As long as the ruling class is successfully using mass-scale narrative manipulation, it won't matter what political strategies you employ because they'll just manipulate that too. Everything we try will be neutered by propaganda until fighting propaganda becomes our #1 priority.
The narratives around your insurgent third party will be manipulated to the advantage of the powerful. Your progressive takeover of the Democrats will be narrative managed into impotence. You can't politics your way around narrative manipulation. You've got to make it THE issue.
You don't measure how effective someone is against the machine by what their campaign platform says or what their strategies are, but by how disruptive they are to the narratives and narrative control of the powerful. If they're not disruptive on that front they're not effective.
The good news is that manipulation only works if you don't realize you're being manipulated. Bringing mass media propaganda front and center will accomplish this. Right now it's very far from the spotlight; it's treated like a marginal issue when it needs to be THE issue.
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The Empire Attacks BDS For The Same Reason Nixon Started The Drug War
"Anyone of sufficient influence who is far enough outside the capitalist, imperialist consensus worldview will necessarily find themselves similarly targeted" caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-empire-a…
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Arkansas' anti-BDS law violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution, because it plainly does. mondoweiss.net/2021/02/arkans…
This is an important victory for civil rights defenders and for Palestinian rights activists, but it's just one battle in a much larger war.
Freedom is the ability to enact your own will for your own life. If anyone is preventing you from doing this, you are not free. If anyone is manipulating you into enacting their will instead of your own authentic will, you are not free. Freedom and manipulation cannot coexist.
There is tyranny by brute force, and there is tyranny by manipulation. In both cases the victim winds up enacting the will of the manipulator, but in the latter there is the erroneous belief that that action was freely chosen. It was not. You are not free if you're manipulated.
You see this play out in abusive relationships: "She can leave whenever she wants, door's right there."
You see it in abusive cults: "Everyone is here of their own free will."
You see it in abusive governments: "Things are the way they are because of how people keep voting."
Conspiracy Theories Are Caused By Government Secrecy
"The DC Circuit has ruled that the CIA is under no obligation to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to its involvement with insurgent militias in Syria" caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/conspiracy-t…
As @LavenderNRed clearly outlines, this ruling comes despite the fact that mainstream news outlets have been reporting on the CIA's activities in Syria for years, and despite a US president having openly tweeted about those activities.
"In other words, the CIA will not be required to admit to actions it is widely reported as having done, much less divulge documents about them to the press for even greater scrutiny."
Calls to mind this Assange quote from before he was silenced:
A Gracie jiujitsu black belt shot this a few days after George Floyd's death demonstrating in no uncertain terms how easy it is to choke off someone's carotid arteries by kneeling on their neck. This should have settled the controversy then and there.
Here's the time in the video of the exact demonstration. The teacher doesn't even use his knee because he doesn't want to hurt his partner, he just uses his forearm to show how easy it is to choke a large man with pressure on that area.
In Brazilian jiujitsu a black belt indicates mastery; this is a martial arts master who has been training arterial chokes for years and years. He is a far greater authority on this subject than Tucker Carlson.
Biden Will Escalate Aggressions Against China While Republicans Call Him A Beijing Puppet
"Team Biden is soft on China," Ted Cruz tweeted the other day, echoing a common accusation leveled against the president from the right with increasing frequency. caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/biden-will-e…
Cruz, who biologically is mostly wetland parasites, is not being truthful. There is no evidence at this early stage that the Biden administration is "soft on China", and there is a lot of evidence that it will be the exact opposite.
Just today the president announced a new Pentagon task force dedicated to countering Beijing which will be led by a virulent China hawk who has previously attacked Trump for being too soft on China. @DecampDave reports the following for @Antiwarcom:
A huge percentage of "left infighting" online has nothing to do with the left and nothing to do with politics whatsoever. Drama addiction is real and social media provides a perfect vehicle with which to feed it. It's mundane masturbatory self-indulgence. psychologytoday.com/au/blog/obesel…
You can see this in the frenetic, feeding frenzy-like energy people get when one clique is going at someone. It's got nothing to do with the issues they're pretending it's about, it's about securing a neurochemical hit they've come to crave.
Everyone knows people like this in real life. Add in the 'like' and 'share' functions provided by social media which are literally designed to trigger the reward center of the brain, add in the thrill of private group chat gossip (they always use group chats), and it's far worse.