Thread by @JYSexton

So.

To understand our crisis and how we got an anti-president who betrays and steals from us, we have to learn from America's history of interfering in other countries and how that's now happening to us.

Here's what I learned writing AMERICAN RULE.

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penguinrandomhouse.com/books/611439/a…

First, we have to recognize that from the era of colonialism, America, like other powerful nations, interfered widely and regularly, subjecting people in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Latin America.

We preached liberty while denying liberty to people of color.

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With the end of colonialism, however, the open subjugation of people without giving them rights or liberty became a public relations nightmare and it became a necessary ruse to pretend like America was dedicated to the rights of people in our founding documents and rhetoric.

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This story starts with Woodrow Wilson, a disgusting and contemptible man who was racist to his core and obsessed with power and how to wield it over people he saw as less than himself and his fellow elites.

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Wilson cut his teeth as an academic who pioneered administration, the system of control that now makes your life miserable.

He believed society could only work when elites created a complicated "maze" that only they could understand and maneuver pawns through.

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It is necessary, as well, to mention that Wilson, as an elitist and racist, was also one of the earlier proponents of eugenics and forced sterilization. He fully believed in the state's responsibility to keep its "lesser citizens" from reproducing.

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Wilson also fancied himself a historian and wrote "A History of the American People." It glorified white supremacy and romanticized the Confederate States of America as a good, proper, and necessary project and slavery as a natural, just condition.

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Wilson's writings inspired the disgusting movie Birth of a Nation and a new propagandized narrative of the Civil War that glorified the South and white supremacy as necessary and just. This has, unfortunately, infected us for generations.

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Even though Wilson promised to keep America out of World War I, he saw an opportunity and an opening with the major powers destroying one another.

If he could enter America into the war he knew he could gain power and influence and possibly emerge as a major power.

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To help get America into the war and positioned as a power, Wilson turned to George Creel as a propagandist.

Creel used a massive Public Information machine to scrub America clean of its racism and economic inequality in order to position it and Wilson as heroes.

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It was Wilson and Creel's belief that America needed to of "one mind" for it to succeed, and so they used psychological manipulation to influence the people and convince them the unequal country was a bastion for hope, liberty, and the American Dream.

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Luckily for Wilson, the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud provided insight into the workings of people's minds and gave him inspiration for how unconscious needs and fears could be used against the people without their knowing.

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And even more fortuitously, Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays was there to help in translating his uncle's theories into purposeful manipulation that could help scrub America clean of its ugly components and position it as a world savior.

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Using his Uncle Sigmund's tactics, Bernays pioneered the idea of "Propaganda," a means of psychological manipulation by "an elite few" that could orchestrate a society of lesser people, or a world for that matter, to do their bidding.

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Creel and Bernays' propaganda was so powerful that by the time Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris for peace talks he was greeted as a messiah. Crowds roared for him, children prayed to him, he was a walking, talking savior-incarnate and the US mankind's best hope.

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Wilson was treated like a messiah because he touted a gospel of democracy and self-determination. The problem was that he didn't mean any of it.

As a racist and elitist, he knew it was simply propaganda without any actual belief, doctrine, or resolve.

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At the peace talks, there was hardly any discussion of actual democracy or self-determination. The old powers sliced the world up for themselves while only paying lipservice to listening to lesser nations. It was the same power structure, only with a new, friendly veneer.

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Among the petitioners of the lesser nations was a young man named Ho Chi Minh who longed for Vietnam to be like the United States.

Unfortunately, he wasn't listened to and was cast aside like so many people who had believed Wilson and the US meant their message of democracy

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It is necessary, as an aside, to point out that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels took their inspiration for how to craft an authoritarian regime from Wilson's propaganda and Bernays' methods. They used them for their own purposes and it led to a similar conflagration.

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After WW2, the Cold War was a battle between the US and USSR to win influence, often by manipulating other countries and perpetuating a Wilsonian-inspired propaganda push to position themselves as the best hope for mankind.

This hid deeply, deeply disturbing actions.

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The Cold War was comprised of proxy wars, or battles in lesser nations where the two superpowers vied for influence through secret manipulation, including propaganda, election interference, psychological operations, all of it to win countries to their side.

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Our CIA interfered in dozens of countries, assassinating individuals, tampering with elections, creating fake news, misinformation, funding fake political parties, and undermining democracy as a whole.

We did this because we still believed as Wilson in lesser peoples.

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We did this in Iran, where we installed the Shah and kept him in power using misinformation, subterfuge, propaganda, and the like.

Of course, Iran rebelled, but it was a foothold for us.

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In Chile, we deposed Salvadore Allende because we believed he was friendly to communism and put in place Pinochet, a dictator who killed his people and robbed them of their resources for his own personal gain and profit.

This was our system, our strategy.

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In places like Panama, we installed CIA operatives like Manuel Noreiga to run the countries with iron fists, to plunder the resources, and keep them in line with American interests.

Like many of these men we put in power, we eventually deposed Noreiga when his use wore out.

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A more obvious example, of course, is Saddam Hussein, who relied on US aid and intelligence to rule as a dictator over Iraq.

He was our man even though he plundered his country and killed his own people. Until he wasn't, of course, and we pretended like we'd never met him.

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The point here is that the United States of America has projected a belief in democracy and self-determination as a matter of public relations and propaganda. We have aided and enjoyed dictators who betray their countries and hurt their people.

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Our method of controlling other nations through misinformation and outside manipulation has now been coopted by Vladimir Putin and others. They freely interfere in our affairs the same way we interfered in Iran, Chile, Iraq, and elsewhere.

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Donald Trump is nothing more than an authoritarian kleptocrat devoid of any patriotism or duty to the United States.

He is here to wreck our system while profiting personally. We have our own kleptocrat now, and we have to recognize our tactics have been turned against us.

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Like other kleptocrats, Trump hides behind tried and trued symbols of "patriotism," the kind designed by people like Bernays.

He pretends to be patriotic and that throws people off the scent that there is literally no duty or patriotism involved.

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These signifiers are like kleptocrats and dictators wearing uniforms, badges, all of it designed to create an outward illusion of dedication to the country while the installed kleptocrat plunders the nation.

We have an anti-president. Pure and simple.

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And we got here the same way the countries we manipulated got here. By fake movements. Artificial, fabricated moments like rallies organized by Russian bots, the Reopen America protest, all of it open manipulation that changes the narrative and perception.

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Like those "lesser" nations we manipulated, we're inundated with outside influence that muddies our discourse and creates a confused culture permeated with misinformation.

We've become the lesser nations we used to manipulate and conquer.

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And the problem is that the American myth of Exceptionalism keeps us from understanding that not only are we vulnerable to outside manipulation, it actually helps that misinformation, it gives them a hook into our psyches that Edward Bernays' pioneered.

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We're seeing it here in America with Donald Trump, we're seeing it in the UK with Brexit. The old means of the superpowers manipulating world affairs and the sovereign affairs of nations are being turned onto us with disastrous results.

It's working.

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We have to protect our elections and recognize the manipulation.

And we have to understand, finally, that Donald Trump is our installed kleptocrat, a person devoid of duty or patriotism and solely in power to dismantle us while using authoritarianism to control us.

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PS/

This is why Trump does nothing to fight the pandemic. He's in office to destroy government as an impediment to corruption and profit. Like these other kleptocrats, he has no interest in using government to help anyone.

That's not what they're there to do.

PPS/ None of this is to say Trump is explicitly a puppet. He might very well be, and there’s evidence to support it. But the undeniable truth is that outside actors know he is a self-interested kleptocrat bad for America and good for their interests, hence the interference.

PPPS/ And make no mistake. Trump is a product of America’s internal problems. Even when we interfered in other countries we used their own divisions and maladies against them. We got here because of our own problems, they’re just taken advantage of.