JOHNSTONE

The most common articles of propaganda — and by far the most consequential — are not the glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy among the critically minded. They're the mundane messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that people are fed day in and day out to normalize the status quo and lay the foundation for more propaganda to be administered in the future.

Reading by Tim Foley.

There are no adults behind the wheel of the vehicle that's driving us toward World War Three. We're on a bus that's being driven straight toward a cliff, and it's being driven by infants. If we survive this it will not be because of the experienced leadership of western governments, but completely in spite of it.

Reading by Tim Foley.

60 Minutes Australia has been playing a leading role in saturating Australian airwaves with consent-manufacturing messaging in support of militarising to participate in a US war against China. A segment they ran a year ago is titled "Prepare for Armageddon: China's warning to the world," and features an image of Xi Jinping overlaid with war planes and explosions and captioned "POKING THE PANDA". Another from a year ago is titled "War with China: Are we closer than we think?" Another from ten months ago is titled "China's new target in the battle to control the Pacific." Another from six months ago is titled "Inside the battle for Taiwan and China's looming war threat." Another from two months ago is titled "Is the Navy ready? How the U.S. is preparing amid a naval buildup in China." 

All of these segments have millions of views on YouTube alone. Now this past weekend 60 Minutes Australia has aired back-to-back segments titled "The real Top Gun: US military in heated stand-off with China" and "Five countries secretly sharing intelligence say China is the No.1 threat," both of which are as jaw-droppingly propagandistic as anything I've ever seen.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Many people turn to conservatism and religion because they perceive — correctly — that mainstream culture is a fraudulent sham bereft of meaning and authentic values. Their solutions are misguided, but their reasons arise from a perception of a very real problem. 

It isn't actually necessary to turn to religion or conservatism to find depth, meaning and groundedness; depth, meaning and groundedness are always abundantly accessible. But nothing about western culture makes this obvious, especially in the mainstream.

Turning to religion and conservatism as a solution to the degradation of mainstream culture is just replacing the modern systems of mass-scale thought control with the old ones. It's a completely maladaptive solution to the problem, but you can't ask people to just keep participating in a worldview that feels like it's sucking your soul out of your body 24/7. You need to offer them something nourishing and authentic. Nothing in mainstream liberal culture offers this; it's self-evidently phony, soulless and vapid.

This isn't something the left can just dismiss. There needs to be something on offer which meets these needs better than both mainstream culture and the regressive belief systems which caused so much suffering in the past.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Biden administration has signed off on both F-16s for Ukraine and attacks on Crimea using US-made weapons. Both of these moves have drawn dire warnings from nuclear-armed Russia, and both would have been unthinkable a year ago.

Reading by Tim Foley.

It works like this:

- As many people as possible are herded into two mainstream political factions who pretend to oppose each other while in reality working together to advance the interests of the powerful.

- Those who can't be herded into the two mainstream factions are herded toward fake "populist" factions, who then herd them into the mainstream factions.

- Those who can't be herded into either category are marginalized into invisibility.

By the time you get down to that bottom tier, their numbers are so inconsequential that you can keep them from having any impact by simply refusing them platforms on mainstream media and letting "democracy" do the rest, because you've got the majority right where you want them.

Most propaganda goes not toward the glaring, obvious lies like the Iraq invasion, but toward mundane control systems like the ideological herding funnel I just described. Really ham-fisted propaganda is the exception, not the rule in the west; the lion's share of the empire's manipulations just go toward keeping people marching to the beat of the imperial machine.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society is the way domestic propaganda is used to shape the way mainstream westerners perceive and think about their world.

Typically the only time you'll ever hear the word "propaganda" mentioned in mainstream discourse is in reference to things other countries do to their own citizenry or as part of foreign influence operations, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the times we've encountered propaganda in our day to day lives, the call was coming from inside the house.

The western media have been exposing their role as propagandists for the US-centralized empire a bit more than usual lately. Here are a few recent examples.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Having an ideologically diverse audience has really opened me up to how politically cloistered everyone's used to being these days. People are always expressing surprise at the fact that they agree with me on some things yet disagree with me on others, either positively like "Wow we're not on the same page economically but I love a lot of what you say", or negatively like "OMG how can someone be so right about war and authoritarianism but SO WRONG about capitalism??"

This wouldn't stand out to them as something surprising or unusual unless it was something they don't normally experience in life. Which is a sign that something is off, because agreeing with people sometimes and disagreeing with them other times is the normal state of human interaction. That's what you experience constantly in life if your interactions are allowed to move naturally.

Reading by Tim Foley.

So of course people who see this express despair. When you first punch through the lies and start to gain an understanding of what's really going on, it can be really unpleasant at first. It feels like what it probably felt like to be a lucid thinker back in much less enlightened times when civilization was dominated by religion and superstition. Lonely. Depressing. As Terence McKenna said, "The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation."

But it gets better. Or at least it does if you allow it to. 

Reading by Tim Foley.

This civilization is so mentally ill that you'll get treated like a gibbering lunatic for expressing the most sane and rational opinions anyone can possibly express. Something as basic as "The world's most powerful government should stop ramping up nuclear brinkmanship on multiple fronts" will get you treated like a kook, when really it's so obvious and common sense it shouldn't even need to be said. That's how crazy mass-scale brainwashing has made everyone.

Reading by Tim Foley.