narrative control – Page 9

It’s Not A Political Problem, It’s A Propaganda Problem: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

February 18, 2021

It’s Not A Political Problem, It’s A Propaganda Problem: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

While we all fixate on electoral political solutions, the powerful focus on narrative control, because that’s where real power is at. The people who pose an actual threat to the machine are those who disrupt its narratives and narrative control agendas. Everyone else is harmless.

If the majority of a troubled population believes their political system is operating in a way that is demonstrably very different from the way it actually operates, then that population doesn’t have a political problem, it has a propaganda problem.

Berners watched the mass media actively sabotage the Sanders campaign day after day in two consecutive elections, and went “The problem is not enough progressives in government!” No, the problem is the billionaire media are constantly lying to everyone. Create a truth-based information ecosystem and politics will move toward health by itself.

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 number one 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.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The US Ministry of Woke Propaganda Wants to Cancel You, Me, Fox, and Anyone Else Who Disagrees

February 14, 2021

The US Ministry of Woke Propaganda Wants to Cancel You, Me, Fox, and Anyone Else Who Disagrees

There’s a saying that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

But I think that there are people who learned from history and want to repeat it.

Don’t get me wrong. If you walked up and asked someone like the little short guy from Facebook who sat on some books at his congressional hearing so he could see over the table or that dude with the dirty looking beard from Twitter or all those so-called journalists frothing at the mouth on CNN whether they wanted to turn our nation into a carbon copy of Hitler’s Germany, they’d be positively aghast at the very notion.

Yet every day on social media, people like me try to share innocuous things, like an article about taco seasoning, I kid you not, and we’re told we aren’t following “community standards.”

For the record, I had waited 15 minutes between posting that article on my personal timeline and was then trying to share it on my frugal living Facebook page. If I’m in trouble for taco seasoning, it probably won’t be long until they kick me off entirely, so if you found this post on social media and want to make sure you see all of our articles, please go here and subscribe – you’ll get a free, full-length copy of The Prepper’s Workbook when you do. You can also find me on Gab, MeWe, and Twitter (for the moment).

If you think this is only happening to conservatives, you’re wrong. I’m an anti-politician, anti-war, lower-case L libertarian who believes that gay married couples should be able protect their legally grown weed with guns.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

When America Voted Out Fascism: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

February 13, 2021

When America Voted Out Fascism: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Biden may be trying to extradite a journalist for exposing US war crimes, and he may be inflicting mass murder and starvation sanctions on disobedient governments around the world to ensure perpetual global domination, but at least America voted out fascism.

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The “two” party puppet show is always fake. Always, always, always, always. When you get really into a movie you forget it’s a movie. You don’t see the screen, you don’t see the actors; you’re enthralled by the show. Getting caught up in the puppet show is the same: buy into any part of it and you lose sight of reality. As soon as you mentally reify it because you really like this or that Democrat or really hate this or that Republican, you lose your ability to see what’s happening. You lose sight of the puppeteers and the strings as you clap along with the performance like a child.

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There is no meaningful difference between a government with one status quo-enforcing party and a government with two status quo-enforcing parties.

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We inhabit two worlds: the real world and the narrative world. In the narrative world, the US drastically changed on January 20th. In the real world―the world minus its narrative soundtrack―all the money, weapons, troops and people are moving basically the same as they were on January 19th.

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If President Biden had all the exact same policies and positions but an (R) next to his name, American conservatives would be ferociously defending him from liberal attacks. If parallel universes exist this is definitely happening in one of them.

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The most dangerous predators are the ones you don’t see. It’s true in nature, it’s true in interpersonal relationships, and it’s true in politics.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Censorship: How the West is becoming more and more like the old Soviet Union

February 8, 2021

Censorship: How the West is becoming more and more like the old Soviet Union

A message I received from Facebook on Jan 29, 2021. Five of my posts were deemed “spam” and erased. Some were somewhat “political” although non-partisan, but two were purely technical. That these posts were erased is an indication that censorship is by now applied to all forms of dissent, not just political ones. It was not unexpected, but it was still somewhat shocking after decades of propaganda that had convinced most of us that the Western world was a place where you could enjoy “freedom of expression.” But we are quickly moving toward a Soviet-style management of public information, as Dmitry Orlov noted already in 2013. It had to happen and it did.

Last year, a Spanish climatologist, a friend of mine, had one of his posts censored by Facebook. Apparently, it was because it was deemed as too “catastrophistic” (or for whatever reason had caused the opaque fact-checkers of Facebook to erase it). He protested and he also tried to convince other climatologists to start a boycott of Facebook.

The answer was a little disappointing, to say the least. It may be best described as a resounding worldwide “meh.” Those climatologists who bothered to reply to him expressed the concept that, yes, censorship is bad, but, you know, you can’t allow deniers to diffuse their fake science around.

It was on this occasion that I discovered that most people like censorship. It is just that it should be applied to those they disagree with. In that case, they actually love it and protest because Facebook doesn’t censor enough (you can read that, for instance, here).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lessons From Wall Street: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

January 29, 2021

Lessons From Wall Street: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. That’s all you’re seeing in efforts to manage information via censorship, algorithm changes, “fact” checking, Russian propaganda panic, etc. Humans are story-driven animals, so if you control the stories you control the humans.

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Lessons from this whole Wall Street/Reddit ordeal:

The stock market is a scam.
There is no “free market” and there never will be.
Wall Street predators are the most despised people on earth.
The public can do more to fight back than it had previously assumed.
There’s surely a lot more we can do to fight back that we haven’t thought of yet.

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You can’t expose how rigged the system really is without pushing against its power structures according to its own rules. When the entire system pushes back and boots you out in front of everyone, more people are made more aware that it is rigged. This can only be a good thing.

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Every single hedge fund plutocrat has at some point in their lives thought the words “I can’t believe I’m getting away with this!”

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This is another one of those awkward “we need to shut down the rabble without looking like a totalitarian oligarchy” standoffs.

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Myth: The rich compete with each other and ordinary people benefit from it.

Reality: The rich collaborate with each other against ordinary people.

Example:

It will always tend to be more profitable to do bad things than good things: ecocide over preservation, exploitation over equality, war over peace. Humanity remains on a doomed trajectory for as long as its systems maintain profit-seeking as the driving force behind its behavior.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Be Your Own Revolution

January 28, 2021

Be Your Own Revolution

I made the mistake of involving myself in a sectarian Twitter spat when I was halfway through my morning coffee today and I instantly felt like an idiot.

People from the Left Twitter faction I’d offended rushed in to push back against the offense I’d caused them, and within minutes I felt it: the all-too familiar sensation of inspiration and creativity draining away from my body. Tension, coldness and defensiveness where previously there was playfulness and the crackling sensation of an exciting new day in which anything was possible.

If you’re active online, you’ve probably experienced this too. The days when you’re involved in sectarian bickering are the days when you are at your least creative, your least inspired, and your least effective at fighting against the machine. At best the drama gives your ego a tickle (as social media platforms are designed to do), after which you feel a bit yuck. The longer you engage in it, the lower the probability that you will produce something creative and inspired that day.

As a general rule, you may find that it works best to reject cliques and factions altogether. When you “belong” to any group you feel compelled to defend it, and to move with it wherever it goes even if that’s not where you feel like the energy is. You get invested in wanting the collective to move in a certain direction, and you get frustrated when it just wants to focus on silly nonsense and sectarian feuds.

So my advice to you here, which you of course can take or leave, is to just blast off on your own and fight your own revolution in your own way.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Twitter Rolls Out New Wikipedia-Like Program To Narrative Manage Tweets

January 26, 2021

Twitter Rolls Out New Wikipedia-Like Program To Narrative Manage Tweets

Twitter has announced that it will be employing “a new community-driven approach to help address misleading information” called Birdwatch which news media are comparing to the model of content moderation used by Wikipedia.

“Twitter unveiled a feature Monday meant to bolster its efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation by tapping users in a fashion similar to Wikipedia to flag potentially misleading tweets,” reports NBC. “The new system allows users to discuss and provide context to tweets they believe are misleading or false. The project, titled Birdwatch, is a standalone section of Twitter that will at first only be available to a small set of users, largely on a first-come, first-served basis.”

“We know there are a number of challenges toward building a community-driven system like this — from making it resistant to manipulation attempts to ensuring it isn’t dominated by a simple majority or biased based on its distribution of contributors,” Twitter’s official statement says. “We’ll be focused on these things throughout the pilot.”

Such claims provide little reassurance for anyone who’s familiar with the establishment narrative control operations which take place on Wikipedia in exactly that way. The Grayzone‘s Ben Norton did a great two-part report last year on the way concerted, aggressive efforts by a small group of shady-looking Wikipedia editors has succeeded in dominating the site’s articles which relate to western imperialist agendas and the reporters who support and oppose those agendas, including getting outlets like WikiLeaks and The Grayzone banned from use as sources despite their having no history of false reports.

“The internet encyclopedia has become a deeply undemocratic platform, dominated by Western state-backed actors and corporate public relations flacks, easily manipulated by powerful forces,” wrote Norton. “And it is run by figures who often represent these same elite interests, or align with their regime-change politics.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

You Counter Trumpism By Ending The Conditions Which Created It, Not With Authoritarian Policies

January 22, 2021

You Counter Trumpism By Ending The Conditions Which Created It, Not With Authoritarian Policies

The US political/media class have been pushing hard for more authoritarian policies to stave off the threat of “domestic terrorism” in the wake of the Capitol riot. President Biden, who was already working on rolling out new domestic terror policies well before January sixth, confirmed after the riot that he is making these new measures a priority. Political internet censorship is becoming increasingly normalized, anti-protest bills are being passed, and now we’re seeing liberals encouraged to form “digital armies” to spy on Trump supporters to report them to the authorities.

And an amazingly large percentage of the US population seems to have no problem with any of this, even in sectors of the political spectrum that should really know better by now.

“What else can we do?” they reason. “What other solution could there possibly be to the threat of dangerous fascists and conspiracy theorists continuing to gain power and influence?”

Well there’s a whole lot that can be done, and none of it includes consenting to sweeping new Patriot Act-like authoritarian measures or encouraging monopolistic Silicon Valley plutocrats to censor worldwide political speech. There’s just a whole lot of mass-scale narrative manipulation going on to keep it from being obvious to everyone.

The way to stem the tide of Trumpism (or fascism, or white supremacism, or Trump cultism, or whatever term you use for what you’re worried about here) is to eliminate the conditions which created it.

Trump was only able to launch his successful faux-populist campaign in the first place by exploiting the widespread pre-existing opinion that there was a swamp that needed draining, a corrupt political system whose leadership does not promote the interests of the people.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Two Faces Of The US Empire

January 16, 2021

The Two Faces Of The US Empire

The Biden/Harris inauguration event is going to be a star-studded celebration spanning an unprecedented five days, a giddy orgy of excitement at a murderous oligarchic empire having a new face behind the front desk after promising wealthy donors that nothing will fundamentally change.

This comes at a time when Americans are now reporting that they trust corporations more than they trust their own government or media, when pundits are gleefully proclaiming in The New York Times that “CEOs have become the fourth branch of government” as they pressure the entire political system to smoothly install Biden, when the leading contender for the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division is an Obama holdover who went from the administration to working for both Amazon and Google, and when Americans are being paced into accepting an increasing amount of authoritarian changes for their own good.

And this manic celebration and increasing brazenness of corporate power are of course overlaid atop an unceasing river of human blood as the globe-spanning empire continues to smash any nation which disobeys it into compliance so as to ensure lasting uncontested planetary hegemony.

But hey, at least they voted out fascism.

The US empire is ugly and creepy. The more you look at it, the uglier and creepier it gets. That’s why so much effort goes into keeping the public from looking at it directly.

The US empire has two faces, one rooted in the west coast and the other in the east. The first face, which sprouts up from Hollywood, presents a grinning plastic smile to the world depicting how fun and wonderful and righteous America is and how all its systems are working completely fine. The second face, which sprouts up from DC, Arlington and Langley, is wild-eyed and covered in blood.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Big Tech Suppresses Free Speech Through Censorship

January 11, 2021

Big Tech Suppresses Free Speech Through Censorship

This Warning We Must Take Seriously

It appears that silencing the masses is not just for countries such as China. The wholesale move by huge tech companies to put its footprint on the neck of free speech speaks volumes about the powerful dictating the direction of society. This all raises to mind the line used by George Orwell in his novel Animal Farm. While the phrase “All Animals are Equal” started as one of the seven commandments, the Animal Farm pigs soon reinterpreted it to read as “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL / BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”

This phrase has become one of our culture’s ultimate examples of how the systematic abuse of language and logic can systematically be used by those with the intention of taking control of those they consider, shall we say, beneath them. Two noteworthy tools used to achieve this goal are propaganda and censorship. The sad reality is that “Power To The People” is dead because we are often unable to agree on anything. Even when people come together in general agreement forms, many individuals are so ridged they allow the finer points and details to become stumbling blocks to moving forward.

In many ways, big tech and mainstream media have become a polarizing force that stirs the pot of social unrest. By promoting polarization they have made it impossible for the American people to unite and regain any control over Washington. This situation benefits those wishing to expand their control over us. Ironically, they are probably giddy over the problems Facebook has created by playing fast and loose with data from its followers. Facebook by crossing the line and abusing the trust of those with accounts and information posted on its platform has taken the pressure off of the mainstream media to do a better job.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Americans Only Care About America. Their Rulers Only Care About World Domination.

January 6, 2021

Americans Only Care About America. Their Rulers Only Care About World Domination.

Ever since November third the American political/media class have been keeping Democrats fixated on Trump’s post-election shenanigans with garment-rending urgency, now going so far as to call for yet another oxygen-sucking impeachment as he’s on his way out the door while millions of Americans are struggling just to meet their basic needs.

You wouldn’t know it from the dominant chatter, but Trump’s impotent attempts to reverse the election results don’t rank anywhere remotely near the top ten worst things this president has done while in office, which include vetoing attempts to end the world’s worst mass atrocity in Yemen, escalating world-threatening cold wars with both Russia and China, murdering untold tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions, pushing Iran to the brink of war by assassinating its top military commander, expanding the “war on terror” and rolling back airstrike regulations designed to protect civilians.

US political discourse hasn’t reflected the fact that Trump’s foreign policy has been far more atrocious than anything he’s done domestically–and certainly anything he’s done since November–because news media coverage does not reflect this fact. News media coverage does not reflect this fact because western news media regard imperialism and mass military slaughter as normal US presidential stuff, and do not regard brown-skinned foreigners as human.

I point this out because it’s good to note, as Trump leaves office, that he spent his entire administration advancing murderous imperialist agendas which spilled very real blood from very real human beings while mainstream America barely even noticed. Their attention was drawn instead to endless narrative theater which had no impact whatsoever on the concrete actions taken by the US government’s executive branch. Their gaze was kept fixated on meaningless political drama while the war machine marched on unseen.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Never Forget How The MSM Smeared Assange: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

January 3, 2021

Never Forget How The MSM Smeared Assange: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The frenetic mass media propaganda campaign against Julian Assange was easily the creepiest and most Orwellian thing I’ve ever witnessed. And now it is silent. It did its job and then disappeared, before the public could really notice what was happening. It’s absolutely stunning.

You wouldn’t know it now, but between late 2016 and Assange’s arrest social media was full of blue-checkmarked narrative managers falling all over each other to be the first to come up with the day’s hottest smear painting a heroic journalist as a villain. Day after day after day. Smearing Assange was one of the easiest ways for an aspiring journalist to show current and prospective employers that you’re on the side of the empire. He was a soft target you could kick to signal that you’ll say whatever the Pentagon wants so you can climb the media ladder.

The smear campaign pervaded every political faction in every part of the US-centralized power alliance. Where they couldn’t get away with openly smearing him they circulated rightist psyops about Trump and Assange secretly working together and the extradition actually helping Assange, which was effectively the same as smearing him. The overwhelming majority of mainstream opinions about Assange are the result not of his work or the life he’s lived, but of a concerted propaganda campaign the majority of which took place between late 2016 and Assange’s arrest in April 2019. People just aren’t aware they’ve been propagandized.

The smear campaign went silent so quickly because it is now impossible to paint yourself as a brave up-punching journalist while smearing someone who is being openly prosecuted for journalism. So they’ve slinked off into the shadows, hoping we’ll forget what they did. Let’s not.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mass Media Propaganda Is Enemy #1: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

December 27, 2020

Mass Media Propaganda Is Enemy #1: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

The most Orwellian tool of our rulers which does the most damage and affects the most lives is not surveillance, nor police militarization, nor government secrecy, but domestic mass media propaganda. It’s also the most overlooked. It’s good to protest the other mechanisms of authoritarian control, but propaganda is enemy number one.

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 can. And they do.

The ability of the plutocratic class to manipulate public thought at mass scale is the single 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. People aren’t taking to the streets protesting it. 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.

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Theories about elite conspiracies to shore up more control over the population tend to greatly underestimate how much control they already have.

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Wanting the US government to have a “competent leader” is like wanting a serial killer to be skilled at evading detection.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Big Media: Selling the Narrative and Crushing Dissent for Fun and Profit

December 21, 2020

Big Media: Selling the Narrative and Crushing Dissent for Fun and Profit

The profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime hasn’t just strangled free speech and civil liberties; it’s also strangled democracy.

The U.S. has entered an extremely dangerous time, and the danger has nothing to do with the Covid virus. Indeed, the danger long preceded the pandemic, which has served to highlight how far down the road to ruin we have come.

The danger we are ill-prepared to deal with is the consolidation of the private-sector media and its unification of content into one Approved Narrative which is for sale to the highest bidders. This is the perfection of for-profit Totalitarianism in which dissent is crushed, dissenters punished and billions of dollars are reaped in managing the data and content flow of the one Approved Narrative.

So don’t post content containing the words (censored), (censored) or (censored), or you’ll be banned, shadow-banned, demonetized, demonized and marginalized. Your voice will be erased from public access via the Big Media platforms and you will effectively be disappeared but without any visible mess or evidence–or recourse in the courts.

That’s the competitive advantage of for-profit Totalitarianism–no legal recourse against the suppression of free speech and dissent. And if you’re shadow-banned as I was, you won’t even know just how severely your free speech has been suppressed because the Big Tech platforms are black boxes: no one outside the profit-maximizing corporation knows what its algorithms and filters actually do or exactly what happens to the disappeared / shadow-banned.

Shadow-banning is an invisible toxin to free speech: if you’re shadow-banned, you won’t even know that the audience for your posts, tweets, etc. has plummeted to near-zero and others can no longer retweet your content…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bravery Is…

December 13, 2020

Bravery Is…

Having trouble interpreting what’s really going on in the world? JP Sears and his fellow ‘thinkers’ explain what the media would like you to think…

Of course you can always trust the media to lead the way to the promised land of truth.

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