouses’ minds with psychological manipulation.
Everyone thinks about psychopathic killers prowling the streets, but not the psychopathic killers who rule our world via mass-scale manipulation.
Conspiracy analysts warn that the government is trying to give everyone a social credit score to force us all to comply with the agendas of the powerful, in nations where mass-scale narrative management through the media and online algorithms already manipulates everyone into complying with the agendas of the powerful.
People assume that they aren’t already behaving exactly how the powerful want them to behave within a civilization whose political, monetary and economic systems are already completely under the control of the powerful.
People think they are free just because they can go and buy whatever they want in an economy rigged for the powerful using money rigged for the powerful, because they can say whatever they want on internet platforms whose algorithms are manipulated by the powerful, because they can vote for a politician who only got on the ballot by being owned by the powerful.
People think they are free because the system let them elect a “populist” like Donald Trump, even after that “populist” spent four years doing nothing but advancing the interests of the powerful.
People think they are free because the system lets them elect “progressives” like Bernie Sanders and AOC, even though those “progressives” always stop short when it comes time to challenge real power.
People spent generations arguing for the right to own guns so they can defend themselves against tyranny while the iron bars of tyranny were quietly being constructed around them the entire time.
Western leftists are so busy arguing with each other that they haven’t noticed that the left has been so effectively sabotaged, hijacked, subverted and neutered in our society that it is now little more than a glorified group chat.
If our information is valuable enough to make Facebook into a trillion-dollar company via surveillance capitalism, we may be absolutely certain that our information is also valuable enough for opaque government agencies to work on gathering our information for its own purposes.
The science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for more than a century, which is an eternity when you think of all the advances in other military technologies that have been achieved during that time. They’re only getting better and better at this, and now the internet has given them unprecedented access to the inner workings of our collective psychology.
A wife who’s been psychologically dominated into doing everything her husband wants doesn’t notice she’s being abused, because she isn’t being beaten into doing those things; she thinks she’s doing what she wants to do.
A population that’s been psychologically dominated into doing everything the powerful want doesn’t notice that it is being tyrannized, because it isn’t being forced to do those things at gunpoint; people think they are doing what they want to do.
None of the people warning of Orwellian dystopia get it: we’re already there. We’re already marching in perfect alignment with what our rulers desire for us. We just haven’t noticed because we’re still able to eat McDonald’s and watch internet porn.
They’re still tightening the bolts in various ways to make sure we don’t escape our prison, but make no mistake: those prison walls are already fully constructed, and have been for a while now.
The walls aren’t physical; the chains are affixed to our minds. But what is the functional difference between a populace which obeys the powerful because it is forced to and a populace which obeys the powerful because it was manipulated into wanting to?
We are trapped. We are checkmated. At least, as long as our minds continue to operate in a way that can be easily manipulated.
It is possible that humanity can collectively break free from this propaganda-induced trance by means of a mass-scale psychological transformation out of our unhealthy relationship with mental narrative, and there are some signs that such a transformation may be on its way.
Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t; every species comes to a point where it either makes the adaptations necessary for its survival or it doesn’t. As the powerful use the chains around our minds to march us all toward an existential cliff’s edge of ecocide and nuclear brinkmanship, we’re about to find out which one we are.
___________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
It says a lot that AOC wasn’t even able to vote against an Israeli apartheid measure that everyone already knew would pass regardless of her vote.
I mean, how far gone is your progressive revolution if you’re not even allowed to have a perfectly safe performative “no” vote? If even the illusion of opposition is banned?
❖
People say, “Why pick on AOC when other lawmakers are way worse?”
They’re not worse, they just perform different functions. The Manchins and Sinemas kill leftward movement openly, the AOCs encourage the left to feed their political energy into a party that’s built to kill leftward movement.
It happens that one of these manipulations is much easier for leftwardy-inclined people to see than the other; it’s easier to recognize Manchin and Sinema-type bullshit than AOC-type bullshit. So you’ll see some factions on the left putting special emphasis on pointing out the one that the general public needs a lot more help recognizing.
❖
I don’t know who needs to hear this but there is no functional difference between a politician who votes a certain way because they want to and a politician who votes a certain way because systemic pressures push them to.
It’s like Trump supporters saying he wanted to fight the Deep State but the Deep State wouldn’t let him. It’s like, okay, so? Who gives a fuck? Either he’s an asshole or an impotent puppet, either way fuck him. Same with AOC and her constant establishment capitulations. Whether they’re serving the empire because they want to or because they have to, it’s clear and undeniable that electoral politics isn’t the way to advance the interests of normal human beings. The system simply does not allow for that.
The absolute least important thing in the universe is how some politician’s feelings are feeling inside. It does not matter what secret intentions they have in their heart. All that matters is what they do. If they can’t do what you need them to, it means they’re useless. Period.
❖
The single greatest threat to freedom and democracy is not foreign governments, nor the authoritarian measures being implemented by our own governments, but the fact that giant media and tech companies are used to continuously manipulate the way people think about all of those governments.
You are not free if your mind is not free. It doesn’t matter if you were free to say and do whatever you want if the powerful are still actively manipulating the thoughts you think, because all your words and actions will arise from those thoughts. Mental sovereignty comes first.
❖
In an alternate universe the governments of a parallel Earth responded to the pandemic by pouring money into healthcare systems, transferring wealth from their nations’ richest to their poorest, and saying “Here’s a new vaccine but it’s up to you whether you use it or not.”
❖
It’s true that knowledge is power. That’s why the powerful work to control people’s access to knowledge through the internet and news media. It’s also why there’s privacy for the powerful and radical transparency for the public, instead of the other way around as it ought to be.
❖
Biden proclaiming that the US is no longer at war because he moved a few thousand troops out of Afghanistan is the most Trump-like thing that has happened so far in this very Trumpian administration.
❖
The US is like “We do not seek a new cold war, we simply seek to remain the unipolar dominator of the entire planet and maintain the ability to unilaterally destroy smaller nations which disobey us. And we’ll do anything to accomplish this, including waging a new cold war.”
❖
George W Bush should never be able to give any speech anywhere without people in the audience cutting him off to yell about his war crimes.
❖
Invented a highly effective new antidepressant that I hope to get to the market ASAP. It’s not a pill it’s just a big wad of cash taken by force from giant corporations.
❖
Mothers and nurses work harder than any billionaire on earth.
❖
People complain about how I do my thing here and say I should do it some other way, and I totally get it. One time I went to an AC/DC concert and they played not one note of smooth jazz. I was so angry.
❖
We are ruled by a nuclear-armed globe-spanning power structure which is driving our world to its doom in myriad ways and that power structure has somehow seamlessly paced us from fearing terrorists to fearing Russian hackers to fearing anti-vaxxers instead of fearing it.
❖
Someone who calls you an “anti-vaxxer” for expressing moderate and reasonable human rights concerns about brand new government policies that affect everyone deserves as much respect as someone who calls you an “anti-semite” for voicing legitimate criticisms of Israeli apartheid.
❖
Having principles means having them even when they don’t further your personal agenda. You may enjoy the sight of having your politics enforced by gunpoint today, but it completely demolishes your voice and integrity when police brutality comes for you tomorrow. Those little self-serving lies that we tell ourselves about how our principles don’t apply here because of blah-blah reason are the levers by which the powerful manipulate us into further and further submission.
❖
Propaganda works because it plugs into our most fundamental egoic mechanisms: identity and fear. Identify tightly with a group or political faction and you’ll accept propaganda which comes from there. Be driven by fear and that will be used to herd you into power-serving agendas.
If you want to free your mind from the chains of power it’s not enough to do research and memorize a bunch of facts. The most important step to freeing your mind from its shackles is to remove from yourself the psychological hooks to which those shackles are attached.
______________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Scenes of thousands of Afghans flooding the Kabul International Airport to flee the country as Taliban fighters were quickly consolidating their control over the capital, raised many questions, leading amongst them: who are these people and why are they running away?
In the US and other Western media, answers were readily available: they were mostly ‘translators’, Afghans who ‘collaborated’ with the US and other NATO countries; ‘activists’ who were escaping from the brutality awaiting them once the Americans and their allies left the country, and so on.
Actually, the answer is far more complex than that offered by Western officials and media, which ultimately – although inaccurately – conveyed the impression that NATO armies were in Afghanistan to safeguard human rights, to educate women and to bring civilization to a seemingly barbaric culture.
Though political dissent is a basic human right, there is a clear and definitive line between the legitimate right to challenge one’s government/regime and willingly collaborating with another – especially when that collaboration can have dire consequences on one’s own people.
In the United States and Europe, there are thousands of political dissidents from many parts of the world – from South America, the Middle East, East Asia, and others – who are, sadly, used as cheerleaders for political and military interventions, either directly by certain governments, or indirectly, through lobby and pressure groups, academic circles and mainstream media.
These individuals, often promoted as ‘experts’, appear and disappear whenever they are useful and when their usefulness expires. Some might even be sincere and well-intentioned when they speak out against, for example, human rights violations committed by certain regimes in their own home countries, but the outcome of their testimonies is almost always translated to self-serving policies.
Thousands of Afghans – political dissidents, NATO collaborators, students, athletes and workers seeking opportunities – have already arrived in various western capitals. Expectedly, many are being used by the media and various pressure groups to retrospectively justify the war on Afghanistan, as if it was a moral war. Desperate to live up to the expectations, Afghan ‘activists’ are already popping up on western political platforms, speaking about the Taliban’s dismal record of human rights and, especially, women’s rights.
But what is the point of appealing to the western moral consciousness after 20 years of a NATO-led deadly invasion that has cost Afghanistan hundreds of thousands of innocent people?
In Afghanistan, an alternative narrative is evolving.
On September 11, hundreds of Afghan women protested in Kabul University, not against the Taliban, but against other Afghan women who purport to speak from western capitals about all Afghan women.
“We are against those women who are protesting on the streets, claiming they are representative of women,” one of the speakers said, Agency France Press reported.
While AFP made a point of repeating that the women protesters have “pledged” their commitment to “all Taliban’s hardline policies on gender segregation”, emphasizing how they were all covered “head to toe,” the event was significant. Among many issues, it raises the question: who represents Afghan women, those who left or those who stayed?
A large banner held by the protesters in Kabul read: “Women who left Afghanistan cannot represent us.”
The truth is no one represents Afghan women except those who are democratically-elected by Afghan society to represent all sectors of that society, women included. Until real democracy is practiced in Afghanistan, the struggle will continue for real freedom, human rights, equality and, obviously, representation.
This fight can only take place within an organic, grassroots Afghan context – whether in Afghanistan or outside of the country – but certainly not through Fox News, the BBC or US Senate hearings.
The late Palestinian-American scholar, Professor Edward Said, had repeatedly warned of the pseudo reality painted by the ‘native informants’ – supposed political dissidents recruited by western governments to provide a convenient depiction of the reality in the Middle East and elsewhere, as a moral justification for war. The consequences, as the 2003 Iraq war and invasion have demonstrated, can be horrific.
Said challenged a particular ‘native informant’, the late Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese academic, whose ideas about the Iraqi enthusiasm for the US war, though proved disastrously wrong, were used by George W. Bush and others as proof that the impending war was destined to be a ‘cakewalk’.
Ajami’s ideas were long discredited, but the political machinations that still prefer ‘native informants’ to genuine human rights defenders and good scholarship remain in place. Many of the Afghan escapees are sure to be strategically placed through the same channels, which continue to promote interventions and sanctions as sound policies.
The war in Afghanistan has ended, hopefully for good, but the conflict on who represents the people of that war-torn country remains unresolved. It behooves the Taliban to deliver on its promises regarding equal representation and political plurality, otherwise there are many others abroad who will be ready to claim the role of legitimate representation.
In the Middle East, in particular, we have already witnessed this phenomenon of the west-based ‘legitimate’ democratic representations. Ultimately, these ‘governments-in-exile’ wrought nothing but further political deception, division, corruption, and continued war.
War-torn Afghanistan – exhausted, wounded and badly needing a respite – deserves better.
The roots of the Great Reset agenda can very clearly be traced back to 80 years ago, when James Burnham, wrote a book on his vision for “The Managerial Revolution,” Cynthia Chung writes.
Klaus Schwab, the architect of the World Economic Forum (f. 1971), a leading, if not the leading, influencer and funder for what will set the course for world economic policy outside of government, has been the cause of much concern and suspicion since his announcement of “The Great Reset” agenda at the 50th annual meeting of the WEF in June 2020.
The Great Reset initiative is a somewhat vague call for the need for global stakeholders to coordinate a simultaneous “management” of the effects of COVID-19 on the global economy, which they have eerily named as “pandenomics.” This, we are told, will be the new normal, the new reality that we will have to adjust ourselves to for the foreseeable future.
It should be known that at nearly its inception, the World Economic Forum had aligned itself with the Club of Rome, a think tank with an elite membership, founded in 1968, to address the problems of mankind. It was concluded by the Club of Rome in their extremely influential “Limits to Growth,” published in 1972, that such problems could not be solved on their own terms and that all were interrelated. In 1991, Club of Rome co-founder Sir Alexander King stated in the “The First Global Revolution” (an assessment of the first 30 years of the Club of Rome) that:
In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself. [emphasis added]
It is no surprise that with such a conclusion, part of the solution prescribed was the need for population control.
However, what forms of population control was Klaus Schwab in particular thinking of?
In the late 1960s, Schwab attended Harvard and among his teachers was Henry Kissinger, whom he has described as among the top figures who have most influenced his thinking over the course of his life.
Henry Kissinger and his former pupil, Klaus Schwab, welcome former- UK PM Ted Heath at the 1980 WEF annual meeting. (Source: World Economic Forum)
To get a better idea of the kinds of influences Henry Kissinger had on young Klaus Schwab, we should take a look at Kissinger’s infamous NSSM-200 report: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests, otherwise known as “The Kissinger Report,” published in 1974. This report, declassified in 1989, was instrumental in transforming US foreign policy from pro-development/pro-industry to the promotion of under-development through totalitarian methods in support of population control. Kissinger states in the report:
… if future numbers are to be kept within reasonable bounds, it is urgent that measures to reduce fertility be started and made effective in the 1970s and 1980s …[Financial] assistance will be given to other countries, considering such factors as population growth … Food and agricultural assistance is vital for any population sensitive development strategy … Allocation of scarce resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control … There is an alternative view that mandatory programs may be needed … [emphasis added]
For Kissinger, the US foreign policy orientation was mistaken on its emphasis of ending hunger by providing the means of industrial and scientific development to poor nations, according to Kissinger, such an initiative would only lead to further global disequilibrium as the new middle classes would consume more, and waste strategic resources.
In Thomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle of Population” (1799), he wrote:
We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. [emphasis added]
As a staunch Malthusian, Kissinger believed that “nature” had provided the means to cull the herd, and by using economic policies that utilised the courting of the plague, famine and so forth, they were simply enforcing a natural hierarchy which was required for global stability.
In addition to this extremely worrisome ideology that is only a stone’s throw away from eugenics, there has also been a great deal of disturbance over the 2016 World Economic Forum video that goes through their 8 “predictions” for how the world will change by 2030, with the slogan “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”
It is this slogan in particular that has probably caused the most panic amongst the average person questioning what the outcome of the Great Reset will truly look like. It has also caused much confusion as to who or what is at the root in shaping this very eerie, Orwellian prediction of the future.
Many have come to think that this root is the Communist Party of China. However, whatever your thoughts may be on the Chinese government and the intentions of President Xi, the roots of the Great Reset agenda can very clearly be traced back to 80 years ago, when an American, former Trotskyist who later joined the OSS, followed by the CIA, and went on to become the founding father of neo-conservatism, James Burnham, wrote a book on his vision for “The Managerial Revolution.”
In fact, it was the ideologies of Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution that triggered Orwell to write his “1984”.
The Strange Case and Many Faces of James Burnham
[James Burnham is] the real intellectual founder of the neoconservative movement and the original proselytizer, in America, of the theory of ‘totalitarianism.’
It is understandably the source of some confusion as to how a former high level Trotskyist became the founder of the neo-conservative movement; with the Trotskyists calling him a traitor to his kind, and the neo-conservatives describing it as an almost road to Damascus conversion in ideology.
However, the truth of the matter is that it is neither.
That is, James Burnham never changed his beliefs and convictions at any point during his journey through Trotskyism, OSS/CIA intelligence to neo-conservatism, although he may have back-stabbed many along the way, and this two-part series will go through why this is the case.
James Burnham was born in 1905 in Chicago, Illinois, raised as a Roman Catholic, later rejecting Catholicism while studying at Princeton and professing atheism for the rest of his life until shortly before his death whereby he reportedly returned to the church. 1 He would graduate from Princeton followed by the Balliol College, Oxford University and in 1929 would become a professor in philosophy at the New York University.
It was during this period that Burnham met Sidney Hook, who was also a professor in philosophy at the New York University, and who professed to have converted Burnham to Marxism in his autobiography. In 1933, along with Sidney Hook, Burnham helped to organize the socialist organization, the American Workers Party (AWP).
It would not be long before Burnham found Trotsky’s use of “dialectical materialism” to explain the interplay between the human and the historical forces in his “History of the Russian Revolution” to be brilliant. As founder of the Red Army, Trotsky had dedicated his life to the spread of a worldwide Communist revolution, to which Stalin opposed in the form of Trotsky’s “Permanent Revolution” ideology. In this ideology, Trotskyists were tactically trained to be militant experts at infighting, infiltration and disruption.
Among these tactics was “entryism,” in which an organisation encourages its members to join another, often larger organization, in an attempt to take over said organization or convert a large portion of its membership with its own ideology and directive.
The most well-known example of this technique was named the French Turn, when French Trotskyists in 1934 infiltrated the Section Francaise de l’International Ouvriere (SFIO, French Socialist Party) with the intention of winning over the more militant elements to their side.
That same year, Trotskyists in the Communist League of America (CLA) did a French turn on the American Workers Party, in a move that elevated the AWP’s James Burnham into the role of a Trotsky lieutenant and chief adviser.
Burnham would continue the tactics of infiltrating and subverting other leftist parties and in 1935 attempted to do a French Turn on the much larger Socialist Party (SP). However, by 1937, the Trotskyists were expelled from the Socialist Party which led to the formation of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at the end of the year. He would resign from the SWP in April 1940, and form the Workers Party only to resign less than two months later.
Burnham remained a “Trotskyist intellectual” from 1934 until 1940, using militant Trotskyist tactics against competing Marxist movements by turning their loyalties and ransacking their best talent. Although Burnham worked six years for the Trotskyists, as the new decade began, he renounced both Trotsky and “the ‘philosophy of Marxism’ dialectical materialism” altogether.
Perhaps Burnham was aware that the walls were closing in on Trotsky, and that it would only be a matter of six months from Burnham’s first renouncement that Trotsky would be assassinated by August 1940, at his compound outside Mexico City.
Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science. [emphasis added]
I reject, as you know, the “philosophy of Marxism,” dialectical materialism. …
The general Marxian theory of “universal history”, to the extent that it has any empirical content, seems to me disproved by modern historical and anthropological investigation.
Marxian economics seems to me for the most part either false or obsolete or meaningless in application to contemporary economic phenomena. Those aspects of Marxian economics which retain validity do not seem to me to justify the theoretical structure of the economics.
Not only do I believe it meaningless to say that “socialism is inevitable” and false that socialism is “the only alternative to capitalism”; I consider that on the basis of the evidence now available to us a new form of exploitive society (which I call “managerial society”) is not only possible but is a more probable outcome of the present than socialism. …
On no ideological, theoretic or political ground, then, can I recognize, or do I feel, any bond or allegiance to the Workers Party (or to any other Marxist party). That is simply the case, and I can no longer pretend about it, either to myself or to others. [emphasis added]
In 1941, Burnham would publish The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World, bringing him fame and fortune, listed by Henry Luce’s Life magazine as one of the top 100 outstanding books of 1924-1944.2
The Managerial Revolution
We cannot understand the revolution by restricting our analysis to the war [WWII]; we must understand the war as a phase in the development of the revolution.
– James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World, published April 24, 1972
In Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, he makes the case that if socialism were possible, it would have occurred as an outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution, but what happened instead was neither a reversion back to a capitalist system nor a transition to a socialist system, but rather a formation of a new organizational structure made up of an elite managerial class, the type of society he believed was in the process of replacing capitalism on a world scale.
He goes on to make the case that as seen with the transition from a feudal to a capitalist state being inevitable, so too will the transition from a capitalist to managerial state occur. And that ownership rights of production capabilities will no longer be owned by individuals but rather the state or institutions, he writes:
Effective class domination and privilege does, it is true, require control over the instruments of production; but this need not be exercised through individual private property rights. It can be done through what might be called corporate rights, possessed not by individuals as such but by institutions: as was the case conspicuously with many societies in which a priestly class was dominant…
Burnham proceeds to write:
If, in a managerial society, no individuals are to hold comparable property rights, how can any group of individuals constitute a ruling class?
The answer is comparatively simple and, as already noted, not without historical analogues. The managers will exercise their control over the instruments of production and gain preference in the distribution of the products, not directly, through property rights vested in them as individuals, but indirectly, through their control of the state which in turn will own and control the instruments of production. The state – that is, the institutions which comprise the state – will, if we wish to put it that way, be the ‘property’ of the managers. And that will be quite enough to place them in the position of the ruling class.
Burnham concedes that the ideologies required to facilitate this transition have not yet been fully worked out but goes on to say that they can be approximated:
from several different but similar directions, by, for example: Leninism-Stalinism; fascism-nazism; and, at a more primitive level, by New Dealism and such less influential [at the time] American ideologies as ‘technocracy’. This, then, is the skeleton of the theory, expressed in the language of the struggle for power.
This is, to be sure, a rather confusing paragraph but becomes clearer when we understand it from the specific viewpoint of Burnham. As Burnham sees it, all these different avenues are methods in which to achieve his vision of a managerial society because each form stresses the importance of the state as the central coordinating power, and that such a state will be governed by his “managers”. Burnham considers the different moral implications in each scenario irrelevant, as he makes clear early on in his book, he has chosen to detach himself from such questions.
Burnham goes to explain that the support of the masses is necessary for the success of any revolution, this is why the masses must be led to believe that they will benefit from such a revolution, when, in fact, it is only to replace one ruling class with another and nothing changes for the underdog. He explains that this is the case with the dream of a socialist state, that the universal equality promised by socialism is just a fairy tale told to the people so that they fight for the establishment of a new ruling class, then they are told that achieving a socialist state will take many decades, and that essentially, a managerial system must be put in place in the meantime.
Burnham makes the case that this is what happened in both Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia:
Nevertheless, it may still turn out that the new form of economy will be called ‘socialist.’ In those nations – Russia and Germany – which have advanced furthest toward the new [managerial] economy, ‘socialism’ or ‘national socialism’ is the term ordinarily used. The motivation for this terminology is not, naturally, the wish for scientific clarity but just the opposite. The word ‘socialism’ is used for ideological purposes in order to manipulate the favourable mass emotions attached to the historic socialist ideal of a free, classless, and international society and to hide the fact that the managerial economy is in actuality the basis for a new kind of exploiting, class society.
Burnham continues:
Those Nations – [Bolshevik] Russia, [Nazi] Germany and [Fascist] Italy – which have advanced furthest toward the managerial social structure are all of them, at present, totalitarian dictatorships…what distinguishes totalitarian dictatorship is the number of facets of life subject to the impact of the dictatorial rule. It is not merely political actions, in the narrower sense, that are involved; nearly every side of life, business and art and science and education and religion and recreation and morality are not merely influenced by but directly subjected to the totalitarian regime.
It should be noted that a totalitarian type of dictatorship would not have been possible in any age previous to our own. Totalitarianism presupposes the development of modern technology, especially of rapid communication and transportation. Without these latter, no government, no matter what its intentions, would have had at its disposal the physical means for coordinating so intimately so many of the aspects of life. Without rapid transportation and communication it was comparatively easy for men to keep many of their lives, out of reach of the government. This is no longer possible, or possible only to a much smaller degree, when governments today make deliberate use of the possibilities of modern technology.
Orwell’s Second Thoughts on Burnham
Burnham would go on to state in his “The Managerial Revolution” that the Russian Revolution, WWI and its aftermath, the Versailles Treaty gave final proof that capitalist world politics could no longer work and had come to an end. He described WWI as the last war of the capitalists and WWII as the first, but not last war, of the managerial society. Burnham made it clear that many more wars would have to be fought after WWII before a managerial society could finally fully take hold.
This ongoing war would lead to the destruction of sovereign nation states, such that only a small number of great nations would survive, culminating into the nuclei of three “super-states”, which Burnham predicted would be centered around the United States, Germany and Japan. He goes on to predict that these super-states will never be able to conquer the other and will be engaged in permanent war until some unforeseeable time. He predicts that Russia would be broken in two, with the west being incorporated into the German sphere and the east into the Japanese sphere. (Note that this book was published in 1941, such that Burnham was clearly of the view that Nazi Germany and fascist Japan would be the victors of WWII.)
Burnham states that “sovereignty will be restricted to the few super-states.”
In fact, he goes so far as to state early on in his book that the managerial revolution is not a prediction of something that will occur in the future, it is something that has already begun and is, in fact, in its final stages of becoming, that it has already successfully implemented itself worldwide and that the battle is essentially over.
The National Review, founded by James Burnham and William F. Buckley (more on this in part two), would like to put the veneer that although Orwell was critical of Burnham’s views that he was ultimately creatively inspired to write about it in his 1984 novel. Yes, inspired is one way to put it, or more aptly put, that he was horrified by Burnham’s vision and wrote his novel as a stark warning as to what would ultimately be the outcome of such monstrous theorizations, which he would to this day organise the zeitgeist of thought to be suspicious of anything resembling his neologisms such as “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, “Two Minutes Hate”, “Room 101”, “memory hole”, “Newspeak”, “doublethink”, “unperson”,”thoughtcrime”, and “groupthink”.
George Orwell, (real name Eric Arthur Blair), first published his Second Thoughts on James Burnham in May 1946. The novel 1984 would be published in 1949.
In his essay he dissects Burnham’s proposed ideology that he outlines in his “The Managerial Revolution” and “The Machiavellians” subtitled “Defenders of Freedom.”
Orwell writes:
It is clear that Burnham is fascinated by the spectacle of power, and that his sympathies were with Germany so long as Germany appeared to be winning the war…curiously enough, when one examines the predictions which Burnham has based on his general theory, one finds that in so far as they are verifiable, they have been falsified…It will be seen that Burnham’s predictions have not merely, when they were verifiable, turned out to be wrong, but that they have sometimes contradicted one another in a sensational way…Political predictions are usually wrong, because they are usually based on wish-thinking…Often the revealing factor is the date at which they are made…It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening…the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration…It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice…
Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo…The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end. Burnham’s writings are full of apocalyptic visions…Within the space of five years Burnham foretold the domination of Russia by Germany and of Germany by Russia. In each case he was obeying the same instinct: the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible.
Interestingly, and happily we hear, George Orwell does not take Burnham’s predictions of a managerial revolution as set in stone, but rather has shown itself within a short period of time to be a little too full of wishful thinking and bent on worshipping the power of the moment. However, this does not mean we must not take heed to the orchestrations of such mad men.
In Part two of this series, I will discuss Burnham’s entry into the OSS then CIA, how he became the founder of the neo-conservative movement and what are the implications for today’s world, especially concerning the Great Reset initiative.
James Burnham 1905–1987, National Review, July 11, 1987, p. 35.
Canby, Henry Seidel. “The 100 Outstanding Books of 1924–1944”, Life, 14 August 1944. Chosen in collaboration with the magazine’s editors.
There’s a quote from an ancient Buddhist text called the Dhammapada that’s often translated as, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.”
In other words our mental habits shape our personality and determine how that personality will behave, and that behavior contributes to the shaping of the world.
We see a similar line in the Upanishads of Hinduism: “As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.”
These are two different ways of expressing the same timeless observation we see pop up in various forms throughout philosophical traditions around the world: that our actions arise from our thoughts and our thoughts arise from our conditioned mental habits, so we need to be very careful about what those mental habits are since it will ultimately determine our destiny.
But the people who pour the most energy and attention into this timeless observation as a group are not the Buddhists, nor the Hindus, nor any religious or philosophical tradition at all. Those who are the most interested in studying and acting upon this insight are the powerful people who rule this world.
The powerful understand that because people’s actions follow from their thoughts and the destiny of the world follows from people’s actions, if you can control the thoughts people think at mass scale you can control the destiny of the world.
Control the way people collectively think about things and you can control the way they act, you can control the way they organize, and you can control the way they vote. This is important because people have become more literate and better at sharing information over the years, and therefore more aware of the value of freedom and equality, so it’s gotten harder and harder to deny them freedom and equality without sparking violent revolutions and winding up with your head in a basket.
Power structures of more “enlightened” societies have addressed this dilemma by giving people the illusion of freedom snd equality while still keeping them enslaved to the agendas of their rulers via mass-scale psychological manipulation. Media institutions, online platforms and think tanks are dominated by plutocrats in coordination with secretive government agencies to ensure that the information the majority of people consume serves the social, political, military and geostrategic interests of the ruling power structure.
This is why when you watch the news on TV it always kind of feels like they are deceiving you; that’s exactly what’s happening. Information that is inconvenient for the powerful is omitted, while information that serves the powerful is amplified and twisted in the most convenient light possible.
This happens not because the media-controlling class is personally leaning over the shoulder of every news reporter and instructing them to lie, but because if you control who runs a media outlet then you control who they will hire and who they will elevate, naturally giving rise to a system wherein reporters understand that the only way for them to advance their careers is to promote narratives which serve the ruling power establishment and marginalize narratives which don’t.
Many journalists – either for self-serving reasons or due to genuine befuddlement – are completely misinterpreting Bernie's media critique. The person who explained it most clearly was Noam Chomsky in this 90-second answer to an equally confused BBC host. This will clear it up: pic.twitter.com/AgznEp3LB1
The best way to manipulate people without their knowing it is to appeal to their strongest and most unconscious impulses. In practice this means tugging at the psychological hooks of the ego, which at their base level are fear and identity. If you’ve made a strong identity out of something like belonging to a certain political party or a certain ideological or ethnic group, then it will carry a lot of egoic weight for you. If you’re in a fear state then there will be a lot of egoic contraction and you’ll consequentially take your thoughts very seriously.
If you can appeal to people’s base impulses of fear and identification it becomes very easy to insert ideas into their minds and give them new mental habits, and that’s exactly what propagandists do. You need to fear the terrorists, the Russians and the Chinese, because they’re going to harm you. You need to support the Democratic Party and everything its pundits tell you, because that’s your tribe. Those anti-vaxxers over there are your real enemy, not the nuclear-armed globe-spanning power structure that is driving our world to its doom in myriad ways. And on and on and on.
They give us the illusion of freedom, but as long as they chain our minds with propaganda we are not free. It wouldn’t matter if they gave us every personal liberty imaginable if a critical mass of us were still thinking in ways which benefit the powerful, because those thoughts would cause us to act, organize and vote in a way that benefits our rulers and not us.
If we want to free our minds from the chains of power, it’s not enough to do research and memorize a bunch of facts about what’s really going on in our nation and our world. The most important step to freeing our minds from their shackles is to remove from ourselves the psychological hooks of fear and identity to which those shackles are attached. This means freeing ourselves from the delusions of egoic consciousness, which, funny enough, brings us right back around to the central tenets of Buddhism and Hinduism again.
As long as humanity is enslaved to the ego it will remain enslaved to abusive power structures, because manipulators will always be able to use our egoic hooks to propagandize us into supporting their interests at mass scale. Until then it won’t ultimately matter how many civil liberties we gain or lose, because we’ll still be unable to move beyond the bonds of our psychological chains.
Not until humanity collectively breaks free from the gravitational pull of egoic consciousness will we truly blast off into the real potentiality of our species.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
We praised their vast medical skills and knowledge. We banged our pots and pans for them and hung signs to profess our eternal gratitude. Well… maybe not exactly eternal. In 2021, you see, we’re dismissing their medical knowledge and our pots and pans have been replaced with pitchforks and torches.
The message to our “health care heroes” is simple: get the jab or else. Never mind that you are literally health care workers, we get to decide what medicines should be injected into you. And if you don’t like it, you’ll be fired — and you’ll deserve it. And once you’ve been fired for exerting your medical knowledge and protecting your bodily sovereignty, you may even be denied unemployment insurance. Good luck being homeless, you ignorant Trump lovers!
Never mind that just last year we genuflected in awe before your medical expertise. Today, we’ll publicly condemn you as unworthy of your scrubs. For example, here are just two excerpts from countless “letters to the editor” all across the Land of the Free:
“These workers are dishonoring their profession by neglecting patient safety and showing their ignorance of basic scientific facts. I have confidence that this group of people will not get their shots after the vaccines win full approval from federal regulators and will join other anti-vaxxers in spreading dangerous COVID variants.”
“If you don’t believe in medical science and the safety practices of the profession, then a career in medicine is not for you.”
Now, I have proven over and over that “basic scientific facts” and “medical science” are both tenuous concepts when viewed through the lens of current corporate propaganda. I won’t rehash that now but you can click here and here for two recent articles of mine. What also should be alarming is how easily programmable we’ve become.
The powers-that-be required us to support the “health care heroes” narrative in 2020. So we did with obedience and gusto. The narrative in 2021 is all about the jab. And boy, have we delivered! Most Americans not only lined up for a shot without knowing what was being done to them. They also became unpaid cheerleaders, pubic relations workers, and enforcers for Big Pharma and government mandates.After all, we’re all in this together… right?
Reminder: This is what happens in a culture addicted to propaganda and fake news…
The West Papua National Committee (KNPB) claims that an attack on a military post in Maybrat regency earlier this month is being used as a pretext to “force the KNPB into a corner” and to criminalise them, reports Suara Papua.
The September 2 attack on Kisor sub-district military post in Maybrat regency, West Papua province, killed four soldiers.
“There are vested interests and a plot by certain parties behind the killing for four TNI [Indonesian military] members at Kisor, Maybrat,” claimed KNPB spokesperson Ones Suhuniap in a statement sent to Suara Papua newspaper.
“First multinational palm oil companies, which are currently challenging [the cancellation of] permits in the western Birds Head region,” he said.
“Second, the construction of [new] Koramil [sub-district military commands] in several districts in South Sorong and Maybrat regencies.
“Third, the additional deployment of troops on the grounds of securing the PON XX Papua [20th Papua National Games].”
Suhuniap said the incident was a plot and a trap which had been arranged to distract public attention from a challenge by four palm oil companies with the Jayapura State Administrative Court (PTUN) against Sorong Regent Jhony Kamuru’s decision to revoke their permits.
Legalising Trans-Papua Highway posts
The “plot” was also to legalise and accelerate the construction of sub-district military posts and TNI and Indonesian police posts on the Trans-Papua highway connecting Manokwari and Sorong.
Suhuniap said that for the KNPB such a plot was nothing new and these methods were often used in Papua, especially against the KNPB.
As has been reported, the police claimed that a member of the civil society KNPB was involved in the attack, namely the movement’s chairperson in the Kisor sector.
However, what their alleged motive was and why they were involved, along with who the mastermind was behind the 19 people declared responsible for the attack had not been cited by the police.
Suhuniap said that if there were KNPB Maybrat members involved then there was a third party which provoked or trapped them into it and so it was necessary to discover the mastermind and what their interests were.
The KNPB did not kill or act in a hostile way towards other people, including the TNI and police, Suhuniap said.
“There is no agenda of murder directed against the authorities or special organisational instruction to attack members of the TNI and Indonesian police,” he said.
Investigation needed
“So the police must delve into and investigate this case further. Who was the mastermind behind the attack? Don’t criminalise the KNPB.” he said.
If the investigation found that KNPB members were proven to have been involved in the attack then their actions were taken as individuals, not the organisation.
“We as an organisation [the KNPB] have never carried out sabotage or urban guerrilla actions,” he said.
Suhuniap also said the attack was part of an Indonesian effort to counter public demands from within Papua and internationally for the release of KNPB international spokesperson Victor Yeimo.
“The state is shaping public opinion to distract the Papuan people’s attention from Victor Yeimo’s release and creating a sense of fear,” he said.
“Indonesian colonialism through its intelligence [services] are shaping public opinion and distracting the Papuan people’s attention by accusing the KNPB of being involved in the attack on the soldiers in Kisor.
“We believe that this effort to distract public attention is a cheap sort of intelligence propaganda to destroy and criminalise the KNPB.”
Suhuniap called on colleagues from West Papua’s 112 resistance movement organisations and all Papuan people to remain solid and not be influenced by the manipulation of public opinion.
“The Papuan people must be consistent in rejecting the extension of special autonomy, the unconditional release of Victor Yeimo and demanding the right to self-determination,” he said.
America is a unipolar superpower governed by octogenarians who work for corporations and banks where military weapons are made by prison slaves to be launched at impoverished foreigners while celebrities attend lavish galas and police guard food in dumpsters from the homeless.
❖
Propaganda warps people’s perspectives so drastically their own opinions don’t even adhere to the values they’ll tell you they hold. A liberal will get angrier about a random member of the public circulating a conspiracy theory than about government agencies killing children with bombs. Political Twitter got angrier about Joe Rogan taking ivermectin than the Pentagon murdering an entire Afghan family and lying about it. All sense of proportion and perspective has been scrambled.
❖
Facebook has had a two-tiered system where famous people won’t be censored or suspended for posts normal people would be. Politicians and celebrities freely ignore mask rules while their servants are forbidden to. They all think they’re better than us, and our systems agree with them.
❖
This is the only kind of revolution they will ever permit you to have. https://t.co/9TMmpEsFGG
If you rise to a position of influence in the western world you will immediately find yourself surrounded by people who are very interested in making sure you support status quo power structures, whether you’re a celebrity, a politician, or a social media executive.
❖
It’s weird how nobody’s even saying the vaccine isn’t working as well as they’d hoped it would. You’re not even allowed to say that. Everyone’s really disappointed but they’re pretending they’re not because anything but 100 percent big-smile cheerleading gets you branded an anti-vaxxer. Everyone’s gotta do this weird, super tense, phoney happy smiley dance about how perfect and not-at-all-disappointing the vaccine is, because being truthful about how disappointed you feel hurts the vaccination campaign and therefore means you’re worse than Hitler.
❖
The world is ruled by plutocrats and secretive government agencies and propaganda has enslaved public consciousness to ensure our compliance with their agendas. Global capitalism will grow ever more abusive until it is dispensed with. This was all already true long before Covid.
“The Great Reset will let corporate elites rule the world!”
They already do.
“They’ll be able to surveil us for state control!”
They already are.
“They’re taking our freedom!”
Your freedom was illusory.
“The vaccine is mind control!”
No that’s what the media’s for.
❖
If it wasn’t the World Economic Forum and the “Great Reset” it would be something else. Capitalism will always inevitably become more unjust, oppressive and corrupt and will keep taking on new forms to continue its cancerous spread. The ultimate problem is human behavior being driven by profit.
❖
At some point we’re going to realize that market forces and the profit motive do not have the wisdom to navigate through the existential crises humanity now faces. Only question is whether we’ll realize this in time to do something or realize it in our final gasps as a species.
❖
If Australia were to pivot its loyalty from Washington to Beijing, western media would suddenly take an interest in Aboriginal human rights and news cycles would be flooded with stories about the need for blockades to punish the Canberra regime for its brutal lockdown oppression.
❖
The worst thing about Australia is America.
❖
If you don't understand why Australia would undermine its own economic and security interests to pour a fortune into America's cold war with China, watch this. Australia isn't allied with the US to protect itself from China, it's allied with the US to protect itself from the US. https://t.co/m6CSKlrF4e
The most evil thing Biden has done as president is continuing Trump administration policies. The most evil thing Trump did as president was continuing Obama administration policies. If you can’t see this, it’s because you are blinkered by a manufactured partisan reality tunnel.
❖
Contemplating the very real possibility of nuclear war is good personal practice. Nothing gets you rearranging your priorities in your day-to-day living like an acute awareness that you could look out your window at any moment and see a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon.
❖
Most of the horrors in our world are man-made, and most of those man-made horrors are born out of a desire to control. A desire to control outcomes. A desire to control other people. A desire to control entire populations. A desire to control wealth. A desire to control the world. It’s all born of an egoic inability to let life be as it is.
❖
Your elections are fake. Your politicians are puppets. Your species is driven by the interplay of preceding forces stretching back throughout our entire evolutionary history and all the way into the Big Bang. The self is an illusion. No one is in charge. This is all made of love. You are love.
________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
![When you tear out a man's tongue..." -Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones [957x601]: QuotesPorn](http://i.imgur.com/FVJfxB5.png)
(@SomersetBean) 
I cut my teeth in El Paso as a graduate TA teaching English – writing, composition, remedial reading, literature – in the early 1980s. That’s when librarians were robust, gutsy and on the front lines of free speech. They helped develop library materials and organize talks around Banned Books Week (September 26 – October 2).
: