Patriot Act 2.0 will be rolled out with a lot of mindless bleating about white supremacists and fighting fascism, and the actual policies and laws put into place will have virtually nothing to do with any of those things. They will be geared at preventing the revolutionary changes that need to be pushed for in the United States by the American people.
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Listening to US politicians and pundits the last few years you’d assume it’s been raining actual 9/11s and Pearl Harbors in America 24/7.
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“Our democracy has been attacked!” screamed the political establishment that just forced you to choose between Donald Trump and Democrat Donald Trump for president.
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Saying there’s been an attack on American democracy is like saying there’s been an attack on Kazakhstan’s fjords.
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Liberals learned the words “coup” and “insurrection” like five seconds ago and now they are academic experts on both of these things.
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The narrative managers’ ability to move liberals and progressives from “Defund the police” to “MOAR POLICING” in just a few months was even more impressive than their ability to move them from “Believe Women” and #MeToo to “Tara Reade is a lying grifter”.
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Here’s how politicians, media and government could eliminate conspiracy theories if they really want to:
- Stop lying all the time
- Stop killing people
- Stop promoting conspiracy theories (eg Russiagate)
- Stop doing evil things in secret
- End government opacity
- Stop conspiring
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To support the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of monopolistic tech oligarchs to exert more and more global control over human communication. Regardless of your attitude toward whoever happens to be getting deplatformed today, supporting this is self-destructive.
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I don’t share people’s magical fascination with the word “tolerance”. As far as I can tell it’s an empty and irrelevant concept. This isn’t about tolerance, it’s about trusting government-tied tech oligarchs to regulate speech around the world on monopolistic speech platforms.
The future of humanity depends on our ability to wake up a critical mass of people to how fucked things really are, and if speech which doesn’t conform to establishment orthodoxy is censored on the platforms the mainstream crowd use to share ideas, that will become impossible.
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“We need to stop fascism so let’s give massive sweeping powers to an elite alliance of unelected authoritarians.”
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“Well I’m a leftist and I haven’t been banned on social media.”
That’s because the left is politically impotent in our society. Unless this is just a hobby for you, at some point you should plan on the left becoming a threat to the oligarchs and warmongers. What do you think happens then?
Do you really think if the left actually becomes a threat to the status quo the Neera Tandens and Rachel Maddows aren’t going to suddenly discover a reason why you’re dangerous and need to be censored? The only way to be fine with censorship is to plan on never challenging power.
Tech billionaires are not on your side, and neither are the government agencies and plutocratic media leaning on them to implement censorship. Those institutions don’t give a shit about silencing the right, they want to implement measures to silence you. The left is being censored already, but it hasn’t seen anything yet.
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“As a leftist I’m fine with censorship because it’s not like the leftist revolution is going to be organized on social media.”
Social media isn’t for organizing the leftist revolution you bonehead, it’s for creating more leftists. It’s for reaching the mainstream.
A leftist’s first and foremost job is to create more leftists. If the left becomes a potent political force, all the censorship protocols they’ve been putting into place these last few years will be used to stop it from infecting the mainstream herd. You shouldn’t want this.
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Trying to stop fascism by making it invisible is like trying to avert a charging bull by putting your hands over your eyes.
If you want to stop the rise of fascism you need to change. Change your sick society. Profoundly. Not just cover up the manifestations of that sickness. Compartmentalizing and covering up the problem instead of pouring money and resources into creating a healthy society which addresses the underlying problems is the most shitlib thing ever.
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Saying you are free to leave these monopolistic platforms and go to some fringe website no one uses is the same as saying you are free to dig a hole and yell into it. There is no magical free market solution to this problem, because the problem is that imperial power structures are deliberately herding people onto monopolistic speech platforms that they can then censor under the guise of terms of service.
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All of the most critical factors determining what people’s lives are like are invisible now. Most people don’t even know they’re happening. Oligarchy. Neoliberalism. Imperialism. Used to be you knew who the king was, and he’d openly do anything he wanted. Now that’s all kept carefully hidden.
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Why is it kept hidden now? Well there are a lot of factors, but mostly it’s because the rank-and-file public discovered guillotines. Ever since then your rulers are out of necessity kept hidden from you, and so is their totalitarianism.
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The US government is the most evil and destructive force in the world. Not Trump. The US government. This will not change in any meaningful way when Trump leaves. Massive amounts of manipulation have been poured into keeping you from seeing this.
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59 responses to “Patriot Act 2, Censorship, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix”
I am a passionate advocate for free speech, one exception. I do not believe it is legal or okay to threaten people with violence online, in person, in a letter, in a phone call. I’d have a lot more faith in people now screaming about internet censorship if they were around when Twitter banned Megan Murphy, a Canadian socialist feminist, for saying that biological males are biological males (a clear and definite fact). Or how about when gendertrender called a pedophile a pedophile online, and wordpress shut down her account? How about the police in Britain calling up a 70-something woman early in the morning telling her she had committed a hate crime by saying that men can’t be women? It ends up seeming like the so-called free speech advocates are not around when WOMEN are deplatformed, only when violent white men are. Women have put up with endless threats online, from being raped with a chainsaw to having their children murdered, and I find these sorts of threats abominable and illegal, but I sure didn’t see very many leftists complaining. So my attitude now is sort of ho hum.
I quit working at shoprite to work online and with a little effort I easily bring in around $45 to 85 per/h. Without a doubt, this is the easiest and most financially rewarding job I’ve ever had.DFb I actually started 6 months ago and this has totally changed my life.
for more details visit………Home Profit System
ts pretty obvious that collecting information about people’s guilty secrets via the Catholic confessional could be used to protect, recruit and blackmail pedophiles for centuries past. If I were a smart pedophile, and my people were threatened with extinction everywhere by almost all other people, I would create a system to protect them. A country for them to live, a way of finding out who they are, a supply chain of victims, and a shroud of secrecy. Does this sound like the Vatican?
I quit working at shoprite to work online and with a little effort I easily bring in around $45 to 85 per/h.GQW Without a doubt, this is the easiest and most financially rewarding job I’ve ever had. I actually started 6 months ago and this has totally
changed my life….
Breaking News:
Descendants of Stalin have submitted an order to Putin, for exhumation of his body and have sumitted a request to Joe Biden for the coffin to interned somewhere in Washington DC.
When queried, the decendants retorted ‘ Russia had become more like America, whilst America had become more like Stalins dream’.
Is this a case of:
In China you have State run media whereas in America you have Media run State?
NANCY PELOSI
He’s a question for January 20th 2021.
1) Could the Dems release all classfied info that Donald Trump is hiding, detailing his collusion with Putin.
Should they not provide the information, Pelosi & Schumer need kicking out of office for being bat-shit crazy.
If anything they’ve ‘incited’ the other half of the country against the Reps, ‘incited’ a WW3 scenario against Russia.
I see American society in these terms. The bears decide the policy, below the bears are the wolfs who enforce the policy, below the wolfs are the sheep who obey the policy. Outside of this structure are the foxes that refuse to obey the policy. Change will not come to American society until the foxes outnumber the sheep.
We need be lions, mon!
It does seem unfair to have an entire network just for the Foxes.
Have you heard of Mathew Ehret, he is the most turned on to who really controls things. He is editor of ‘The Rising Tide platform,. He does tutorials for members, he speaks of Russia, China, America, in Abraham Lincoln time when those three protagonists were going to initiate a Belt and Road initiative, no joke. When the American civil war was happening, Russia had their fleet patrol both sides of the US, to protect the US from Britain, believe it or not
There’s a lot of modern Russian nationalist revisionism of late about the Czar’s role in our Civil War. It is more credible that he sent what was left of his war fleet to the safety of US neutral harbors during the conflict. You may recall that much of the Russian navy and its main naval base at Sebastopol were destroyed by Anglo-French forces in the Crimean War less than a decade earlier. The Czar feared the great powers would use Russia’s savage repression of the latest Polish insurrection in 1863 as the rationale to complete the destruction of his vulnerable surviving vessels. The Crimean War was declared for an absurd public excuse, but its true reason was that the world’s dominant colonial powers feared the growing military might of Russia. In this way, it foreshadowed the two empires’ grim efforts to annihilate Germany in the next century.
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No war has ever been fought for ideals, only for the greater profit of the belligerent’s ruling class.
Thank you very much for the information ,, I have a lot of catching up on my historical knowledge , thanks once again.
“Liberals learned the words ‘coup’ and ‘insurrection’ like five seconds ago and now they are academic experts on both of these things.”
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It’s too bad the word Liberal has been dragged through the mud and ruined. True Liberals from generations ago were people of vision and honor. But Right Wing radio talk show hosts began to call clueless, empty-headed Dems “liberals” as a term of utter derision and have continued to do so for many years. Other words in our language have been distorted beyond recognition as well. When you distort language, you distort ideas. You distort concepts. You distort… THINKING. The great George Carlin had much to say on that subject. Just another way of fouling the shared social space of language… all done DELIBERATELY.
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“I don’t share people’s magical fascination with the word ‘tolerance’. As far as I can tell it’s an empty and irrelevant concept.”
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Tolerance now means some kind of self-appointed authority will decide what is and is not acceptable. Same kind of treatment given to the word… “liberal”.
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“Social media isn’t for organizing the leftist revolution you bonehead, it’s for creating more leftists.”
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Social media is a process of erasing any useful thought from our brains. Most users are participating willingly. Good ideas are such messy things. Would you drink just anything that some unknown person poured into your drinking glass? It could be sewer water for all you know. Then why would you trust (Anti)-Social media to put sewage into your precious brains? Just reading such words has a hidden effect on you.
And you can even become… addicted to the (awful) taste.
It’s the ‘what’, not the ‘who’.
If the ‘what’ is wrong, it doesn’t matter ‘who’ is doing it.
The indoctrinated nation that over two centuries was meekly contented, in Bernays terms, to settle for the choices it was given, has now fully realized the systemic scandal of that cynical arrangement, and it no longer feels comfortable with it.
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The incessantly battered and largely demoralized regime, headed by a political illiterate whose grasp and cunning do not go far beyond routine prevarications required for New York real estate deals, apparently was thoroughly infiltrated as well, exactly like its third world homologues. Violent Antifa shock troops, now the elites Brown Shirts, were bussed into Washington,D.C. in white vans, under police escort.
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Capitol Hill guards facilitated the storming of the United States Congress by removing barricades and letting the mob through. Nor did the choreographers forget to make sure that there would also be the obligatory sacrificial victim. From an operational standpoint, Gene Sharp would have been pleased, though it is unlikely that in his day the domestic application of his technology had actually been envisaged.
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This fine article can be read here:
Lights Out for the City on the Hill by Stephen Karganovic!
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/01/10/lights-out-for-the-city-on-the-hill/
Will items intended as satire (well, maybe) also be censored? File under “Where’s Hillary?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2016/10/14/the-hideous-diabolical-truth-about-hillary-clinton/
When everyone is too afraid to say anything or do anything or think anything; the owners and the masters will be satisfied with the ” general public “. Until that time they are going to just keep on making sure that the public stays divided and confused.
They will never be satisfied.
https://www.technocracy.news/schwab-on-right-to-travel-risk-assessment-brain-scans/
Until the transhumanist agenda provides, so they believe, total control. Old fashioned totalitarianism ain’t got nothin’ on these freaks.
You correctly noted the revolutionary changes that need to be pushed for by the American people.
The changes to be pushed “for” are somewhat clear at this point. But where we push “from” is rarely considered. A clearer assessment of the revolutionary battlefield is needed ……
https://thegreatconflation.com/2021/01/10/visualizing-the-assault-on-free-speech/
I am making over $9k a month working part time. I stored being attentive to different human beings inform me how much money they are able to make on line so I decided to lok into it. CMs well, it turned into all actual and has completely modified my life.
That is what I do….-!~!~!~!…. Home Profit System
I read the short article and pondered the diagrams, only to draw the conclusion that as a centralist/socialist, I have little involvement in the controversies described. Yet I do have a stake in them in light of my commitment to free speech, which in turn enables me to persuade others to see things in the centralized/socialist way. Am I missing something in this analysis and these diagrams, am I misinterpreting them, or am I THAT out of things?
If free speech is a high priority, you probably don’t favor centralized power. I didn’t discuss socialism in the post and rarely address either socialism or capitalism because each can function at a variety of scales. If you identify as a socialist, the question to ask is whether you favor the coercive, top-down variety or a more community-based, cooperative form.
Ms Johnstone, have you read this? It hits the nail squarely on the head!
Wednesdays Other Story by Matt Taibbi
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56151.htm
Hits the nail smack dab in the center. Thanks for passing it on, Ron.
Newton-
Yes it gets too skinny to read replies. Yes, they throw us a bone now and then. A lot of “woe is me”, but no solutions. How about raising the minimum wage to a level where government support is not required? Oh no, can’t cut into profits, they’ll just raise prices. And it is especially arguments concerning our war machine that receive the most censorship. Look how hard and fast they came down on Ms. Gabbard. I also just heard that Nancy Pelosi is blaming the storming of the Capitol on those “evil Ruskies.” Of course, no proof required as usual. I have to laugh to keep from crying.
True enough, all of it. For me, the first meaningful step to really push for would be a federal job guarantee with decent wages and benefits, which would automatically set a higher minimum wage AND address the pressing problem of millions upon millions of either unemployed or underemployed workers. These new jobs could also be heavily weighted toward environmental protection and other “green” endeavors, and with meeting essential human needs like child and elder care which do not yield substantial profits without becoming rip-offs. Numerous times I have tried to make a comment on this blog to get readers interested (hell, to get Caitlin interested) in the job guarantee (JG) proposal put forward in significant detail by Caitlin’s fellow Australian blogger, economist Bill Mitchell (billyblog), and his MMT colleagues. The JG would beat the hell out of a measly and dependency-creating guaranteed annual income, but so far there has been little interest shown in the idea on this site. Employment, as we’ve known it in our neoliberal gerbil wheels, is over, sorry as it was. Even mainstream thinkers are beginning to grapple with what comes next after the pandemic shutdowns and work-at-homes coupled with the relentless increase in automation. I hate to say it, but I often come across more creative and constructive thinking on mainstream sites these days than I do here, Caitlin’s perceptive posts excluded, of course, from this criticism. People love to bitch or dogpile on the rabbit. But when it comes to concrete thinking and crafting practical proposals, the ardor evaporates.
On the topic of economics, I am currently reading an interview of Michael Hudson by Pepe Escobar. Very long, but interesting.
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/01/07/the-consequences-of-moving-from-industrial-to-financial-capitalism/
Hudson’s a good one. Not completely MMT-oriented, but damn sharp in his historical analysis, especially of debt. I’ll give the Consortium interview a read as well and thanks for linking it.
It’s a long read, Skip, for an article, but a damn good one. I’m going to forward this to a friend with whom I’ve been talking about economic issues. Like me, he grew up in a time when a different form of capitalism (Fordism) worked on some level for many in the working class (although it was polluting the hell out of the planet). He sort of gets that the capitalism he knew when he was younger has morphed into something far more sinister, but lacks the tools of economic analysis to get a handle on what’s happened. This might help, so again, I’m glad we’ve had this conversation.
Glad you enjoyed it. I’m not an economist, but I get the general gist. Pepe Escobar is one of my favorites. Hudson sounds like he knows what’s happening.
Private property or direct democracy. There are no other choices.
We just had our Reichstag moment
Yes, and it was planned. The capitol had been left open and completely unguarded, the protesters were welcomed in, most of them had no idea what to do next. Trump had not incited them to violence; rather, he specifically thanked them, wished them well, and urged them to “cheer on” their “representatives.” Those were his words. But it is doubtful that they were aware of the Electoral College session taking place. At some point, it became a symbolic action for them: taking back the government for the people. The neoliberal elite, the actual owners of this nation, had their well-paid corporate media ready with a prepared message duplicated and spread throughout the airwaves: this is the greatest violence done to America since 911, it is all Donald Trump’s fault, and we must get rid of him now — we cannot afford to wait two weeks, even though he had conceded and agreed to an orderly transfer of power.
And the people just ate it up. As they always do.
“The future of humanity depends on our ability to wake up a critical mass of people to how fucked things really are, and if speech which doesn’t conform to establishment orthodoxy is censored on the platforms the mainstream crowd use to share ideas, that will become impossible.” I agree with everything that Caitlin has written in this entire post except for her use of the word “impossible.” Damn difficult, at least at first, yes. But let us never allow the bastards in charge to think, even for one moment, that anything they can do will render the rest of us impotent.
“There is no magical free market solution to this problem”. Since there has been nothing remotely resembling a free market anywhere in the world for several decades, perhaps a century or more, how would we know? There is certainly none involved in the Technocracy. The bank cartel finances the operations they prefer. Which have nothing to do with anyone’s welfare, except the bank cartel’s and those of its minions in governments and corporations.
Regarding censorship, if all ideas are not on the table, it’s impossible to select the best. If Thomas Jefferson’s ideas aren’t on the table, how can one determine they are better or worse than Stalin’s?
The #1 reason that Trump was vilified was because the oligarchs couldn’t control him. He was never truly “in their club,” and he spoke too many truths to the people, which scared the hell out of our rulers. They live in constant worry that the mask might slip, and an uncontrollable narcissist who likes to direct-tweet with the people is a genuine threat to their power structure.
All of the divisions — race, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc. — are being exploited by those at the top to keep the masses at each other’s throats. If we ever snap out of their fabricated reality and look up for a change, focus out energies on those who are really in charge, they would be in serious trouble. That’s why everyone freaks out whenever people talk about the populist, anti-authoritarian left and the populist, anti-authoritarian right uniting in their fight against the tyrannical, authoritarian globalists.
Globalism is colonialism.
The real left and the libertarians need to come together to stop the imperial war machine. Then we can have an honest, in-depth discussion about the extent of the role of government in a free society. First we have to get control of the government and make it stop killing people. I had hopes that Tulsi Gabbard would be such a person, and run as an independent in 2020. I strongly suspect she was made an offer she couldn’t refuse. I fear it will take a revolution. Hopefully Gandhi will be our model, and we can forego the guillotines.
I like what you say, Skip. Isn’t there a jujitsu move that is possible here, playing off the “expressed” intention of the plutocrats as they expand their control mechanisms over public speech, social gathering, etc.; i.e. the urgent necessity to protect life and society. Rather than directly fighting against the plutocrats here, might the smartest and most effective move be to go with the force being applied and use it against itself? You say you want to protect life and society? We do, too. So let’s go even further, let’s really do it, by providing for everyone’s basic needs while also attending to the health of the planet. Something along that line, using the curtailment of freedom as an opening to advance it. Hope I’m making this subtle suggestion at least a little clear.
Yes, what you say makes sense. However, those words will never be allowed to be spoken to the masses via the MSM. I fear we are about to be royally screwed yet again by the democrats. Whenever the oligarchy succeeds with a new way to funnel money to the top, it is via a democrat. Bill Clinton gave us NAFTA, repeal of Glass-Steagall, welfare “reform”, and the Telecommunications Act that allowed complete control of the MSM. Get ready for more with sleepy Joe.
I hear you, but what little attention I pay to the MSM recently brought the surprise that reporters were actually talking about the hardships of working class families brought on the by pandemic–the paltriness of the $600 checks–and wondering how they will manage when those paltry payments run out. Sure, it’s all scripted, but there seem to be emerging aspects of that script which are moving, however slowly and haltingly, in a more progressive direction. I may be going out on a limb here, but I don’t think that society at large, including the plutocrats, has the stomach any longer to see huge portions of the American working class living on street and dependent on food banks. Same with the longstanding practice of cops needlessly shooting black people. Of course, this may well be wishful thinking, since I also believed that, at the last minute, W would pull back on unleashing “shock and awe” on Iraq.
“by the” not “the by”…how I wish Caitlin would figure out a way to let us edit our comments, and I know I’m not alone. If you want to respond, Skip, just make a new post and I’ll pick it up at the beginning of the comments.
Truth stated simply and beautifully, JM. Your views need to be read or heard far and wide.
There is a growing awareness of how it all is but the far left and the far right, who share so much in common, are being manipulated apart. The machine is cranking out scads of disinformation to buy the time it needs to implement what it believes will be total control. It won’t be. Remember these are the same conspirators who never get anything else right either. It may be worse. That’s their track record. In many ways it’s a race between the forces of awakening and suppression.
The goal of the evil ones is an internet of bodies. It’s the colonization of the individual. Mars and the moon are phantasmagorical distractions. The final frontier is us. How much of individual minds have already been colonized by technology? The enemy is past the gate.
Too many people who regard themselves as leftist don’t see the problem with censorship, bc it’s presented as necessary for “the greater good”.
It’s like socialists being unwilling to accept Adam Smiths views on unemployment. It can’t be eliminated without a huge price. Ask Russia. There has to be dissent, honest or not. If there isn’t p, you get the US.
Who are these “socialists” of whom you speak? Certainly there are few if any of them in either of the major parties.
Cf the USSR N Korea and any of several African states at various times. I could have said communists. Zero unemployment was the commonality.
I should have made clear Smith did not say it in so many words, unemployment and stats not yet coined, nor used as terms.
Cf the USSR N Korea and any of several African states at various times. I could have said communists. Zero unemployment was the commonality.
I should have made clear Smith did not say it in so many words, unemployment and stats not yet coined, nor used as terms.
George, I sincerely doubt that the United States has any reason at this point to fear a socialist/communist takeover. The corporations are now fully in charge.
Could not agree more. It’s so entrenched that it will require a cataclysm to dislodge it. Look back a mere 15 years when the Guardian and further back WaPo were where a whistleblower might go. Now? Both of these are now shameless neocon parrots.
Bullseye. I wish I’d written this myself it so echoes my own beliefs.
The chaos and mayhem will only be getting worse each day. The ” owners and the masters ” want us peons attacking and killing each other. Soon the only secure locations will be places with their own private police forces keeping law and order. Us peons will be risking death every time we venture out into the ” public domain “.
“mob riots” on January 6 is a lying meme but even the left are wielding it.
Calls for social media to delete all photos, videos, testimony of election fraud is a form of mob riots.
The way social media is deleting and Memory Holing evidence of election fraud is akin to when Guiliani ordered the removal of the twin towers evidentiary rubble to China.
my comment was censored.
You are free to make your comment somewhere else.
Chris Hedges and Cornell West dissect, analyse and offer hope here;
https://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/chris-hedges-and-cornel-west-americas-existential-crisis/comment-page-1/
On point.
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“Our democracy has been attacked!” screamed the political establishment that just forced you to choose between Donald Trump and Democrat Donald Trump for president.”
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The nearest thing I can think of to this psyop is the psychological tactic of “good cop, bad cop.”
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Instead of cops using it on criminal suspects, it’s being used on humanity.
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Cheney/Bush was selected by the crime syndicate for President; bad cop for Democrats, good cop for Republicans.
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Obama/Biden was selected by the crime syndicate for President; bad cop Republicans, good cop Democrats.
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Trump/Pence selected by crime syndicate; bad cop Democrats, good cop Republicans.
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Harris/Biden selected by crime syndicate; bad cop republicans, good cop Democrats.
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All of them selected by crime syndicate; good cop robber baron crime syndicate, bad cop humanity.
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Anyone else feel like they’re being jerked around? It’s a complete sham.
It’s called a flimflam. Heads I win, tails you lose.