The most Orwellian tool of our rulers which does the most damage and affects the most lives is not surveillance, nor police militarization, but mass media propaganda. It's also the most overlooked. It's good to protest other authoritarian control tools but propaganda is enemy #1.
You don't need the ability to spy on dissident groups if you can control public thought enough to prevent those groups from forming in the first place. You don't need the ability to quash public uprisings if you can propagandize people away from rising up at all. And they do.
The ability of the plutocratic class to manipulate public thought at mass scale is the most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society. It warps the entirety of our political spectrum, all our thinking, all our discourse, and what we perceive as normal.
And you just don't see people fighting it. The @ACLU isn't protecting people's mental sovereignty from the manipulations of sociopathic government-aligned oligarchs. People aren't taking the media-owning class to the Supreme Court for brazen election interference. But they could.
In terms of the effect it has on society, no control tool comes remotely close to advancing as many interests of the powerful against the interests of the people as domestic plutocrat-sponsored propaganda. Nothing will change until people start noticing and resisting this.
Life pro tip: 100% of the capitalism cultists who say you "don't understand economics" are posturing. It's an empty slogan they've been trained to bleat, and if you debate them for a bit you'll soon find that all they can do is point at other people's ideas. They're pure bluster.
It's really amazing how universal this experience is. They have no idea that they're living in a reality tunnel that is made entirely out of empty narrative fluff, because they generally exist in tightly insulated echo chambers which never challenge it.
Trump's term has revealed that virtually everyone, all across the political spectrum, has been wrong about him. And it's a testament to the power of echo chambers that they remain just as wrong as they were four years ago. caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/everyone-was…
After weeks of speculation and hopes that Trump might pardon Snowden and/or Assange before leaving office on January 20th, what the latest round of presidential pardons has delivered is about as far from that as you can conceivably imagine.
Echo chambers are responsible for the fact that:
- Rightists STILL think Trump is antiwar despite all his warmongering
- Libs STILL think he's a Russian asset despite his cold war aggressions against Russia
- Leftists STILL think he's Hitler despite fewer deportations than Obama
After four years everyone--left, right and center--has been proven wrong about Trump. He was neither a uniquely evil monster (he was indisputably not even as bad as Bush), nor a populist hero draining the swamp and fighting for the common man against the Deep State.
Here is what Trump's term proved about him: he was a US president. Better than some, worse than others, but also deeply awful all around since he voluntarily served as the head of the most evil and destructive force on earth. He was the same kind of monster as his predecessors.
People who wrongly saw Russiagate as the deep state attacking Trump won't recognize the similarities to the Chinagate op.
Those who know Russiagate was the US intelligence cartel manufacturing a case for aggressions against Russia will see the same thing happening with Chinagate.
Russiagate was not the deep state attacking Trump because they don't like him; it was barely about Trump at all. It was about reigniting cold war hysteria and manufacturing support for a new cold war. All the China/Biden stuff will be used in the same way.
"But Caitlin, Russiagate was fake and Chinagate is REAL!"
No you dupe. You only believe that because you think Russiagate was about Trump. If you understood that it's just diddling narratives to force a confrontation before US hegemony is surpassed, you'd see them as the same.
The debate rages on over whether House progressives should force a floor vote on Medicare for All, with one side arguing that AOC and the rest of "The Squad" were elected to advance progressive policies and the other side arguing that AOC is cool so shut up and leave her alone.
As we discussed yesterday, Americans will not be given Medicare for All despite overwhelming public support because so much power depends on keeping them poor so they don't interfere in the affairs of a nation which serves as the hub of a global empire.
Human behavior only changes when there's an expansion of consciousness, individually or collectively. Substance abuse doesn't end until you turn and face the inner demons compelling it. A society doesn't reject racism until it collectively becomes aware of how damaging it is.
For this reason, the ultimate fight is to spread awareness of what's really going on. It's not winning elections or getting what we want that will lead to lasting change, it's an expansion of understanding of what's really happening in ourselves, our society, and our world.
This is why so much of the battle is happening on the front of propaganda, censorship, and press freedoms. The more unconscious aspects of our world want to keep things secret, distorted, and hidden in the shadows, while those who want change are fighting to turn the lights on.