Digest: this week in dystopian propaganda
And a little bit of good stuff too
Happy Saturday! 🥳
Wow. What a week it’s been. I feel like my brain has been well and truly scrambled, and I didn’t even spend that much time on Twitter.
Is anybody else seeing a remarkable uptick in the amount of weirdness, BS, and hysteria in the media lately? It feels to me that there has been a palpable levelling-up among the chaos merchants.
I’m starting to think that the main objective — over and above the normal war-mongering or fear-mongering — is sowing confusion. Everything feels manufactured. Just this last week I have really noticed it. I will see a flash on Twitter of some story, then a day later, I see it again, but told in reverse. Then, it just kind of disappears, leaving behind only a whisper of an idea lodged in my brain. And on and on we go.
Let’s take a short tour of some nonsense, shall we?
There are absolutely NO bio-labs, you crazy Russian conspiracy theorist!
Um, sorry, we meant: there are biological research facilities but it’s no big deal. Wait, no, I mean, there are biological research labs and it’s incredibly scary because Russians might get their hands on them.
Ben Collins, NBC reporter on the “dystopia beat” — no, I’m not making that up — was tweeting earlier in the week about how the far-right was pushing a crazy idea that there are bio labs in the Ukraine, that America is somehow connected to these bio labs and that this is dangerous.
Mr. Collins goes on to refer to the story as “bananas”.
The following day, high-level State Department veteran and old Ukraine hand Victoria Nuland bluntly informed Senator Marco Rubio that there are “biological research facilities” in Ukraine. No word from Mr. Collins yet on how to appropriately spin this contradiction to ourselves without accidentally joining QAnon.
Rubio and Nuland tease the next plot twist
The Rubio-Nuland exchange is remarkable not for her admission of the biological research facilities, which really could mean a wide variety of things and by confirming their existence she’s really saying nothing at all. Rather, it’s the utterly bizarre set-up of the next scary plot twist.
1) A hypothetical is presented (Russian forces may be seeking control of these heretofore imaginary biological research facilities about which we know nothing)
2) A vague and unsettling solution is floated (working with the Ukrainians, whatever the hell that means, to prevent unspecified materials from getting into Russian hands)
3) The hypothetical is buttressed with an even scarier hypothetical — “chemical or biological incident”
4) Culprit of said hypothetical incident is identified, tried and convicted:
Q: “Is there any doubt in your mind that it would be 100 percent the Russians that were behind it?” A: “there is no doubt in my mind senator.” (That is a real exchange, by the way.)
Got that, rubes? There may well be a terrible biological or chemical incident, from labs that the US knows all about, but it will definitely be ALL THE RUSSIANS FAULT and nothing to do with the US. Bio labs are dead! Long live bio labs!
Rubio tees up the ball. Nuland knocks it out of the park. (Apologies for mixing my sports metaphors.)
They are hiding the truth among the lies
I realised something very important this week. The mainstream media is now at Cold War Kremlin - level sophistication of hiding the truth among their lies.
The New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg’s conversations with an undercover reporter for Project Veritas illustrated this nicely.
Earlier this year, Rosenberg wrote in the Times that right-wing spin on the January 6 incident at the Capitol included claims such as: “the F.B.I. planted agents to stir up the crowd.” It is clear from the tenor of the piece that the reader is supposed to take these claims as false. It is, Rosenberg and colleagues wrote, “a reimagining” of what actually happened. Which, the Times insists, was that a rabid crowd of Trumpian lunatics first plotted then attacked the noble seat of democracy and almost slaughtered all the innocent politicians gathered inside.
In Project Veritas video, however, Rosenberg emphatically tells his companion: “there were a ton of FBI informants amongst the people who attacked the Capitol.”
Note that the Times reporting doesn’t *quite* come out and say “there were absolutely no FBI in the crowd.” So it’s not *technically* lying. Instead, cleverly, they build the narrative, through implication and phrasing, that only crazy people thought there were. And you’re not a crazy person, right?
Rosenberg was also caught saying:
“[The left] were making too big a deal. They were making this into some organised thing that it wasn’t.”
In the video, Rosenberg said that he and his colleagues were outside the Capitol building that day “having fun.” Not in the least bit scared.
But this is how they described it in the paper.
“Other officers also fell under mob attack, while the rest fought to keep the hordes from storming the Capitol and upending the routine transfer of power. Sprayed chemicals choked the air, projectiles flew overhead and the unbridled roars formed a battle-cry din.”
What now? “Battle-cry din”??? Can I just say for the record that twenty plus years ago, when I was writing for this paper, there is no way in hell such florid language would have made it past the copy editors.
What is going on?
Ukrainian women’s militia video
So this batshit video came across my radar this week:
So I guess “Ukraine’s Women Warriors” have hired the director of all those ISIS videos for their brand launch.
This is totally normal and not suspicious at all. Got that?
Going back to where it all began
I highly recommend this Substack essay on the 2012 Kony internet campaign, which its writer suggests, was the first emotionally driven political campaign to really catch fire on the Internet. The playbook worked so well, it seems, it’s been in use ever since.
Reasons to be cheerful
Don’t worry, I’m sure it will all be fine!
But seriously, among the madness this week there was one voice, at least, speaking some truth, and coming across it felt like water to a man in the desert.
Royce White, former NBA player turned Republican congressional candidate has been on “right-wing” media saying words of depth and beauty. He told Bannon: “I’m very disappointed how mental health has been hijacked and weaponised by the new left. Mental health is another way to say the human condition, where mind body and spirit converge into our perceivable existence.”
I love that — mental health is our human condition, and right now it’s highly, highly disordered.
Never fear. There are some great people out there, doing great work. Godspeed, Mr. Royce.
Excellent observations. Not sure if it's a coincidence or a purposeful act that the corporate gatekeepers in American media are following the propaganda playbook of Big Brother in Orwell's 1984, almost verbatim. This phenomenon became noticeable, and more frequent, in 2016 once it was obvious that a large portion of the American population wanted Donald Trump as their next President.
Example one is the offering of contradictory information from day to day. They copied this from the daily rants of 1984's Ministry of Truth, such that on Monday "we're at war with Eurasia, we've always been at war with Eurasia" and on Tuesday "we're at war with Eastasia, we've always been at war with Eastasia."
The same Democrats/Liberals who told us that George Bush was evil for starting a war with Iraq and criticized Defense /Intelligence Community for using a variety of techniques to deter America's enemies now can't get enough of military intervention and want a war with Russia. The same people who were opposed to America's aggressive stand against the Soviet Union during the Cold War can't wait to impose a no fly zone against Russia. This type of gaslighting is meant to make you doubt your own recollection of facts to the point that you believe anything that Big Brother avers as truth.
Example two is the juxtaposition of contradictory concepts to confuse definitions and to make individuals doubt everything they knew to be true about the world in which they live. In 1984 it was illustrated as such:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
In the post Trump world, the media declared that Donald Trump, whose daughter/son in law and grandkids are Jewish, and who supported Israel in every turn, was in fact a Nazi. Other pundits declare that Ben Shapiro, who publicly wears a Yamaka on his head, is also a fascist and a Nazi.
The Democratic Party declares itself in opposition to segregation, yet they took the term "colored people" (used by the segregationists in the South to create separate bathrooms and water fountains) turned it inside out, and now declare all non-Europeans as "people of color."
The media always declares its support for science "follow the science" yet they tell us that standardized tests, mathematics, and all the post-Enlightenment empirical sciences are "racist" because they were formalized by European men.
Suffice it to say that we've entered a world that is truly worthy of a dystopian novel. The only difference is that physical force has not yet been used to buttress the propaganda. That too may be on the horizon if we are not vigilant.
I’m curious what happens when it all breaks down, which it will…. There’s too many lies out there right now. You’ve got the mRNA shot and the possible long term effects, the stolen election that Biden and the MSM just can’t quite put away, Nazis and biolabs in Ukraine and a guy like Putin who is smart enough to bring out real evidence of that situation to the world, perhaps why they’re sanctioning and banning Russian media in the West beyond anything reasonable…. On top of that we will eventually have widespread inflation and serious food shortages because fertilizer costs too much and conventional agriculture is incredibly damaging to the Earth. Most people have no clue just how bad it honestly is, look at Portugal…. Say a real pandemic comes along, with an airborne virus that really kills people, perhaps from some sort of interaction with the GMO mosquitos that are being released. And then there’s psychopathy, an incurable mental “disease” that lots of the elite sure seem like they have that is little researched or talked about. And there’s perhaps even “worse” things than that such as UFOs/aliens that aren’t seriously studied and tend to get relegated into the world of “conspiracy”. So humanity is in quite a pickle! Lots of soul growth happens from adversity though, so we will see how the future unfolds.