Caitlin Johnstone

The McProxy War Continues: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article: ❖ The war in Ukraine is so aggressively marketed and PR-intensive and so interwoven with US corporations we should just call it the McProxy War. Dumbest, phoniest, most PR-intensive proxy war of all time. pic.twitter.com/Dh8w1uG98i — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 20, 2022 A Ukrainian Embassy reception was sponsored…

Caitlin Johnstone
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Listen to a reading of this article:

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The war in Ukraine is so aggressively marketed and PR-intensive and so interwoven with US corporations we should just call it the McProxy War.

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The mass media enthusiastically promote US propaganda of their own volition. The National Endowment for Democracy openly runs information ops to help overthrow foreign governments. Social media corporations voluntarily and intimately coordinate with US government agencies. What does the CIA even do anymore?

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The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats say they want to do good things but they’re lying and Republicans say they want to do bad things and they’re telling the truth.

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By golly, I’m beginning to suspect the “national security concerns” about releasing all JFK documents are concerns that it would completely invalidate the entire US government.

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Hard proof could emerge of the CIA directly assassinating JFK and as long as it was only covered by Tucker Carlson it would have zero meaningful impact.

Carlson now plays the role of Alex Jones: make sure he’s the only one talking about an inconvenient truth and it makes it look like a right wing crackpot conspiracy theory. Only difference is Carlson has a much larger audience and therefore kills the story much more effectively.

What does it look like when someone criticizes nuclear brinkmanship with Russia, for example, and then starts babbling about woke M&Ms and saying the commies are trying to make your son wear a dress? It makes it all look bogus. And that’s exactly what Alex Jones would do too: say real things about how the US is arming terrorists in Syria or whatever and then turn around and start babbling about Hillary Clinton being a reptile and child slave colonies on Mars, making the whole thing look crazy.

I used to think it was great when I’d see Tucker Carlson covering an inconvenient narrative like the chemical weapons false flag in Syria or whatever. I’d say “Ah good, it’s getting mainstream coverage!” But over the years I’ve seen Carlson’s “coverage” do far more harm than good.

Now good faith critics of empire get associated with Carlson and his right wing ideology whenever they talk about unauthorized narratives. Even very left wing empire critics like me get called right wing for criticizing US proxy warfare in Ukraine, just because Carlson does.

And this is possible because only the farthest fringes of the left ever talk about unauthorized narratives. No left-leaning media outlets close to the mainstream ever provide meaningful coverage to transgressive stories, so it makes it possible to spin them as right wing issues. So I’m not actually even blaming Carlson for this. Even if there wasn’t a mountain of evidence that he’s a US intelligence lackey (and there is), it’d still be primarily the fault of the left (and what passes for the “left” in the US) for leaving a right wing pundit to cover this stuff.

And of course it’s not like Carlson is only reporting inconvenient facts. He spouts mainstream empire propaganda constantly. He’s the single most effective promulgator of anti-China propaganda in the English-speaking world. So he’s like a two-way propaganda street: the empire reverse-launders information through Carlson to make good info look dirty, and also he pipes propaganda into the minds of his establishment-wary audience making bad information look good. He may be America’s best and most effective propagandist.

I don’t claim to know exactly how planned out this all is or who’s doing the planning, I only know that that’s the effect of what Carlson does. When someone very prominent does something very convenient for the most powerful people in the world, it’s probably not an accident.

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It’s possible that the empire’s violent shutdown of the awakenings of the 1960s was the mortal wound that would ultimately kill our species, and the last few decades have just been humanity lying on the ground bleeding out and waiting to die of ecocide or nuclear armageddon.

It’s also possible that awakening is inevitable, and that the sixties were the first morning stirrings before we opened our eyes to the light.

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