Category Archives: Media Literacy

Alt Media was Exposing Epstein Corruption as ABC was Covering it Up—Who’s the Real Fake News?

Posted on by
1

Prince Andrew with Jeffrey Epstein

By Matt Agorist

Source: Free Thought Project

One of the largest stories in the news this week was the ABC anchor who was recorded on a hot microphone ranting about how the network suppressed her story on Jeffrey Epstein and his ties to the elite — three years ago. While this admission was certainly noteworthy, it should come as no surprise. Over the past few years, the mainstream media, in general, has refused to report on any of Epstein’s ties to current and past government officials, Hollywood insiders, and even royalty. Now, as the “Epstein didn’t kill himself” memes storm the internet, it has all of the sudden become “cool” to finally talk about this insidious group of power elite predators. However, those of us in the alternative media have been talking about this stuff for years — before it was cool — and we were called conspiracy theorists for doing so.

In 2016, the Pizzagate conspiracy took the internet by storm and created a slew of unprovable theories that never materialized. While the mainstream media was shouting down the Pizzagate crowd, TFTP and others were reporting on the real child sex trafficking conspiracy involving Epstein and his friends like the Clintons. As we reported in 2016, flight logs showed that Bill Clinton allegedly took numerous flights on the “Lolita Express” (Epstein’s private jet) to “orgy island” (Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean) to engage in sex with underage girls.

Epstein is also tied to the current president Donald Trump. Indeed, prior to taking the White House, billionaire Donald Trump dished out praise for Epstein back in 2002, telling New York Magazine for an article, in hindsight, peculiarly titled, “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery,”

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

When we were reporting on these provable facts years ago, the mainstream media was suppressing them. Even Prince Andrew was tied to this convicted pedophile. In fact, one piece of evidence submitted during a lawsuit against Epstein last year was a photo of Prince Andrew with his arm around the underage victim, Virginia Roberts who claims that was she was both forced to have sex with Epstein and that she was “loaned out” to perform sex acts on his friends.

The photo resurfaced last year during the trials, yet it was entirely ignored by the mainstream. Coincidentally, any ties to the Royal Family have been ignored by the mainstream despite the evidence.

Why is that?

“The Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways,” Amy Robach, ‘Good Morning America’ Co-Host and Breaking News Anchor at ABC was recorded saying on a hot mic in the now viral video.

As ABC was taking marching orders from the Royal family to cover for a convicted pedophile, those of us in the trenches of alternative media were putting out reports left and right. The Miami Herald is arguably one of the largest purveyors and investigators in the Epstein corruption case, putting out bombshell after bombshell over the last few years. Sadly, however, most of it was ignored.

As TFTP has reported, Epstein is a convicted child molester and sexually abused no less than 40 underage girls. Despite this fact, Alexander Acosta protected him while serving as a U.S. Attorney in Florida.

Instead of going to prison for life, as he should’ve considering the evidence against him, Epstein only got 13 months and was allowed to stay in the Palm Beach County Jail in his own private cell where he was allowed to leave the prison six days a week for “work release.”

Instead of being investigated for letting this convicted pedophile off with a wrist slap, Acosta was appointed by Trump to Secretary of Labor. During his appointment hearing in 2017, Acosta defended the way he handled the Epstein case.

“At the end of the day, based on the evidence, professionals within a prosecutor’s office decide that a plea — that guarantees that someone goes to jail, that guarantees that someone register generally and that guarantees other outcomes — is a good thing,” he said.

As the Alternative Media was screaming from the rooftops — literally, we did a podcast on this last year —  that this man let a pedophile off with a wrist slap and was then appointed a high position in the government, the mainstream media ignored it once again. Only after Epstein was arrested did Acosta’s role become something the mainstream media would talk about. The coverage almost immediately led to this pedophile helper’s resignation.

When the Hollywood #metoo movement blew up, the mainstream media focused solely on a few people while ignoring Epstein’s ties to any of it. However, pining away with pertinent information were the folks at the Antimedia, showing the connections. 

When Epstein was being sued in Federal Court last year, the mainstream was again silent. But TFTP contributor, founder of the Conscience Resistance, and Houston mayoral candidate Derrick Broze was in Florida — standing in front of Epstein’s mansion — trying to get this information out to the public.

Yet again, the algorithms, the “fact checkers” and thought controllers acted almost in unison to silence these platforms. A month after TFTP published Broze’s extensive investigative work, our entire social media network across Facebook and Twitter, consisting of nearly 7 million followers, was surreptitiously wiped off the face of the internet. 

None of the information we have put out in regard to Epstein over the past few years has been wrong. Alternative media has had their finger on the pulse of the Epstein corruption for years, yet we have been shoved into the fringes by the mainstream. Coincidence?

Sadly, however, although it appears that they are finally reporting on the Epstein corruption, the mainstream media is still pussyfooting all over it. They are more concerned with Epstein’s death in jail than the actual connections to these elite child traffickers, many of whom are still free.

Whitney Webb with Mint Press News has been following the Epstein case down into the deepest crawls of the establishment and has been asking hard questions, like how the hell is Ghislaine Maxwell — who is alleged to have helped Epstein traffic these children — still walking around a free person? If you want a true glimpse into how deep the rabbit hole goes, you can take a look at their in depth coverage, here. 

The sleight of hand tactics employed by the mainstream are becoming more and more apparent as we progress through time. It is no surprise that they have earned the nickname “dinosaur media.” Let’s hope that those who help to protect society’s worst, who victimize and prey on innocent children, will one day find their platforms used for this protection, extinct, just like the dinosaurs.

It’s the DNC, Stupid: Democratic Party, Not Russia, Has Delegitimized the Democratic Process

Posted on by
Reply

By Elizabeth Vos

Source: Consortium News

Establishment Democrats and those who amplify them continue to project blame for the public’s doubt in the U.S. election process onto outside influence, despite the clear history of the party’s subversion of election integrity. The total inability of the Democratic Party establishment’s willingness to address even one of these critical failures does not give reason to hope that the nomination process in 2020 will be any less pre-ordained.

The Democratic Party’s bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential nomination, followed by the DNC defense counsel doubling down on its right to rig the race during the fraud lawsuit brought against the DNC, as well as the irregularities in the races between former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova, indicate a fatal breakdown of the U.S. democratic process spearheaded by the Democratic Party establishment. Influences transcending the DNC add to concerns regarding the integrity of the democratic process that have nothing to do with Russia, but which will also likely impact outcomes in 2020.

The content of the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks demonstrated that the DNC acted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the lead up to the 2016 Democratic primary. The emails also revealed corporate media reporters acting as surrogates of the DNC and its pro-Clinton agenda, going so far as to promote Donald Trump during the GOP primary process as a preferred “pied-piper candidate.” One cannot assume that similar evidence will be presented to the public in 2020, making it more important than ever to take stock of the unique lessons handed down to us by the 2016 race.

Social Media Meddling

Election meddling via social media did take place in 2016, though in a different guise and for a different cause from that which are best remembered. Twitter would eventually admit to actively suppressing hashtags referencing the DNC and Podesta emails in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Additional reports indicated that tech giant Google also showed measurable “pro-Hillary Clinton bias” in search results during 2016, resulting in the alleged swaying of between 2 and 10 millions voters in favor of Clinton.

On the Republican side, a recent episode of CNLive! featured discussion of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which undecided voters were micro-targeted with tailored advertising narrowed with the combined use of big data and artificial intelligence known collectively as “dark strategy.” CNLive! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan noted that SCL, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations “worldwide,” specializing in behavior modification. Though Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018, related companies remain.

The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding for the creation of an online “troll army” under the name Shareblue. The LA Times described the project as meant to “to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical.” In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign.

In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found broke federal law. Despite this, no prosecution for the breach was ever attempted.

Though the purge was not explicitly found to have benefitted Clinton, the admission falls in line with allegations across the country that the Democratic primary was interfered with to the benefit of the former secretary of state. These claims were further bolstered by reports indicating that voting results from the 2016 Democratic primary showed evidence of fraud.

DNC Fraud Lawsuit

The proceedings of the DNC fraud lawsuit provide the most damning evidence of the failure of the U.S. election process, especially within the Democratic Party. DNC defense lawyers argued in open court for the party’s right to appoint candidates at its own discretion, while simultaneously denying any “fiduciary duty” to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the impression that the DNC would act impartially towards the candidates involved.

In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC’s defense counsel argued against claims that the party defrauded Sanders’ supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders’ supporters knew the process was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC’s lawyers argued that it was the party’s right to select candidates.

The Observer noted the sentiments of Jared Beck, the attorney representing the plaintiffs of the lawsuit:

…“People paid money in reliance on the understanding that the primary elections for the Democratic nominee —nominating process in 2016 were fair and impartial, and that’s not just a bedrock assumption that we would assume just by virtue of the fact that we live in a democracy, and we assume that our elections are run in a fair and impartial manner. But that’s what the Democratic National Committee’s own charter says. It says it in black and white.”

The DNC defense counsel’s argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party’s right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was protected by the First Amendment. The DNC’s lawyers wrote:

“To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege would run directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties, especially when it comes to selecting the party’s nominee for public office.” [Emphasis added]

The DNC’s shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic.  This no indication that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race,

Tim Canova’s Allegations

If Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn’t enough, serious interference was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida’s 23rd congressional district. Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election in which Canova ran as an independent.

Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal ballot destruction, improper transportation of ballots, and generally shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the Sun-Sentinel reported at the time:

“[Canova] sought to look at the paper ballots in March 2017 and took Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes to court three months later when her office hadn’t fulfilled his request. Snipes approved the destruction of the ballots in September, signing a certification that said no court cases involving the ballots were pending.”

Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies. Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms.

Republicans appear no more motivated to protect voting integrity than the Democrats, with The Nation reporting that the GOP-controlled Senate blocked a bill this week that would have “mandated paper-ballot backups in case of election machine malfunctions.”

Study of Corporate Power

A 2014 study published by Princeton University found that corporate power had usurped the voting rights of the public: “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

In reviewing this sordid history, we see that the Democratic Party establishment has done everything in its power to disrespect voters and outright overrule them in the democratic primary process, defending their right to do so in the DNC fraud lawsuit. We’ve noted that interests transcending the DNC also represent escalating threats to election integrity as demonstrated in 2016.

Despite this, establishment Democrats and those who echo their views in the legacy press continue to deflect from their own wrongdoing and real threats to the election process by suggesting that mere discussion of it represents a campaign by Russia to attempt to malign the perceptionof the legitimacy of the U.S. democratic process.

Hillary Clinton’s recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being “groomed” by Russia, and that the former Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a “Russian asset”, were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments externalize what Gabbard called the “rot” in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet.

Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled: “Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent,” Jamali argued:

“Moscow will use its skillful propaganda machine to prop up Gabbard and use her as a tool to delegitimize the democratic process.” [Emphasis added]

Jamali surmises that Russia intends to “attack” our democracy by undermining the domestic perception of its legitimacy. This thesis is repeated later in the piece when Jamali opines: “They want to see a retreat of American influence. What better way to accomplish that than to attack our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of our elections.” [Emphasis added]

The only thing worth protecting, according to Jamali and those who amplify his work (including former Clinton aide and establishment Democrat Neera Tanden), is the perception of the democratic process, not the actual functioning vitality of it. Such deflective tactics ensure that Russia will continue to be used as a convenient international pretext for silencing domestic dissent as we move into 2020.

Given all this, how can one expect the outcome of a 2020 Democratic Primary — or even the general election – to be any fairer or transparent than 2016?

 

Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter, co-host of CN Live! and regular contributor to Consortium News. 

How Far Will They Go?

Posted on by
1

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

CBS-News carried another bucket of muddy water for the coup team Sunday night with a lead 60 Minutes agit-prop story on Maria Butina, an ambitious Russian cutie who worked the American NRA circuit in the most public manner imaginable to make herself into a sex-bomb celebrity at the exact moment in history when the US Deep State wished to reinforce the fantasy, as Lesley Stahl put it, that “Russia was interfering in our electoral process.”

Of course, Ms. Stahl and her shifty producers left out half the story: how Maria Butina was manipulated by her FBI-handler and sometime-boyfriend, Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who had been employed by the Bureau over the years on other undercover assignments. They didn’t mention him or seek to understand his role in the operation. But they gave plenty of air-time to the DOJ lawyer, John C Demers, who prosecuted Ms. Butina, and never bothered to ask Demers why Butina was not charged with espionage — perhaps because nothing remotely like that occurred.

How media giants like Ms. Stahl can keep mouthing this malarkey designed to stoke a new cold war is one of the great mysteries of our national psychology these days. You’d think they’d learned something from the train wreck of the Mueller Investigation, the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco, and the current debacle of Adam Schiff’s imploding Ukraine whistleblower caper — namely, that spouting lies will eventually get you found-out and disgraced.

But the coup team is now dangerously stuck tripling and quadrupling down on its fairy tale narrative as the reckoning of its dark deeds approaches and its star players await their turns on the witness stand. Half the country has been waiting patiently for authorities-of-standing to put an end to this Hitchcockian campaign of seditious fog that has driven us close to the brink of a second civil war. That half of the country has actually been reading the evidence of this treason and sedition — underwritten by Hillary Clinton and her allies — on the back-channels of the Internet. None of that evidence has been posted through the main media outlets wholly owned by the coup team, gospel to the other half of America, and soon millions of credulous bystanders who got high on three years of CIA-issued RussiaGate Kool-Aid will get the surprise of their lives when they discover how deeply they were played.

The CIA and the FBI are in a fight for their lives now. The evidence shows pretty clearly that these rogue agencies conducted all the election “meddling” of 2016 and that the RussiaGate hysteria was an engineered smokescreen to hide their tracks and cover their asses when the certainty of a Hillary election triumph nauseatingly resolved unfavorably in the cold, gray dawn of 11/8/16. Despite the chatter about an “insurance policy,” they were quite unprepared for the exposure that loomed.

They also badly underestimated the resources of what is now a very sturdy alt.media which has managed to weave the real story of what happened over the past three years into a shocking tapestry of massive subversion and treachery. A big part of the true story is how amazingly incompetent the RussiaGate coupsters were. Did they really believe they could conceal the ties between their agencies and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS operation, and its feckless front man, British ex-spy Christopher Steele, and the whole outfit’s connection to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee? Did they suppose they could pass off Stephan Halper and Joseph Mifsud as Russian agents when the two have consorted with US and allied intelligence for decades? The US Department of Defense even holds Mr. Halper’s million-dollar pay stubs and Mr. Mifsud appears in photographs of every Western cloak-and-dagger cocktail get-together of spook officialdom for the last twenty years.

The latest, and most desperate gambit is the UkraineGate whistleblower, a CIA employee blatantly playing errand-boy for his mentor John Brennan and deeply tied to 2016 election shenanigans emanating from Ukraine, featuring his former employer, ex-Vice-President Joe Biden. This shadowy figure, pegged as Eric Ciaramella, 33, may shortly find himself in a grand jury chamber answering for his role in this charade. Ciaramella has just been hung out to dry by his sponsor, Rep. Adam Schiff in a desperate attempt to dissociate himself from the huggermugger within his House Intel Committee that preceded the falsely blown whistle.

It’s not an overstatement to say that many of the figures behind this gigantic web of lies and deceit ought to answer charges up to and including treason. The question is whether Messers Barr & Durham have the cojones to cater the banquet of consequences that this huge cast of characters should be made to feast from. Another question is whether these desperate characters and the agencies they represent will go all the way now and attempt to enlist the military brass in an outright overthrow of the executive. There are already intimations of this. It would be answered by the kind of civil violence that has broken out in other parts of world where other Deep States have worn out their welcome — and their legitimacy.

Surviving on the Battlefield in the Information War

Posted on by
1

By Tony Cartalucci

Source: New Eastern Outlook

There is undoubtedly an information war raging. There are intentional liars, people who witlessly repeat these lies, poor research, and opinions spun to look as if it is research. To sort the ever increasing amount of information from disinformation, there are a few simple methods people can use.

But above all, people must personally dedicate themselves to following the truth no matter where it brings them, having the courage to accept a reality that may not necessarily mesh with their current perception. The inability to do this will render moot all other means of determining the veracity of any given report or piece of analysis.

Find the Original Source

This is fundamental. When anyone, anywhere makes a claim, whether it is in a historical documentary or book, or regarding current events, one must find the original source. Where did this information come from? Is it a direct quote? If so, can this quote be verified? If the quote is “alleged” or “leaked” or otherwise second-hand information or the sources never revealed, it is impossible to verify and therefore impossible to consider as verified.

Often conversations relayed by second-hand sources serve as the basis of propaganda. It is essentially the process of placing words into the mouths of people who never said anything of the sort. Media that repeatedly uses quotes that are impossible to verify may be engaged in disinformation.

If the quote is confirmed, that alone does not mean that what was said was “true.” It simply means that someone made a statement – the veracity of which must be determined through other means. Finding the source of a claim often helps shatter long-held myths. This is particularly true in regards to historical matters.

Follow the Money

All protests, political movements, and armed struggles require immense amounts of resources to start, perpetuate, and most importantly to succeed.  They also require leadership. If one finds themselves reading reports of events that do not mention funding or the names of specific leaders, either those reporting on the events don’t have these facts and should make note that such information is both missing and essential to find, or misdirection and disinformation is at play.

Omitting these facts has been done intentionally across the Western media to obfuscate Western involvement particularly in “political uprisings” and “armed rebellions” that are made to appear spontaneous and indigenous but are in fact long-planned, foreign-backed conspiracies. The so-called “Arab Spring” is perhaps the most notorious example of this, where the Western media failed intentionally and repeatedly to identify the funding and individuals involved in both street protests and subsequent armed attacks on security agencies across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Had the public carefully read through reports, and followed the money, they would have found a combination of US State Department money and the Anglo-American-backed Muslim Brotherhood behind each and every “uprising” across the Middle East, with Al Qaeda forming the subsequent armed groups that overran Libya and are currently leading attempts to overthrow the government of Syria.

Look at What People Do, Not at What They Say…

There are media reports, government press releases, op-eds, analysis, and policy papers of every kind. Many times, these various sources contradict each other. How does one go about determining which is true and which is disinformation? It is quite simple, don’t simply listen to what reporters, analysts, and policymakers say, look at what they and those they have influence over are doing.

The United States claims that it is fighting the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) in Syria. However, if we “follow the money” and realize that it is impossible for ISIS to sustain its fighting capacity within Syria or Iraq alone, and requires an immense amount of resources from abroad to continue its operations, we realize those resources are undoubtedly passing through territory the US and its allies in fact control.

That the US is not interdicting these vital supplies, including additional fighters, weapons, and cash, is proof that claims in the media and amid government press releases that the US is “fighting ISIS” are false.

Conversely, in veteran journalist Seymour Hersh’s 2007 New Yorker article, “The Redirection,” he stated explicitly, citing US and Saudi officials, that the West and its regional allies planned to use sectarian extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda to wage a regional proxy war against Syria and Iran. This also so happens to be precisely what is now playing out across the MENA region. Hersh’s analysis can be tracked down through his sources, by following the money – as only state-sponsorship can explain Al Qaeda and ISIS’ fighting capacity in Syria, Iraq, and beyond – and by simply looking at what is now unfolding across the region.

None of what the current corporate media or government press releases say can be verified in a similar manner, and certainly, none of what is said by the West currently, matches what is actually happening on the ground.

Finally, let us consider policy papers released by corporate-funded think tanks like the Brookings Institution. Such policy papers have repeatedly laid out plans for arming extremists, incrementally invading and occupying Syria, and eventually toppling the Syrian government. This too, is precisely what we see happening on the ground, though the Western media and Western representatives claim the cause is not a  premeditated Western conspiracy, but a series of coincidences and unfortunate turns of fate.

Final Thoughts 

The truth is hard to arrive at, not only because people intentionally seek to fool others, but because often, many unintentionally fool themselves. Reality can be unpleasant. Watching a nation be destroyed can be heartbreaking and the desire to insulate oneself from the pain through cognitive dissonance can be overwhelming. However, one of the greatest maxims in human conflict is to truly know yourself and know your enemy. Truth isn’t just a matter of virtue, it is a factor that will make the difference between victory and defeat.

If victory over the forces of greed and hegemony is truly our goal, then we must face the facts no matter how unpleasant. Our failure to do so will cost us everything – and those driven by greed and hegemony know. That is why they have invested so much in clouding reality and obfuscating the truth. We must invest more in seeing through this clouded reality, and discover the truth, no matter how unpleasant.

Phantom Performances – The Rise of the Spectacle

Posted on by
Reply

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

ˈspɛktək(ə)l/

noun

a visually striking performance or display

an event or scene regarded in terms of its visual impact

“Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image.” ~John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards

“Magical thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but also of totalitarian culture.” ~Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion

Welcome to the spectacle. Or perhaps I should say the kind of spectacle that has become the face of entertainment that pervades our westernized cultures. The way that the spectacle succeeds is that it isn’t so much about fooling us into believing its lies as real, but rather that it is we who ask to be fooled. We seek to suspend our sense of reality, to pursue a space of escape. The spectacle pulls us in because we lend our willingness to its agenda. If we are honest, in this post-truth age, we will admit to living in an age of spectacle. And it is from this that many of us receive our interpretation of reality. Since the middle of the 20th century onwards the ‘western spectacle’ has been in the form of media advertisement and propaganda. We may think that we’ve only recently arrived at the age of the spectacle, where Disneylandification is becoming the norm, and Super Bowls are interspersed with scantily-clad singers, and TV programs appear in the slots between advertisers. Yet the whole spectacle show has been a form of function creep ever since telecommunications first emerged as a social phenomenon. The image has been with humanity since the first dawn of our arising; from cave paintings to hieroglyphics to cuneiform clay tablets. The major difference is that today the spectacle of the image has not only gone global, but it has also gotten inside of our heads.

Western cultures especially (and the US specifically) have now made the image, the spectacle, and hence the illusion so grand, so vivid, and so persuasively realistic that they are becoming our basis of reality. We swing from one illusion to the alternative, which is still yet another grand spectacle; just as we swing from the political left to the right, believing each side is distinctly different. Yet each is a part of the same bubble that customizes our lives – they form a part of our news, our heroes, our tragedies, and our dreams. We now serve a mosaic of ideals carefully crafted as a patchwork of phantom performances. Nothing is ever real anymore except the painful extremes that pervade our daily existence: the violence, the suffering, the deprivation, the inequality, the disease. Only these fragments that create great pain become the real, and from these many of us seek refuge in a plenitude of diversions, distractions, and triviality.

Western civilization has chosen to be played out upon a grand stage where the performance – of invented storylines and scripts – runs the show. We move through social realities that are an entanglement of signs, virtual connections, and social media status. It’s all about who is going to be the next ‘influencer’? We are encouraged to project back into the world our entertainment-mediatized fantasies. People begin to act out their imaginary landscapes, often in violent and distorted ways, as young students massacre their classmates before going to eat at McDonalds. This is the hyperreal that distorts a stable reality, making it harder to gain a grounded perspective on things. People are increasingly being guided by the false totems of media-militarized-entertainment.

The media spectacle gives us our modern guiding images. This is similar to how in the Middle Ages images depicted in stained glass windows and paintings of religious torment or salvation acted to control and influence the social behavior of our ancestors. For many of us the white-bearded god above is dead, so we have media depictions of heroes, adventurers, McGyvers, celebrity-cosmetic makeovers, beauty pageants, talk shows and reality television to be our social guides. An illusory sensate reality has been erected that runs on pseudo-lives and phantom performances. Such phantom performances mask our personal failures and conveniently hide them behind a curtain of the unreal. People prefer to watch the rich and famous on television rather than face the domestic unhappiness of their own lives. Why have ice when you can have bubblegum-flavored ice-cream?

Luckily for those of us who live in the west we inhabit a world of easy-correction where we can make ourselves better if we buy certain products, ingest certain foods, and hang-out in the right yoga gyms. For every situation there is seemingly a commercial solution. We have not been abandoned, after all. In the realm of hyperreality, our fantasies are no longer an impediment to success. On the contrary, our fantasies are the portals through which we enter. All we need is for the world of the media to give us our dream. Everybody has talent, as the reality shows tell us – ‘Britain’s Got Talent,’ ‘America’s Got Talent:’ in fact, we’ve all got talent! We are all of us hidden unique performers, and the world ‘out there’ is begging for our arrival. This is not to be confused with the manipulation by greedy commercial enterprises that are ready to discard you as soon as your ‘talent’ no longer sells.

Yet the truth of the matter is that the spectacle of celebrity culture seeks commodities, not real individuals or souls. It doesn’t want that we seek for any form of transcendence, illumination, or real growth. It is a world that seeks only those that feed the phantom and encourage others to do the same. It is the ‘real’ that gets pushed into a black hole – to become a figment of the imagination, whilst imaginary dreams take its place. Celebrity culture thrives from the very lack of inner reflection. There is no ‘going within’ unless it is a form of medication going down our throats. If we are brutally honest, the celebrity spectacle is an ugly specter that can be as cruel as it is superficial.

The Spectacle of Celebrity Culture

No one achieves celebrity status on their own. It is a stage performance that requires a hoard of cultural enablers; from media, marketers, promoters, agents, handlers, and a host of hungry and gullible people. It is a veritable stage of actors, with each person in it to gain something for themselves. They either seek attention, satisfaction, fame, wealth, or a combination of these. Celebrity culture has come to dominate how many of us define our sense of belonging. It has come to define how we relate to the world around us, and in this respect has disfigured our notions of social belonging and community. Celebrity culture funds and feeds our own movies inside our heads as we invent our roles and behavior. It is a culture in which very few participants are even real for a day.

We idolize celebrities and often project them as idealized forms of ourselves. And yet through this substitution we move further away from any real self-actualization. The transcendent – the Real – does not do substitutes. By throwing our fantasies onto others we are diminishing our own power. In the words of one serious journalist,

We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop psychology …in contemporary culture the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the spontaneous, until reality itself has been converted into stagecraft. 1

We are subtly pushed through the well-structured stagecraft whilst all the time thinking that it is real. Our contemporary ‘death of the gods’ has been replaced by a divine adoration of celebrities and celebrity culture. Celebrity items, like holy relics, are paraded, idolized, and sold for vast sums. People rush for autographs, only to sell them later on eBay to make an unhealthy profit. Celebrity personal possessions are sold off at prestigious auction houses for astronomical prices, so aging people can wear the clothes of their idols. The glitzy suit that Elvis wore before dying in a Las Vegas toilet; or the dress that Marilyn Monroe wore to show her knickers to the world above a subway vent. Everything is up for grabs – the profane is made sacred, and then sacrificed as celebrity talismans. It all engenders a performance of hysteria, leading sometimes to stalking, or what is nowadays referred to as ‘trolling,’ as celebrity private photos are hacked and shared online. It’s happened to Emma Watson, Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson, Scarlett Johansson…and the list goes on, and on, and on.

The world of celebrity culture thrusts us into a moral void. People are valued by their appearance and their skin-deep beauty rather than their humanity. Such a culture focuses upon onanistic desires and ways for self-gratification. The cult of self ‘has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.’2 The cult of self also promotes the right to get whatever we wish, and celebrity media plays into this, often at the cost of the celebrity who suffers from social media harassment and online trolling. Celebrity public life is not a sacred space; instead, it has become a theatre of performance that is open for all spectators. And those spectators who surround themselves with celebrity culture tend to live in the present, fed by an endless stream of packaged information. They live by credit promises, ignorant to the future prospect of unmanageable debt. They are hostage to a culture that keeps them enthralled, like a television commercial replete with pleasing jingles. They navigate their purchases through well-known brands, eyeing the famous logos as guides. It is an image-saturated reality, bright and tantalizing, offering comfort and satisfaction upon all levels – until the credit runs out. Then the person becomes an outlaw to the very system that fattened them up like foie gras ducks.

These are the trivial diversions that for many are necessary, and which exist in cultures that prize shallow entertainment above substance. We may wonder whether the consumerist celebrity culture is a compensation for the loss of our true freedom regarding the human spirit and our well-being. And celebrities too are often trapped within their own fairy-tale prisons. They are skillfully controlled by their handlers and pushed in front of the media – all this to compensate for the insatiable appetites of those thirsty spectators that swarm upon celebrity culture. We are tantalizingly shown that even us, the humble spectators, can triumph in fame through the lens of reality television. The celebrity machinery oils itself on the media-creation of third and fourth-rate celebrities that have their fifteen minutes of fame – crammed together on desert islands, stuffing insects into their mouths as they bad-mouth their once beloved ‘best-friend’ and vote them off the show. Reality survival, it seems, comes at a cost. And then when they finally emerge into the ‘real world’ of the hyperreal they throng and mingle with other reality-stars under the glare of media spotlight in the vain hope that together they can populate an illusory world of the celebrity.

The world of reality television is another limb on the body of phantom performance. In the last decade a multitude of reality shows have cropped up on our television screens; and they all have one thing in common – they involve being constantly watched. Popular shows such as Big Brother put strangers to live together with round-the-clock constant surveillance. These strangers are even videoed in their beds as they sleep or fondle and kiss with other contestants. Sex lives are ogled over alongside the tears and on-screen breakdowns. Then the television psychologists are wheeled out to offer ‘expert commentary’ on the contestant’s state for mass consumption. Yet underneath all this glamour and glitz is the subtle message that intrusive surveillance is a normal feature of contemporary societies. In fact, it even masquerades as something cool that can be shared online, and which can make us famous. However, the brute reality is that such reality shows normalize what would otherwise be blatant non-constitutional intervention. And yet such shows make surveillance not only routine but a potentially enjoyable part of our modern lives. We are being conditioned into monitoring and sharing our own lives for others to see. Our phantom performances can make any one of us into an enviable star.

Social media is now rife with home-grown videos where everyone from toddler to teenager to retiree is making their performances visible to the image-hungry collective. Selfies too are the new fashionable rage as we perform in front of ourselves. This trend has become so pervasive that each year the number of selfie-related deaths has been increasing. In 2015 more people died from taking selfies than from shark attacks.[i] A dedicated online Wikipedia page has been established to record some of the ongoing ‘selfie-deaths.’ Here are a few examples:

Two young men died in the Ural Mountains after they pulled the pin from a live hand grenade to take a selfie. The phone with the picture remained as evidence of the circumstance of their deaths. (Russia, January 2015)

An 18-year-old died when she attempted to take the “ultimate selfie”, posing with a friend on top of a train in the north-eastern Romanian city of Iași when her leg touched a live wire above which electrocuted her with 27,000 volts. (Romania, May 2015)

A 19-year-old from Houston died after trying to take an Instagram selfie while holding a loaded gun to his head. He accidentally fired the gun and shot himself in the throat. (USA, September 2015)

A 17-year-old student, Andrey Retrovsky from Vologda, Russia, fell to his death attempting to take a selfie while hanging from a rope from a nine-story building. The rope snapped. Retrovsky was known for taking ‘extreme’ selfies and posting them to his Instagram account. (Russia, September 2015)

Selfie deaths, it seems, are global – and not a rare occurrence. Our phantom performances come at a cost. In a world where the image is iconic, more and more people are losing themselves in a reality where a sense of achievement comes from catching the ‘ultimate selfie.’

The drive for inner fulfilment, transcendence, and growth has been wavered aside in favor of the pixilated image. We fear not being seen. We dread being anonymous. Even being a spectral ghost is preferable to being dead.

We Are the Image

The new perspective on the world is pixilated. We are awash with images without substance and which are routinely fetishized as iconic. Signs are lacking immanence; they are fleeting and transient like never before. That is why corporations spend millions trying to find an image logo that will stick around long enough to be implanted into our minds. Images are becoming signs to the disappearance of the real. Images are the new believable reality; now no one cares that the original behind the image has quietly slipped away. The world exists as if in a play of phantom appearances. The image has taken centerstage within the space of the new real. We are now the image.

Yet the danger here is that in being given the image with its glamour and glitz we are in return giving up our critical and intellectual tools that help us cope with a complex world. Where once we had the faculty of separating illusion from reality we now have a simplified hyperreal world where everything can be explained away by a platitude of post-truth phrases. Does it even matter anymore that Las Vegas with its illusion of France with the mock Eiffel Tower, or its pseudo-canals of Venice, are far from the reality of France or Venice? How many people care? Or that the fantasy worlds within the various Disney theme parks are merging with the entertainment-saturated lives outside? Would it truly matter if we were all living within a controlled environment as depicted within the film The Truman Show? Or maybe, just maybe, such films are actually trying to tell us something – to wake us up?

The danger now is that our cultural spectacles – our celebrity culture and spectral images – are making any other alternative seem dull to us. It may be that in an age of simplified gratification any complex reality is boring. What the ‘real’ presents us with may no longer be enough. In its place we are perhaps seeking a false magic.

We have lost touch with that essential something that can work like magic in our lives. As one thinker recently stated:

We live in changing times whereby humanity is undergoing a transformation…We need to understand phenomena at deeper levels, and not just accept what we are told, or what is fed to us through well-structured social institutions and channels. We must learn to accept that our thinking is a great tangible spiritual force for change. 2

The notion that our ideas, our vision, our projections onto the world can be a ‘great tangible spiritual force for change’ is eluding us. Never before has it been so important to trust in the power of the human spirit, and to put forth, with honesty and integrity, the innate human power. The alternative is that we slide into the slipstream of our own phantom performances – we become the image.

 

Extract from the book Bardo Times: hyperreality, high-velocity, simulation, automation, mutation – a hoax?

Endnotes 

1 Hedges, Chris. 2010. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books, p15

 2 Gulbekian, S.E. 2004. In the Belly of the Beast: Holding Your Own in Mass Culture. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, p251

[i] See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/11881900/More-people-have-died-by-taking-selfies-this-year-than-by-shark-attacks.html

How Real Mind Control Works

Posted on by
1

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

When people are confronted with the idea of “mind control” they often think of something out of television or film media; a lone prisoner tortured, chemically dazed and conditioned into a hollow zombie as his captors squeeze information from him or use him to complete a task he would not normally do or morally accept. And while there is actually some truth to this kind of Hollywood depiction, as is evidenced in the exposure of government programs like MK Ultra, the most insidious forms of mind control are far more subtle.

Governments and the elitists behind them do not necessarily need to physically cage, drug and brutalize people in order to influence how they behave. All they need to do is manage their perceptions, expectation and assumptions. This can be accomplished with large portions of the public, rather than one person at a time.

The elites have always been fascinated with the idea of mass hypnotism. In the 18th century Franz Mesmer was famous for entertaining European royalty with displays of what he called “animal magnetism”, which included what we now know as hypnosis of individuals and groups. Mesmerism has since become synonymous with the attempt to befuddle people and dictate their actions while in a kind of trance. Hypnotism is still a very active subject in psychiatric circles and the US government took avid interest in hypnotism as a weapon during their MK Ultra experiments in the 1950s.

People involved in the field of hypnotism are quick to point out that a hypnotized person cannot be made to do something that goes against their code of ethics, but this is not exactly the whole story. A hypnotist makes suggestions that the subject chooses to follow (or refuses to follow) while in a trance state, however, what if they can be convinced (or fooled) through hypnosis into believing that a particular action is in their best interest in spite of their moral code or sense of self preservation?

This type of control over a subject can and has been accomplished in hypnotic therapy, and examples of “covert” hypnotherapy are also on record, including the example of an Ohio divorce attorney that used covert hypnotism against multiple female clients and is suspected of using it against some court employees to disarm their psyches and then rape them without memory of the incident.

About two thirds of any given population are capable of being hypnotized to varying degrees. Stanford University has been avidly searching for a brain pattern that acts as a fingerprint for those that are more prone to hypnotic influence, and they believe they have found certain factors involving areas of the brain that handle heightened focus and attention. Reduced peripheral awareness also helps to increase the subject’s vulnerability to hypnosis and vastly increases suggestibility.

These conditions can in fact be encouraged in large crowds of people. Consider this for a moment – What daily activity is the average person involved in that hyperfocuses their attention on a single point in space for long periods of time and removes almost all of their peripheral awareness? If you said “cell phone use” then you win a chicken dinner. Beyond creating an artificial and constant low dose of dopamine in the human brain leading to addiction, cell phones and other small electronic devices actually create the perfect conditions for a person to be hypnotized as they rip them away from all peripheral awareness and make them highly suggestible to those who know how to use covert methods.

To reiterate, a hypnotic state can be induced in large groups of people for extended periods of time with the correct long term stimulus. Watch here as mentalist Darren Brown hypnotizes or “brainwashes” an entire shopping mall of people into raising their hands exactly when he wants them to without them being aware of why they are doing it. Notice that around two thirds of the crowd complies.

Hypnotic suggestions last as long as the subjects continue to believe that the suggestions are correct. Hypnotism is essentially an agreement between the hypnotist and the persons being hypnotized that a particular belief is true (even if it is not). In the case of a victim of an attack, the person may want to believe that the traumatic event did not happen, and thus they can be convinced through hypnosis to forget it. In the case of a group of people, the hypnotist would have to identify an idea or fear that they all share and WANT to believe is real, and then exploit it.

I think some of the political applications of this are obvious.

The false left/right paradigm is a perfect Petri dish for obtaining or manufacturing the consent of the masses to be hypnotized. They WANT to believe that their team, which they have willingly joined, is the correct team and that the leadership of that team has their best interests at heart. They want to believe that the actions of their party, through legislation or direct means, are always rational and morally sound. And, even when the leaders of their party do things which are completely contrary to the beliefs and morals of the people who make up the party, those people still want to believe that there must be some logical reason behind these decisions that they do not yet grasp.

Beyond this, the threat of the “other party” or team is an ever constant stimulus in the form of fear.  We watch the scripted battles of these two fabricated teams play out in elaborate forms of Kabuki theater, yet nothing ever really changes except that the global elites grow more powerful.  Still, many people actually believe these battles to be real, and invest immense amounts of energy and focus into them as if the fate of the world is being decided within the antics of a political soap opera.

When people are afraid or hyperfocused on an outside threat, they once again become more suggestible. This is why mainstream political discussions focus less on understanding of the threat (the “How” and the “Why”) and more on perpetuating the threat.  With understanding of the enemy (or false enemy), the threat can be assessed and fear is reduced, even if the threat is real. Without understanding, fear only increases. Political powers seek to constantly remind us that threats exist without allowing us the benefit of context.  They do not want us to have an in-depth knowledge of the mechanics behind the threats.

We are told that our system works in a particular way that seems logical, but it only makes sense to us so long as we want to believe that the system functions as we were taught.  We have to have blind faith that what we were initially told was absolutely true.  The question is, why should we?  Isn’t it better to remain skeptical of most things and to study what is handed to us?  If we’re given a strange elixir by an utter stranger and we’re told to “drink up!”, would we not question what’s in the frothing brew and what it does?  Would we not investigate?

In the case of information and proclamations some people would not investigate, because it is more comfortable to believe the lies, or perhaps because they will be rewarded for going along with the status quo.  Only when we become willing to sacrifice comfort, when we stop wanting to accept everything we are told at face value and start questioning the reality that is handed to us, only then will the mass hypnosis we were once influenced by lose its power.

The hypnosis of the elites requires ever increasing forms of distraction and stimulation in order to keep the public entranced. The creation of fear and confusion is vital to the execution of mass mind control, and this is a factor that many people absolutely refuse to recognize or take into consideration. The idea that the elites would build a system only to then deliberately destroy it is just too much for many to fathom. But again, what better way to hyperfocus an entire population and make them malleable to suggestions that they would not normally consider otherwise?

In past articles I have outlined the incredible array of similarities between global elitist groups and the behaviors and character traits of narcissistic sociopaths (also known as narcopaths or psychopaths).  I have even theorized that globalists are actually a highly organized group of narcopaths who recruit other narcopaths into the fold. Many high-level narcopaths are intuitively knowledgeable on the dynamics of suggestibility and the human psyche. I would call this their primary survival trait.

Narcopaths are well known for creating confusion around them in order to gain control of the people in their lives or the people in a room. They are also known for being willing to build up certain routines and acclimating people around them to a particular environment, only to suddenly disrupt it all as a means to stun their victims and create subservience. It is important to realize that these people do NOT necessarily care about stability. In fact, they often will actively sabotage stability to obtain something they care about more – control.

The strategies that individual narcopaths exhibit on a small scale are simply magnified thousands of times when we talk about the behaviors of the global elitists. People who consider themselves rational are hard pressed to comprehend this kind of behavior, but there is a devious tactical logic to it. Mind control of others can be achieved by keeping those people infinitely off-balance. Conjuring moments of tenuous peace, and then striking with cycles of unpredictable crisis. Before we know it, many years of instability have gone by and the organized narcopaths in power have gained even more control.  We wonder where all that time went, and why we were not able to change things? It is because we have been hypnotized into inaction, or the wrong actions in the name of meaningless political stagecraft.

Real mind control and mass hypnosis requires, as already mentioned, our consent, but it is consent that is conned out of us. It is conned out of us by fake leaders with intentions and actions that do not match their promises. It is conned out of us by a system that breeds conformity of thought and tells us that those who think outside the widely accepted norm are aberrant and “crazy”. It is conned out of us by our own weaknesses – our desire to go along to get along, our fear of confronting the crowd and telling them they are wrong, our fear of losing what we think is stability, or our fear of being on our own.

Real mind control is not about torture and force, it is about quietly induced acceptance. We can remove our consent from the hypnotists anytime we wish, but we have to be willing to stop ignoring certain realities. We have to be willing to feel the pain that comes when we recognize we have been conned and controlled in the past, and we have to revel in our ability to refuse to conform. It must become a part of who we are – the people who do not take what we are told at face value. The people that question almost everything. The people who cannot be mesmerized.

How To Defeat The Empire

Posted on by
2

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

One of the biggest and most consistent challenges of my young career so far has been finding ways to talk about solutions to our predicament in a way that people will truly hear. I talk about these solutions constantly, and some readers definitely get it, but others will see me going on and on about a grassroots revolution against the establishment narrative control machine and then say “Okay, but what do we do?” or “You talk about problems but never offer any solutions!”

Part of the difficulty is that I don’t talk much about the old attempts at solutions we’ve already tried that people have been conditioned to listen for. I don’t endorse politicians, I don’t advocate starting a new political party, I don’t support violent revolution, I don’t say that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and the proletariat will inevitably rise up against the bourgeoisie, and in general I don’t put much stock in the idea that our political systems are in and of themselves sufficient for addressing our biggest problems in any meaningful way.

What I do advocate, over and over and over again in as many different ways as I can come up with, is a decentralized guerrilla psywar against the institutions which enable the powerful to manipulate the way ordinary people think, act and vote.

I talk about narrative and propaganda all the time because they are the root of all our problems. As long as the plutocrat-controlled media are able to manufacture consent for the status quo upon which those plutocrats built their respective empires, there will never be the possibility of a successful revolution. People will never rebel against a system while they’re being successfully propagandized not to. It will never, ever happen.

Most people who want drastic systematic changes to the way power operates in our society utterly fail to take this into account. Most of them are aware to some extent that establishment propaganda is happening, but they fail to fully appreciate its effects, its power, and the fact that it’s continually getting more and more sophisticated. They continue to talk about the need for a particular political movement, for this or that new government policy, or even for a full-fledged revolution, without ever turning and squarely focusing on the elephant in the room that none of these things will ever happen as long as most people are successfully propagandized into being uninterested in making them happen.

It’s like trying to light a fire without first finding a solution to the problem that you’re standing under pouring rain. Certainly we can all agree that a fire is sorely needed because it’s cold and wet and miserable out here, but we’re never going to get one going while the kindling is getting soaked and we can’t even get a match lit. The first order of business must necessarily be to find a way to protect our fire-starting area from the downpour of establishment propaganda.

A decentralized guerrilla psywar against the propaganda machine is the best solution to this problem.

By psywar I mean a grassroots psychological war against the establishment propaganda machine with the goal of weakening public trust in pro-empire narratives. People only believe sources of information that they trust, and propaganda cannot operate without belief. Right now trust in the mass media is at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information is at an all-time high. Our psywar is fought with the goal of using our unprecedented ability to circulate information to continue to kill public trust in the mass media, not with lies and propaganda, but with truth. If we can expose journalistic malpractice and the glaring plot holes in establishment narratives about things like war, Julian Assange, Russia etc, we will make the mass media look less trustworthy.

By decentralized I mean we should each take responsibility for weakening public trust in the propaganda machine in our own way, rather than depending on centralized groups and organizations. The more centralized an operation is, the easier it is for establishment manipulators to infiltrate and undermine it. This doesn’t mean that organizing is bad, it just means a successful grassroots psywar won’t depend on it. If we’re each watching for opportunities to weaken public trust in the official narrative makers on our own personal time and in our own unique way using videos, blogs, tweets, art, paper literature, conversations and demonstrations, we’ll be far more effective.

By guerrilla I mean constantly attacking different fronts in different ways, never staying with the same line of attack for long enough to allow the propagandists to develop a counter-narrative. If they build up particularly strong armor around one area, put it aside and expose their lies on an entirely different front. The propagandists are lying constantly, so there is never any shortage of soft targets. The only consistency should be in attacking the propaganda machine as visibly as possible.

As far as how to go about that attack, my best answer is that I’m leading by example here. I’m only ever doing the thing that I advocate, so if you want to know what I think we should all do, just watch what I do. I’m only ever using my own unique set of skills, knowledge and assets to attack the narrative control engine at whatever points I perceive to be the most vulnerable on a given day.

So do what I do, but keep in mind that each individual must sort out the particulars for themselves. We’ve each got our own strengths and abilities that we bring to the psywar: some of us are funny, some are artistic, some are really good at putting together information and presenting it in a particular format, some are good at finding and boosting other people’s high-quality attacks. Everyone brings something to the table. The important thing is to do whatever will draw the most public interest and attention to what you’re doing. Don’t shy away from speaking loud and shining bright.

It isn’t necessary to come up with your own complete How It Is narrative of exactly what is happening in our world right now; with the current degree of disinformation and government opacity that’s too difficult to do with any degree of completion anyway. All you need to do is wake people up in as many ways as possible to the fact that they’re being manipulated and deceived. Every newly opened pair of eyes makes a difference, and anything you can do to help facilitate that is energy well spent.

Without an effective propaganda machine, the empire cannot rule. Once we’ve crippled public trust in that machine, we’ll exist in a very different world already, and the next step will present itself from there. Until then, the attack on establishment propaganda should be our foremost priority.

The Future of the Spectacle

Posted on by
Reply

…or How the West Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Reality Police

By CJ Hopkins

Source: Off-Guardian

If you want a vision of the future, don’t imagine “a boot stamping on a human face — for ever,” as Orwell suggested in 1984. Instead, imagine that human face staring mesmerized into the screen of some kind of nifty futuristic device on which every word, sound, and image has been algorithmically approved for consumption by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (“DARPA”) and its “innovation ecosystem” of “academic, corporate, and governmental partners.”

The screen of this futuristic device will offer a virtually unlimited range of “non-divisive” and “hate-free” content, none of which will falsify or distort the “truth,” or in any way deviate from “reality.”

Western consumers will finally be free to enjoy an assortment of news, opinion, entertainment, and educational content (like this Guardian podcast about a man who gave birth, or MSNBC’s latest bombshell about Donald Trump’s secret Russian oligarch backers) without having their enjoyment totally ruined by discord-sowing alternative journalists like Aaron Maté or satirists like myself.

“Fake news” will not appear on this screen. All the news will be “authentic.” DARPA and its partners will see to that. You won’t have to worry about being “influenced” by Russians, Nazis, conspiracy theorists, socialists, populists, extremists, or whomever.

Persons of Malicious Intent will still be able to post their content (because of “freedom of speech” and all that stuff), but they will do so down in the sewers of the Internet where normal consumers won’t have to see it.

Anyone who ventures down there looking for it (i.e., such “divisive” and “polarizing” content) will be immediately placed on an official DARPA watchlist for “potential extremists,” or “potential white supremacists,” or “potential Russians.”

Once that happens, their lives will be over (ie, the lives of the potentially extremist fools who have logged onto whatever dark web platform will still be posting essays like this, not the lives of the Persons of Malicious Intent, who never had any lives to begin with, and who by that time will probably be operating out of some heavily armed, off-the-grid compound in Idaho).

Their schools, employers, and landlords will be notified. Their photos and addresses will be published online. Anyone who ever said two words to them (or, God help them, appears in a photograph with them) will have 24 hours to publicly denounce them, or be placed on DARPA’s watchlist themselves.

Meanwhile, up where the air is clean, Western consumers will sit in their cubicles, or stagger blindly down the sidewalk like zombies, or come barrel-assing at you on their pink corporate scooters, staring down at the screens of their devices, where normal reality will be unfolding.

They will stare at their screens at their dinner tables, in restaurants, in bed, and everywhere else. Every waking hour of their lives will be spent consuming the all-consuming, smiley, happy, global capitalist Spectacle, every empty moment of which will be monitored and pre-approved by DARPA.

What a relief that will finally be, not to have to question anything, or wonder what is real and what isn’t. When the corporate media tell us the Russians hacked an election, or the Vermont power grid, or are blackmailing the president with an FSB pee-tape, or that the non-corporate media are all “propaganda peddlers,” or that the Labour Party is a hive of anti-Semites, or that some boogeyman has WMDs, or is yanking little babies out of their incubators, or gratuitously gassing them, or attacking us with crickets, or that someone secretly met with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, or that we’re being attacked by Russian spy whales, and suddenly self-radicalized Nazi terrorists, or it’s time for the “International Community” to humanitarianly intervene because “our house is burning,” and our world is on fire, and there are “concentration camps,” and a “coup in Great Britain”…

…or whatever ass-puckering apocalyptic panic the global capitalist ruling classes determine they need to foment that day, we will know that this news has been algorithmically vetted and approved by DARPA and its corporate, academic, and government partners, and thus, is absolutely “real” and “true,” or we wouldn’t be seeing it on the screen of our devices.

If you think this vision is science fiction, or dystopian satire, think again. Or read this recent article in Bloomberg, “U.S. Unleashes Military to Fight Fake News, Disinformation.”

Here’s the lede to get you started …

Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel ‘large-scale, automated disinformation attacks’…the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips. If successful, the system after four years of trials may expand to detect malicious intent and prevent viral fake news from polarizing society…”

What could be more reassuring than the knowledge that DARPA and its corporate partners will be scanning the entire Internet for content created with “malicious intent,” or which has the potential to “polarize” society, and making sure we never see that stuff? If they can’t do it, I don’t know who can.

They developed the Internet, after all.

I’m not exactly sure how they did it, but Yasha Levine wrote a book about it, which I think we’re still technically allowed to read.

Anyway, according to the Bloomberg article, DARPA and its corporate partners won’t have the system up and running in time for the 2020 elections, so the Putin-Nazis will probably win again.

Which means we are looking at four more years of relentless Russia and fascism hysteria, and fake news and divisive content hysteria, and anti-Semitism and racism hysteria, and … well, basically, general apocalyptic panic over anything and everything you can possibly think of.

Believe me, I know, that prospect is exhausting … but the global capitalist ruling classes need to keep everyone whipped up into a shrieking apoplectic frenzy over anything other than global capitalism until they can win the War on Populism and globally implement the New Normality, after which the really serious reality policing can finally begin.

I don’t know, call me crazy, or a Person of Malicious Intent, but I think I’d prefer that boot in the face.