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Controlling the Narrative Is Not the Same as Controlling the Virus
Controlling the Narrative Is Not the Same as Controlling the Virus
Are these claims even remotely plausible for a highly contagious virus that spreads easily between humans while carriers show no symptoms?
It’s clear that the narrative about the coronavirus is being carefully managed globally to minimize the impact on global sentiment and markets. Authorities are well aware of the global economy’s extreme fragility, and so Job One for authorities everywhere is to scrub the news flow of anything that doesn’t support the implicit official narrative:1. The coronavirus is only an issue in China; it’s contained outside China.2. The coronavirus will soon be contained in China, and global business will quickly return to normal.
In pushing this narrative, authorities around the world share the same goal: limit the damage to consumer confidence and markets, as the legitimacy of every regime from Beijing to Washington D.C. to Nairobi is based on maintaining these economic fictions:
1. Global growth will continue in an unbroken trend in the decades ahead.
2. This growth benefits everyone, not just elites.As I’ve noted in previous posts, the critical dynamic here is consumer confidence: consumers cannot be allowed to become hesitant or afraid lest they stop borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, buying, buying, buying and speculating, speculating, speculating.
Authorities outside China have no more interest in accurate death totals being released than Chinese authorities, and so official agencies and the corporate media dutifully parrot the implausibly low Chinese statistics as if they reflected reality.
But controlling the narrative is not the same as controlling the virus. The narrative is intangible but the virus is real-world. Authorities are betting that controlling the narrative about the virus is equivalent to controlling the actual virus.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Nobody Sets Out To Become A War Propagandist. It Just Sort Of Happens.
Nobody Sets Out To Become A War Propagandist. It Just Sort Of Happens.
Senior Huffington Post UK editor Chris York has published what is by my count his twelfth smear piece against a small group of academics and independent journalists who’ve expressed skepticism of establishment Syria narratives.
York’s obsessive deluge of hit pieces revolve around British academics Tim Hayward and Piers Robinson, as well as independent journalist Vanessa Beeley. Every word in this sentence hyperlinksto a different article smearing them.
York’s twelfth such hit piece is much like the preceding eleven: it omits fundamentally crucial facts, it hides the shady nature of its sourcing, it makes outright false claims, and will only be believed by individuals who either don’t research this subject very deeply or whose paychecks depend on their not thinking about it too hard. But, more importantly, it’s his twelfth such hit piece.
A dozen smear articles. A dozen. Not against politicians. Not against powerful government leaders or massive celebrities. York’s smears focus on two professors with some 22,000 Twitter followers between them both, and Beeley, whom York himself refers to as an “obscure blogger” while authoring smear piece after smear piece after smear piece about her.
Now Beeley, Hayward and Robinson all do great work asking the important questions that no one else is asking about the many, many glaring plot holes in the narratives we’re being fed about what’s happening in Syria by the western political/media class. I am a fan. But only a relatively tiny number of people have ever heard of them. I don’t want to minimize the importance of what they do, but they are generally unheard of outside of small esoteric internet circles which focus on deep dives into questionable government narratives about Syria.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Terrifying Rise of the Zombie State Narrative
The Terrifying Rise of the Zombie State Narrative
The ruling Establishment has learnt a profound lesson from the debacle over Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. The lesson they have learnt is not that it is wrong to attack and destroy an entire country on the basis of lies. They have not learnt that lesson despite the fact the western powers are now busily attacking the Iraqi Shia majority government they themselves installed, for the crime of being a Shia majority government.
No, the lesson they have learnt is never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong. They see the ghost-like waxen visage of Tony Blair wandering around, stinking rich but less popular than an Epstein birthday party, and realise that being widely recognised as a lying mass murderer is not a good career choice. They have learnt that the mistake is for the Establishment ever to admit the lies.
The Establishment had to do a certain amount of collective self-flagellation over the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, over which they precipitated the death and maiming of millions of people. Only a very few outliers, like the strange Melanie Phillips, still claimed the WMD really did exist, and her motive was so obviously that she supported any excuse to kill Muslims that nobody paid any attention. Her permanent pass to appear on the BBC was upgraded. But by and large everyone accepted the Iraqi WMD had been a fiction. The mainstream media Blair/Bush acolytes like Cohen, Kamm and Aaronovitch switched to arguing that even if WMD did not exist, Iraq was in any case better off for having so many people killed and its infrastructure destroyed.
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The News Churn Memory Hole: How The MSM Lies Even When Telling The Truth
The News Churn Memory Hole: How The MSM Lies Even When Telling The Truth
“This goofy ass Trump letter is gonna get more outraged coverage than the bombshell report on the entire Afghanistan war being a lie and frankly I don’t know if I can handle that right now,” popular Youtube commentator Kyle Kulinski tweeted today.
The post was just one of the many observations that Kulinski tosses into the Twitterverse every day, presented in his typical casual, offhand way without any self-significance. But if you actually pause and think about what he’s saying here, how true it is and what it says about the mass media institutions which people rely upon to form their worldviews, it’s actually a damning indictment of our entire society.
It is a fact that far more news media energy is going into one trivial aspect of an impeachment agenda that will with absolute certainty fail to remove Trump from office than there is for the known fact that the US government fought to suppress indisputable proof that American officials have been consistently lying about an 18-year military occupation which continues to this day. This fact should, by itself, be sufficient to completely discredit the mainstream press. This one tiny piece of information, that there’s vastly more buzz about an irrelevant impeachment sideshow than there is over the Afghanistan Papers, should in and of itself cause everyone to regard the entire establishment media complex with the same amount of respect as it gives the Flat Earth Society.
This last week teaches us that temporarily freezing and then unfreezing future military aid to one of our many far-flung client states is huge national emergency but the government systematically lying about every aspect of the longest war in US history is a forgettable non-issue
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Why I Don’t Talk More About 9/11
Why I Don’t Talk More About 9/11
For some reason 9/11 keeps coming up in my online interactions with people lately, both with establishment loyalists who call me a “9/11 truther” and with skeptics who say I don’t write enough about what really happened on that day 18 years ago. So I figured I’ll bang out a few quick paragraphs on the subject in the interest of transparency, and so I don’t have to keep having the same conversations over and over again.
My position on 9/11 itself is pretty simple: I don’t know exactly what happened on the eleventh of September 2001, and I think anyone who claims to know with absolute certainty exactly what happened is fulla shit. But it’s also extremely obvious that the world was lied to about what happened by the US government and its allies, as evidenced by the massive, glaring plot holes in the official 9/11 narrative.
The most concise and rock-solid compilation of these plot holes that I have ever seen was compiled by conspiracy analyst James Corbett in this five-minute video and its accompanying source notes. Corbett made this video eight years ago on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and to this day I believe it’s the strongest and most irrefutable case against the official narrative.
I have never once seen anyone even attempt to refute Corbett’s video, because as an argument it is completely unassailable. The brilliant thing about it is that, while it’s called “9/11: A Conspiracy Theory”, all it actually contains is the official narrative about how the alleged Al-Qaeda conspiracy to attack US buildings with jet planes is officially theorized to have taken place, per the establishmentnarrative. Corbett simply tells the story, exactly as it exists in mainstream discourse, but he tells the full story all at once while omitting the part where the storyteller tries to make it all sound perfectly reasonable and plausible.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Attacking The Source: The Establishment Loyalist’s Favorite Online Tactic
Attacking The Source: The Establishment Loyalist’s Favorite Online Tactic
If you’re skeptical of western power structures and you’ve ever engaged in online political debate for any length of time, the following has definitely happened to you.
You find yourself going back and forth with one of those high-confidence, low-information establishment types who’s promulgating a dubious mainstream narrative, whether that be about politics, war, Julian Assange, or whatever. At some point they make an assertion which you know to be false–publicly available information invalidates the claim they’re making.
“I’ve got them now!” you think to yourself, if you’re new to this sort of thing. Then you share a link to an article or video which makes a well-sourced, independently verifiable case for the point you are trying to make.
Then, the inevitable happens.
“LMAO! That outlet!” they scoff in response. “That outlet is propaganda/fake news/conspiracy theory trash!”
Or something to that effect. You’ll encounter this tactic over and over and over again if you continually engage in online political discourse with people who don’t agree with you. It doesn’t matter if you’re literally just linking to an interview featuring some public figure saying a thing you’d claimed they said. It doesn’t matter if you’re linking to a WikiLeaks publication of a verified authentic document. Unless you’re linking to CNN/Fox News (whichever fits the preferred ideology of the establishment loyalist you’re debating), they’ll bleat “fake news!” or “propaganda!” or “Russia!” as though that in and of itself magically invalidates the point you’re trying to make.
And of course it doesn’t. What they are doing is called attacking the source, also known as an ad hominem, and it’s a very basic logical fallacy.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Narrative Managers Faceplant In Hilarious OPCW Scandal Spin Job
Narrative Managers Faceplant In Hilarious OPCW Scandal Spin Job
Imperialist propaganda firm Bellingcat has published a response to the ever-expanding OPCW scandal, and it’s got to be seen to be believed.
Before we begin I should highlight that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which according to its own cofounder was set up to do overtly what the CIA had previously been doing covertly, namely orchestrating narrative management geared toward the elimination of governments which refuse to comply with US interests. NED is funded directly by the US government, which means that Bellingcat is funded by the US government via an organization set up to promote imperialist regime change agendas. Bellingcat is also funded by Open Society Foundations, another imperialist narrative management operation.
Syria has been the target of what may be the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in history, and Bellingcat has been consistently rallying behind even the most transparently ridiculous tools of this campaign. This includes the notorious Bana Alabed psyop which at its height saw CNN staging a fake, scripted interview featuring a seven year-old girl assigning blame to Bashar al-Assad for an alleged sarin gas attack in Khan Shaykhun. Bellingcat’s stellar investigative work (which has been praised in fawning puff pieces by mainstream outlets like The Guardian and The New Yorker) concluded that this obvious propaganda construct was in fact nothing other than a little girl and her mother independently composing viral tweets, giving interviews and authoring books about how the Syrian government must be toppled via western interventionism.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Propaganda Narratives Are Custom-Made For Each Ideological Echo Chamber
Propaganda Narratives Are Custom-Made For Each Ideological Echo Chamber
Yesterday I started a thread on Twitter lamenting the fact that support for WikiLeaks and Julian Assange has been eroded all across the political spectrum since 2016 by the establishment smear campaign.
I started the thread because I’d just been reflecting on how some of the first clumsy articles I ever wrote for this gig were basically just me marvelling at how support for Assange had united Berners, Trumpers, Greens, anarchists, libertarians and hackers against those who sought to silence him. Yet today I routinely see people from those factions smearing him because, at some point between then and now, an establishment propaganda narrative got through to them.
Almost immediately after I made the initial post, commenters started lining up to unintentionally prove me right. A Bernie supporter came in to proclaim that Assange is “a giant piece of shit”, and a liberal claimed Assange was “a de facto member of an election campaign to get a white nationalist elected president of the U.S.”
Multiple Trump supporters came forward arguing in support of their president’s persecution of Assange, arguing that his imprisonment and pending extradition is no big deal, claiming Assange is a CIA asset, saying Assange needs to be punished for publishing US military secrets, arguing that Trump is actually just trying to force Assange to give up his sources for the 2016 publications (as though a president coercing a journalist to give up a source with the threat of life in prison would be perfectly fine and constitutional), and claiming Assange’s persecution is coming exclusively from the UK and not the US (the US extradition request is the only reason for his continued imprisonment and US officials are openly giving instructions to British prosecutors in the courtroom).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Most human suffering is due to believed mental stories, from the psychological suffering of the individual to the large-scale suffering caused by international power structures who advance violence and oppression via propaganda. We must evolve a new relationship with narrative.
Most people’s lives are dominated by mental story, so whoever can control those stories controls the people. The good news is that all we need to do to reclaim our world from the controllers is to reclaim our stories. The barrier between us and freedom is as thin as a fairy tale.
I talk about fighting establishment narrative control a lot, not because it’s the best way to change things, but because it’s the only way. The public will never, ever use the power of their numbers to change things so long as they’re being successfully propagandized not to.
We are bulldozing a paradise while praying we go to Heaven when we die. We are killing off giant-brained leviathans in our own oceans whose mental lives we know little about while searching the stars for intelligent life. We are burning our home in our search for a sense of home.
The most condescending sound in the known universe is Bill Maher’s voice.
Joe Biden could slip into a coma tomorrow and they’d still wheel him out to the debates with the words “NOT TRUMP” scribbled on his forehead in sharpie. And he’d continue to poll in the mid-to-high twenties.
We are about three years from watching President Biden say he’s working with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to win the Cold War, soiling himself at the podium, and then CNN pundits earnestly discussing his similarities and differences to President Obama.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
WaPo Warns USA Needs More Narrative Control As Pentagon Ramps Up Narrative Control
WaPo Warns USA Needs More Narrative Control As Pentagon Ramps Up Narrative Control
Do you lay awake at night terrified that the Russians are able to control your mind with information warfare while the US government’s slavish devotion to democratic values leaves it powerless to stop them? Me neither. But according to The Washington Post, whose sole owner is a CIA contractor and Pentagon board member bent on hijacking the underlying infrastructure of the economy, we should be.
WaPo columnist David Ignatius, who has been one of the more hyperbolic promulgators of western Russia hysteria in written media, has published an article titled “Why America is losing the information war to Russia” about a new book by former State Department undersecretary for public diplomacy Richard Stengel. Stengel and Ignatius engage in a joyful Red Scare frolic with the exuberance of two little boys with a box of spray paints, each trying to one-up the other in hysterical apocalyptic ominousness about the way evil, authoritarian governments like Russia have been able to weaponize information while freedom-loving democracies can only look on in passive despair.
“The cruel paradox of the Internet, once hailed as a liberating force, is that it empowers governments that control information and enfeebles those that let it run free,” warns Ignatius.
“[Authoritarian governments] have gone from fearing the flow of information to exploiting it,” cautions Stengel. “They understand that the same tools that spread democracy can engineer its undoing.”
Unsurprisingly, at no point during this brotherly romp does Ignatius bother to make mention of the fact that Stengel is actually on record saying he supports the use of propaganda and believes the US government should be using it on its own citizens.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How a Small Group of Pro-Israel Activists Blacklisted MintPress on Wikipedia
How a Small Group of Pro-Israel Activists Blacklisted MintPress on Wikipedia
For over ten years, Wikipedia has been a key focus of right-leaning, pro-Israel groups that have effectively weaponized the online encyclopedia as a means of controlling the narrative when it comes to the state of Israel’s more than 50-year-long military occupation of Palestine.
For over a decade, pro-Israel and ultra-nationalist Israeli settler groups have sought to weaponize the popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, through concerted covert editing campaigns, offering Wikipedia editing courses to West Bank settlers and even formal alliancesbetween Israel and Wikipedia to allow Israelis to create and edit content in a variety of languages.
In recent years, this alliance between pro-Israel partisans and Wikipedia has stepped up, largely in response to the growth of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to pressure Israel to comply with international law with respect to occupied Palestine and the blockaded Gaza Strip. As a consequence, news outlets that consistently report on the success of BDS, such as MintPress News, have been targeted on Wikipedia by such partisans, who recently succeeded in blacklisting MintPress as a “reliable source” on the online encyclopedia.
In early June, a small number of partisan Wikipedia editors privately voted to blacklist MintPress News from use as a source on the online encyclopedia website at the behest of a Wikipedia editor who took issue with MintPress’ coverage of current events in Venezuela and Syria. At no point was MintPress ever asked to comment or allowed to respond to any of the allegations made and MintPress is unable to appeal the decision.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How Real Mind Control Works
How Real Mind Control Works
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 1950’s.
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.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Julian Assange’s Victory
Julian Assange’s Victory
Throughout history, dark and reactionary forces have always attempted to control the world; by violence, by deceit, by kidnapping and perverting the mainstream narrative, or by spreading fear among the masses.
Consistently, brave and honest individuals have been standing up, exposing lies, confronting the brutality and depravity. Some have fought against insane and corrupt rulers by using swords or guns; others have chosen words as their weapons.
Many were cut down; most of them were. New comrades rose up; new banners of resistance were unveiled.
To resist is to dream of a better world. And to dream is to live.
The bravest of the brave never fought for just their own countries and cultures; they fought for the entire humanity. They were and they are what one could easily define as “intuitive internationalists”.
Julian Assange, an Australian computer expert, thinker and humanist, had chosen a new and mostly untested form of combat: he unleashed an entire battalion of letters and words, hundreds of thousands of documents, against the Western empire. He penetrated databases which have been storing the evidence of the most atrocious crimes the West has been committing for years and decades. Toxic secrets were exposed; truths revealed. To those who have been suffering in silence, both face and dignity were finally returned.
Julian Assange was a ‘commander’ of a small team of dedicated experts and activists. I met some of them, and was tremendously impressed. But no matter how small in numbers, this team has been managing to change the world, or at least to give the Western public an opportunity to know, and consequently to act.
After WikiLeaks, no one in New York, Berlin, London or Paris has any right to say “we did not know”. If they do not know now, it is because they have decided not to know, opportunistically and cynically.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Media, Mueller, the Big Con and the Democratization of Narrative
The Media, Mueller, the Big Con and the Democratization of Narrative
Falling for a con is painful. The first reaction is to deny being conned, of course. The second is to blame skeptics for being correct in their skepticism.
Here’s the fundamental “story” of the Mueller Investigation: elites don’t like “the little people” democratizing public narratives. The elites–who reckon theirright to rule is self-evident–want to set the narrative and the context, because that’s the foundation of power: once you get the citizenry to agree on your narrative and context, you secure two valuable things: 1) political legitimacy and 2) their obedience.
Elite anxiety over the “the little people” democratizing narratives is not a new phenomenon. Elites have demanded control of any media outlet that doesn’t parrot their line and have tried to declare skeptical inquiry sedition for generations, stretching back to the founding of the Republic.
The elite interest in controlling the narrative and context long predates the era of “fake news.” Please read this excerpt from the 1991 book The Radicalism of the American Revolution about the democratization of everyday life in post-Revolutionary War America (1790 – 1830):
“The result of all these assaults on elite opinion and celebrations of common ordinary judgment was a dispersion of authority and ultimately a diffusion of truth itself to a degree the world had never seen. With every ordinary person being told his ideas and tastes, on everything from medicine to art to government, were as good as, if not better than, those of “connoisseurs” and “speculative men” who had college degrees, it is not surprising that truth and knowledge became elusive and difficult to pin down.”
This democratization deeply unsettled the elites, who were accustomed to leading by setting the “acceptable” narrative and context. Democracy, they discovered to their chagrin, isn’t a force that one can bottle up and dispense in measured doses around election time; it spreads throughout every sphere of the society.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Censorship Tightens As Governments Lose Control
Censorship Tightens As Governments Lose Control
Governments have lost control of the narrative that they are in control of events. Everyday I wake up to another instance of outrageous censorship from some ‘social media’ company blocking or banning someone for no apparent reason.
The latest outrage is Twitter banning the account of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange’s mother, Christine.
Australian and New Zealand ISPs have gone bonkers IP blocking sites in the wake of the Christchurch massacre. Sites like Zerohedge have been targeted in the past two weeks for publishing narratives orthogonal to what the governments in the West are comfortable with people consuming.
First it was Facebook, blocking and then unblocking Zerohedge with no apparent reasoning behind it. Now its ISP’s over-reacting to an emotional event ensuring that a good crisis never goes to waste.
And these ISPs are going much farther than just avoiding any potential legal liabilities. They are now openly calling for the platforms themselves — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — be regulated by governments to stop ‘dangerous information’ from reaching the eyeballs of consumers.
And another mask is ripped off revealing the ugly totalitarians underneath.
It begins with legitimizing de-platforming people like Alex Jones and social media companies like Gab. Because some speech is too free. These are people supposedly too fringe to be suffered.
So it’s easy to whip up some public support for censorship of them alongside a one-sided media bombardment of justify their silencing to a large swath of people.
Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been…?
It’s especially easy to do this after having whipped everyone up into two camps of highly polarized and radicalized camps across multiple political vectors.
Trump vs. Liberals in the U.S.
Remainers vs. Leavers in the U.K.
Open borders vs. Immigration control across the West
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
