Caitlin Johnstone

On the fifth of April, 2017, CNN staged a fake, scripted interview featuring a seven year-old Syrian girl sounding out pro-regime change talking points syllable-by-syllable using concepts that she could not possibly understand. CNN host Alisyn Camerota was asking the child questions throughout the performance, which means that Camerota necessarily had the other half of the script.

CNN has never offered an explanation for this event, and nobody has ever been able to provide me with a plausible defense of it.

This is not some tinfoil hat fantasy I made up in my imagination. This happened. CNN knowingly staged a fake, scripted interview and deceitfully passed it off to its audience as a real one, exploiting a small child for interventionist propaganda in an inexcusably fraudulent way.

And yet CNN has the gall to get huffy and indignant when it’s suggested that they tried to use scripted questions in a town hall about the Florida school shooting.

I rarely pay much attention to the false flag theories which emerge after every hotly publicized mass shooting in America. They’re very convoluted and consist mostly of pointing out inconsistencies and plot holes in the official story being advanced, without offering any clear substantial narrative about what did happen and why. It’s not that I doubt for one second that the US power establishment would butcher American citizens if it significantly benefitted them, I just see no clearly laid-out evidence that that’s what happened in these cases.

That said, the fact that the same mass media machine which brazenly staged a war psyop using a seven year-old girl is loudly condemning people who question the official narrative about the Florida school shooting is obscene.

Google the words ‘shooting conspiracy’ and you’ll come up with a deluge of articles from mainstream outlets who helped sell the “weapons of mass destruction” lie to the world, including CNN. Do a Twitter search for the same words and you’ll find employees of mass media outlets doing the same thing; the same mass media outlets which blacked out Bernie Sanders during the presidential primary, which bolster the illusion of freedom and democracy and legitimize the two-headed one-party system day after day, which back every single military action of the US government without exception, which go full attack dog on third parties and government transparency advocates, which helped the US power establishment lie about Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, and Syria in order to manufacture support for interventionism in those countries.

The mass media created conspiracy theories. By lying to the public day after day after day in the most grotesque and brazen ways imaginable, they created an environment where people will necessarily question the ways in which reality differs from what they’ve been told. How could they not? And yet these depraved manipulators still dedicate massive amounts of resources toward putting immense public pressure on anyone who still has unanswered questions, because Seth Rich’s family wants you to shut up and some guy shot a hole in a pizza shop floor.

And it works. I’ve seen people being attacked in the most vicious and disgusting ways on social media for publicly asking questions about the Florida shooting, in ways that cannot possibly be psychologically comfortable. Twitter cliques organize around tearing down individuals who have made tweets expressing skepticism about the authorized shooting narrative, tagging high-follower accounts to come in and help beat up the latest person who isn’t confident that all the facts add up in this particular case. It’s an environment which most certainly facilitates fear of speaking and self-censorship.

But it is always okay to ask questions. Always. It is always okay to express skepticism of mainstream narratives. Always. It is always okay to share information on social media as we try to figure out what’s happening in the absence of trustworthy news media. Always.

Your own educated best guess is always superior to placing blind faith in a mass media machine which you know for a fact will lie to you whenever it is in the interests of its plutocratic owners. Trying to find your own way is better than asking directions from a malicious compulsive liar.

And yeah, your best guess will be wrong sometimes. In an environment that is saturated in propaganda designed to manipulate the way you think and vote, it can be hard to know which way is up all the time, let alone bat a perfect thousand. But what choice have these pricks left us? We can’t trust them, so we’ve got to use alternative media, communication with trusted peers, education and critical thinking to supplement the information they refuse to give us, and we can only do our honest best.

Give yourself permission to take your best guess at what’s going on in the world without the permission of either the establishment propaganda machine or its rank-and-file groupthink minions. Give yourself permission to try your most sincerely to figure out what’s happening with compassion for yourself and the rest of the population that is being psychologically brutalized by mass media psyops on a daily basis, and if you find out something you believed is wrong, course correct and keep doing your best.

Until we live in a healthy world where mass media psyops are illegal, where it would be unthinkable for a major media outlet to exploit a small child for the purpose of deceiving its audience into supporting military violence, this is going to have to be how we operate. Nobody is ever in any position to bully you into silence for doubting the official narratives about what is happening in a world ruled by a power establishment with a known history of using lies, false flags and propaganda to manipulate the public into supporting its agendas.

Think free and be unapologetic about it. That is your sovereign right, and anyone who tries to stop you from exercising it is your enemy. Never abdicate your authority over your own understanding of the world to anyone. It is yours. Own it.

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