Why do mainstream media reporters within ostensibly free democracies act just like state media propagandists? Why are they so reliably pro-establishment, all throughout every mainstream outlet? Why do they so consistently marginalize any idea that doesn’t fit within the extremely narrow Overton window of acceptable opinion?Why does anyone who inconveniences western establishment power always find themselves on the losing end of a trial by media? Why are they so dependably adversarial toward anything that could be perceived as a flaw in any nation outside the US-centralized power alliance, and so dependably forgiving of the flaws of the nations within it?

The way I see it there are only two possible explanations for the unanimous consensus in mass media on these issues:

Explanation 1: The consensus exists because the mass media reporters are all telling the truth all the time.

OR

Explanation 2: The consensus exists because there is some kind of system in place which keeps all mass media reporters lying to us and painting a false picture about what’s going on in the world.

Those are the only two possibilities, and only one can be true, since any mixture of the two would result in the loss of consensus.

Most mainstream westerners harbor an unquestioned assumption that Explanation 1 is the only possibility. The things they see on CNN, the BBC and the ABC are all accurate descriptions of what’s really going on in the world, and the consensus in their descriptions exists because they’re all describing the same objective reality.

But what would that mean exactly? Well, for starters if the mainstream media reporters are telling us the truth all the time it would mean that the same power institutions which slaughtered millions in Vietnam and Iraq for no good reason are actually virtuous and honest. It would mean the positive, uncritical picture that is consistently painted of those same institutions which wage nonstop campaigns of bloodshed and oppression to ensure the profit of economic manipulators and war profiteers is due to those institutions possessing merits which are overall so positive that no criticism of them is needed. It would mean that the status quo of climate destruction, steadily growing wealth inequality, an increasingly Orwellian surveillance system, an increasingly militarized police force, increasing internet censorship, and crushing neoliberal austerity measures are all things people voted for using the excellent democratic political system the mainstream media defends, based on the accurate information the mainstream media gave them about what’s in their best interests.

Explanation 1 sounds improbable in that light. We know that the system is spectacularly screwed up, and we know that the political establishment which these mainstream outlets always defend does unforgivably evil things, so we should expect to see a lot more critical reporting and a lot less protecting of the status quo. But we don’t. We see war crimes ignored, oppression justified, the two-headed one-party system normalized, dissident narratives smeared as fake news conspiracy theories, and unproven assertions by government agencies with a known history of lying reported as unquestionable fact.

But that leaves only Explanation 2. How could that be right?

This part of a 1996 interview between Noam Chomsky and the BBC’s Andrew Marr describes a foundational element of Explanation 2: that there is a system in place which ensures that all the reporters in positions of influence are there not to report factually on the news of the day, but to sell a particular narrative that is friendly to the state and the status quo.  Chomsky describes a “filtering system” which ensures that only those loyal to power rise to the top within the plutocrat-owned media, to which Marr objects and insists that his peers are brave truth-tellers who hold power to account. Subsequently, the following exchange takes place:

Chomsky: Well, I know some of the best, and best known investigative reporters in the United States, I won’t mention names, whose attitude towards the media is much more cynical than mine. In fact, they regard the media as a sham. And they know, and they consciously talk about how they try to play it like a violin. If they see a little opening, they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make it through. And it’s perfectly true that the majority – I’m sure you’re speaking for the majority of journalists who are trained, have it driven into their heads, that this is a crusading profession, adversarial, we stand up against power. A very self-serving view. On the other hand, in my opinion, I hate to make a value judgement but, the better journalists and in fact the ones who are often regarded as the best journalists have quite a different picture. And I think a very realistic one.

 

Marr: How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are..

 

Chomsky: I’m not saying your self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.

“If you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

It is an obvious fact that mainstream media outlets are owned by the extremely wealthy, as has been the case for a very long time. Owning media is in and of itself a profitable investment, “like having a license to print your own money” as Canadian television magnate Roy Thomson once put it. So when it comes to the news media outlets which form people’s perceptions of the world, what incentive would a powerful plutocrat have to platform anti-establishment voices on those outlets and help sow ideas which upset the status quo upon which said plutocrat has built his empire? It certainly wouldn’t make him any more money, and if anti-establishment ideas like socialism, anarchism, non-interventionism or skepticism of government agencies gained popular footing in public consciousness, it could upset the foundation of the plutocrat’s dynasty and cause him to lose everything.

Plutocrats have put a lot of energy into influencing government policy in order to create legislation which ensures the continued growth of their wealth and power. A whole lot of maneuvering has had to happen over the course of many years to create a political system wherein government bribery is legal in the form of campaign finance and corporate lobbying, wherein deregulation of corporations is the norm, wherein tax loopholes are abundant and tax burdens are shifted to the middle class, wherein money hemorrhages upward to the wealthiest of the wealthy while ordinary people grow poorer and poorer. What incentive would these powerful oligarchs have to risk upsetting that delicate balancing act by helping to circulate ideas which challenge the very governmental system they’ve worked so hard to manipulate to their extreme advantage? And how many incentives would they have to keep everyone supporting the status quo?

How hard would it be to simply decline to give anti-establishment voices a platform, and platform establishment loyalists instead? How easy would it be for a wealthy media owner or influential investor to ensure that only establishment loyalists are given the job of hiring and promoting editors and reporters in a mainstream media outlet?

If you’ve ever wondered what motivates all those blue-checkmarked corporate media journalists to spend so much time on Twitter defending the powerful and attacking the disempowered, this is your answer. They spend their own free time smearing Jill Stein, calling Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite, attacking Julian Assange, supporting longtime neoconservative war agendas against Russia, Syria and Iran and uncritically reporting intelligence agency assertions as fact not because there’s a CIA officer hovering over their shoulder at all times telling them exactly what to tweet, but because they’re auditioning for a job. They’re creating a public record of their establishment loyalism which current and future employers will look at when weighing hiring and promotion decisions, which is why both journalism schools and journalism employers now encourage journalists to cultivate a social media presence to “build their brand”, i.e. their public resume.

So it’s very easy to fill mass media jobs with minds which are not predisposed toward rocking the boat. A pro-establishment consensus is artificially built, and now you’ve got an environment where someone who stands up and says “Uh, hey, so we still haven’t seen any actual hard evidence that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way” or whatever is instantly greeted by a wall of shunning and shaming (observe Aaron Maté‘s interactions with other journalists on social media for a good example of this), which can be psychologically difficult to deal with

Anyone who’s ever gone to high school can understand how powerful the social pressures to seek peer approval and fit in can be, and anyone who’s ever worked a normal job anywhere can understand the natural incentives that are in place to behave in a way that is pleasing to one’s bosses. In any job with any kind of hierarchy, you quickly learn the written rules, and you pay close attention to social cues to learn the unwritten ones as well. You do this in order to learn how to avoid getting in trouble and how to win the approval of your superiors, to learn which sorts of behaviors can lead to raises and promotions, and which behaviors will lead to a career dead-end. You learn what will earn you a pat on the back from a leader, which can be extremely egoically gratifying and incentivizing in and of itself.

It works exactly the same way in news media. Reporters might not always be consciously aware of all the pro-establishment guidelines they’re expected to follow in order to advance their careers, but they know how the reporters who’ve ascended to the top of the media ladder conduct themselves, and they see how the journalists who win the accolades behave. With the help of editors and peers you quickly learn where all the third rails and sacred cows are, and when to shut your mouth about the elephant in the room. And for those rare times that all these filtration devices fail to adequately filter out dissident ideas, you see the example that gets made of those few who slip between the cracks, like CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill for his defense of Palestinian human rights or Phil Donahue for his opposition to the Iraq invasion.

So plutocrats own the mass media and platform status quo-friendly voices, which creates an environment full of peer pressure to conform and workplace pressure to advance establishment-friendly narratives. Add to this the phenomenon of access journalism, wherein journalists are incentivized to cozy up to power and pitch softball questions to officials in order to gain access to them, and things get even more slanted. It’s easy to understand how all this can create an environment of consensus which has nothing to do with facts or reality, but rather with what narratives favor the US-centralized empire and the plutocrats who control it. But all those dynamics aren’t the only factors going into making sure a consensus worldview is maintained. Remember that hypothetical CIA officer I mentioned earlier who isn’t actively leaning over every journalist’s shoulder and dictating what they tweet? Well, just because he’s not dictating every word produced by the mass media machine doesn’t mean he’s not involved.

Secretive and unaccountable government agencies have an extensive and well-documented record of involving themselves with news media outlets. It is a known and undisputed fact that the Central Intelligence Agency has been intimately involved in America’s news media since the 1950s, and it remains so to this day. In 2014 it was a scandal when reporter Ken Dilanian was caught collaborating with the CIA in his publications, but now veterans of the US intelligence community like John Brennan and James Clapper openly fill out the line-up of talking heads on MSNBC and CNN. Just recently the Guardian published a lie-filled smear piece on Julian Assange which was almost certainly the result of the outlet’s collaboration with one or more intelligence and/or defense agencies, and when that article caused an outcry it was defended as the likely result of Russian disinformation in an evidence-free article by a CIA veteran who was permitted to publish anonymously in Politico. The Washington Post is solely owned by Jeff Bezos, who is a CIA contractor, and who we may be certain did not purchase the Post under the illusion that newspapers were about to make a lucrative comeback. Secretive government agencies are deeply involved in the workings of western news media, in many ways we know about, and in far more ways we don’t know about.

Taking all of these factors into consideration and revisiting Explanation 1 and Explanation 2 from the beginning of this article, it should be obvious to you that the most logical explanation for the uniform consensus of support for pro-establishment narratives in the mass media exists because there is indeed a system in place which keeps all mass media reporters lying to us and painting a false picture about what’s going on in the world.

This doesn’t mean that these news media outlets lie about everything all the time, it means they mostly provide half-truths, distortions and lies by omission whenever it benefits the agendas of the powerful, which is functionally the same as lying all the time. I sometimes get people telling me “Caitlin! The MSM lies all the time, and they say global warming is real! That means it’s false!” But it doesn’t work that way; if the TV tells you a celebrity has died then it’s probably true, and if they say it’s about to rain you should probably roll up your car windows. If they lied about everything all the time they would instantly lose all credibility, and their ability to propagandize effectively would be lost. Instead, they advance evidence-free narratives asserted by opaque government agencies, they avoid highlighting inconvenient truths, they ignore third parties and dissident ideas except to dismiss them, they harshly criticize the misdeeds of governments which oppose the US-centralized empire while sweeping the misdeeds of imperial members under the rug, and when there’s an opportunity to sabotage peace or support war, they seize it. They distort only when they have to, and only as much as they need to.

In this way the powerful have succeeded in controlling the people’s narratives about what’s happening in their country and their world. This is the system of narrative manipulation we are up against when we try to sow dissident ideas into public consciousness, and as the old adage goes, it is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

And yet we are gaining ground. The manipulators have been losing control of the narrative, which is why the mass media have been acting so weird and desperate since 2016. The unelected power establishment failed to manufacture support for its would-be Syria invasion, it failed to get the public to buy into the Russia hysteria, trust in the mass media is at an all-time low, and it’s continuing to plummet. More and more people are waking up to the fact that they are being lied to, which is good, because the only thing keeping them from pushing for real change is the fact that there are all these screens in everyone’s lives telling them that real change isn’t needed.

The liars are against the ropes, and they’re starting to look winded. A populist information revolution is looking more winnable than ever.

_________________________

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61 responses to “How Plutocratic Media Keeps Staff Aligned With Establishment Agendas”

  1. Nice article, Caitlin. The conscious efforts don’t simply shape the narrative but mould opinions and attitudes, and even initiate campaigns. Right now, the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird is being supplemented by the British government’s recruiting ideologically committed ‘journalists’ and pundits globally as well — the so-called Integrity Initiative. See:

    https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/11/british-government-behind-secret-anti-russian-disinformation-campaign.html

  2. I love your comments on the Plutocratic Media. I don’t always agree with you on some things, but for the most part you are dead on. Love your website! Robert Thomas.

  3. This is the first time I have seen this website so my comment lacks context. Just because this seems to be a US website, I’d like to mention a guy called Udo Ulfkotte. He used to be an appreciated journalist in Germany working for prestigious newspapers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Spiegel etc. Then there was a point in his life when he started to feel ashamed about the exact thing this article describes and he started writing books about his experience. Then after a few years he passed away, however I think his books are recent enough and perfectly relevant.
    Currently on amazon this book if his is priced at 900 USD in English (Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News by Dr. Udo Ulfkotte), the same book in German ( Gekaufte Journalisten) is 29 USD.
    https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Udo+Ulfkotte

    What he explains in this book is very similar to what is written in this article, and this is from someone who has done it for decades. I have read the book in Hungarian and I’d like to recommend it to everyone who wants to get confirmation from someone who has seen this world from the inside. And you might also ask yourselves why the English version of this book is priced at 900USD.

  4. Caitlin, there is a 3rd and far more insidious explanation for the bias in media reporting.

    The reporter’s culture has carefully taught them to believe in the values of neoliberal capitalism. Their thinking is driven by the ethos of faith in private enterprise, ever-expanding commodification, and bootstrap individualism – the stuff many fools think will Make America Great Again (for them).

    Anchors were taught in college that Like Clark Kent, their job was to report “truth, righteousness, and the American way.” They were taught in journalism class that their job was to serve as a mirror for the system. Investigative journalism is to root out those who would undermine our noble republic.

  5. “Those are the only two possibilities, and only one can be true, since any mixture of the two would result in the loss of consensus.” To believe that all the media (or the government) says is false is as absurd as believing all is true. The media prints material that is true and sometimes false. That is not a mixture but a fact of sometimes speaking truth to power, sometimes speaking lies for power. The consensus is not about always lying. The media is not a monolith, anymore than the fascist smear that is “controlled by Jews.” \

    Johnstone, like Paul Craig Roberts who promotes her, is a an apologist for Trump. She has banned me for saying this, but note how her views coincide with his: fake news! No collusion!

    1. You are living in the illusions created for you. Yes everything from PRAVDA/MSM is beyond false, it is deliberately created to obfuscate any truth.

      The only people who cannot see that truth are the people who are mind effed by PRAVDA/MSM. Most were but many have awoken. The dystopia has your brain on hold.

      Every utterance I have said is provable and well past clear today as a fact. Simply wake up from the dream you have been spoon fed !

  6. Charles Robinson Avatar
    Charles Robinson

    Yeah the old tired MSM = Main Stream Media. It should rather be called SQP = Status Quo Propaganda

  7. Cait – Love you. Thank you.

  8. Just want to send a message to the UN! Get stuffed you disgusting whoring sacks of shit! I WILL NOT be obeying your Global Law on the Refugee Compact, nor your law on hate-speech either, you murdering filthy biased scum! Shove your Refugee Compact where it fits, like up your muddy grubby back passage, you bunch of fucking retarded psychopaths! My support to ANYONE that bombs your headquarters!

  9. The earth has borne a species, homo sapiens who live in twenty-first century and whose brain still skulks in the Stone Age. Nothing is more essential to the human condition than freedom, and nothing more elusive and fragile. America first of all nation to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings. The news mantra– like a farmer feeding his pigs ,,if they want it ,, feed it to them,,

  10. Step 1 for most people is to turn them off. Don’t watch CNN, don’t listen to NPR, don’t buy or read the NY Times or Washington Post. This has two benefits. One, it keeps their propaganda out of your head. It is amazing how when you really do turn them off, someday you hear second hand what they are yakking about and it just sounds crazy to you. Welcome to the Truth.

    The second reason is that it hurts them financially. It makes those media companies money losers instead of money printing machines. They sell access to your eyeballs. They sell access to your brain. They use rating numbers and website hit numbers and circulation numbers to sell their product to corporations and campaigns. When you stop buying and refuse to even click on a link to their website just because its them and you don’t want to support them, you do hurt them financially.

    Last decade there was a movie called “V for Vendetta”. Towards the end, the Great Leader wanted to talk to his people to try to tell them not to march on Parliament. In modern terms, he’d be begging them not to put on the yellow vests. But the movie showed just empty chairs in front of the tellies because no one was listening anymore. Turn them off.

    1. This echoes what truthteller Trump said: “Don’t believe what you see and hear. Believe me: NO COLLUSION! FAKE NEWS! “

    2. The best advice.

      I’ve been following it and giving it for decades – since I realized how fooled good people were by the supposed Liberals, the DLC Clintons, etc.

      Not to mention all the obvious prated falsehoods surrounding every facet of 9/11.

      Painful.

  11. Important message to Australians – Five Eyes

    These are the criminal grubs selling Australian down the drain, and the people who has STOLEN Australia’s Sovereignty to the Globalist Pigs, namely The Atlantic Council!

    These are the Australian traitorous grubs selling this country down the drain:

    1.Australian Secret Intelligence Service
    2.Australian Signals Directorate
    3.Australian Security Intelligence Organisation
    4.Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation
    5.Defence Intelligence Organisation

    These criminal grubs are NOT working in Australia’s best interest, they are working for the Globalist Scum bags, The Atlantic Council & Club Of Rome, these scum bags have their own Agenda, namely , bringing in Global Government along with the FULL control of YOUR money by the introduction of a digital currency!

    You want a future for your children? Then get to an MP office and scream at them! Let them know you WILL NOT tolerate this any more!

    https://journal-neo.org/2018/12/10/anglo-saxon-eyes-are-fixed-on-countering-china/

    1. Agree. The ever increasing intrusion into our private lives combined with digital money means that the government will have complete control over you and your family. Try living any sort of lifestyle without money.
      China is introducing a social credit system whereby those who do not toe the govt. line are finding their liberties are being restricted as a punishment.
      This surely is where we are headed. No vax, no school to mention one which is in the spotlight at the moment.

  12. And a direct thank you to major news outlets for 40 years of cooperation from:

    David Rockefeller to Trilateral Commission in 1991:

    “We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world, if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a World Government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”

  13. Caitlin,

    “… all the others from The (Dulles bros.’ original) Deep State named above — envisioned employing U.S. military action to preserve U.S. business interests, whether or not it was truly in U.S. national security interests.”

    This historical perspective detailing G.H.W. Bush’s actions and involvement with Kennedy’s assassination posted by my FB friend John Sakowicz is a worthy read. The following statements taken from it answer, to a great extent, questions you raise regarding our currently gagged journalistic system (the original NWO purpose and plan):

    “Who were the first champions of The Deep State?

    The most obvious names include the first CIA director Admiral Sidney Souers, the first civilian CIA director Allen Dulles, his brother former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, second director CIA General Hoyt Vandenberg (USAF), third CIA Director Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, investment banker Averell Harriman (Brown Brothers Harriman), first U.S. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, General Nathan Twining (USAF Chief of Staff who lead the Cold War nuclear escalation, 1953-1957, and Chairman Joint Chief of Staff, 1957-1960), CEO Chase Manhattan Bank David Rockefeller, and others.

    The New World Order view pursued as U.S. foreign policy by Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles, as secretary of state under Eisenhower — and all the others from The Deep State named above — envisioned employing U.S. military action to preserve U.S. business interests, whether or not it was truly in U.S. national security interests.”

    https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2077728348916273&id=100000373830495

    1. Your are correct in what you say. However, it does go back further than that. If you read Gen Smedley Butler’s “War is a Racket” written in 1935, you find that by that point this US Marine Corps general was sick and tired of being used to go advance US business interests. https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

      The difference of course was that after WW2 the US was the sole undamaged super-power in the world so the people you name could both make more money and do more harm with that great power that they misused.

    2. In other words, as our fearless leader Donald Trump says: America First!
      Or as he also said: “I am a nationalist (in the far right sense) AND a globalist (in the sense of using slave labor in poor countries).”

  14. There is a pithy analysis of one explanation for the mainstream media’s constant conformity to the propaganda and agendas of the in-crowd (the powers that be, the 1%, etc.) In the Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 14, January 1986, David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis of the George Peabody College of Vanderbilt University give us a one-sentence definition of “sense of community”—it is a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together. Even shorter expressions of the same ideas are found in terms such as “consensual validation,” “group-think,” and “echo chamber.” When Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, he was identifying the core community which has become globally dominant to the extent that members see and make commitments in every context in accordance with the “us-them” paradigm that President George W. Bush articulated. Publishers of MSM only hire and retain people who are clearly committed to be members of this core group and are dedicated to enforcing the commitments of the group. Rule number one for the group: support the troops and do not oppose any war wanted by the group.

  15. Whatever the Elite and their MSM are doing is working!
    “How Big Brother Grips Americans’ Minds To Support Invasions”
    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-09/how-big-brother-grips-americans-minds-support-invasions

  16. Some years ago a CBC radio show called “Media File” interviewed Conrad Black, founder of the National Post newspaper. Black was asked if he ever influenced his publishers or editors as to what appeared in his paper. “Absolutely not” said Black, “I just hire people who think like I do, and I leave them alone”.

  17. Peri Dwyer Worrell Avatar
    Peri Dwyer Worrell

    I find it hilarious that people who have no problem recognizing this process in action in journalism are somehow oblivious to its working in fields like climate science.

    1. Peri, you have expressed my own thoughts more succinctly than I did. Kudos.

    2. i find it hilarious that you think climate science works like journalism. hint, see all the references to money and power in the article, and then couple that with the vast influence and wealth of the fossil fuel companies. you think they are promoting climate science?

      1. You identify the wrong culprit. Who benefits financially from the Paris and Beijing Carbon Markets? Banks do. Carbon markets are a way to monetize the air we breathe. Banks are the most powerful corporations on the planet because they finance governments and other industries (including fossil fuel companies). Large banks have financed and promoted the global warming agenda and now offer us a fake solution—carbon markets. We can likely all agree that there is environmental degradation even if we may not agree on global warming. The real culprit for our environmental degradation is the financial system that banks helped create. Our monetary system demands that we buy more and more—excessive consumption. We are encouraged to finance granite countertops etc. and “leverage”. Finance 101: Money does not come into existence in our system until someone borrows money from a bank. The term “borrow” is a misnomer because banks actually create the money that they lend as mere electronic accounting entries. (Banks are like King Midas with his magic hand that creates gold.) But, because interest is charged on every loan it is never enough to just pay back the principle amount that the bank created. We are required to pay compounding interest. That is much more money than the original loan amount. For instance, a $100K house over a 30 year period at 5% interest costs about $250K. But, where does that extra 150K for interest payments come from???? It must be created too at some point by a bank issuing more loans at some future date. Making interest payments (in addition to principle) requires that the money supply must always be expanded (grow) in order to service all debt (principle plus interest) in a society. This is why economist say that the economy MUST grow each year. But, increasing the money supply means that banks must continually lend more and more so that more money enters the money supply which then allows you, I, governments, and corporations to service (pay) existing outstanding loans. And for banks to lend more and more we must buy more and more. We must all go into more and more debt. Solution? None of this would be a problem if banks were not allowed to charge interest. (charging interest was once a crime in the Christian world for about 1500 years). Banks could charge one time service fees instead of compound interest. (Prices for houses, cars, etc would start to drop to what people could afford to pay out of pocket.) But, then large banks would not make as much money nor would they have as much influence over the societies they rule.

  18. Sorry but all I see here are crocodile tears from the Left. Read again Caitlin’s column except this time replace the words (and their applicable derivatives) “plutocracy” and “oligarchy” etc with the words “government” and “leftism” and you will have the same evil as described and denounced by Caitlin. Actually you will have an even worse evil.
    It is no secret that the left is violently anti-free speech. So what in the world makes anyone think that a “new and improved” leftist collective replacing the old order will have free speech in it?! It obviously will not.
    As for Caitlin’s “concern” for the truth being told she is contradictory. She, correctly, points out that the MIC matrix “lies all the time” – except for the lies she wants to believe to be true e.g. “climate change”. It is either or. They are either liars or they are not. Her attempt to try to straddle the fence of lies rings very hollow. I suspect that the lefties want to be able to use the same political power grab fraud of “climate change” for the exact same reason the current PTB wants to use it for – to gain even more collective control over people. Individual freedom is the answer not more leftist collectivist tyranny.

    1. First of all, there is no significant political Left, at least not in the US. There is a sort of wide substrate of leftish sentiment among the people, but the presently dominant factions (Trumpoids, Deep State, Evangelicals, etc.) are entirely authoritarian. Some authoritarians dress themselves in leftish clothing, but authoritarians, and therefore rightists, they are and remain.

      Second, you say ‘They are either liars or they are not.’ But, as the post notes, the most effective form of propaganda mixes truth and lies (and uses other techniques, like obfuscation and framing). If you’re going to critique the text, at least read it carefully.

      1. Anarcissie, “…there is no significant political Left…”

        How can you type this with a straight face?! The US is run by leftists. Every political narrative is leftist. And everything is political to the left. Globalism is leftist. The oligarchs are leftists. The banksters are leftists. The very essence of leftism is authoritarianism because authoritarianism is based on government violence. And leftism is based on government violence. Every thing the left stands for requires more government power and less individual freedom . Authoritarianism is impossible without government power and government power is the very soul of the left.

        “…the most effective form of propaganda mixes truth and lies…”

        A liar is one who tells lies. Lying is knowingly speaking an untruth. That one may speak a truth with a lie does not negate the fact that that person/entity is a liar for speaking lies. Any attempt to distort the unvarnished truth is a lie whether or not a truth is mixed in as part of an attempt to promote the lie.

        If you’re going to critique my post at least understand the meaning of “liar” and “lying”.

        1. First, authoritarianism without government power is perfectly possible and extremely common. It is possible in the relationship between a parent and a child, a husband and a wife, a boss and his employee, and in a myriad other relationships between humans. Second, leftism is exactly about fighting these authoritarianisms. Your revisionistic definition of leftism is ahistorical; it is not and never has been simply about *more* government, it’s about *what* the government does. The ‘individual freedom’ that the left is against is the freedom of the parent to beat his child, of the husband to beat his wife, of the boss to tyrannise and exploit his employee or to poison the environment that others live in. Thus, the left is *for* the ‘individual freedom’ of the child and the wife not to be beaten, of the employee not to be tyrannised and exploited (a guaranteed right to holidays and a work day limited to no more than 8 hours feels quite freeing), and of humans to live in a non-poisoned environment. It is also *for* a person’s individual freedom to vote on what the group s/he is part of is going to do, which you deny by ludicrously describing it as violence.

    2. Crocodile tears? Where? If anyone needs to “read again” Caitlin’s column, it is you. In fact, she talked about you – evidently you missed it:

      “I sometimes get people telling me ‘Caitlin! The MSM lies all the time, and they say global warming is real! That means it’s false!’ But it doesn’t work that way; if the TV tells you a celebrity has died then it’s probably true, and if they say it’s about to rain you should probably roll up your car windows. If they lied about everything all the time they would instantly lose all credibility, and their ability to propagandize effectively would be lost.”

      Further, Johnstone has constantly pointed out that the MSM lies about Climate Change and that they are in the pocket of the mighty global corporations whose bottom lines depend on not only underplaying the threat, but especially misdirecting the blame.

      Also, I attempted to do as you suggested and re-read Johnstone’s article, “…except this time replace the words (and their applicable derivatives) ‘plutocracy’ and ‘oligarchy’ etc with the words ‘government’ and ‘leftism’ …” but since she never once uses either of the words “plutocracy” or “oligarchy,” it’s not possible.

      Johnstone does mention that “…plutocrats own the mass media and platform status quo-friendly voices,” and that is true. I can attempt to replace “plutocrats” with your suggestions of either “government” (obviously false) or “leftism” (whatever that is) but now we would be suggesting that the billionaire capitalist owners of MSM are somehow raging communists. I understand that the hard right and/or rising fascist supporters want us to believe that the likes of mega-capitalist billionaires such as Soros, or the rightist war monger criminal Hillary Clinton are “leftists,” but they are far, far from it. In fact, I am tempted to ask, “What left?” I see no organized left in the United States; certainly not the Democratic Party, which is now as much the party of the rich as are their Republican buddies – something Johnstone has brought to our attention over and over and over again.

      You state: “It is no secret that the left is violently anti-free speech.” Well, if you are speaking of Democrats, perhaps – if being one inch to the left of a right-wing authoritarian greedster is “left.” The Democrats are not “left.” In fact, the Democrats are probably the biggest enemy of “the left” in the USA that exist – what “left” there is. There are a few leftists in the United States, and the majority of them detest the Democrats as much as the billionaire capitalist Democrats detest them. Pelosi stated: “We’re capitalists!” on CNN and she didn’t lie … for once.

      1. Terry, oh I caught her doublethink attempt to wiggle out of her “they lie to us all the time” – except when she wants to believe their lies nonsense. To believe that they are liars and propagandists only on everything else but by golly they would not lie about this other thing designed to increase the power of TPTB is at best self delusion, a lie to oneself. It is doublespeak.
        Please reread my post and you will see where I stated “and their applicable derivatives” in regards to replacing the various words to make my point that Caitlin and the left want to replace the current bad system with an even worse system i.e. an even bigger, more intrusive and thereby an even more authoritarian government. The left is not against tyranny in principle. They just want to be the ones who get to inflict the tyranny.
        The left, not the democratic party, violently attack free speech and are calling for the end of free speech altogether. The left wants to abolish free speech. No human being should support the control freak left’s attempt to deny this most basic human right in any way shape or form.

        1. Really, inforebelscum, I don’t think we will be able to have any meaningful discussion here. Your definition of “left” leaves me baffled. They run the world? Really? I read have read right-wing publications all my life, was raised among the most far right-wing Birchers and religious authoritarians you can find. One thing has always amazed me: The extreme right – and that is exactly where your views emanate – have a particular dichotomy that is at odds with logic. One one hand they claim that “the left” runs and controls the entire world. From the other side of their mouth comes the claim that “leftists” are it epitome of bungling idiots, unable to find their way out of a paper bag.

          Above you stated that “The US is run by leftists.” False, utterly false: At this time all three branches of the US government are totally controlled by the right wing authoritarian Republican party. Yes, the Democrats will control the House come next year, but they will continue as the “ineffective opposition.” Just watch – Social Security, Medicare, and any other federal program that benefits the 99% of us is going to be decimated and the Democrats are going to be the ones to give the GOP the votes needed to get it done.

          Further, you stated: “Every political narrative is leftist.” Be careful of absolutes. Your statement cannot be true. A grade school child would know this. I’ll assume you threw this out in a fit of anger or something because the logic fails. You yourself are proof that the statement is false.

          This remark of yours, “The very essence of leftism is authoritarianism because authoritarianism is based on government violence,” would have certainly surprised the long list of right-wing authoritarians throughout history. Or are you one of those who is going to peddle the fable that the likes of Pinochet, Hitler, Mussolini and the rest were somehow far leftists? If so, this conversation is over.

          Wish I had more time to write, but I don’t.

          1. I had that time. Consciousness has two directions which are progressive and conservative. Progressives think like a wave where conservatives think like a particle. A wave is everywhere and has no identity. A particle is at a certain spot and has identity (individual features). Progressives believe in universal justice (everywhere, everyone is the same and all have to pay) and a conservative would say: “my first right when I earned money is to spend it myself.” Because of this unknown feature of consciousness people will have to be fooled in two different ways. One half of the population is convinced by the idea that the enemy is right wing and the other half that the enemy is left wing. This way the press will always convince everyone. Just read your own newspaper and you will find the explanations of your like.

    3. I find it is possible to talk to the right-wing opposition, but to do so one has to accept that they speak a different language. From my old hippie background, I would tend to use the word “The Establishment”. If I listen to right-wing opposition they would describe the same phenomenon as “Liberals”. What is required is to dig a little deeper beyond the words being used to understand that I from my old 60’s liberal point of view and they from their right-wing point of view were largely talking about exactly the same thing.

      Perhaps the moment when you realize that what Ms. Johnstone is describing fits exactly into what you would describe but with different words is not a time for arguing about which words to use, but instead is a time for enlightenment in that both left and right are largely fighting the same opponent. This leads to the thing that most horrifies the elites which is the fear that they will not be able any longer to divide and conquer by setting left versus right.

      1. Old Joe, in my opinion you are pretty damn close when you say that now is “…not a time for arguing about which words to use, but instead is a time for enlightenment in that both left and right are largely fighting the same opponent.”

        Those who have been told they’re “on the right” and have come to believe it (Rah, rah, Team!) have counterparts on the left (also cheering, Rah, rah, Team). The tiny, minuscule fraction that own the world are more than happy to see us fight among ourselves and distracted by trifles. They will do anything to keep the attention away from the screwing the 99% of us are getting. Mostly they pay propaganda experts (commonly known as Think Tanks) to have us all at each other’s throats. It’s an old game, but an effective one. Caitlin writes about this non-stop and has them dead-to-rights.

      2. Old Joe, I also visit right wing sites (been kicked off of all the main ones too I am proud to say). The left and the right are two sides of the same coin. Both crave power over their fellow human beings; they just disagree on how to wield that power and on whom to inflict it upon.
        The real dividing line is not left v right; it is control freaks v everyone else. Aggression v voluntary interactions. Collectivism v Liberty. The left and the right both embrace the former while decent people support the latter. Problem is is that there are very few of us MYOB decent people around anymore. And by design, mostly from the left, I might add.

      3. Sorry folks, but this isn’t just about words. The left/right division is quite real, and when it comes to a positive programme of action, as opposed to abstract ranting against the elite and a few concrete issues, there is no possibility for a common cause. One side wants to help people, and it wants to be able to decide to do that collectively by means of a vote; the other side is rabidly opposed exactly to these things, and presents them as immoral and illegitimate in principle. One side wants to increase the existing elements of welfare to which the elite has been forced, after a lot of struggle, to acquiesce; the other side, having been brainwashed by the elite, wants to destroy these very achievements.

        Society is a collective and necessarily has rules and mechanisms of collective action. The left is working to make the rules and mechanisms of society accountable and useful to the population and not just the elite (democracy, welfare state, socialism); the libertarian right, like the plutocrats, wants to block this effort, and it does that by falsely presenting collective action and rule-making as inherently illegitimate and/or avoidable. One side is against war because it kills people, the other is, at best, too stingy to finance it. ‘Cross-ideological’ collaboration against war and censorship can work temporarily (and the fact that it seems to be an attractive approach is a symptom of how weak and marginalised the real left has become), but in the long run, it has no future.

  19. Quick, brief thoughts:
    1 Anyone who actually believes explanation one also still believes in Santa Claus, or other fairy tales.
    2. Best examples of media gone bad as a provision of lucrative contracts, Rachel Maddow
    and Steven Colbert. I find both of them unwatchable.
    3. The hardest sell to the public is the one that says, ‘If it seems to be too good to be true – it most certainly is.

    1. Many go along with Explanation 1 unconsciously. They simply don’t realize what they are doing or ever think about it. To us it is like believing in Santa Claus as you said but to them it is not a belief – it is reality and not to be questioned.

      This reminds me of an exchange between the young Marie Louise von Franz and Carl Jung. He told her about a mental patient that said she lives on the moon. Franz said of course she doesn’t live on the moon, it’s all in her mind. Jung then said No, she actually lives on the moon!

      Jung is giving us a hint at how we can approach those that believe in the unreal. It is not by bashing them directly which actually reinforces the belief which is like a complex or split-off piece of their consciousness that tenaciously defends itself against disintegration. A complex will use a threat to further rationalize and strengthen itself. The CIA has done extensive studies on the structure of consciousness and techniques to manipulate it. The elites and CIA use those techniques on us.

      The way the public is being manipulated by the elites with demonization narrative propaganda is very dangerous. We need to find a way to get the believers to question. It is finding a way to treat their complex. I think one way to make the opening is to get enough Americans to question the foreign wars in an antiwar movement alliance of the political opposites. Caitlin also suggested this – a good idea. Note the elites efforts to keep us at each others throats. They are deathly afraid of an alliance of the opposites. The opposites in France are demonstrating together and it might spread to the US. I am watching and hoping. I hope the French have lit the fuse.

      Every day now the situation is getting worse, more dangerous. The establishment left and right and behind them the elites are digging the US into a hole and can’t stop. We must figure out what is to be done.

  20. Caitlin and Tim, I would add the public-school education system to the MSM when it comes to reinforcing the Elite’s narrative.
    ..
    Also, I would add the entire world of “economics” — departments of economics that teach only one way of looking at the human motivation, methods of production, economists that appear as experts on TV, etc. — to the MSM and public school brainwashing. The official narrative is that the present system in which the vast majority of wealth and large-scale capital equipment is owned by a microscopic percentage of the population for their own astronimical profit is the perfect system. All it needs is a tweak here and there and everything will turn out just fine for 7.4 billion people.
    ..
    After that fine tuning/tweaking by TBTF banks and a few hundred trillion of more debt for future unborn taxpayers to pay back, all of this system’s seemingly vitally-necessary need for increasingly expensive, increasingly intensive wars; and this system’s seemingly vitally necessary need for a continuous wild increase in the human population, will somehow, some way magically disappear and Utopia ensue. Anyone who does not agree that the present arrangement is the perfect arrangement will be weeded out of the garden of “economics” as far as getting a job goes. But they’ll still have the opportunity to rant during dinner conversation, or maybe even run for political office on a platform of “hope and change” . Of course they won’t get elected, but that’s democracy for you. Some win and some lose.

  21. The leftist media virtue signals their nonexistent moral superiority by conflating immorality with criminality, to claim that socialism’s tax and regulation established welfare states are not totalitarian theocracies, imposing universal moral obedience, but the necessary defense from immorality.

    This allows them to support their fake humanitarianism, which is immorality and unethically funded entirely by politicized cited theft, coercively confiscating the incomes and regulating every action of the entire population. That the consequences have been a nation wide degeneration into animal packs, hoping to profit from the coercion, while avoiding its penalties, all preying on each other by electing political enablers promising to legalize the victimization of productive people, for the benifitm of politically favored packs of predators is ignored, because noticing would interfere with the media’s self image as world saviors.

    It is a common failing of the left to substitute propaganda for truth, because without the deceit, they would be regarded with the same contempt as those who steal what they want, from whoever has it, in person.

    1. JR, agreed and well said. The left complaining about lies and tyranny is like satan complaining about lies and tyranny. The left has no more regard or use for truth than Ol’ Scratch himself.

    2. JR, you certainly picked an appropriate avatar. Hoping you don’t find anyone to bite today.

    3. It is a common failing on the American(-style) right to describe collective decision making and solidarity as unethical coercion. If you want to live among other human beings, you have to pay a price for that. You have to accept that collective decisions will be made and to recognise that other human beings, just like you, will have a voice in the making of other decisions. You will have to stick up for others, just like others will stick up for you. You will have to help others when they need it, just like others will help you when you need it. If you don’t want that, you are free to go and live in a jungle or on a desert island. You people, however, desperately want to have your cake and eat it, too, and regularly throw tantrums when you can’t have it your way. Your pompous pseudo-ethical reasonings are a rather transparent cover for pathological selfishness, small-mindedness and ill-will towards those (currently) less fortunate than yourselves.

      1. F. Foundling: Hmmmm….”collective decisions” require a numerical majority, telling the numerical minority what they can do and why they should like it. And what these decisions are whether each individual should choose cooperative trade, criminal theft or politicized theft to get what they want and what will be the consequences.

        Naturally the cooperative in order to survive by cooperatively working for a living, would mutually (not collectively) create cooperative relationships of _voluntarily_ caring, sharing and trading with one another as the means of acquiring and maintaining peaceful prosperous lifestyles. The cooperatively peaceful, trading for what they want, would also need to shoot thieves scampering off with their stuff, because each cooperative life is depending on that stuff for survival. So they wouldn’t run around trying to fool people into thinking thieves, voting for other people’s money, rather than working for their own, are actually “those less fortunate” so they can continue stealing with politics, without the risk of retaliation for stealing in person.

        Trade presumes equal profits for every trading participant; theft, politicized or criminal, infers the unequal redistribution of profits from a loser to a winner. So no, you aren’t going to guilt trip me into thinking that I’ll rip the money _I_ worked for to put food on my family’s table and vote it into the pockets of billionaire political predators buying votes with the promise to enrich tax sucking sloth, (although none of them ever keep that promise, instead keeping most of the loot, much to the dismay of their constituencies of thieves. )

        LOL on the “pathological selfishness.” Is that when somebody truthfully says “no, leftie thieves, you can’t create utopia by electing political predators to steal on your behalf,” and then the lefty says, you must be “pathological selfish,” otherwise you’d insist that everyone must steal whatever they want, from whoever has it…because..because…because…whatever could be the reason.

        Oh, yes, lefties don’t want to work for a living, and they sure don’t want to borrow to pay for what they want but don’t have, because then they’d have to pay the money back, not to mention if they accepted voluntarily offered charity, then they’d have to say “thank you,” a word yet to pass their thieving lips. So how will lefties survive if they couldn’t steal from productive people. They wouldn’t and good riddance.

        You could make some sense, were you ever to figure out the difference between “charity” and “exploitation.”

        1. Flash news: societies impose certain obligations on their members. Always have, always will. Democratic societies do that by majority vote. Obligations are, by definition, not voluntary. They are only voluntary in the sense that you can choose to leave that society and find/found a society that doesn’t impose any obligations on you – somehow your lot never choose to do that. One type of obligation is the obligation to pay a certain amount of money. Such an obligation is not ‘theft’ or ‘predation’. All of the above is entirely normal and, by definition, not criminal.

          The money you will pay will go to support the feeding and education of children who can’t afford them (and you could have been born as one), decrepit old people (which you may become one day), people who are sick or disabled (just as you might get sick or disabled tomorrow), protection against criminals or potential invaders (which you may also be threatened by some day), etc., etc. There are also numerous useful everyday government services that all citizens, including you, benefit from regularly. The people that the money will benefit, who may include yourself, are not morally inferior to you (‘sloth’, ‘thieves’, ‘predators’, non-‘productive’, etc.). You are morally obliged to pay that money, and yes, you *must* also be forced to pay it, whether you like it or not. And no, you won’t get to feel like some kind of king who gives stuff when he wants and to whom he wants (‘charity’) – even if you weren’t too stingy to give enough, you can’t personally do the calculations to determine exactly where resources are needed and to ensure that they are provided with the required regularity, which is why charity is not and has never been sufficient to provide welfare. Not to mention that, as I said, you are not morally superior to the people benefitted, so you simply don’t deserve to feel like some kind of king over them. Even if some of the money is, as you say, misappropriated, some of it will still be used for that purpose, and that is enough of a reason for you to be obliged to pay it.

          The amount of money that you have earned does not, under capitalism, automatically correspond to what you morally deserve or to how useful you have been to your fellow human beings, since it also depends on a thousand other factors and contingencies – including market fluctuations, strokes of luck, manipulative advertisements, dishonest tricks, careerist machinations, inheritance, the education your parents gave you and the know-how and connections they transmitted to you, etc. Under the present system, an honest factory worker or a school teacher that raises and educates the future citizens gets many times less than a hedge fund manager that does nothing useful or a lying journalist that promotes war or the economic interests of his employer. It is obviously unjust and immoral to want people’s living standards, education, healthcare and very life to depend solely on the amount of arbitrary signs the present insane system has given them. You have convinced yourself that you are better than all those who are poorer than yourself, but that is a patent self-serving falsehood.

  22. The human mind??? Ink and quill… from the time of writing to the printing press, lies are the insurrection of the victors ideological bias. The more useful idiots on board the conformity-Conditioning train, the better the geological fermentation… What moves the masses is generic information of the least resistance to the unformed conditioned mind. Brainwashing is far easier, because the past indoctrination’s and permeation’s of educational genocide are alive and well in the minds of the indoctrinated…, I will include myself as a matter of the mentally disabled that have to overcome the unconscious reality of my own conditioning. Here the strugal of cognitive dissonance, as well, the values of amoral insanity are a devisive unrelenting battle to extricate the minds eye from conditioned values of myth, half truths, propaganda steering apparatuses of the third kind… Ask me if i feel there is other intelligent life in the universe…I would say yes, but, I look at the earth and it’s inhabitants and become discouraged and depressed, that the word intelligent means a dam thing… More like intelligentsia and heard mentality with variants of conditioning leading to an abstract world of confusion and misplaced ideological religiosity and habits that keep the status quo in a constant work of carnage and death to the non-participants… I would like to see an original Idea that comes from the creative source of the unabridged incite and creative power and cosmic neutral duality!

    If it ain’t duality, it is spun to create an a-moral source of object self-narcissistic dogma, propagated for the unaware masses of indoctrinated mentality, of course, he who leads, must formulate a concept of authority that gives the right of might to the few. Thusly, the coded underbelly of the sub-conscience is always at -0- dark thirty , fermenting under duress and confusion. Humanity is something for non-reptilian minds… Here the school of the non-feeling, is overshadowed by the intelligentsia of deviance and all things objective to reason for the reason of reasoning, authoritarian fear and ideological herding of the masses into the suburban city lifestyle, of industrial power, and the brazen fleecing of the masses of the fruits of their labors. But who’s code are we following? And by what right do they have authority to rule the minds of the masses. My guess it is the herd mentality!
    Gc

  23. Here’s my contribution: in France, protests have been going on for 4 weeks now. The government pretends that “mobilisation is declining”, though it’s blatantly false to anyone participating the protests. And the media dutifully parrot the official stance. For instance, last Saturday there were supposedly 10000 protesters in Paris. There were *at least* 3 different marches (Champs-Élysées, Bastille, Nation-République). Here’s a picture of the “March for Climate” I was part of. The avenue is crowded, it’s more than 2 km long. Does anyone thing there are much less than 10 000 people here? A reasonable estimation would be 40 000 for one march. There were 2 others in Paris alone.

    https://image-store.slidesharecdn.com/05680c02-e9fa-4a5d-9185-7efd8702a09f-original.jpeg

  24. Yesterday Twitter decided to suspend my account over the following post. They want ‘me’ to remove it. I found this odd… They shut down people’s entire pages but they want ‘me’ to remove a post they claim breaks their rules? I am not sure what is really behind this. I appealed their decision and let them know I don’t care about Twitter enough to remove this post. I mainly go there to follow journalists I trust and I can find them elsewhere. So unless they change their minds, I will not be on twitter anymore, ldbrillante.

    The so called offending tweet: “And @realDonaldTrump can go jump off a cliff If he thinks I want teachers in my daughter’s school where she ‘teaches’, carrying guns… that just make gun deaths MORE LIKELY TO OCCUR… not less likely People SHOULD NOT have to carry a gun to be safe in America.”
    9:07 PM – 21 Feb 2018

    1. LDB, you are aware, I hope, that guns are inanimate objects, right?

  25. “Access Journalism”
    .
    Media whores that fellate TPTB get paid in leaks and interviews from top officials.
    .
    Surprised you didn’t mention the term, Caitlin.

    1. Dammit, I meant to but I forgot. I’m adding that in.

  26. And who controls the media? Is there a group of people who may not be criticized.

    1. I often thought of this… of the thousands of stories that, daily, cross the wire, how can all of the major news outlets pick the same stories without something having told them what to use? Does Rupert Murdoch get a phone call at night from “the boss” telling him tomorrows stories? I don’t know… it sure seems as though a system of some kind is in place.

    2. MOI, yes there is indeed a group of people that cannot be criticized and not only does Caitlin not criticize that group of people she advocates that that group of people is right and everyone else is wrong.

    3. Who controls the media? Today, a handful of giant media conglomerates – Comcast, the Walt Disney Company, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom and CBS – control much of what the American people see, hear and read. Newscorp includes Fox News, with its
      24 hours of leftwing bashing on radio and TV. As the noted author A.J. Liebling wrote; “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

    4. We all know that the root cause of our most urgent geopolitical problems is the rampant criminality at the very top stemming from an extreme concentration of wealth and power among a tiny circle of ruling elites. Given this, could there be a more disastrous recipe for global catastrophe in the foreseeable future than an entirely brainwashed civilization being too afraid to even name (let alone properly criticize) the one very small tribe of insecure, easily threatened but cunningly inventive racial and religious supremacists that exercises an extreme concentration of wildly disproportionate and unaccountable power over banking, politics, media and US militarism with total impunity, because its fabricated status of eternal victimhood immunizes this exceptional tribe of cognitive elites with their dangerously schizoid double-binds against any serious public criticism – so much so that if anyone dares to break with the terrifying mental paralysis of this cultural taboo by simply mentioning the obvious, they are immediately charged with the indefensible crime of antisemitism and instantly expelled from acceptable public discourse – and by even the most passionate anti-establishment voices of critical dissent? Enjoy the apocalypse, and don’t forget to crucify the whistle blowers!

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