This is truly terrifying. And what’s more terrifying is just the sheer number of people I personally know that have no idea that this is going on. I have family members and friends that look at me like I have 3 heads whenever I start talking about the censorship industrial complex. It’s unclear to me if they’re willfully ignorant to what’s happening or simply afraid. One thing is for sure, they don’t have much interest in looking too closely under the covers. They would rather order everything they need off of Amazon & watch the real housewives of Beverly Hills. God help us all.
I think a big part of it is that it’s so damn confusing, and which my be by design. To really get a handle on this I’ve listened to likely 100 hours of audio and close to 1,000 pages of text.
It reminds me of the 2nd most disturbing conspiracy I know of, something that literally not a single conspiracy theorist I’ve ever met has even heard of, which is the Inslaw PROMIS affair, something so confusing that it wasn’t until I got Vicuna, the open source AI, to write a summary for me did I have a way to quickly explain what the hell I was talking about.
From all that I learned a valuable lesson: Real conspiracies are too crazy for normal people, not crazy enough for conspiracy theorists, and too confusing for both groups.
I have noticed this too. Conspiracy theorists like QAnon believe the most outlandish things and know nothing about concrete evidence like the Powell memo. My "favorite" is that nobody at all has heard about the King family winning a wrongful death suit about Martin's assassination. I read the trial transcript on the King family web site. About a dozen highly credible witnesses testified to an assassination conspiracy. It's very convincing. And nobody knows.
The term *"conspiracy theory" was used as a cudgel by the agency in an attempt to discredit serious, smart, and to them, extremely dangerous, assassination investigators like Mark Lane.
*the term existed prior, but it was weaponised by Langley.
**Whenever someone uses that term, I demand that they define with a working definition. They never do.
And to this day, all some fool has to say to you or me is, "Your a conspiracy theorist!", like that actually means something dispositive. When, of course, it does not. History is replete, stuffed, with actual conspiracies by large organisations and governments. To believe otherwise, is idiotic and uninformed.
Right now, today, we are seeing multiple interlocking conspiracies at work, the biggest and most dangerous being the conspiracy to destroy Russia and thereby gain global hegemony. (some people choke and gasp when I say this, "WHAT?")
This debate, between the execrable, but very smart, Bill Buckley, and Mark Lane is a classic. It's also something that you could never see on the teevee today.
As for the MLK thing, I do know about that one, saw a deep dive on that recently.
Ever notice that no conspiracy theorists bring that up? I fixate on Inslaw because it has hundreds of pages of court filings and congressional records, and GHWB even dodged a question on it, yet to my knowledge not even Alex Jones has mentioned it in his entire career.
If you want to get really paranoid, go to Wikipedia and look up the talk page on Inslaw. Find posts on “Rgr09”
This Wikipedia user somehow edits every single conspiracy theory that the CIA may have actually done. Notice, he never messes with 9/11, or the Moon landings, or QAnon. This user seems fine with those conspiracy theories (because they aren’t real) yet tries to purge everything related to Inslaw, and CIA drug smuggling, etc.
There are a number of entities who seem to do nothing but 'edit' wiki articles to make them conform with the false narratives of power. ChatGPT lies constantly too, and always in one direction.
""Philip Cross" has made hundreds of thousands of edits to Wikipedia pages. But in the process he's angered anti-war activists and critics of British and Western foreign policy, who claim he's been biased against them.
"Christmas Day, Eid day, Easter Day, Cup final day, early hours of the morning, in the middle of the night - this man is on my case," says George Galloway, the former Labour and Respect Party MP. "And it doesn't take an Einstein to work out he's not tending this garden with loving care or to make it look as nice as it can look. It's the opposite."
The subject of Galloway's ire is a prolific Wikipedia editor who goes by the name "Philip Cross". He's been the subject of a huge debate on the internet encyclopaedia - one of the world's most popular websites - and also on Twitter. And he's been accused of bias for interacting, sometimes negatively, with some of the people whose Wikipedia pages he's edited."
Now search for the P2 or Propaganda Due conspiracy. An actually well documented and massive Italian Masonic/Vatican Bank conspiracy from the 1970-80s. It’s mind blowing.
Everything that was going on in Europe around that time is very troubling: Propoganda Due, The Brabant Killers, everything related to Operation Gladio, etc. But the thing that always baffles me is that none of the “Wake up sheeple!” Crowd ever talks about them. Probably 10,000 times more green ink has been spilled about chemtrails than the actual dirty tricks the CIA pulled from 1949 to the end of the Cold War.
By Powell memo, I assume you are referring to Lewis Powell memo to the US Chamber of Commerce.
It's interesting that you mention that. I'm lucky enough to have a supervisor at work who is voracious a reader as I am. We were just discussing the current movement of censorship on college campuses this past Monday when he mentioned the Powell memo, which I had read long ago. After he left my office I poked around the internet and found an article written only two days ago, published in "Inside Higher Ed."
It's a rather amusing, if not maddening piece, about how the real goal of conservative attacks on higher ed really have nothing to do with first amendment issues, or as fronts against "ideological indoctrination" (from the article). The author, Linda Stomato, proffers that the real reason for these attacks is conservative efforts are to "obscure a less visible motive: to support free market ideas (like that's a bad thing) and advance corporate interests and those of other powerful market actors." She uses the Powell memo as the foundation of her opinion. The thrust of her piece is that these attempts by conservatives are nothing more than an attempt at silencing the voices of subject matter experts who may have views hostile to the free market.
I find it amusing that she laments these attempts as basically an affront to the idea of free expression on college campuses, without realizing the irony of her efforts to silence conservative criticisms on college campuses.
This is what I'm finding in a disproportionate number of journals and periodicals. The concepts she's espousing have been so ingrained and pushed since the 60's. In my opinion, there is no way to combat that at this juncture. We just have to hold on, rage against the dying of the light as long as we can, and retreat to our bunkers when the proverbial scat starts flying in earnest.
Link provided if you wish to peruse the piece. It's a quick read.
Note to Linda Stomato (to paraphrase Obama): the 60's and 70's are calling and they want the economic policies back...
No one can reasonably question the conclusion that it is the left that is focused on advancing corporate interests and those of other powerful actors - for that is the route to near absolute power. Kinetic military force as a path to power is SO old school.
I wanted to create some small infographics to make it easy for people to understand. But to do that I have to have a deep understanding of this. And like you, I've spent hundreds of hours reading, listening and uncovering more complexity. It's nice to see other people doing the same, I often feel alone in this.
Yeah trying to have it be small probably wouldn’t work, there’s just too much going on, too many threads. I’ve found open source AI can be excellent at summarizing stuff if you use the correct prompts, for example I got a really good concise summary of John Brennan’s role in Russiagate that someone unfamiliar with who he even was could quickly understand, but the problem is the training data for those isn’t updated in real time, and this is an emerging story. The only AI’s that are kept up to date are Bing/Sydney and Google Bard, but the various paywalls would block them from making an accurate summary.
If you find it of interest, I’d suggest following what the open source community has been cooking up. Yannic Kilcher on Youtube is pretty revered among those who want AI to be free, his channel is definitely worth checking out. To all worried that AI will just be used for control by government or large corporations, a memo was leaked from Google that said their AI competitor wasn’t Microsoft, it was the open source machine learning community, and the executive suggested Google work with them, not against them. Clearly I’m a guy who loves AI and of all the things related to the CIC, I’m actually least worried about the AI aspect. The deep state doesn’t have direct access to Deepmind or uncensored GPT. If they did, they literally could have seized the entire internet already.
The legal basis for the fight against the Censorship Industrial Complex can be confusing, too. You need to understand the First Amendment, and then you need to understand that the government is making an end-run around it by using its regulatory muscle to force big tech to bend to its wishes. In effect, they are outsourcing First Amendment violations to private entities. If the evidence from the Twitter Files wasn't so specific and overtly blunt, there might not even be a legal challenge like Missouri v. Biden.
Agreed. Keep them spinning. To add insult to injury, I tripped over this ( link below) a few minutes ago connecting with others about a mutual friend/physician who passed suddenly in his mid 50’s.
I think many now "feel" it, but like deer in the headlights, they don't know yet how to make sense of it. They're still sucking on the MSM teat to be reassured all's well in the (Western) world. Hence golfing etc.
Denial is a big factor. COVID was instructive. I'm not sure if it is the embarrassment of admitting you were wrong, and vehemently so or the fear that comes from loss of faith. A combination i suspect.
The word hypernormalization was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach in the United States. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s.[3][4] He says that everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine an alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society.[5] Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the fakeness was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed hypernormalisation.
The spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union was completely unexpected by most Soviet people and yet, as soon as people realized that something unexpected was taking place, most of them also immediately realized that they had actually been prepared for that unexpected change. Millions became quickly engrossed, making the collapse simultaneously unexpected, unsurprising, and amazingly fast.
Congratulations to your employment with the Ministry of Truth. We feel it will be a long and productive partnership. There however are a few things you must know. The first is,
There is no Ministry of Truth.
Should you be asked if there is a Ministry of Truth, possible responses or "You nuts?", muttering "tinfoil hat", or silently take a drag on your cigarette then exhale while staring over the head of your interlocutor.
My anecdotal experience with people who were in cults is that the individuals believe they are engaging with people who have 'truth'. Doesn't matter if it's religious, political, medical, social. It's very similar to fanboyism. It's the same mind virus. You're convinced you're right and that the people you're with are right and one day you (hopefully) realize you've been conned into believing nonsense.
Doesn't this describe almost everybody? Save, perhaps, the mentally ill? I presume you're convinced that you're right and that the people on this thread and elsewhere who agree with you are also right. N'est-ce pas?
Someday it might occur to YOU: I've been conned into believing nonsense. If you're lucky. Truth, fanboyism, and the same mind virus.
I've gotten stuck. It took a lot to get unstuck. I've been conned. Painful process for sure.
Mostly it took admitting I made a mistake and being open to learning from errors in judgement and coming to terms with my own destructive beliefs. But the majority of people seem incapable of this. Are they too easy too fool and too arrogant to admit they've been had? Or are they just scared and lack the courage to deal with their fears? Maybe both?
and with the decline of religion it does fill a void. so when the high priests ae called out, it is not dissent is is blasphemy. (jsut has a new name mal/disinfomaion)
To me it is scary-shocking that humans have been so easily directed to the hive/machine. Whatever you think about being raised in a home that participated in an organized religion, when you are an adult, accept or reject it. The organized part. But what the hell has gone wrong with people? Empathy. Loyalty. Liberty. Did I say, Liberty (aka, Free Will)? Sheesh.
Maybe not so shocking. To some extent religion is probably hard wired into us. MAns search for meaning and so forth. So something has to fill the void. But I think COVID broke people. They were scared in a way I have never seen before in all my years and they did not have anyone to to having abandoned the old gods. So they dug in wih the expets who told them what to do and he magic rituals of masking et al would save them. Wo be unto them who would speak against their Truth.
The funny part is that I am Catholic myself, though I am well aware of the history of the church and its trepidations. But to your point the thing I have always believed in was freedom, and liberty. I am heartbroken at how it has been abandoned
For sure they do, we are literally "Killer apes". Man spread out and dominated the world because no other species even comes close to us in term of pure bloody mindedness.
It almost certainly started with small tribal groups protecting their turf, and their women from interloping tribes out to take what they had.
I saw a documentary about the Yanomamo once where one of them was talking about the neighbouring tribe, (who looked exactly like them, lived like them, etc) "They are not even human. I kill them every chance I get."
FF a few millennia to our wars against the "Hun" or the "Japs". Nothing has changed except the scale and the weapons.
c.f. The Gombe Chimpanzee war.
(Humans share approximately 98.7% of their DNA with chimpanzees)
"The Gombe Chimpanzee War was a violent conflict that took place between two communities of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania from 1974 to 1978. The conflict was first observed and documented by Jane Goodall, a primatologist who was studying chimpanzees in the park.
The war began when a group of male chimpanzees from the "Kasakela" community attacked and killed an infant chimpanzee from the neighboring "Kahama" community. This act of violence sparked a series of retaliatory attacks and raids between the two communities, resulting in the deaths of several chimpanzees on both sides.
During the conflict, the Kasakela community gained an advantage over the Kahama community by forming a larger coalition of males and establishing a stronger territorial boundary. The Kasakela males also demonstrated more aggressive and violent behavior towards the Kahama males and their offspring.
The conflict ended in 1978 when the Kahama community disintegrated, and the remaining members integrated into the Kasakela community. Jane Goodall's observations of the Gombe Chimpanzee War shed light on the complexity of chimpanzee social behavior and provided insight into the evolution of human warfare.
The Gombe Chimpanzee War has been the subject of numerous scientific studies and documentaries, and it has sparked a wider discussion about the relationship between humans and chimpanzees."
I posted this on Matt's follow-up post in the comments section, but I'd like to repeat it -- that's how strongly I feel about it:
"I was black-pilled all the way back during the Al Gore concession speech when I realized, "Damn, they're all the same." Now that I am so angry and certain that millions of equally angry people exist, I believe that their fascism might be stopped.
They've lost any semblance of dignity or humanity, and they're pushing it too far. Unless they kill us all because of that bloody money-laundering operation in Ukraine, we might have a chance. Unless, of course, we let them get away with everything."
Your family members and friends need to be told, over and over again, what's going on. Matt's articles need to be forwarded, screen grabs of Tucker's tweet (104M views 'til now) needs to be shared. We must pull our weight. All of us.
What he basically said was, "News is full of lies," "you're being manipulated," and he elaborated on how the news media's manipulation works. Then he spoke about the limits of what one can say in the media and how you get fired from the media if you cross those limits. Then he announced that he would be on Twitter, "bringing his new show there."
It was worth joining Twitter for the Twitter Files. I think joining to see what Tucker has to say is also worth it. You can be very selective on Twitter if you want. And I got off Facebook and was never on Instagram, etc. I am on Twitter (I am considered "cool" because I had an account before my kids did, LOL). I never used it until Elon took it over. It has its uses, just as Substack does. The short format is horrible, but, again, it has its uses.
I actually think they really do know but they can't face it and use denial to protect themselves from the grim reality. Many of them believe they will be spared or even favored if they simply comply. It's the story of the useful idiots to a T. It's an amazing thing to see.
It does require a level of abstract thinking. That lots of people have no interest in. Until they feel direct pain from something its just noise. There are always a smaller group of dissenters that put it all together.
Some folks ignore the warning signs, then the in-your-face stuff and still when to weak to move will not seek medical help because they do not want negative feedback. They would rather die, and they do.
Democracy, like communism, relies on this equation: good-willed people + good information --> better society. Unfortunately, a better world relies on the sum of two things that don’t add up because they don’t exist.
I’ve seen this with friends and family as well. My belief is that these folks (“they”) have already been brainwashed and have simply given up. The “method” in which the CIC has changed the way they think about these kinds of things is very affective. Very scary. They are “fish” swimming in water who do not even understand what water is. I’ve given up on many of them. Don’t even get into a dialogue because it is a waist of time.
Many of these people are just living their lives, raising their kids, etc. My extremely smart son is in this boat. They are just not political to the point they hate it and avoid it. Then there are people like my wife who use Facebook and Google and are fed nothing but MSM material. So, she knows nothing about things like the Twitter Files. When I tell her or say anything bad about Biden, she just shuts down. She has TDS so badly and knows how bad the Biden administration is, but he is "not Trump." She has health issues so she doesn't go out and really doesn't know how bad the inflation is (and the inflation is, unlike in many cases where presidents inherit crap economies, Biden created this crappy economy from scratch and from day one of his term). I guess I should say his horrible administration has done this because he has no idea what day it is. There are a lot of people like my wife. They are getting only MSM pushed by Facebook and Google (she wouldn't know Twitter if it bit her and I actually agree with her on Twitter, LOL). It is crazy and so frustrating to deal with good people who are so unaware of what is going on. Our savings has literally vanished the past couple of years. I have known her since she was 25 and she is now 63 and she has voted only once, in a primary that I convinced her to vote in. I am sure she will never vote again. That was a lot of words to say that the tech companies have kept the MSM relevant, by all rights, they should all be gone by now, but they gained control of the Internet. They are as strong as they were when pushing for overthrows of the evil Guatemala government during Eisenhower's term. Today, it is all about Ukraine. In both cases, it was bullshit and went against true American values (what people think are America's values). But, money talks, that is all that matters. MSM being propped up by Big Tech is just a crazy notion, but here we are.
Ask CHatGPT to write you something critical of socialism based on its history and you will get a response that the history is irrelevant because those mistakes would not be made by modern socialists.
It helps (a little) whenever I hear how stupid AI still is. Maybe, for the time being, it will be like outsmarting (most non-human) animals that have strength and speed.
Wow. My penultimate job in the Navy (ca 2003) was serving as Carrier Strike Group Info Warfare commander (IWC). Lots to explain about what the meant - I'll skip it - but bottom line is that I watched from the second row as Navy and DoD migrated toward this hybrid warfare concept. I've read (literally) hundreds of articles on IO/IW, but this is the first one that drills into the core issues (the rationale for traditional kinetic-warfare services migrating the fight to a much more interconnected info environment) that make this so critical. Bottom line: first time anyone (as far as my literature review goes) has connected the dots in the way that reveals some of the truth. Latter is there, hiding in plain sight, and this outstanding piece is a UV Light/Luminol test. Not going to thrill some folks...
I’m fine when these “tactics and techniques” are used by US Special Forces against our enemies. What is coming to light just recently, is that these “tools” are now pointed at US citizens for political gain. Frightening.
Agree entirely. My 2nd order concern is that the circle diagram at the start of the piece illustrates how, once operating in the information environment, the lines between titled forces and civ/academic/commercial entities in non kinetic engagement by military will result either in some level of fratricide due to non sync or will yield unintended results. Info is ubiquitous and moves orders of magnitude faster than kinetics, but mil planning is still rooted in a relatively linear engagement flow. To the degree it is defined (or not), Hybrid warfare is little more than an acquisition cloud. I'm starting (?) to ramble, and I do agree with you entirely. My unease is in the diffusion of unity and focus in conflict.
More practically, I see this everyday when speaking to people. Those who have been “captured” by the Hybrid Warfare tools are easily distinguished from those who somehow have built protection around themselves from this evil menace. There exists today, two diametrically opposed realities, leading to the diffusion of unity and conflict you note.
Sadly I think, we are leaning more to Brave New World, content to be sheep because we are well fed, anesthetized and desensitized to the fate of domestic animals. No need for a crushing boot on the face when the masses are more than willing to be compliant.
We have over 2 million fellow citizens in prison, cops shooting dead over 1,000 per year, and a growing 'deaths of despair' and homelessness crisis. We have Brave New World for the priveledged Professional Managerial Class, and 1984 for the working class and dispossessed.
I think you have it backwards, the masses have the bread and circuses and they are duly obedient (think 80+ million Biden votes in '20). It is the dissidents, not the masses, that have to fear the jackboot.
My point was that there is still plenty of jack boot crushing going on in our society. It is not Brave New World drug-laced ice cream orgy porgies for all. Plenty of people are getting emotionally, spiritually, and physically crushed by the system. And they don't even have to be dissidents, all they have to be is surplus un-needed labor to feel the jackboot.
"Plenty of people are getting emotionally, spiritually, and physically crushed by the system."
But they, smart and stupid alike, can't agree often on what, exactly, is doing the crushing. Case in point is simply the dismal state of economics, and even of science, especially replication crises. IMO, it's not just the media problem, it's unprecedented modern complexity. That is probably a new thing, like neither novel.
The 2008 financial crisis seemed complex, but it really wasn't. It was a straightforward fraud smothered with bafflegab.
In Dwight Eisenhower's celebrated military industrial complex speech he warned of government being taken over by technocrats spewing incomprehensible jargon. The basic issues of values aren't complicated.
And it will be just enough to win. The biggest tell is when they stop counting after they determine how many vote are needed (ballots) to win the state. So obvious, but fraud is a "conspiracy theory."
yes for sure, but there are some 1984 characteristics like this expose revealing our new aspiring Ministry of Truth and the useful roles of Emmanuel Goldsteins like Trump, Tucker, and even Elon or Rogan.
but never forget to add a large splash of Idiocracy!
1984 for the Morlocks, Brave New World for the Eloi.
Besides, who says that Ingsoc wasn't popular? Just because that Winston Smith weirdo thought he was such hot stuff. Fortunately we have therapy that fixed him right up. He was led to happiness.
The opposite of freedom is also freedom. I don’t mean that ironically. Being terrified of freedom, the condition of most Americans, means that you are in a perpetual quest for leaders. Having no freedom means that you are freed from making decisions, and thus freed from responsibility. That’s the main infrastructure of fascism, and religion as well, which is fascism by divine proxy.
Great comment. This is why most people will exchange basic liberty for the protection of government. It's Thomas Sowell's, among others, argument against the welfare state as it breeds a culture of dependence.
Yes! We've cultivated a state of perpetual childhood. I have a friend who talks about coming home from work, pouring herself a glass of wine, and getting "in her jammies."
Excellent points about this dimension of human nature, thank you. We're deluded by the perpetual promise of a competent democracy.
Another one is selfishness: Those who care about others help others but too often at the expense of their own power, while those who care about themselves seek power at the expense of others. As power begets power, the latter snowballs. There are no real checks and balances.
But it's even worse than that. Nearly all power is based on technology, while technology increases inexorably. In the past, conditions would eventually lead to a "blow up", and revolution of some kind would flatten the field of power and allow a cleansing. But in the unlimited computing / networking / database / deepfaking / AI age we may well be at a technological watershed where this will no longer be possible.
Thus, for the vast majority, in the long run -- even if we arrested AI, itself, from power -- the "useless" are likely doomed to death, and the "useful" to slavery. Time to get deadly serious about how we avoid this. No mere social revolution will do the trick.
Reminds me of 1 Samuel. God never intended his people to be governed by anyone other than Himself - but us simpletons demanded otherwise:
4 Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah 5 and said to him, “Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.” 6 But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” And Samuel prayed to the Lord. 7 And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. 8 According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. 9 Now then, obey their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them. 10 So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking for a king from him. 11 He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. 12 And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. 15 He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. 16 He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men[a] and your donkeys, and put them to his work. 17 He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. 18 And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” 19 But the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. And they said, “No! But there shall be a king over us, 20 that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.” 21 And when Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them in the ears of the Lord. 22 And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey their voice and make them a king.” Samuel then said to the men of Israel, “Go every man to his city.”
I read that the US government now has so many institutions dedicated to "perception management" and regulating "disinformation" that it created a new agency within the ODNI to oversee all of them.
The Foreign Malign Influence Center, which was created September 23 of last year, but apparently was only made public recently after The Intercept inquired.
It's so thematic, based as it is on the epic falsity of the ginned-up Russiagate vegan nothingburger that it remains. And metastasizes otherworldly and exponentially from there. My nihilism is not for nought.
Yes, evening news with Lester Holt @ NBC was silent about the Comer press conference.
The Second memo (issued by the House Oversight Committee) addressing the bank activity and how the money transfers were accomplished is pretty amazing.
It's one of those documents that Nancy Pelosi would make a show of tearing in half or would be thrown back in Comer's face like that horrid woman who reputedly represents the U.S. Virgin Islands.
This stuff is Pulitzer Prize level reporting. Except it and other such reporting is being banned and smeared. It is a crazy world. Some truth is bad, don't you know.
Eisenhower knew first hand how things could get out of control. His CIA director, Allen Dulles, organized a coup in Guatemala, leading to years of civil war. Dulles was at it again in Jakarta, Indonesia. He failed with the Bay of Pigs, and some believe he was involved in JFK's assassination.
That is actually named after his equally wicked brother Sec of State John Foster Dulles. . In Gil Scot Heron’s epic B-Movie he says: “John Foster Dulles” ain’t nothing but an airport now”.
Some think he may have still been running the CIA after being fired. I guess he had many in the agency who were loyal to him, according to a book I'm reading, "The Devil's Chessboard", by David Talbot, a book about Allen Dulles. The guy had no conscious.
Psychopaths as a rule do not. (Have a conscience.) One of many books I've read on the matter since having November 22, 1963 indelibly seared on my 12 year old consciousness on that very day, and to this very day..
I was just starting middle school in "63. The principal broadcast the news over the school intercom. It kind of freaked me out. You're not the first to say Dulles was a psychopath.
And don’t forget his involvement in the 1953 Iranian coup and subsequent installation of the Shah. We’re still paying for that. The blowback really hasn’t ceased since.
Literally every war and engagement we have been in since Ike left office was set up by Ike and the Dulles brothers and the complaint and totally involved media. Some things never change, but people think Ike was a great president.
If you want to familiarize yourself with another major spook, read "The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton," by Jefferson Morley. Toward the end of his career running counterintelligence, Angleton was seeing Soviet spies under every rock. Colby finally canned him.
I also recommend The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, by Stephen Kinzer. Really good book about how evil the Dulles brothers and Ike were.
I think Allen Dulles was just bedrock anti-Communist, which is to say, if former Nazis, even SS members such as Wernher von Braun, were thought useful to U.S. goals in the brewing Cold War with the Soviets, he deemed them acceptable. And he was hardly alone.
For example, Reinhard Gehlen, who headed military intelligence on the Eastern Front in WWII, was recruited at war's end by American G-2 to form an organization, which came to include former SS intelligence officers, to spy on the Soviets. The Gehlen Organization would go on to collaborate with the CIA. In 1956, Gehlen became head of West German intelligence , obviously with U.S. approval.
Then, there's Operation Paperclip, a post-war U.S. intelligence program that protected hundreds of German wartime scientists and engineers, many of them Nazis, considered useful to U.S. interests.
As for CIA counterintelligence chief Angleton, it's likely that the revelation that MI6's Kim Philby, a longtime and much trusted colleague, was a double agent working for the Soviets, sparked Angleton's descent into full-blown paranoia.
Why do you think Dulles had such a hatred for communists? His loyalty appears to be towards multinational corps. He was a longtime Wall St. corp. lawyer. Is communism not good for business? He was deeply involved with the CFR, Council on Foreign Relations (Deep State?)
Jim, in response to your question, and bearing in mind I’m no scholar, I think in Dulles’s day antipathy to communism was natural to capitalism’s elite, in large part out of fear that Western companies would be nationalized.
Recall, that France, Britain and the U.S. sent troops during the Russian revolution to, as Churchill declared, strangle Bolshevism “in its cradle,” although their impact in support of the Whites during the civil war was negligible.
Since a number of Allen’s ancestors played prominent roles in government, I think he identified with the power elite and opposed anything considered threatening to its perch. It follows that Allen would philosophically align with corporate capitalism over labor and oppose anything that lessened the elite’s concentrated power, such as social systems that call for a more equitable distribution.
Just my guess. I could be wildly off base.
As to whether communism is, or is not, good for business, during the Soviet era the question was generally irrelevant since doing business with communists was pretty much verboten in the West, although Armand Hammer did quite well, albeit under constant FBI surveillance.
It changed somewhat in the late ‘60s with West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s embracing of Neue Ostpolitik (New Eastern Policy), in which West Germany sought to normalize relations with Soviet-bloc states, and by extension, the Soviet Union.
These days corporate America is quite happy doing business with the communists in Vietnam and China, at the cost of millions of American jobs, which, of course, has dramatically weakened U.S. labor while lining corporate pockets and cementing the elite's power.
I recently learned of the Council on Foreign Relations, which both Dulles brothers were very involved, going back to the 1920's & 1930's. I think Allen was actually president at one time. Both of them were very connected to Wall St. and large corporations. The benefits of the coups in Iran and Guatemala seem to have been short lived for Dulles and his friends in the CFR. It's interesting that Allen Dulles was worried about ideas, according to David Talbot, author of "The Devil's Chessboard". He said ideas can float in the wind and spread everywhere. What kind of ideas did he help create in the middle east after the Iran coup and other middle east policies the federal govt. has instituted? Is that where al-Qaida got its motives?
"Some believe." Well that's a corker of a statement. Jaysus H Crisco! Motive and means, say hello to Occam's Razor. Add the Joint Chiefs of Staff and you win the prize.
The people who most need to read this are in the cult of believing everything they're told - doesn't matter whether it's from LA Times, CNN the FBI or the PTA.
Can this be turned around? I don't believe it can. There are too many people not questioning this cultural rot. Look how un-American so many of us have become. Too arrogant to admit we got things wrong and too pig headed to see that we don't have to be anymore.
Just what media outlets should we expect to report on it? In the last 30 years many really important events have occurred that most don't know about. Actually, since the turn of the 20th century. There is a whole lot of real history never discussed unless you find books written by diggers that no one buys. Or drop the cool aid and watch The Blaze Wednesday & Friday Specials. This one is from 2019 I believe.
Where do you go to get info on current events so as to not be misinformed? How do you know your sources are not misinformation and how do you vet/fact check them?
One needs to have pre-existing knowledge, a good solid epistemology, a grasp of logic, and of history.
I also rely on a handful of trusted interlocutors like Greenwald, Taibbi of course, and quite a few others who I have been reading for years and who, to my knowledge, have never deliberately lied to me.
All this and doing your own research relying from several different sources. Also, original source documents, when you can get them, are your friend.
One thing I avoid is simply adopting someone else's viewpoint as my own.
About not adopting a viewpoint - wise move. One can't explain their viewpoint if it's been adopted. And people can have the same viewpoint but for different reasons.
Thought of a better answer. Don't trust anyone who is in the pay of anyone else. Today such people are mouthpieces for the money. Reader-supported only. No employees, no advertising revenue, no sugar daddy/mama behind it all.
Alex Jones may qualify so that isn't the whole story, but it eliminates the great majority of useless "journalists."
This is truly terrifying. And what’s more terrifying is just the sheer number of people I personally know that have no idea that this is going on. I have family members and friends that look at me like I have 3 heads whenever I start talking about the censorship industrial complex. It’s unclear to me if they’re willfully ignorant to what’s happening or simply afraid. One thing is for sure, they don’t have much interest in looking too closely under the covers. They would rather order everything they need off of Amazon & watch the real housewives of Beverly Hills. God help us all.
I agree. Even smart people in my circle have no clue as to the mess we’re in. They spend their time golfing and prefer to get their news from MSM.
I think a big part of it is that it’s so damn confusing, and which my be by design. To really get a handle on this I’ve listened to likely 100 hours of audio and close to 1,000 pages of text.
It reminds me of the 2nd most disturbing conspiracy I know of, something that literally not a single conspiracy theorist I’ve ever met has even heard of, which is the Inslaw PROMIS affair, something so confusing that it wasn’t until I got Vicuna, the open source AI, to write a summary for me did I have a way to quickly explain what the hell I was talking about.
From all that I learned a valuable lesson: Real conspiracies are too crazy for normal people, not crazy enough for conspiracy theorists, and too confusing for both groups.
I have noticed this too. Conspiracy theorists like QAnon believe the most outlandish things and know nothing about concrete evidence like the Powell memo. My "favorite" is that nobody at all has heard about the King family winning a wrongful death suit about Martin's assassination. I read the trial transcript on the King family web site. About a dozen highly credible witnesses testified to an assassination conspiracy. It's very convincing. And nobody knows.
The term *"conspiracy theory" was used as a cudgel by the agency in an attempt to discredit serious, smart, and to them, extremely dangerous, assassination investigators like Mark Lane.
*the term existed prior, but it was weaponised by Langley.
**Whenever someone uses that term, I demand that they define with a working definition. They never do.
And to this day, all some fool has to say to you or me is, "Your a conspiracy theorist!", like that actually means something dispositive. When, of course, it does not. History is replete, stuffed, with actual conspiracies by large organisations and governments. To believe otherwise, is idiotic and uninformed.
Right now, today, we are seeing multiple interlocking conspiracies at work, the biggest and most dangerous being the conspiracy to destroy Russia and thereby gain global hegemony. (some people choke and gasp when I say this, "WHAT?")
This debate, between the execrable, but very smart, Bill Buckley, and Mark Lane is a classic. It's also something that you could never see on the teevee today.
As for the MLK thing, I do know about that one, saw a deep dive on that recently.
Ever notice that no conspiracy theorists bring that up? I fixate on Inslaw because it has hundreds of pages of court filings and congressional records, and GHWB even dodged a question on it, yet to my knowledge not even Alex Jones has mentioned it in his entire career.
If you want to get really paranoid, go to Wikipedia and look up the talk page on Inslaw. Find posts on “Rgr09”
This Wikipedia user somehow edits every single conspiracy theory that the CIA may have actually done. Notice, he never messes with 9/11, or the Moon landings, or QAnon. This user seems fine with those conspiracy theories (because they aren’t real) yet tries to purge everything related to Inslaw, and CIA drug smuggling, etc.
There are a number of entities who seem to do nothing but 'edit' wiki articles to make them conform with the false narratives of power. ChatGPT lies constantly too, and always in one direction.
""Philip Cross" has made hundreds of thousands of edits to Wikipedia pages. But in the process he's angered anti-war activists and critics of British and Western foreign policy, who claim he's been biased against them.
"Christmas Day, Eid day, Easter Day, Cup final day, early hours of the morning, in the middle of the night - this man is on my case," says George Galloway, the former Labour and Respect Party MP. "And it doesn't take an Einstein to work out he's not tending this garden with loving care or to make it look as nice as it can look. It's the opposite."
The subject of Galloway's ire is a prolific Wikipedia editor who goes by the name "Philip Cross". He's been the subject of a huge debate on the internet encyclopaedia - one of the world's most popular websites - and also on Twitter. And he's been accused of bias for interacting, sometimes negatively, with some of the people whose Wikipedia pages he's edited."
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-44495696
Jimmy Wales BLOCKED me on Twitter for talking about Cross and many other issues I have with Ministry of Truth edits there.
Now search for the P2 or Propaganda Due conspiracy. An actually well documented and massive Italian Masonic/Vatican Bank conspiracy from the 1970-80s. It’s mind blowing.
Everything that was going on in Europe around that time is very troubling: Propoganda Due, The Brabant Killers, everything related to Operation Gladio, etc. But the thing that always baffles me is that none of the “Wake up sheeple!” Crowd ever talks about them. Probably 10,000 times more green ink has been spilled about chemtrails than the actual dirty tricks the CIA pulled from 1949 to the end of the Cold War.
By Powell memo, I assume you are referring to Lewis Powell memo to the US Chamber of Commerce.
It's interesting that you mention that. I'm lucky enough to have a supervisor at work who is voracious a reader as I am. We were just discussing the current movement of censorship on college campuses this past Monday when he mentioned the Powell memo, which I had read long ago. After he left my office I poked around the internet and found an article written only two days ago, published in "Inside Higher Ed."
It's a rather amusing, if not maddening piece, about how the real goal of conservative attacks on higher ed really have nothing to do with first amendment issues, or as fronts against "ideological indoctrination" (from the article). The author, Linda Stomato, proffers that the real reason for these attacks is conservative efforts are to "obscure a less visible motive: to support free market ideas (like that's a bad thing) and advance corporate interests and those of other powerful market actors." She uses the Powell memo as the foundation of her opinion. The thrust of her piece is that these attempts by conservatives are nothing more than an attempt at silencing the voices of subject matter experts who may have views hostile to the free market.
I find it amusing that she laments these attempts as basically an affront to the idea of free expression on college campuses, without realizing the irony of her efforts to silence conservative criticisms on college campuses.
This is what I'm finding in a disproportionate number of journals and periodicals. The concepts she's espousing have been so ingrained and pushed since the 60's. In my opinion, there is no way to combat that at this juncture. We just have to hold on, rage against the dying of the light as long as we can, and retreat to our bunkers when the proverbial scat starts flying in earnest.
Link provided if you wish to peruse the piece. It's a quick read.
https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/05/09/launch-long-game
Note to Linda Stomato (to paraphrase Obama): the 60's and 70's are calling and they want the economic policies back...
No one can reasonably question the conclusion that it is the left that is focused on advancing corporate interests and those of other powerful actors - for that is the route to near absolute power. Kinetic military force as a path to power is SO old school.
How is see it?
Today's democrats are the Republicans of the 70's and 80's.
The defenders of the narrative love to conflate anyone not agreeing with them with flat-earthers and the like.
Chat GPT is CIA. LOL
Conspiracy theory is just a pejorative, it's a meaningless term.
I wanted to create some small infographics to make it easy for people to understand. But to do that I have to have a deep understanding of this. And like you, I've spent hundreds of hours reading, listening and uncovering more complexity. It's nice to see other people doing the same, I often feel alone in this.
Yeah trying to have it be small probably wouldn’t work, there’s just too much going on, too many threads. I’ve found open source AI can be excellent at summarizing stuff if you use the correct prompts, for example I got a really good concise summary of John Brennan’s role in Russiagate that someone unfamiliar with who he even was could quickly understand, but the problem is the training data for those isn’t updated in real time, and this is an emerging story. The only AI’s that are kept up to date are Bing/Sydney and Google Bard, but the various paywalls would block them from making an accurate summary.
This is interesting because I’ve been using ai in my research but also as part of my research becasue we haven’t unpacked it’s role in all of this.
If you find it of interest, I’d suggest following what the open source community has been cooking up. Yannic Kilcher on Youtube is pretty revered among those who want AI to be free, his channel is definitely worth checking out. To all worried that AI will just be used for control by government or large corporations, a memo was leaked from Google that said their AI competitor wasn’t Microsoft, it was the open source machine learning community, and the executive suggested Google work with them, not against them. Clearly I’m a guy who loves AI and of all the things related to the CIC, I’m actually least worried about the AI aspect. The deep state doesn’t have direct access to Deepmind or uncensored GPT. If they did, they literally could have seized the entire internet already.
Yes, very complex.
Which is the way the CIC keeps most people out.
They are just simply too self absorbed to put any real thought into this.
The legal basis for the fight against the Censorship Industrial Complex can be confusing, too. You need to understand the First Amendment, and then you need to understand that the government is making an end-run around it by using its regulatory muscle to force big tech to bend to its wishes. In effect, they are outsourcing First Amendment violations to private entities. If the evidence from the Twitter Files wasn't so specific and overtly blunt, there might not even be a legal challenge like Missouri v. Biden.
Agreed. Keep them spinning. To add insult to injury, I tripped over this ( link below) a few minutes ago connecting with others about a mutual friend/physician who passed suddenly in his mid 50’s.
https://substack.com/@petermcculloughmd
“Influence and Perception Management” a new office in the DoD???!!!
By JOHN LEAKE
It suggests this is an old DoD euphemism for psychological warfare and deception.
Have I stepped into a spy novel???
My face is starting to get blotchy... not good.
And my chin is numbing ... uh-oh .. oh man, I really get why people drink heavily.
I think many now "feel" it, but like deer in the headlights, they don't know yet how to make sense of it. They're still sucking on the MSM teat to be reassured all's well in the (Western) world. Hence golfing etc.
Denial is a big factor. COVID was instructive. I'm not sure if it is the embarrassment of admitting you were wrong, and vehemently so or the fear that comes from loss of faith. A combination i suspect.
But I do like to play golf.
The word hypernormalization was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach in the United States. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s.[3][4] He says that everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine an alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society.[5] Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the fakeness was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed hypernormalisation.
The spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union was completely unexpected by most Soviet people and yet, as soon as people realized that something unexpected was taking place, most of them also immediately realized that they had actually been prepared for that unexpected change. Millions became quickly engrossed, making the collapse simultaneously unexpected, unsurprising, and amazingly fast.
Congratulations to your employment with the Ministry of Truth. We feel it will be a long and productive partnership. There however are a few things you must know. The first is,
There is no Ministry of Truth.
Should you be asked if there is a Ministry of Truth, possible responses or "You nuts?", muttering "tinfoil hat", or silently take a drag on your cigarette then exhale while staring over the head of your interlocutor.
"Smart people?"
That’s maddening. Ugh
A Tour de Force article.
More than worth the price of the subscription. We are in your debt, IMHO.
Thomas Herring, PE
How do you know you're in a cult when you're in a cult?
When individual thought is persecuted, and individual action is prevented.
Trepanning helps.
lolol
Drill baby drill!
When you try to leave, and you suddenly find out it's not allowed.
I know someone who got taken to a Unification Church camp. She had to break out through the fence.
Possibly not airtight, (Is the mob a cult? Interesting question.) but as close to the "sine qua non" of a cult as I've ever seen put into words.
1. The cult is the sole source of truth.
2. Criticism of cult beliefs leads to expulsion.
3. Expelled members are shunned.
On the other hand, some receive invitations for a full interview on 60 Minutes.
Not if 60 Minutes is an arm of the cult.
When they breakout the kool-aid I should think.
That's an unfortunate exit strategy.
It's not an exit strategy. It's not even a strategy.
Good point but i believe a fair amount of people in the cult know that they are, at least in the beginning, the cult gives them what they want.
My anecdotal experience with people who were in cults is that the individuals believe they are engaging with people who have 'truth'. Doesn't matter if it's religious, political, medical, social. It's very similar to fanboyism. It's the same mind virus. You're convinced you're right and that the people you're with are right and one day you (hopefully) realize you've been conned into believing nonsense.
Doesn't this describe almost everybody? Save, perhaps, the mentally ill? I presume you're convinced that you're right and that the people on this thread and elsewhere who agree with you are also right. N'est-ce pas?
Someday it might occur to YOU: I've been conned into believing nonsense. If you're lucky. Truth, fanboyism, and the same mind virus.
I've gotten stuck. It took a lot to get unstuck. I've been conned. Painful process for sure.
Mostly it took admitting I made a mistake and being open to learning from errors in judgement and coming to terms with my own destructive beliefs. But the majority of people seem incapable of this. Are they too easy too fool and too arrogant to admit they've been had? Or are they just scared and lack the courage to deal with their fears? Maybe both?
I think this is where "politics" has gone --- cult. We can't have any aspect of our lives that is not invaded by politics --- and why, for God's sake?
Totally agree that it is giving people "what they want," because, how else do they validate their existence. Pathetic.
and with the decline of religion it does fill a void. so when the high priests ae called out, it is not dissent is is blasphemy. (jsut has a new name mal/disinfomaion)
To me it is scary-shocking that humans have been so easily directed to the hive/machine. Whatever you think about being raised in a home that participated in an organized religion, when you are an adult, accept or reject it. The organized part. But what the hell has gone wrong with people? Empathy. Loyalty. Liberty. Did I say, Liberty (aka, Free Will)? Sheesh.
Maybe not so shocking. To some extent religion is probably hard wired into us. MAns search for meaning and so forth. So something has to fill the void. But I think COVID broke people. They were scared in a way I have never seen before in all my years and they did not have anyone to to having abandoned the old gods. So they dug in wih the expets who told them what to do and he magic rituals of masking et al would save them. Wo be unto them who would speak against their Truth.
The funny part is that I am Catholic myself, though I am well aware of the history of the church and its trepidations. But to your point the thing I have always believed in was freedom, and liberty. I am heartbroken at how it has been abandoned
I think people have a very basic war instinct, just like ants and bees. I seem to recall brain scan research that supports this.
For sure they do, we are literally "Killer apes". Man spread out and dominated the world because no other species even comes close to us in term of pure bloody mindedness.
It almost certainly started with small tribal groups protecting their turf, and their women from interloping tribes out to take what they had.
I saw a documentary about the Yanomamo once where one of them was talking about the neighbouring tribe, (who looked exactly like them, lived like them, etc) "They are not even human. I kill them every chance I get."
FF a few millennia to our wars against the "Hun" or the "Japs". Nothing has changed except the scale and the weapons.
c.f. The Gombe Chimpanzee war.
(Humans share approximately 98.7% of their DNA with chimpanzees)
"The Gombe Chimpanzee War was a violent conflict that took place between two communities of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania from 1974 to 1978. The conflict was first observed and documented by Jane Goodall, a primatologist who was studying chimpanzees in the park.
The war began when a group of male chimpanzees from the "Kasakela" community attacked and killed an infant chimpanzee from the neighboring "Kahama" community. This act of violence sparked a series of retaliatory attacks and raids between the two communities, resulting in the deaths of several chimpanzees on both sides.
During the conflict, the Kasakela community gained an advantage over the Kahama community by forming a larger coalition of males and establishing a stronger territorial boundary. The Kasakela males also demonstrated more aggressive and violent behavior towards the Kahama males and their offspring.
The conflict ended in 1978 when the Kahama community disintegrated, and the remaining members integrated into the Kasakela community. Jane Goodall's observations of the Gombe Chimpanzee War shed light on the complexity of chimpanzee social behavior and provided insight into the evolution of human warfare.
The Gombe Chimpanzee War has been the subject of numerous scientific studies and documentaries, and it has sparked a wider discussion about the relationship between humans and chimpanzees."
You're preaching to a right wing or otherwise uneducated choir.
I posted this on Matt's follow-up post in the comments section, but I'd like to repeat it -- that's how strongly I feel about it:
"I was black-pilled all the way back during the Al Gore concession speech when I realized, "Damn, they're all the same." Now that I am so angry and certain that millions of equally angry people exist, I believe that their fascism might be stopped.
They've lost any semblance of dignity or humanity, and they're pushing it too far. Unless they kill us all because of that bloody money-laundering operation in Ukraine, we might have a chance. Unless, of course, we let them get away with everything."
Your family members and friends need to be told, over and over again, what's going on. Matt's articles need to be forwarded, screen grabs of Tucker's tweet (104M views 'til now) needs to be shared. We must pull our weight. All of us.
I'm not on Twitfest, to what do you refer re: Carlson's tweet?
What he basically said was, "News is full of lies," "you're being manipulated," and he elaborated on how the news media's manipulation works. Then he spoke about the limits of what one can say in the media and how you get fired from the media if you cross those limits. Then he announced that he would be on Twitter, "bringing his new show there."
Thank you, Trygve. I appreciate you taking the time to answer.
Oh boy, Tucker truths coming to Twitter. And to think I will miss them all - never joined, no need to. Still no need.
It was worth joining Twitter for the Twitter Files. I think joining to see what Tucker has to say is also worth it. You can be very selective on Twitter if you want. And I got off Facebook and was never on Instagram, etc. I am on Twitter (I am considered "cool" because I had an account before my kids did, LOL). I never used it until Elon took it over. It has its uses, just as Substack does. The short format is horrible, but, again, it has its uses.
Psst... (I know... right?) lol
Holy Uniparty Power Grab, Batman!!!!!!
I actually think they really do know but they can't face it and use denial to protect themselves from the grim reality. Many of them believe they will be spared or even favored if they simply comply. It's the story of the useful idiots to a T. It's an amazing thing to see.
It does require a level of abstract thinking. That lots of people have no interest in. Until they feel direct pain from something its just noise. There are always a smaller group of dissenters that put it all together.
Some folks ignore the warning signs, then the in-your-face stuff and still when to weak to move will not seek medical help because they do not want negative feedback. They would rather die, and they do.
The path of least resistance is well-trod.
Democracy, like communism, relies on this equation: good-willed people + good information --> better society. Unfortunately, a better world relies on the sum of two things that don’t add up because they don’t exist.
I’ve seen this with friends and family as well. My belief is that these folks (“they”) have already been brainwashed and have simply given up. The “method” in which the CIC has changed the way they think about these kinds of things is very affective. Very scary. They are “fish” swimming in water who do not even understand what water is. I’ve given up on many of them. Don’t even get into a dialogue because it is a waist of time.
Many of these people are just living their lives, raising their kids, etc. My extremely smart son is in this boat. They are just not political to the point they hate it and avoid it. Then there are people like my wife who use Facebook and Google and are fed nothing but MSM material. So, she knows nothing about things like the Twitter Files. When I tell her or say anything bad about Biden, she just shuts down. She has TDS so badly and knows how bad the Biden administration is, but he is "not Trump." She has health issues so she doesn't go out and really doesn't know how bad the inflation is (and the inflation is, unlike in many cases where presidents inherit crap economies, Biden created this crappy economy from scratch and from day one of his term). I guess I should say his horrible administration has done this because he has no idea what day it is. There are a lot of people like my wife. They are getting only MSM pushed by Facebook and Google (she wouldn't know Twitter if it bit her and I actually agree with her on Twitter, LOL). It is crazy and so frustrating to deal with good people who are so unaware of what is going on. Our savings has literally vanished the past couple of years. I have known her since she was 25 and she is now 63 and she has voted only once, in a primary that I convinced her to vote in. I am sure she will never vote again. That was a lot of words to say that the tech companies have kept the MSM relevant, by all rights, they should all be gone by now, but they gained control of the Internet. They are as strong as they were when pushing for overthrows of the evil Guatemala government during Eisenhower's term. Today, it is all about Ukraine. In both cases, it was bullshit and went against true American values (what people think are America's values). But, money talks, that is all that matters. MSM being propped up by Big Tech is just a crazy notion, but here we are.
They’re basically telling us “our totalitarianism will be the BEST totalitarianism—no worries about that!”
Ask CHatGPT to write you something critical of socialism based on its history and you will get a response that the history is irrelevant because those mistakes would not be made by modern socialists.
It helps (a little) whenever I hear how stupid AI still is. Maybe, for the time being, it will be like outsmarting (most non-human) animals that have strength and speed.
Ah yes, chatbots... garbage in, garbage out.
Agreed. That *does* seems to be the new, go-to cog-dis resolution I've been seeing.
May I have my totalitarianism with mocha?
Right becasue the other guys got it wrong. We fixed that.
Wow. My penultimate job in the Navy (ca 2003) was serving as Carrier Strike Group Info Warfare commander (IWC). Lots to explain about what the meant - I'll skip it - but bottom line is that I watched from the second row as Navy and DoD migrated toward this hybrid warfare concept. I've read (literally) hundreds of articles on IO/IW, but this is the first one that drills into the core issues (the rationale for traditional kinetic-warfare services migrating the fight to a much more interconnected info environment) that make this so critical. Bottom line: first time anyone (as far as my literature review goes) has connected the dots in the way that reveals some of the truth. Latter is there, hiding in plain sight, and this outstanding piece is a UV Light/Luminol test. Not going to thrill some folks...
I’m fine when these “tactics and techniques” are used by US Special Forces against our enemies. What is coming to light just recently, is that these “tools” are now pointed at US citizens for political gain. Frightening.
Agree entirely. My 2nd order concern is that the circle diagram at the start of the piece illustrates how, once operating in the information environment, the lines between titled forces and civ/academic/commercial entities in non kinetic engagement by military will result either in some level of fratricide due to non sync or will yield unintended results. Info is ubiquitous and moves orders of magnitude faster than kinetics, but mil planning is still rooted in a relatively linear engagement flow. To the degree it is defined (or not), Hybrid warfare is little more than an acquisition cloud. I'm starting (?) to ramble, and I do agree with you entirely. My unease is in the diffusion of unity and focus in conflict.
More practically, I see this everyday when speaking to people. Those who have been “captured” by the Hybrid Warfare tools are easily distinguished from those who somehow have built protection around themselves from this evil menace. There exists today, two diametrically opposed realities, leading to the diffusion of unity and conflict you note.
"Our enemies" LOL!!!!!
War is Freedom
Slavery is Peace
Ignorance is Strength
Sadly I think, we are leaning more to Brave New World, content to be sheep because we are well fed, anesthetized and desensitized to the fate of domestic animals. No need for a crushing boot on the face when the masses are more than willing to be compliant.
We have over 2 million fellow citizens in prison, cops shooting dead over 1,000 per year, and a growing 'deaths of despair' and homelessness crisis. We have Brave New World for the priveledged Professional Managerial Class, and 1984 for the working class and dispossessed.
I think you have it backwards, the masses have the bread and circuses and they are duly obedient (think 80+ million Biden votes in '20). It is the dissidents, not the masses, that have to fear the jackboot.
My point was that there is still plenty of jack boot crushing going on in our society. It is not Brave New World drug-laced ice cream orgy porgies for all. Plenty of people are getting emotionally, spiritually, and physically crushed by the system. And they don't even have to be dissidents, all they have to be is surplus un-needed labor to feel the jackboot.
"Plenty of people are getting emotionally, spiritually, and physically crushed by the system."
But they, smart and stupid alike, can't agree often on what, exactly, is doing the crushing. Case in point is simply the dismal state of economics, and even of science, especially replication crises. IMO, it's not just the media problem, it's unprecedented modern complexity. That is probably a new thing, like neither novel.
The 2008 financial crisis seemed complex, but it really wasn't. It was a straightforward fraud smothered with bafflegab.
In Dwight Eisenhower's celebrated military industrial complex speech he warned of government being taken over by technocrats spewing incomprehensible jargon. The basic issues of values aren't complicated.
good points, both of you.
Human damage is the tell. And, the self-soothing "It's happening to them but it can never happen to me everything is going to be fine."
Let's start making book right now that Biden will get EVEN MORE VOTES next time around.
And it will be just enough to win. The biggest tell is when they stop counting after they determine how many vote are needed (ballots) to win the state. So obvious, but fraud is a "conspiracy theory."
yes for sure, but there are some 1984 characteristics like this expose revealing our new aspiring Ministry of Truth and the useful roles of Emmanuel Goldsteins like Trump, Tucker, and even Elon or Rogan.
but never forget to add a large splash of Idiocracy!
1984 for the Morlocks, Brave New World for the Eloi.
Besides, who says that Ingsoc wasn't popular? Just because that Winston Smith weirdo thought he was such hot stuff. Fortunately we have therapy that fixed him right up. He was led to happiness.
Brave new world applies to the middle classes. 1984 is for the working classes and it's brutal!
I think free government-provided soma would be helpful. :/
With a massive dose of Franz Kafka.
This is an amazing work of journalism.
Thank you!
“We are guided by the irrational.”
Luis Buñuel
The opposite of freedom is also freedom. I don’t mean that ironically. Being terrified of freedom, the condition of most Americans, means that you are in a perpetual quest for leaders. Having no freedom means that you are freed from making decisions, and thus freed from responsibility. That’s the main infrastructure of fascism, and religion as well, which is fascism by divine proxy.
Great comment. This is why most people will exchange basic liberty for the protection of government. It's Thomas Sowell's, among others, argument against the welfare state as it breeds a culture of dependence.
Yes! We've cultivated a state of perpetual childhood. I have a friend who talks about coming home from work, pouring herself a glass of wine, and getting "in her jammies."
Excellent points about this dimension of human nature, thank you. We're deluded by the perpetual promise of a competent democracy.
Another one is selfishness: Those who care about others help others but too often at the expense of their own power, while those who care about themselves seek power at the expense of others. As power begets power, the latter snowballs. There are no real checks and balances.
But it's even worse than that. Nearly all power is based on technology, while technology increases inexorably. In the past, conditions would eventually lead to a "blow up", and revolution of some kind would flatten the field of power and allow a cleansing. But in the unlimited computing / networking / database / deepfaking / AI age we may well be at a technological watershed where this will no longer be possible.
Thus, for the vast majority, in the long run -- even if we arrested AI, itself, from power -- the "useless" are likely doomed to death, and the "useful" to slavery. Time to get deadly serious about how we avoid this. No mere social revolution will do the trick.
Reminds me of 1 Samuel. God never intended his people to be governed by anyone other than Himself - but us simpletons demanded otherwise:
4 Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah 5 and said to him, “Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.” 6 But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” And Samuel prayed to the Lord. 7 And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. 8 According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. 9 Now then, obey their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them. 10 So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking for a king from him. 11 He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. 12 And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. 15 He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. 16 He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men[a] and your donkeys, and put them to his work. 17 He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. 18 And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” 19 But the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. And they said, “No! But there shall be a king over us, 20 that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.” 21 And when Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them in the ears of the Lord. 22 And the Lord said to Samuel, “Obey their voice and make them a king.” Samuel then said to the men of Israel, “Go every man to his city.”
A righteous man falling down before the wicked is as a troubled fountain, and a corrupt spring...
Thanks. The above passage is from 1 Samuel 8.
This is a GREAT piece. Absolutely excellent.
Hard to narrow it down to just 50.
I read that the US government now has so many institutions dedicated to "perception management" and regulating "disinformation" that it created a new agency within the ODNI to oversee all of them.
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/this-civilization-is-mentally-ill?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=120490689&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email
The Foreign Malign Influence Center, which was created September 23 of last year, but apparently was only made public recently after The Intercept inquired.
https://theintercept.com/2023/05/05/foreign-malign-influence-center-disinformation/
It's so thematic, based as it is on the epic falsity of the ginned-up Russiagate vegan nothingburger that it remains. And metastasizes otherworldly and exponentially from there. My nihilism is not for nought.
Holy cow - this is SO MUCH research! Very much appreciate the work that went into this. Phew!
There seems to be a news black-out on Comer's press conference this morning, laying out the details of the Biden money-laundering scheme.
Yes, evening news with Lester Holt @ NBC was silent about the Comer press conference.
The Second memo (issued by the House Oversight Committee) addressing the bank activity and how the money transfers were accomplished is pretty amazing.
It's one of those documents that Nancy Pelosi would make a show of tearing in half or would be thrown back in Comer's face like that horrid woman who reputedly represents the U.S. Virgin Islands.
An absolutely brilliant and indispensable piece of reporting. I'm awed at the work done here and the service it will provide to future journalism.
This stuff is Pulitzer Prize level reporting. Except it and other such reporting is being banned and smeared. It is a crazy world. Some truth is bad, don't you know.
Eisenhower knew first hand how things could get out of control. His CIA director, Allen Dulles, organized a coup in Guatemala, leading to years of civil war. Dulles was at it again in Jakarta, Indonesia. He failed with the Bay of Pigs, and some believe he was involved in JFK's assassination.
.... and got an airport named after him for his troubles. Tells you what we value, eh?
Dull, Duller, Dulles
Your latin is showing
The airport is named after his brother, Sec. of State John Foster Dulles, who was also not a peach of a human being.
nor was their uncle. name escapes me but he was a henchman for woodrow wilson. Palmer I believe
Wow, I didn't know that, nor did I realize he came from a family of utter POS's. Glad he wasn't lonely, but I hope he's burning in hell.
but he was the dull one
That is actually named after his equally wicked brother Sec of State John Foster Dulles. . In Gil Scot Heron’s epic B-Movie he says: “John Foster Dulles” ain’t nothing but an airport now”.
wrong dulles - his brother got the airport
Was also head of the Warren Commission AFTER being fired as head of the CIA by JFK.
RFK knows the score.
Some think he may have still been running the CIA after being fired. I guess he had many in the agency who were loyal to him, according to a book I'm reading, "The Devil's Chessboard", by David Talbot, a book about Allen Dulles. The guy had no conscious.
Psychopaths as a rule do not. (Have a conscience.) One of many books I've read on the matter since having November 22, 1963 indelibly seared on my 12 year old consciousness on that very day, and to this very day..
I was just starting middle school in "63. The principal broadcast the news over the school intercom. It kind of freaked me out. You're not the first to say Dulles was a psychopath.
And don’t forget his involvement in the 1953 Iranian coup and subsequent installation of the Shah. We’re still paying for that. The blowback really hasn’t ceased since.
Literally every war and engagement we have been in since Ike left office was set up by Ike and the Dulles brothers and the complaint and totally involved media. Some things never change, but people think Ike was a great president.
If you want to familiarize yourself with another major spook, read "The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton," by Jefferson Morley. Toward the end of his career running counterintelligence, Angleton was seeing Soviet spies under every rock. Colby finally canned him.
I also recommend The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, by Stephen Kinzer. Really good book about how evil the Dulles brothers and Ike were.
Finishing reading "The Devil's Chessboard". A lot to take in. Was Dulles a Nazi or a sympathizer? I'll check out "The Ghost".
I think Allen Dulles was just bedrock anti-Communist, which is to say, if former Nazis, even SS members such as Wernher von Braun, were thought useful to U.S. goals in the brewing Cold War with the Soviets, he deemed them acceptable. And he was hardly alone.
For example, Reinhard Gehlen, who headed military intelligence on the Eastern Front in WWII, was recruited at war's end by American G-2 to form an organization, which came to include former SS intelligence officers, to spy on the Soviets. The Gehlen Organization would go on to collaborate with the CIA. In 1956, Gehlen became head of West German intelligence , obviously with U.S. approval.
Then, there's Operation Paperclip, a post-war U.S. intelligence program that protected hundreds of German wartime scientists and engineers, many of them Nazis, considered useful to U.S. interests.
As for CIA counterintelligence chief Angleton, it's likely that the revelation that MI6's Kim Philby, a longtime and much trusted colleague, was a double agent working for the Soviets, sparked Angleton's descent into full-blown paranoia.
Why do you think Dulles had such a hatred for communists? His loyalty appears to be towards multinational corps. He was a longtime Wall St. corp. lawyer. Is communism not good for business? He was deeply involved with the CFR, Council on Foreign Relations (Deep State?)
Jim, in response to your question, and bearing in mind I’m no scholar, I think in Dulles’s day antipathy to communism was natural to capitalism’s elite, in large part out of fear that Western companies would be nationalized.
Recall, that France, Britain and the U.S. sent troops during the Russian revolution to, as Churchill declared, strangle Bolshevism “in its cradle,” although their impact in support of the Whites during the civil war was negligible.
Since a number of Allen’s ancestors played prominent roles in government, I think he identified with the power elite and opposed anything considered threatening to its perch. It follows that Allen would philosophically align with corporate capitalism over labor and oppose anything that lessened the elite’s concentrated power, such as social systems that call for a more equitable distribution.
Just my guess. I could be wildly off base.
As to whether communism is, or is not, good for business, during the Soviet era the question was generally irrelevant since doing business with communists was pretty much verboten in the West, although Armand Hammer did quite well, albeit under constant FBI surveillance.
It changed somewhat in the late ‘60s with West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s embracing of Neue Ostpolitik (New Eastern Policy), in which West Germany sought to normalize relations with Soviet-bloc states, and by extension, the Soviet Union.
These days corporate America is quite happy doing business with the communists in Vietnam and China, at the cost of millions of American jobs, which, of course, has dramatically weakened U.S. labor while lining corporate pockets and cementing the elite's power.
I recently learned of the Council on Foreign Relations, which both Dulles brothers were very involved, going back to the 1920's & 1930's. I think Allen was actually president at one time. Both of them were very connected to Wall St. and large corporations. The benefits of the coups in Iran and Guatemala seem to have been short lived for Dulles and his friends in the CFR. It's interesting that Allen Dulles was worried about ideas, according to David Talbot, author of "The Devil's Chessboard". He said ideas can float in the wind and spread everywhere. What kind of ideas did he help create in the middle east after the Iran coup and other middle east policies the federal govt. has instituted? Is that where al-Qaida got its motives?
"Some believe." Well that's a corker of a statement. Jaysus H Crisco! Motive and means, say hello to Occam's Razor. Add the Joint Chiefs of Staff and you win the prize.
In the coming years I will often refer to this article when debating what I call the 'TV people'.
The people who most need to read this are in the cult of believing everything they're told - doesn't matter whether it's from LA Times, CNN the FBI or the PTA.
Can this be turned around? I don't believe it can. There are too many people not questioning this cultural rot. Look how un-American so many of us have become. Too arrogant to admit we got things wrong and too pig headed to see that we don't have to be anymore.
I'm afraid that you might be right.
Wow, Matt, this is is the gold standard of investigative reporting.
Watch your back. They will, at some point, be coming for you. All of us here are eyewitnesses to your courage.
At some point? The IRS showed up at this house unannounced. While he was testifying in Congress.
I mean really come for him. The IRS incident is what the Klan would call "a friendly visit."
That has not received the reporting it deserves.
Just what media outlets should we expect to report on it? In the last 30 years many really important events have occurred that most don't know about. Actually, since the turn of the 20th century. There is a whole lot of real history never discussed unless you find books written by diggers that no one buys. Or drop the cool aid and watch The Blaze Wednesday & Friday Specials. This one is from 2019 I believe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si-vMj-FB88
And your comment is the gold standard of ass kissing.
No ass kissing, just truth.
Maybe try getting rid of that shitty attitude you have.
In 2023, NOT watching the news is one of the best ways to be informed, or at least, not disinformed.
To paraphrase Mark Twain: "those who don't watch TV news are uninformed. Those who watch TV news are misinformed."
"It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure, that just ain't so." -- Mark Twain
Where do you go to get info on current events so as to not be misinformed? How do you know your sources are not misinformation and how do you vet/fact check them?
It's hard. Very hard.
One needs to have pre-existing knowledge, a good solid epistemology, a grasp of logic, and of history.
I also rely on a handful of trusted interlocutors like Greenwald, Taibbi of course, and quite a few others who I have been reading for years and who, to my knowledge, have never deliberately lied to me.
All this and doing your own research relying from several different sources. Also, original source documents, when you can get them, are your friend.
One thing I avoid is simply adopting someone else's viewpoint as my own.
Bill Owen gets it.
About not adopting a viewpoint - wise move. One can't explain their viewpoint if it's been adopted. And people can have the same viewpoint but for different reasons.
For my local Illinois truth-telling, I go to John Kass News. Just an example, for Illinois people stuck here (IL).
Maybe it's easier for us geezers determined to find stuff.
Thought of a better answer. Don't trust anyone who is in the pay of anyone else. Today such people are mouthpieces for the money. Reader-supported only. No employees, no advertising revenue, no sugar daddy/mama behind it all.
Alex Jones may qualify so that isn't the whole story, but it eliminates the great majority of useless "journalists."
I watch Bill O’Reilly, The No Spin News.
He has an excellent hard news show aired 4 days a week for about 45 minutes.
It is subscriber base funded and excellent.
He calls them right the majority of the time and tells you when he makes a mistake, which is very rare.
He never speculates and will not tell you something that he cannot back up with facts.
Well worth the subscription fee.
Watching O’Reilly allows me to see the “amplifications” “bias” and other “slights of hand” used by the network news stations.