6 May, 2017
This article will serve as a
kind of Part 2 to “How To Fight The Establishment Propaganda Machine And Win”.
In Part 1 I described a strategy for taking out America’s unelected power
establishment by disrupting public trust in its mass media propaganda machine,
and here I’d like to suggest a few solid examples of some specific attacks that
we can use in the current political climate.
Unlike the outdated and
inefficient control structures of oppressive regimes throughout most of human
history, the corporatist oligarchs who have shored up power in America rule not
by punishing and executing dissidents, but by creating the illusion of freedom
while keeping its subjects enslaved. As Noam Chomsky wrote, “The smart way to
keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of
acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” By
using the mass media to keep the public passive and obedient in this
way — manipulating public discourse into an extremely narrow spectrum of
debate — the oligarchs have been able to spare themselves the rebellions,
uprisings and assassinations that overtly oppressive regimes inevitably find
themselves confronting, which has enabled them to amass more wealth and power
than any conventional dictator could ever dream of.
This style of enslaving a
population by the use of propaganda and manipulation instead of threats and
violence is both the oligarchy’s strength and its weakness, because it also
means that we are free to use the following narrative-disruption tactics at all
times, and as relentlessly as possible. Since the oppressors need to maintain
the illusion of freedom, the propaganda machine is their first and last line of
defense; they can’t fall back on the outdated modes of oppression without
shattering the illusion of freedom and creating rage and unrest in a nation of
320 million heavily-armed primates. They can’t shut off the internet or start
punishing counter-propagandists, for example, because doing so would instantly
wake the public up from the matrix, cause a civil war, collapse the economy,
and end the very kingdom they’ve worked so hard to build for themselves. Since
there is no need to fear any retaliation other than more media manipulation, we
can know with certainty that we can push the following attacks as hard as we
like. So we should.
1. Bana Alabed
I want to make this as clear
as I possibly can: the Bana Alabed psy-op is the single clearest example ever of
the mass media collaborating with the oligarchy against the interests of the
American people. I don’t think even people who’ve seen through this thing fully
appreciate what a golden opportunity this is. A seven year-old girl who does not
understand English, who CNN reports
is legitimately tweeting in baby talk about the advantages of US military
interventionism in Syria, and who CNN (who is known to
do artificial pre-interviews) trotted out in front of the camera to recite
plainly-scripted war propaganda syllable-by-syllable while the phoney host
nods along solemnly as though she’s not knowingly complicit in the single most
transparent psy-op in the history of western television? And then this same
corporate news network has the gall to re-roll the tape of this fake interview in
order to silence opponents of interventionism in Syria? Doesn’t get any better
than that. This is where the propaganda machine officially jumped the shark,
and we should all be pointing and screaming about it constantly.
I was just listening to an interview
with the Resistance Chicks in which the host said that if everyone in
America viewed the Youtube video they made showing just how clear and
undeniable the fraud in this brazen, sloppy piece of war propaganda is, that
would be the end of CNN forever. I strongly agree with him, and would add that
it would completely disrupt all trust in all corporate media as well. Mainstream
America simply has no idea just how evil and manipulative these people are, and
they were completely exposed in this desperate attempt to manufacture consent
for another regime change war over a strategic location in the fossil fuel
conflict.
This should be the “jab” of
your psywar striking arsenal, the primary attack that you keep pumping in your
foe’s face at every opportunity. We should all be talking about this constantly
and making this thing go viral. Any time Syria comes up, you should drag the conversation
kicking and screaming into a discussion about the Bana Alabed psy-op, because
it is irrefutable proof that the corporate media is lying to the American
people about that country, proof which necessarily kills any other argument
they might make since that’s where all their ideas about Syria come from. If we
can demonstrate to the public that they’ve been told such an indefensible lie
by an institution they’ve placed so much trust in, their faith in the mass
media will be completely disrupted, and reality will finally have enough space
to get a word in edgewise.
2. The DNC scandal
If Bana Alabed is your jab
then the DNC scandal is your cross, and we should be smashing them both in
rapid fire 1–2 combinations right in the establishment’s face all day. The
Democratic National Committee’s Plan A defense in the lawsuit by defrauded
Sanders supporters was their motion-to-dismiss on the grounds that, despite
representing one of the two barely-distinguishable political parties in a
rigidly-enforced two-party system, they aren’t under any obligation to give the American people any say
into which candidates they run to govern the country.
This is plain-as-day proof for
all to see that democracy does not exist in America. If independent and
third-party candidates face insurmountable obstacles under the current system’s
rules and the two political parties are allowed to manipulate their nomination
process to advance whatever candidate suits their interests, then all you will
ever get a vote on is the choice between two establishment-selected
pro-establishment corporatists. You do not get to call that democracy. If we
can show mainstream America that democracy is not happening in their country,
we can get them curious about who really is calling the shots.
Remember, this was the DNC’s
Plan A. If it gets past their motion-to-dismiss, can you imagine how bad their
Plan B is going to be? They could have instructed their lawyers not to make
such a politically disastrous argument in the presence of a court stenographer,
but they didn’t, because if they can’t get this lawsuit dismissed it’s going to
be even more disastrous. Aside from the risk of winding up in a situation where
they have to refund Berners their 27 bucks, there’s the even worse threat of
seeing Donna Brazile and Debbie Wasserman Schultz questioned under oath by an
extremely competent and passionate Sanders-loving attorney. We’ve already got
enough ammunition to bring the whole thing crashing down just based on what we
know about what they did and the way they’ve chosen to defend it, but if that
gruesome twosome is forced to testify we’ll get even more.
The mainstream media has been
doing its best to ignore this lawsuit and make everyone forget the DNC scandal.
We must assure them that we will never allow this to happen. Hold a grudge and
keep pushing this thing into the light.
3. Syria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9hPwbc8JZo
Just keep a watchful eye on
the whole country in general and keep pointing out the lies and plot holes in
the official media narrative about what’s happening there. Ladies, you know how
when a guy has been talking to you and you know he only wants to get in your pants,
how that completely changes the way you look at everything he’s saying and
doing? Well, the oligarchy is the guy and Syria is your lady parts. They want
to get their little corporatist dick into that country so bad, so you can be
certain that anything their media mouthpieces say about it is some sleazy
attempt to make that happen. If they’re going to overextend themselves and make
a stupid blunder, odds are it will be with Syria.
All we need to do is keep our
eyes peeled for extremely porous narratives like the Idlib gas false flag and attack them relentlessly, while
continually reminding everyone of the parallels between the lies the corporate
media told to sell the American people the invasion of Iraq and what we see
happening now with its neighbor to the west. America’s power establishment is
constantly raping the Middle East for the same reason it obstructs all attempts
to move toward a sane environmental policy: its empire is largely built on
fossil fuels. These psychopaths do not give a shit about Syrian civilians, they
care about oil and natural gas. American military interventionism has never,
ever happened for humanitarian purposes, which is why you’ve never seen nonstop
mass media coverage of the antics of any brutal warlords in sub-Saharan Africa;
their locations have no material or strategic value to the oligarchs. It’s only
when they happen to occupy key strategic locations and refuse to capitulate to
US interests that the talking heads start painting them as dictators and
begging us to think of the children.
One thing I like to do is
challenge people to find anything negative about Assad from the mainstream media
on the internet dated prior to 2009. They won’t be able to find any, because he
didn’t become an evil dictator in the eyes of the west until he started
favoring Russia in Syrian resource policy instead of America and its oil state
allies. Not only are we expected to believe that Assad has some kind of sick
sexual fetish for gratuitously bombing and gassing his own civilians, but that
he only developed this fetish in the last eight years. Right.
If you want to educate yourself about a key weakness in the establishment
narratives, Syria is definitely the place to start digging. It’s just lies on
top of lies on top of lies, and the more desperate the oligarchs get to create
public support for an invasion, the more mistakes they’ll make, and the more
evidence we’ll be able to show people that they’re being lied to.
4. Tulsi Gabbard
As we’ve discussed recently, America’s power establishment it terrified of Tulsi Gabbard.
A consistently sincere anti-war, pro-universal healthcare, anti-surveillance,
pro-environment, anti-drug war, pro-economic justice progressive who also has a
rapidly growing support base among Trump supporters and independents is hugely
threatening to the elites who thrive on death and oppression, which is why
they’ve got their media goons constantly attacking her and doing damage control
on what she’s saying whenever she does something that’s counter to their
interests like going on a fact-finding mission in Syria. Facts and truth are
poison to their agenda, which is why you’ll see more and more smear pieces on
the Hawaiian congresswoman as her star continues to rise.
As I said in Point 6 of my last article, in this media war that we’re fighting it’s
crucial to always be on the attack. One of the ways that you can do this is to
keep advancing causes that you know the power establishment is aggressively
opposed to, forcing the corporate media into defense mode as they scramble to
find ways to justify sabotaging something perfectly beneficial and healthy. We
did this accidentally when we decided to lift up Bernie Sanders, forcing the
establishment to fall all over itself trying to kill our movement to such an
extent that it made some serious mistakes and got caught. We’ll always have the
WikiLeaks documents exposing their disgusting manipulations and collusion,
we’ll always have the fact that the CIA-funded Washington Post ran sixteen smear pieces on Sanders in the span of sixteen
hours at the hottest point in the primary race, we’ll always have the fact
that the shameless media blackout on Sanders was found by a Harvard
study to have crippled his campaign. These manipulations were exposed
because we put the establishment in a situation where it had to do a lot of
crazy, conspicuous things to maintain the status quo, and those erratic,
unusual movements opened a lot of eyes.
We can do the exact same thing
again with Tulsi, but consciously and deliberately instead of accidentally. We
can keep working to push her further and further into the spotlight, creating
more and more public buzz around her and forcing the media to play defense
while we keep advancing and attacking. Not because it will get her elected, but
because it disrupts the narrative and makes them overextend themselves into
conspicuousness whenever they have to do something weird and creepy to shut her
down. Then, just like we’ll be doing with the DNC corruption our Bernie
campaign exposed, we can point at that weirdness and make a lot of noise,
putting them even more on the defense and further disrupting public trust in
the mainstream media.
This principle applies to any
grassroots initiative that the corporate media tries to sabotage. If the
single-payer healthcare push starts gaining more ground, you may be sure that
the talking heads on TV will stop ignoring it and start attacking it, just like
they eventually had to do with the Sanders movement. Keep pushing toward the
light however you can, and point out their attempts to keep things in the dark.
5. Memes
I watched the above meme go
viral in real time during the primaries; the guy who created it in the Facebook
group I was in was so tickled with how it took off. Using one picture and ten
words, he was able to encapsulate the entire spin campaign that all of
corporate media had been engaged in against Sanders and make them look
completely ridiculous following the upset Michigan win in a single image. It
was so clarifying to have such a solid illustration of what they were doing to
us, and from that point onward we could share that meme in any conversation
where we were trying to describe the nature of the disease we were fighting.
While the anti-establishment movement was churning out these media guerilla
warfare bombs, Hillary Clinton’s Twitter account was asking its followers to describe how student debt makes
them feel “in three emojis or less.” Which prompted a lot of this:
People brought so much
creativity into illustrating just how out of touch this candidate was with
millennials and their media, and it definitely hurt her campaign. Read through
the Podesta emails if you ever want some insight into how completely clueless
the Clinton campaign staff were about how to use the new media; watch every
little idea for a tweet get passed along from staffer to staffer to make sure
it was “on message” before launching it. I remember seeing one email that I
can’t find right now (a million internet points to anyone who can) where staffers
were forwarding one another an anti-Hillary meme under the mistaken impression
that it had been created by the Sanders campaign. Huma Abedin couldn’t even
figure out how to view it. It was like watching an elderly drunken fisherman
trying to figure out how to use his grandchild’s smart phone.
In a war of information, the
ability to convey a complex idea very quickly is a precious advantage; it can
be difficult to get people to sit down and watch a whole video or read an
entire article, but circulating a witty image/word combination that they can
ingest at a glance can change the way people think in a way the legacy media
simply can’t compete with and cannot understand. While we’re deploying a steady
deluge of constantly-evolving counter-propaganda bombs, the Washington think
tanks are spending days trying to get everyone “on message” for a single
low-key psy-op. Learn to create and use memes and get deeply familiar with new
media, and you’ll be armed with a heavy artillery that the enemy will never be
equipped with.
6. The Russiagate psy-op
The media spent months
manipulating the American public into hating Russia beginning in the latter
part of last year, even launching a deliberate psy-op to marry the words
“hacking” and “election” in the minds of its viewers by constantly using the
phrases “election hacking” and “hacked the election” in headline after headline
in November and December. This psy-op was so successful that half of all Hillary voters believed that Russia had actually
tampered with vote tallies per a YouGov poll in December.
The explanation for why Russia
is alleged to have “hacked the election” is even more porous; Putin preferred
Trump to Clinton because Clinton wanted to invade Syria to install a no-fly zone, which top military officials attested would have necessitated a
war with both Syria and Russia. So the charge is that the Russian government
hacked Democratic officials and fed emails to WikiLeaks in order to avoid
needless escalations and a military conflict with the United States in a
country that the US government and its media goon squad have been lying about
constantly. It’s lies and propaganda on top of lies and propaganda all the way
down; they’re trying to paint themselves as a victim of something they themselves
created. In reality, the American permanent government doesn’t like Putin
because he’s cock-blocking them on Syria and doing other naughty things like working with China to move away from the US dollar as a reserve
currency, and the establishment is openly admitting
that they want to increase pressure on him to hurt his popularity and get him
deposed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAxaalddaqI
Most importantly, we are
seeing more and more evidence that Russiagate is dying; the more Trump capitulates to the deep state, the more the
accusation that he colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016
election fades from emphasis, which means that this was only ever their goal.
The only reason the entirety of both the corporate media and the political
establishment poured relentless energy into hammering the American psyche with
this accusation was to pressure the president into falling in line on Syria,
WikiLeaks, Russia and other oligarchic interests. We are being paced out of the
#TrumpRussia hysteria as gradually and methodically as we were paced into it,
and soon that massive psy-op will go completely unmentioned in mainstream media
in the hope that the public will forget about it and move on.
We won’t ever let that happen.
We will keep reminding everyone of how the 24/7 news churn was relentless in
pummelling the public consciousness day after day after day with the absolute
certainty that Trump is in bed with Putin. We will remind them that they were
lied to. We will remind them that they believed those lies. The more time goes
on, the stronger an anti-propaganda weapon this will become and the more
distrust we’ll be able to sow in the corporate media, because no hard proof of
Trump-Russia election collusion will ever emerge. If any such evidence existed,
the intelligence community’s vast surveillance network would have found it and
leaked it to the Washington Post in December. If the Kremlin wanted to
manipulate the US election using hackers, they’d just do it; they wouldn’t need
to coordinate it with an American political candidate. They will continue
backing away from Russiagate, and we will continually remind the American
public of their grotesque manipulations.
7. Internet Shills
How covert agents infiltrate the internet to Manipulate, Device, and Destroy Reputations https://t.co/Tp6ltCjAIf
— @USNEWSCORPS1
The only reason we ever knew
that the Clinton campaign was hiring professional shills to pose as real
Hillary supporters online in order to deceive people and manipulate public
discourse is because they were forced to disclose it due to FEC regulations. If not for
this disclosure, we never would have known that Correct the Record was
employing shills in this way. America’s power establishment as a whole is not
subject to such disclosure laws, however, and to believe that Correct the
Record was the extent of their shill army would be naive in the extreme. Here
is an Intercept article by the amazing Glenn Greenwald from 2014 about “how
western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online
discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction,” just
for a tip-of-the-iceberg glimpse at some of the vile practices the deep state
is up to its elbows in.
This fact is a weapon in our
psywar because continually bringing it up and pointing at it as a reality
weakens public trust in the establishment and its narratives. There is always a
distinct possibility that that person on your internet forum who is scoffing
and ridiculing an anti-establishment narrative or public figure is a paid
shill. This is always a fact, and everyone should always be aware of it.
Targeted shill armies don’t have to be that big to significantly manipulate the
dialogue of a high-visibility online conversation, they are not relatively that
expensive for an extremely wealthy plutocrat, and America’s plutocrats (who per definition are part of the deep state) stand plenty to
gain by maintaining the status quo. If they’ll use the media to manipulate
public perception and buy up the legislative branch of the US federal government
with campaign funding and corporate lobbying to keep things working in a way
that is beneficial to them, there’s no reason to believe they wouldn’t try to
manipulate online discourse with targeted shill campaigns as well. Hell, we
already know for a fact that individual
corporations and conglomerates hire shills to manipulate conversations on
Reddit, so why wouldn’t they manipulate politically crucial discourse as
well?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjLsFnQejP8
So this is happening, though
the specifics and extent are not yet known. As an aside, though, I find it very
encouraging that this is the best these creeps can do to try and sabotage
grassroots movements in the new media — “Durr, let’s throw money at it! We’ll
pay people to do what they’re doing!” Their pathetic mummified brains just
can’t keep up with the newly shifting paradigm, and they’ll never be able to
hire enough shills to shift the tide of a steadily-awakening populace. So
that’s tasty.
Let me know what other tactics
you’ve thought of for disrupting the propaganda machine in the comments below,
and please circulate your ideas far and wide.
Let’s do this thing.
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