Thread by @caitoz

This Is Your Brain On Echo Chambers: Right Calls Biden A Xi Puppet As He Packs His Cabinet With China Hawks

"Whenever someone tells you that a US president is going to be 'soft' on a nation the US government has marked as an enemy, you are being played."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/this-is-your…

This is your brain. This is your brain on echo chambers.

Prior to the US election I wrote a couple of articles saying that if Biden wins he will be attacked by the right as a Xi Jinping puppet even as he escalates dangerous cold war aggressions with China.
caityjohnstone.medium.com/if-biden-wins-…
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/biden-will-n…

This prediction was very obvious, largely because it's exactly what happened with Trump and Russia, and it's already proving true. Dopey wingnuts have been in my mentions telling me that Biden is a Xi Jinping puppet, even as Biden packs his cabinet with virulent anti-China hawks:

It's not hard to see where people are getting the impression that Biden is going to be a sycophantic Beijing lackey, though, with influential rightist voices pounding that message into their skulls all day every day despite all evidence to the contrary.

https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1330993653276405767

This complete schizm from reality, where you've got an incoming administration stacked with China hawks running alongside an alternate imaginary universe in which Biden is a CCP lackey, is only made possible with the existence of media echo chambers.

https://twitter.com/GavinWax/status/1330613081190387715

It's the same dynamic that let liberals spend years shrieking about the executive branch of the US government being run by a literal Russian agent even as Trump advanced mountains of world-threatening cold war escalations against Moscow in the real world.
caityjohnstone.medium.com/25-times-trump…

You see this dynamic at work in conventional media, where plutocrat-controlled outlets like Breitbart are still frantically pushing the Russiagate sequel narrative that Hunter Biden's activities in China mean that his father is a CCP asset.

https://twitter.com/BreitbartNews/status/1330269463187509253?s=20

You also see it in social media.

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1309407239594221569

"We live in different information universes, chosen for us by algorithms whose only criterion is how to maximise our attention for advertisers’ products to generate greater profits for the internet giants," writes Cook.

https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1330733661155700736

Because people are a lot more likely to click, read and share information which validates their pre-existing opinions and follow people who do the same, social media is notorious for the way it creates echo chambers which masturbate our confirmation bias.
wired.com/story/facebook…

Whole media careers were built on this phenomenon during the years of Russiagate hysteria, and we see it play out in spheres from imperialism to Covid-19 commentary to economic policy.

https://twitter.com/HKrassenstein/status/1329073535705223170

Someone benefits from this dynamic, and it isn't you. As we've discussed previously, we know from WikiLeaks documents that powerful people actively seek to build ideological echo chambers for the purpose of propaganda and indoctrination.

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1305710124837740544

Splitting the public up into two oppositional factions who barely interact and can't even communicate with each other because they don't share a common reality keeps the populace impotent, ignorant, and powerless to stop the unfolding of the agendas of the powerful.

You should not be afraid of your government being too nice to China. What you should worry about is the US-centralized power alliance advancing a multifront new cold war conducted simultaneously against two nuclear-armed nations for the first time ever in human history.

Whenever someone tells you that a US president is going to be "soft" on a nation the US government has marked as an enemy, you are being played. Aways, always, always, always. It's just people manipulating you away from your natural, healthy inclination toward peace.

Get out of your echo chamber, look at the raw information instead of the narratives, and stop letting these sociopaths manipulate you.

https://twitter.com/RepDanCrenshaw/status/1330953537308782593