I write a lot about government secrecy and the importance of whistleblowers, leakers and leak publishers, and for good reason: governments which can hide their wicked deeds from public accountability will do so whenever possible. It’s impossible for the public to use democracy for ensuring their government behaves in the way they desire if they aren’t allowed to be informed about what that behavior even is.
These things get lots of attention in conspiracy circles and dissident political factions. Quite a few eyes are fixed on the veil of government opacity and the persecution of those brave souls who try to shed light on what’s going on behind it. Not enough eyes, but quite a few.
What gets less attention, much to our detriment, is the fact that the primary mechanism of our oppression and exploitation is happening right out in front of our faces.
The nonstop campaign by bought politicians, owned news outlets, and manipulated social media platforms to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world contribute vastly more to the sickness of our society than government secrecy does. We know this from experience: any time a whistleblower exposes secret information about the malfeasance of powerful governments like NSA surveillance or Collateral Murder, we see not public accountability, nor demands for sweeping systemic changes to prevent such malfeasance from reoccurring, but a bunch of narrative management from the political/media class.
This narrative management is used to shift attention away from the information that was revealed and onto the fact that the person who revealed it broke the law or misbehaved in some way. It’s used to convince people that the revelations aren’t actually a big deal, or that it was already basically public knowledge anyway. And it’s used to manipulate public attention on to the next hot story of the day and memory hole it underneath the white noise of the media news churn. And nothing changes.
We’ve seen it happening over and over and over again. The narrative management machine has gotten so effective and efficient that it’s been able to completely ignore the recent revelation that the US, UK and France almost certainly bombed Syria in 2018 for a completely false reason. A few half-assed Bellingcat spin jobs and an otherwise total media blackout, and it’s like the whole thing never happened.
What this tells us is that our first and foremost problem is not the fact that conspiracies are happening behind a curtain of government secrecy, but that the way people think, act and vote is being actively manipulated right out in the open. Government secrecy is indeed one aspect of establishment narrative control, but controlling the public’s access to information is only one aspect. The bigger part of it is controlling how the public thinks about information.
The reason people never use the power of their superior numbers to force real change, even though they’re being exploited and oppressed in myriad ways by the ruling class, is because they’ve been propagandized into accepting the status quo as desirable (or at least normal). The propaganda of the political/media class is therefore the establishment’s front line of defense. Its most powerful, and essential, weapon.
This is important for dissidents of all stripes to understand, because it means we’re not just passively waiting around for another Manning or Snowden or an Ian Henderson to give us information which we can use to fight the oppression machine. Those individuals have done a great public service, but the battle to awaken human consciousness to what’s really going on in our world is in no way limited to leakers and whistleblowers. It is not at the mercy of government secrecy.
If you are engaged in any type of media, you are engaging the narrative matrix which keeps the public asleep and complacent. It doesn’t matter if you have a Twitter account, a Youtube account, some flyers or a can of spray paint: if you are capable of getting any kind of message out there, you are able to directly influence the mechanism of your oppression. You are able to inform people that they are being lied to, you are able to explain why, and you are able to point them to where they can find more information.
This is extremely empowering. You do not need to wait around hoping that some bombshell piece of information makes it past all the various security checks and spinmeisters and triggers a real social awakening. You can be that information. You can become a catalyst for that awakening.
The key to turning this ship around does not lie hidden somewhere behind a veil of government opacity. It lies in you. It lies in all of us. We can begin awakening our fellow humans right now by attacking the narrative management of the propaganda machine that sits right in front of us, unarmored and unhidden.
____________________________
Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
66 responses to “The Primary Mechanism Of Your Oppression Is Not Hidden At All”
Once again I must repeat myself: “This is all about Greed, The Lust For Power, and Profit over all” Like Kevin O’Leary states on Shark Tank: ” You gotta be willing to sell your Mother”. People who retain morals and honesty and compassion tend not to get rich. But then they do not need 450 foot Yachts and Private Jets, they like to take walks in the woods instead……Imagine for a moment 750,000,000,000.00 bucks spent on war and war making, while 40,000,000. people in this country go to bed hungry, have no health care, and probably have 25,000. bucks on their credit cards, or owe those wonderful Payday Lenders forever & ever…..Keep shopping on the Big “A” people……..
Ho Chi Minh’s Declaration of Independence (1945)
Sucker. You think we still dance to that tune, bro.
What can never be unsaid.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
What I’m curious to know, Caitlin, is why you are wedded to the idea that Collateral Murder is a genuine video.
.
Do you believe that you wouldn’t have been duped for a decade or that Julian wouldn’t have been or that Wikileaks as a group wouldn’t have been or that not all of us could have been?
.
If so, this is exactly what the power elite rely on. They rely on us:
— not wanting to accept being duped
— getting comfortable in whatever notions they’ve managed to persuade us of and not wanting to budge from from them – my goodness is it easy for that to happen – takes no time at all
.
If you want to be a true analyst, you need to be able to turn on a dime in your thoughts. You need to be able to face-palm in a moment and go, “OMG! They’ve fooled us on that too.”
.
We’ve all been duped about various things for decades, centuries and no doubt millennia. About 3 months ago I was contacted by someone who is writing a book on how nuclear weapons are a hoax. Amazing, huh? Within five minutes I was on board with the idea, helped by the fact that just at that time I’d seen Mordechai Vanunu’s name mentioned, the alleged Israeli nuclear power worker who’d allegedly leaked nuclear weapons secrets. I looked him up on Wikipedia and his story contained a very convoluted quite hilarious capture that included a honey trap, a white van (there was an alleged white van containing explosives dust and Israeli Mossad agents stopped in a road block on 9/11 – they always like to connect their events) and a diverted Israeli navy ship. The Wikipedia stories for the allegedly assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists are also unconvincing … and then a number of the Hiroshima survivor stories don’t add up – just like the 9/11, Pearl Harbour, Christchurch shooting and Las Vegas shooting miracle survivor stories don’t add up either. See https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/they-tell-us-clearly.html. Not saying, of course, there was no bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There clearly was, of course, but not, it seems, atomic bombings.
.
Terry Jones said this about history:
“History is not necessarily “what happened”, it’s very often what somebody wants us to think happened. So I suppose we shouldn’t believe everything we’re told.”
.
What I think is fascinating is that it’s not just that people at the time falsely presented what happened but that people living now know what happened even centuries ago (seemingly the truth being passed down by the elite through generations) and are still “curating” it and we can tell they’re still curating it because they always give us the clues.
.
The “official story” of the Great Fire of London in 1666 is a load of cobblers and both the reality and fictional account of the event bear striking similarities to the reality and fictional account of 9/11. See Gloria Moss’s fascinating article (she doesn’t link it to 9/11) https://off-guardian.org/2019/09/01/the-great-fire-of-london-cui-bono.
.
What strikes me is that they’re still giving us the clues. For example, in one source you’ll see that William Farriner, whose bakery the fire allegedly started in, his family and a manservant escaped through a window and over the rooftop while the maid was “too fearful to follow” and didn’t make it while another version omits the manservant. Surely, since 1666 they would have managed to get the story straight with manservant or no manservant. We are told the playwright, James Shirley, and his wife were evacuated to a refugee camp. In some versions, we are told they died of fright and exposure but others only of exposure. Presumably, fright would be the equivalent of a heart attack from shock. So the fire was from Sep 2-6 and he and his wife both died on the same day, October 29. What a coincidence! It seems rather odd, doesn’t it, that James Shirley who had kingly connections was left to die from exposure in a refugee camp and that “fright” would have played a role almost two months after the fire. Could he and his wife, in similar fashion to Barbara Olson (media personality and wife of Ted Olson, former Solicitor-General), who didn’t make phone calls from Flight 77 nor die in it on 9/11 because there was no Flight 77, have been “disappeared” somehow?
It’s amazing, isn’t it? It occurred to me that James Shirley may have had debtors he needed to avoid and whaddayaknow? he wrote a play, The Gamester, “noteworthy for its realistic and detailed picture of gambling in its era.” Not evidence, of course, not evidence but Dostoyevsky wrote a novel, The Gambler, and was an “avid gambler” himself losing “large sums of money and being in debt most of his life.”
Oops! Creditors not debtors.
I call “controlling the narrative” programming, or brainwashing, or mind control, but we are talking about the same thing. It works extremely well because about 80% of the population are what I call the Followers. They follow their leaders just like sheep do. The leaders are the 1% that I call the Sociopaths (because they are indeed sociopaths). That leaves about 20% of the population, about half of which I call the Minions, who are wanna-be Sociopaths and eagerly serve the Sociopaths in the pursuit of selfish enrichment. The final 10% or so are the Independents, people like you find commenting on Caitlin’s enlightening articles, who choose to think for themselves. The reason the Sociopaths, and not the Independents, always control the Followers and Minions is because the independent-minded Independents have a hard time agreeing on things and uniting into an organized force. Being an organized force is the key, and it is something the Sociopaths have sufficiently mastered after thousands of years of practice. This well-established model is going to be tough to change, and the only ones that can change it are the Independents. At the same time, the Sociopaths will be doing everything in their power to sabotage any efforts the Independents make to create change. This is the proverbial battle of good versus evil, and history shows us, unfortunately, that evil is steadily winning.
You are right Chico, while independent thinkers may see the bullshit for what it is, we don’t have a strategy in place under which we can formulate a better way for our society to go. We are like the rats in a building that is about to be demolished. Most of the rats are just going about their daily scavenging, following the consensus narrative. Some of the rats know that the building is going to blow up but they continue running around inside trying to fix things, trying to neutralize the explosive. This brings me to the conclusion that it’s time to get out of the cities and live a simpler life, using only local resources, thereby not harming people in distant communities by stealing their resources. We seriously need to concentrate on sharing our resources, our labor and our time with each other so that we have a cohesive and caring community. While the sociopaths go about their gleeful job of destroying society, communities that are strong and cohesive will be able to rise up from the ashes.
Step, you got the right idea, brother! I went rural 40 years ago, and never regretted it for a moment, no T.V., no Micro-wave ovens, just a wood stove, which is also my hot water heater, I have to travel 18 miles to town, and I do all of my shopping Locally (Except for this Lap-top) which I only got because I went deaf and needed a means of communication…Are all of the local businesses gone from your area? Get busy and open a store or shop of your own, treat people fair and square, and you will be able to stay in business as long as you do not get Greedy. You won’t even need to take out ads, word of mouth is the best advertising, I owned my own auto repair shop for 30 years, and never took out an ad, and always had more business than I could handle, because I treated everyone as Equals, and fixed their vehicles right so they did not have to come back to me……Right now I am old, retired, and alone, but I am used to it, I am lucky to have good neighbors & we help each other out as needed. Plus I have time to keep up with this tired old world of ours, and think for myself. Ms. Johnstone is pretty much Right-On, I appreciate that she takes the time to write her thoughts out for us to read and share, we need 100 million just like her. An aside: J. Bezo’s has almost all the money in the world why do people insist on giving him even more? Is it worth it to save $1.00 on TP delivered to your front door? How nice it is for me when I shop in town and everyone says Hello, and are willing to go the extra mile to procure for me just what I need…..Just Saying; People, wise up-rise up quit being complacent wage slaves……
Thanks for replying to me George. I would like to share some ideas with you. I have made a temporary email if you would like to have a conversation: hutuanga@outlook.co.id
when one has goats & you need to contain them in a certain perimeter, most a happy to stay within their alloted area . it’s the ones that move beyond these that are delivered a swift ending or are given the position of leading the sheep through the yards and straight onto the killing room floor
I’m not so sure about that–Kathryn Austin Fitts might also take issue with the transparency of oppression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5AlWQM6RTk&fbclid=IwAR2V_ySvzokoqnSqYfOdKegxlGA9Lst0EFjJ9sxQMppWRRaBu7RHqX8glKc
“Most people prefer to believe that their leaders are just and fair, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which he lives is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one’s self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.” ~ Michael Rivero
Though for years they’ve tried to tell you
With their radios and TV news
Hope for change will always be a bridge too far
But now you’ve just begun to know who we are.
We are more than the nations that divide us
We are those who know it’s time now to be free
WE ARE MORE – WE ARE THE 99%
The next big step in the right direction is coming to realize that the world is so rotten that any talk of reform is misguided and a waste of time.
Knowing what’s wrong with the world is a good start. Knowing that the world is so rotten that any talk of reform is the next step in the right direction.Knowing how to build a better world is the biggest step in the right direction. Some think they have the answer to the world’s problems but Yeshua’s strategy is far superior. After infiltrators from the Roman Empire hijacked the revolution He started, Yeshua’s unique and brilliant strategy has never been discovered, understood and put into practice. This shows how successful the Roman Catholic Church and ruling dynasties have been at brainwashing complacent and apathetic populations.
When a lot of parties and counterparties can’t pay each other because their revenue flows are cut off, the securities, currencies, equities, and other abstract representations of wealth go south. The US and Europe are no better positioned for a crisis in their banking arrangements, and confidence is starting to crack. Both economic mega-regions have relied on central banking hocus-pocus to prop up stock markets and maintain the illusion that the logic of bonds still applies. The first thing to go moneywise in a contracting financial system is the magic of compound interest. Please read the rest of this article here:
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/crisis-o-rama/
The key question that must be answered is: who owns and therefore controls the MSM and social media because he who pays the piper calls the tune? Answer that question and you will know where this 24/7 propaganda and subversion is coming from. Yes…we all must fight to tell the truth and expose the MSM as a cesspool of lies and treason…but we must also expose the powerful entities who control the mass media, most western governments and just about all vital institutions of freedom, liberty, peace and prosperity. Only the truth will set us free and as stated by Orwell: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it”. Ordinary mostly decent citizens have been brainwashed and weaponize to unwittingly attack truth tellers and true patriots in the service of vile and sinister creatures without a shred of humanity who rule over us. Little do they know that they do this in support of their mortal enemies.
We’ve all been brainwashed by the controlled narrative not to say the “J” word, but we can still say “sociopaths” without guaranteed persecution. And the power-mad controllers are without a doubt sociopaths, which is a psychological orientation that cuts across all belief systems, ethnicities, and other identifiers. It is a psychological deviancy that has cost humanity nearly all of its amazing potential. The tiny minority of deviants control the normal masses, when it should be the normal masses that properly manage the tiny minority of deviants. Thus the human world is upside down, and has been for millennia, all because of unidentified, unmanaged, psychological deviants. It’s in the best interests of the vast majority to change that. Sociopaths should not be allowed to be our leaders, but so far we have no effective policy in place to prevent it.
And we need to be able to ask the most difficult question. Why after two world wars in the last century is humanity standing on the precipice of a third?
Power. Manifested as interest it has been present in every conflict of history – no exception. It is the underlying motivation for war. It cuts across all apparently unifying principles: family, kin, nation, religion, ideology, politics – everything. We unite with the enemies of our principles, because that is what serves our interest. Power is the cause of war. Once again we will see its destructiveness on a global scale.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Money is also the most powerful behavior modifier, can be good or bad. We have a money system based on usury; the abuse of monetary authority for personal gain. Its not just excess interest, its creating money as interest bearing debt for profit. If your money system is for-profit then the society will be for-profit, a kick them while they’re down, me first, pull the ladder up behind you society. Look into why all the great religions banned it, why all the great philosophers condemned it and read what Dante’ had to say about it….”an extraordinarily efficient form of violence by which one does the most damage with the least effort.” I think those who don’t know what is going on with the money are not woke.
The neoliberalism fever dream is subsiding. The thought that private banks and corporations are better at governing than the political concepts of the nation-state has proven itself false. This 40-yr. constructed Creditocracy had one goal in mind – to sink the nation (world) deep into private debt for social control and to force the surrender of national assets and services to privatization. Bernie wants to revive fiscal policy for public purpose, i.e., use government spending as it was intended, not just for the benefit of Wall St, the MIC and corporations. It’s time to end the reign of creditor predators.
https://www.rt.com/shows/renegade-inc/479922-debt-loans-social-system/
The Real Lesson from the Great Depression: Fiscal Policy Works!
https://rooseveltinstitute.org/real-lesson-great-depression-fiscal-policy-works/
Fiscal policy has its limits and we’ve reached them. We have a monetary problem, the private control of the money. As Frederick Soddy said, “Government does not need to get into the banking business, banks need to get out of the governing business.”
Are we at full employment capacity? Have we run out of real resources? That’s what the fiscal focus should be on, not whether or not we have the financial capacity.
“Stephanie Kelton is a professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University and a senior economic adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. She was the chief economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee in 2015 and in 2016, POLITICO named her one of the 50 people most influencing the public debate in America. Her forthcoming book, ‘The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of a New Economy’ will be published by Public Affairs in 2020.”
https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/what-is-modern-monetary-theory-with-stephanie-kelton/
Caitlin, it is money that is the oligarch’s mechanism of power and control and yes it is operating right before our eyes but is hidden by, as Marshall McCluhan pointed out, “by public incredulity” supplied by the media they own and the schools they control through government. It is not OUR government, it is THEIR government. 10 centuries before Christ the Greeks recognized that the most vital prerogative of democratic governance was to create and issue the money. Any government that does not control the money is controlled by those who do. “Ours” is controlled by international finance. You may think you know all you need to know about money but I think if you did you would be telling us all about it. Please look into it. Great work, love the song!! It is my morning ritual.
The rhetoric we use to describe ourselves is so disconnected from reality that it has induced collective schizophrenia. America, as it is discussed in public forums by politicians, academics and the media, is a fantasy, a Disneyfied world of make-believe. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into illusions. The longer we fail to name and confront our physical and moral decay, the more demagogues who peddle illusions and fantasies become empowered. Those who acknowledge the truth—beginning with the stark fact that we are no longer a democracy—wander like ghosts around the edges of society, reviled as enemies of hope. The mania for hope works as an anesthetic. Please read this entire article here:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/america-land-of-make-believe/
Caitlin, the evidence shows that Collateral Murder is faked. It was used as a way for Chelsea Manning, intelligence asset, to infiltrate and undermine Julian and Wikileaks. I really do not understand the hostility to this notion when it represents a typical MO of infiltration.
.
In Collateral Murder, dust magically covers the fact that no one is killed. It is similar to the magic dust, packed into the twin towers before their collapse that covered the obviousness of controlled demolition and made Ground Zero look like a war zone. It is also similar to the magic dust in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu (Black Hawk Down) that covered the fact that no soldiers “fast roped” down from a Black Hawk down in the failed raid.
.
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/wikileaks-controlled-opposition.html
.
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/twin-towers-the-magic-dust.html
.
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/battle-of-mogadishu-1993.html
“…evidence shows that Collateral Murder is faked.” Not buying it, Petra. Your reasoning is unsound, extreme, and does not corroborate with so many known facts. While it is true that we are being constantly deceived, you take it to a level that would be inefficient for the ruling sociopaths. When it comes to deceiving and manipulating, the ruling sociopaths are the best, and they don’t do things inefficiently.
You need a better refutation than that, Chico. I have backed my claim with evidence. You need to argue against it and also provide evidence that supports the reality of the video. Did you even look at it I wonder. I’m amazed at how people can refute things without even checking the backup of the person’s claim.
.
What’s inefficient about it? Totally efficient … and they spend absolutely millions and millions on propaganda – they love spending money on that – no expense spared. What better way to infiltrate than to present all wrapped in a nice, pink bow EXACTLY the kinds of shocking things we expect to be (and are, of course, genuinely) perpetrated by the warmongers. However, when they infiltrate they don’t use the genuine article even if it’s available. No, no, no, no, no. They always like to control the information so they present their controlled version of US soldiers targeting civilians. The real thing would probably be too shocking. When it’s controlled it doesn’t seem quite so bad, it’s sanitised to a degree.
.
I wonder how you think people and groups are infiltrated, I really do. I tried to tell someone that Ethan McCord was actor and she said, “Oh no, he’s my Facebook friend.” What on earth does infiltration involve if it doesn’t involve becoming FB friends for goodness’ sake.
i’m afraid the wheels of history churn a little too slow for us mere mortals to actually feel the churning, but we can and should do our level best to make them turn faster and come to a least violent end. the ruling ghouls are definitely threatening, and will do their level best, to bring the entire humanity down with their own demise. we can and should pull the plug, cut the cord, and build a self-sustaining community around ourselves as best as we can. i don’t know about others but i need very little to survive, and don’t mind the simplest, independent, just, and peaceful life at all, and it’s not the worst time to live in from that perspective.
Living simply and peacefully is not an option… just ask the American Indians or Aboriginals of Australia or West Papua or Palestinians how that worked out for them.. Anyone who doesn’t stimulate the economy will be exterminated.
“We can begin awakening our fellow humans right now by attacking the narrative management of the propaganda machine that sits right in front of us, unarmored and unhidden.” Here’s precisely the kind of attack against narrative management that Caitlin rightly calls upon all of us to make, each in our own way.
https://www.ae911truth.org/news/642-fran-shure-digs-into-operating-mockingbird-in-part-22-of-why-do-good-people-become-silent-or-worse-about-9-11
Hey, love the analogy of turning the ship around. My first tendency was to launch into a professional/technical description of every aspect of turning a ship, drawn from my life of doing that very work. And, the more I wrote it in my head, I realized that a ship that is aground can’t be turned. Mankind is not floating freely along merrily in a dream. Man is aground and stuck here in the material world trapped and hopelessly mired on a cultural shoal. Now, in order to turn a ship that is aground, you must either wait for a celestial moment that will provide a natural lifting from the firmament or lighten the load of the grounded ship. What is the ship ladened with? This ship of souls needs either of those things to happen. Then and only then will the ship be turned successfully. The celestial moment will come with destructive force leaving few souls to begin anew with a lightened load. I digress. I don’t want to fawn over your work, obviously you are good at what you do. But, I think the situation is hopeless. I can’t argue with people that have hope of changing the world. But, when the ship lost it’s rudder and went aground it lost it’s hope. We are all here experiencing this moment in time because we have all been here before experiencing this closing of one age and the dawning of a new age of enlightened souls coming closer to the Devine plan of a return to oneness. Living a life of truth, integrity and self-realization will help all.
i’m afraid the wheels of history churn a little too slow for us mere mortals to actually feel the churning, but we can and should do our level best to make them turn faster and come to a least violent end. however, the ruling ghouls are definitely threatening, and will do their level best, to bring the entire humanity down with their own demise. we should pull the plug, cut the cord, and build a self-sustaining community as best as we can. i don’t know about others but i need very little to survive, and don’t mind the simplest, independent, just, and peaceful life at all, and it’s not the worst time to live in from that perspective.
“What this tells us is that our first and foremost problem is not the fact that conspiracies are happening behind a curtain of government secrecy, but that the way people think, act and vote is being actively manipulated right out in the open.” https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/02/01/exit-from-the-matrix-deep-state-vs-free-individual/
So if I get this article correctly, we are passengers on a ship and the government are the crew and captain taking us wherever they want. We must incite mutiny among the passengers and take control of the ship. Nice thought but as long as the buffet tables and nightly entertainment continue we are enjoying the cruise too much to care about it. However once they do shutdown it will be too late.
Another wonderful commentary from Caitlin. We are so lucky to have her in our lives. But … always a ‘but’… it ends with a hopeful message that I’m afraid I’ve learned, in an overwhelmingly painful way, ignores a very real phenomenon. The friends, loved ones and neighbors with whom we are so desperately trying to engage have shut down. Every single one of my ‘progressive’ acquaintances suffer from a massive case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Every. Single. One.
You can come to the table with brilliant and otherwise persuasive, fact-filled arguments and it just doesn’t matter because … Trump. You can reveal a million points showing that Trump is the symptom, not the problem; the pus, not the boil and wiping away the pus won’t rid us of the festering, toxic disease we reside in. It just doesn’t matter.
The cognitive dissonance and group-think mentality in these people (most of them highly intelligent folks) is off the charts. No amount of fact-checking and links to powerful articles of truth alters their world view. And the truly disheartening result is that you become a kind of pariah. Worse, in these ridiculous yet vicious times, a Putin Puppet. A Useful Idiot and Russian Asset.
So by all means, continue to struggle to open the minds of our friends to the pervasive propagandizing that is destroying our lives. But as with alcoholism, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. I am beyond hoping anymore that that step is anywhere close to happening anytime soon. And we’ve run out of time.
It is even worse than you describe. Not only are progressives rabid about Trump but they are thoroughly disillusioned about the Democratic Party. Many are rallying behind Sanders but it will be to no avail. I predict if Sanders takes the nomination, he will be persuaded to take Clinton as VP. Then if they win he will, after a suitable time, die by a simulated heart attack or some other illness and HRC will be president. People who get in the Clinton’s way seem to die under odd circumstances.
The DNC will not allow Bernie to win the primary. They will change the rules (again) to allow their superdelegates to choose who will be Trump’s opponent in the general, and it won’t be Bernie. They loathe everything he stands for.
An old motto from the 70’s:
“If voting could change the system, they’d make it illegal”
A snippet I heard from a 60’s anti-war rally:
“You guys in the US don’t have death squads, because they don’t need them. You willingly elect your oppressors. If someone like Ho Chi Minh or Fidel Castro won the election, you’d have death squads in your country, too”
The point being that “democracy” and “free elections” are rigged.
Anyone who thinks that voting can unseat The Powers That Be needs some serious book time in a library with old-fashioned books and journals from decades past.
Why this hope that Sanders is “it”? He’s a rabid zionist, and his supposed progressive stance is a veneer.
My experience has been similar to what you describe. I can’t even say something like, “that thing CNN said is false,” or their response will be something like, “CNN is against Trump, so if you criticize CNN, you love Trump.” I literally preface everything I say with, “we agree Trump is terrible,” but they don’t hear that. And these are college educated, professional people. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real, and it’s frightening. I had someone tell me they stopped donating blood, because they could not stand the thought that it might be used to save a Trump supporter.
I was reminded of an article by Caitlin some time ago, in which she compared people brainwashed by propaganda to members of a cult, or victims of domestic abuse. She said that if you try to de-program someone in a cult, they will attack you. They have been trained that the cult is their place of safety, and will perceive you to be attacking them. If I remember right, her suggestion was to not cut them out of your life, but just make them aware you will be there for them if they decide to leave the cult. Give them somewhere to go when they realize which news is fake.
I’ve been wondering a lot lately if the strategy for attempting to de-program people must be different in person than online talking to strangers. If you say something directly to someone, they will take it as a personal attack. If you can float a message out onto the Internet, you don’t know if anyone will see it who needs to see it, but people can browse it anonymously, so you can be very harsh and direct, and they may not take it as a personal attack.
I’d be interested to know if anyone has any tips for effectively poking holes in narrative. Also, I’d be interested to know if anyone remembers how they learned to see through propaganda. I bet it wasn’t your friend telling you that you are a dummy for watching CNN. I don’t remember anything specific, myself. I think it was listening to people on the Internet. Before Caitlin I listened to Black Agenda Report, and before that Glenn Greenwald. I get frustrated with Common Dreams and Democracy Now!, but in fact I think they were a bridge to finding voices smarter than them. I learned about Glenn Greenwald from Common Dreams, and I followed a link from Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter feed to Caitlin. I bet there’s a lot of ways that strategy can go wrong, but you’ll never escape the propaganda if you never stray from CNN.
I don’t challenge the Never Trump people, becuase I see serious issues with Trump. I consider Israel a foreign country, and Trump as their asset in our government. I do try to find their particular arguments, and drill away at them. With my brother, it’s the EPA. I point out that the EPA was set up as a way to protect corporations from citizen lawsuits, and allow them to continue to pollute, with government protection. I’ve also discussed immigration, trade agreements, and locker-room-level discussions of women, pointing out that he’s no worse that normal.
There is only one person I’ve discussed immigration with, and he shuts down pretty fast when I accuse him of wanting open borders; I think he realizes I’m correct, and doesn’t want to think about what that means.
Don’t try to defend Trump, he’s not a free agent, and he’s not our saviour. He’s dirty, just beholden to a diferent master. Try to get your conversationalist to focus on issues, and educate them on where their interests lie, and what is really going on.
i don’t remember any kind of common viewpoint that ho chi minh or fidel castro were behind death squads. che guevara was widely admired.
the epa wasn’t set up to protect corporations at the outset. it got captured by the industries it was supposed to regulate.
Go to Abe’s books & get a copy of “The Experience, A Celebration Of Being” by Sirio Esteve, Random House 1974. I made this book available by buying 50 copies of it from used book dealers a few years ago, I gifted them all out, 159 pages of pure wisdom—See Page 11: Slavery. It sure helped open my eyes……Some copies cost less than .10 cents + 3.99 Shipping….
It is so sad, people who I love and respect believe that the Syrian president is a monster who gasses his own people and that a handful of Arabs in commercial airliners brought down the twin towers. My friends so dearly want to believe that the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) only tells the truth. To think otherwise means that they must totally re-construct their understanding of our overlords. The ABC is guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes. They have totally betrayed the Australian people who pay for them. In 2014 they had the audacity to broadcast a speech from Rupert Murdoch who lectured Australians on how they should live and think. The very man who has dumbed down more Australians than anyone else was given a platform by our treasonous national broadcaster. They should have ignored him like they have ignored the OPCW scandal and like they have ignored the plight of a very brave Australian – Julian Assange.
I don’t even try to confront people’s ignorance of the elites games any more. I just make posters and post them up in my local town.
In 1993, the ABC did a BS story on Serbs starving Bosniaks in Srebrenica.
See my article on the 1995 staged Srebrenica massacre.
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/srebrenica-massacre.html
I have just posted a long and serious, up to date assessment of what we can know this morning (Texas) about the Wuhan coronavirus, 2019-nCoV. This is a very big, global deal, already, even if you have not experienced any viral or economic effects at all. Facebook and Twitter are censoring unapproved news about it, so you know it’s a thing… http://www.johndayblog.com/2020/02/first-bad-news.html
Another hyped media event. It is a contagious type of flu but has typical death rates of previous strains of flu. The potential problem with a death rate of under 3% and high contagion alot of people over 70 could die. I do find it quite curious that this is tailored to take out a certain segment of the population which is the most drag on society from a pension and health care aspect.
John, it’s Ms. McDaniel from your old college days at the Ark. And you were my preceptor at People’s Community Clinic. I live in Oregon. I just discovered your blog, tried to post, but it doesn’t look like it posted. Anyway, cheers! Glad to see you hear on Caitlin’s great website!
John, I have friends that insist that HIV was created on purpose inside a government lab and spread all over the world to get rid of ” unwanted humans “. Nothing seems too far fetched anymore no matter how crazy it sounds.
When what we are told about the coronavirus pandemic is so full of anomalies that seriously undermine its reality and we are shown absolutely zero convincing evidence of the pandemic I see no reason to believe anything we are told about it. People wearing masks, people on gurneys, people making statements and quoted statistics can all easily fit “staged”, no problem at all. Many stagings involve people on gurneys and quoted statistics. Nothing could be easier to stage and falsify.
.
The big mistake people make is to assume that something “big” must be real, to assume that the power elite would not be so audacious to stage something so big and global as the coronavirus pandemic. That’s the big mistake. The power elite are extremely experienced in duping us and have done so since time immemorial. Hitler said (but it wasn’t his original idea), when you tell a lie tell a whopper; as people are familiar with small lies they will disbelieve them but the audacity of a massive lie is beyond their comprehension so they will believe it. Since I woke up to 9/11, I’ve gotten over any inability to comprehend a massive lie. I can believe anything at all is a lie when I see anomalies in the story – and, in fact, I see no reason – and nor should you – to believe anything where highly significant anomalies are manifest.
.
I put a summary of the anomalies I’ve encountered below (no doubt there are many more) that so seriously undermine the credibility of the “coronavirus pandemic” that I see no reason to believe the existence of it in any shape or form. The thing is when they hoax us they tell us clearly and nothing could be clearer from the anomalies below. These anomalies are deliberate, they’re not screwups or simply indicated by the lie we’re told. They’re very, very deliberate and put in full view.
.
Summary of anomalies
1. Absence of any convincing evidence of anything reported about the virus.
.
2. Two contradictory and equally implausible and unsubstantiated stories about a “coronavirus” hospital being set up (one from an empty building in 48 hours and one from the ground up in 6 days). There is no evidence provided of the finished hospital that was meant to be finished in 6 days.
.
3. Implausibility of animals reported to spread the virus including Chinese cobras, many-banded kraits, hedgehogs and critically-endangered pangolins. We are shown an image with a pangolin mentioned in the caption, however, the image shows a civet cat which has not been mentioned in relation to the coronavirus but was allegedly a carrier of the SARS virus.
.
4. Implausibility of a prominent Australian scientist making a denigrative comment about a Chinese research team’s work in the form of, “It’s complete garbage.”
.
5. A paper being published in the Journal of Virology so quickly after alleged outbreak and claimed to be peer-reviewed.
.
6. The claim of a person lying on the floor in a hospital, another lying on the ground outside and a person falling flat on their face representing sufferers of the virus.
.
7. The remarkable coincidences of the Netflix docuseries on preventing a pandemic and Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise in October last year.
.
For links and more detail see: https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/blog/coronavirus-hoax-jan-2020
If you stage several false pandemics then when a real pathogen is introduced to thin the herd people will believe it is a freak of nature and not a creation of man.
An example is let a harmless bomb go off in the world trade center by a terrorist group. Then when planes fly into the same building years later it seems more plausible. The TSA was thought out 10 years before it was implemented. Just needed an excuse to form it. No coincidence D mick Cheney wielded power then.
Thanks Petra, a very good summary there. Another thing to add to the list is the masks that people in the streets are wearing in to protect themselves: they are dust masks designed to prevent aerosols, dust etc. As far as I am aware viruses would fly through those masks without even touching the filtering material.
Let’s not forget one of the most powerful means of communication we have: we can simply talk with each other.
Yes, exactly.
Dear Caitlin,
For some reason my good friend Darrell Rolstone is being blocked from receiving your newsletter, in spite of his/my best efforts to get him registered. As it is, I’m forced to forward everything to him!
Could you please see about “unblocking” him? His email address is darrell_rolstone@yahoo.com.
Much Thanks,
S.A. Hogan (horror/paranormal author at amazon.com books)
Most of all, choose your sources wisely: https://swprs.org/media-navigator/
Something’s happening in Iowa. The caucuses are this week. And CNN just suddenly pulled a poll that they had been advertising as ‘the gold standard’. I recently saw reports of another poll showing Sanders with a 9 pt. lead. Wanna bet the very pro-Biden and anti-Sanders CNN decided that a poll showing Sanders with a big lead would give even more momentum to what appears to be a growing mass rejection of the corporate war-dems?
Can’t remember the last time a poll that was previously announced was suddenly pulled. That doesn’t happen. Well, maybe in old Soviet elections.
Well in 2016 most exit polls ended up getting canceled. Of the ones that weren’t cancelled 10 showed inconsistencies that by international standards would indicate election fraud. In all 10 cases the “error” was in Clinton’s favor.
http://www.p2016.org/chrnothp/Democracy_Lost_Update1_EJUSA.pdf (page 6 and 7)
So clearly we shouldn’t poll at all either right before or after a “Democratic” primary because the polls can’t be trusted and would just feed baseless conspiracy theories about how the election was rigged!
(…and non-sarcasitcally…)
I bet the margin of victory predicted for Sanders was too big in the most recent polls. Hence they needed to be disqualified for some reason so that Biden (or perhaps Buttigeig – some corporate shill for sure) could pull out a “surprise” victory. If it looks like a 3-4% margin of victory disappeared over the course of a few weeks that’s a lot more believable than a 10% margin of victory evaporating overnight.
Spot on!
Precisely!
BDS your enemy, whoever / whatever they may be. no one can force you to buy something or vote for someone that you do not want to. no one can force you to support an entity that works against you. cut the cord and pull the plug. stay far away from those that will implode soon.
at the same time, do the opposite to your friends and neighbors. build a safety net with each other. a hard time may be coming. we’ll survive the ghouls. we are many and don’t need much to survive, as long as we have one another. i trust my neighbors and believe in strangers’ humanity.
I’d like to add that those sleazy bought politicians and owned news outlets were paid for with the profits produced by our labor.