JOHNSTONE

I get funny reactions from people who are new to my work, often because I don't act like the other indie media figures they follow. I'm unrefined and swear a lot. I engage on social media with both followers and critics far more than most do. I talk about elite conspiracies to create a totalitarian dystopia, but I differ from other conspiracy analysts in that I assert that the dystopia is already here and has been for generations.

One of the main things that sets me apart from other people whose names I often get mentioned alongside is that I don't just publish anti-establishment commentary on news and politics and polemics against the empire; I publish art, poetry, philosophical musings, and big-picture assessments of what's going on with humanity as a whole. In case anyone's curious, I have a number of reasons for doing this.

Reading by Tim Foley.

There's a thread going around on Twitter by Columbia University's Sophie Fullerton advancing the claim that I have promoted crazy conspiracy theories about child "crisis actors" in Syrian war atrocities. Fullerton has me blocked on Twitter so I can't respond to her there, but in her thread she brings up one of the most egregious instances I've ever seen of US war propaganda in the mass media, so it's worth taking some time to unpack her claims here as a public service.

The "interview": https://youtu.be/R7MRWhZzL5k

Reading by Tim Foley.

One of the main differences between myself and other commentators who talk about an elite conspiracy to implement a totalitarian dystopia is that the others warn that we are being pushed toward this dystopia, while I insist that we're already there and have been for generations.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Well you know kids these days they're so entitled
.

They'll quit a job just because they don't like it
,

or because it doesn't pay enough
,

or because they're not grateful for the privilege

of turning a gear 
for a silver dollar and an attaboy sammy.

And you know kids these days they're scary and strange,


because what are they doing on them smart phones anyhow
?

And how do we keep track of what they're getting up to


when we can't see it through our front windows 
from between the gaps in the blinds?


And how are we supposed to mind them


when we don't understand their jokes or their references,


or why they're being so nice to freaks?

How can we teach them to hate their bodies


when they insist that all bodies are beautiful?

And how can we teach them to fight like a man


or submit like a woman

when they insist that they are neither?

And how can we teach them what to think about things

when they'd rather watch other kids create content

than listen to the pundits we put on TV?

And how can we teach them to kill for our country


when they're so gentle and sensitive

and care about other people's feelings?

And how can we force our system on other countries


when they keep whining to foreigners online about how bad it is at home?

And how is capitalism supposed to work


when they have no shame in being poor
,

and just blame the system when they can't afford a home

instead of hating themselves?

And how is industry supposed to thrive

when they keep babbling nonsense about saving the environment;

do they have any idea how bad that would be for the economy?

And how can we train them how to run this world


when they keep waving us away whenever we try


and telling us we're the ones who created this mess in the first place?

And you know kids these days,

kids these days,

buddy lemme tell you the trouble with kids these days

is they don't know how to goddamn listen.

We try to teach them what's been working for us,

and they just say "It hasn't been working though.

Stop trying to save us.

We'll save you."

And, I mean, what the hell is that?

"We'll save you?"

Save us from what?

And how?

Dang little brats you don't even know how to use a cassette player.

____________________

Reading by Tim Foley.

You are not separate from the universe. How could you be? The whole thing worked together to give rise to you through an unbroken chain of occurrences over billions of years, and the stuff you are made of comes from the same Great Whatever as everything else. Since the dawn of life on this planet organisms have been exchanging water and other elements back and forth through eating, drinking, reproducing and dying, and you are inseparably one with that dance.

And your own elements will not die. When your incredible heart stops beating and the stuff your amazing body is made of begins to come apart, your own molecules will simply continue the dance of the elements that has been going on for billions of years.

You won't die, you'll just return. Some elements born of stardust arranged themselves on two legs, looked around, experienced countless wonders, laughed, cried, fell in love, learned and unlearned, and then changed form, like a ripple ceasing its movement and becoming indistinguishable from the surrounding water. The water remains the same — it's just doing a different dance now.

Reading by Tim Foley.

The Washington Post has an article out with the brazenly misleading headline "Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters". Anyone who reads the article itself will find its author Tim Starks acknowledges that "Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior," but the insertion of the word "little" means anyone who just reads the headline (the overwhelming majority of people encountering the article) will come away with the impression that Russian trolls still had some influence on 2016 voters.

"Little influence" could mean anything shy of tremendous influence. But the study did not find that Russian trolls had "little influence" over the election; it failed to find any measurable influence at all. 

Starks does some spin work of his own in a bid to salvage the reputation of the ever-crumbling Russiagate narrative, eagerly pointing out that the report does not explicitly say Russia definitely had zero influence on the election's outcome, that it doesn't examine Russian trolling behavior on Facebook, that it doesn't address "Russian hack-and-leak operations," and that it doesn't say "doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all."

None of these are valid arguments. Claiming Russia definitely had no influence on the election at all would have been beyond the scope of the study, the report's authors do in fact argue that the effects of Russian trolling on Facebook were likely the same as on Twitter, the (still completely unproven) "Russian hack-and-leak operations" were outside the scope of the study, as is the question of whether foreign influence operations can be a threat in general.

What Starks does not do is make any attempt to address the fact that mainstream news and punditry was dominated for years by claims that Russian internet trolls won the election for Donald Trump. He does not, for example, make any mention of his own 2019 Politico article telling readers that the Russian Twitter troll operation ahead of the 2016 election "was larger, more coordinated and more effective than previously known."

Reading by Tim Foley.

The science of modern propaganda arguably got its start over a century ago during World War I when a young Edward Bernays was recruited to help sell the conflict to a reluctant American populace, after which he took what he'd learned on that front and folded it into a lifetime of work on the study of mass-scale psychological manipulation.

That was when propaganda as we know it today came into being, with the scientific method applied to the task of refining techniques for manipulating large-scale human behavior using modern media distribution. Those methods have been in research and development this entire time, and have advanced at least as much as our other instruments of warfare have advanced since World War I.

But that wasn't the beginning of mass-scale psychological manipulation by the powerful. That has been going on since the dawn of civilization.

Reading by Tim Foley.

They don't just call Democrats "communists" and "Marxists" in order to attack Democrats, they do it to disappear the entire giant expanse of political spectrum that exists to the left of the capitalist imperialist Democratic Party. They want you to think that's as far left as it gets.

Democrats refer to themselves as "the left" for the same reason. Both mainstream factions work to shrink the Overton window into a tug-o-war between Republican capitalist imperialists and Democrat capitalist imperialists. Between two opposing factions of neoliberal neocons.

Reading by Tim Foley.

A couple of months into Elon Musk's control of Twitter, it's fair to say that from an anti-censorship, pro-transparency perspective there have been a few positive results of the platform coming under new management. The revelations from the Twitter Files about US government involvement in influencing a massive social media company's policies and actions have been indisputably newsworthy information that's absolutely in the public interest to have, and some anti-establishment voices have been saying their accounts have been noticeably more visible since the changeover.

It's also fair to say at this point that Musk has allowed far more negative practices to continue than he has ended. In an excellent new article titled "Under Musk, Twitter Continues to Promote US Propaganda Networks," Fair.org's Bryce Greene breaks down the many different ways that Twitter is still manipulating the information its users see in ways that serve the interests of the US government.

Greene contrasts the wildly unbalanced way media coming from empire-targeted governments is suppressed and labeled "state-affiliated media", while US-aligned accounts which would deserve such a designation are not given it, and are often amplified and aided.

"In short, Twitter is serving as an active participant in an ongoing information war," Greene writes.

Reading by Tim Foley.

Western “liberal democracies” are just totalitarian regimes with more money and better narrative management. The US-centralized empire controls the global south with bombs, bullets and blockades and controls the rest of us with mass-scale psychological manipulation.

Sure it's more pleasant to be sitting where we are rather than at the barrel of the gun, but don't confuse pleasantness with freedom. It's nice that here they let you criticize your government and buy whatever you can afford at the store. It would be pleasant to live in a vat with your brain plugged into a virtual world of endless pleasure, too, but it wouldn't be freedom. Psychological tyranny is still tyranny.

Reading by Tim Foley.