March 29, 2021

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE: “Mental Stories in Our Heads”

“So much of our society is made out of mental stories in our heads. From news media propaganda to Hollywood to internet censorship to government secrecy to think tanks to Bellingcat to Wikipedia entries, vast fortunes are continuously poured into controlling the dominant worldwide narratives by the power structures who benefit from them. The dominant narratives all tell us the same few things over and over again. Capitalism is working great. Your government is your friend. The governments who oppose your government are bad. If you are a Democrat, you have been hearing that the country is now a thousand percent better without the Orange Menace in charge. If you are a Republican, you’ve been hearing that it’s a thousand percent worse. In reality, in terms of the overall operation of the empire both domestically and internationally, hardly anything of significance has changed apart from the narrative overlay. This narrative management campaign is so far-reaching and ubiquitous that even highly intelligent people are swept up in its manipulations, simply because they are receiving the same narratives from so many different sources and receive insufficient contradictory input to create doubt in them. And this is just such a perfect illustration of how pervasively human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative.”

Caitlin Johnstone

~via Caitlin Johnstone

March 2, 2021

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE: “We’re Not Radical — We’re Just Sane”

“One of the most consequential collective delusions circulating in our society is the belief that our society is free. This is why you rarely see anyone who opposes the empire platformed on mainstream media. This is also why you saw the imperial narrative managers completely lose their minds during the Tulsi Gabbard presidential campaign. It wasn’t because they feared she could win the election, it was because there was a US congresswoman standing on mainstream liberal platforms criticizing certain critical aspects of US warmongering. Someone had attained a position of influence and was using that influence to disrupt narratives that are very important for powerful people to maintain. She therefore needed to be smeared very aggressively to nullify the influence she was having. So the good news is that they can’t get rid of us altogether or they’ll shatter the illusion of freedom, while the bad news is that they’re working tirelessly to prevent us from ever attaining a critical mass of political consequence. Our job is to wake up the mainstream public. Our job is to find a way to outmaneuver them and attain that critical mass anyway so that we can use the power of our numbers to force real change. It does mean we need to stop thinking of ourselves as radicals (we’re not radical, we’re just sane) and push inward from the fringes to the heart of the mainstream public as hard as we can. We absolutely can win this thing, we just have to push hard enough for it.”

~Caitlin Johnstone

~via

They Don’t Work To Kill All Dissent, They Just Keep It From Going Mainstream

August 19, 2020

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE: “Saudi Arabia Is Just An Honest Version Of America”

“Saudi Arabia is just an honest version of America. The tyranny is right out in the open, state censorship is straightforward instead of being outsourced to Silicon Valley, the oligarchs and the official government are the same people, they don’t pretend their wars are humanitarian, and they just directly murder journalists they dislike instead of using a fake judicial system to do it. Establishment guard dogs dislike Trump not because he’s ending the wars (he isn’t), nor because he opposes establishment interests (he doesn’t), but because he’s a poor narrative manager and all too often leaves the ugly face of the empire fully exposed. They dislike him for the same reason mobsters would dislike a mob boss who’s constantly yelling in public about how they’re all gonna go out and do a bunch of nasty mobster stuff.”

~Caitlin Johnstone

~via

Saudi Arabia Is Just An Honest America: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

August 6, 2020

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE: “In Hollywood”

In Hollywood miserable rich people who are bad at living teach the public how to live.

In Hollywood people who have lost touch with their humanity teach the public how to be human.

In Hollywood the most fake people in the world teach the public about reality.

In Hollywood they make ninety-minute commercials about how America is perfectly sane and how neoliberalism is totally working.

In Hollywood people pretend to be other people saying words that other people wrote telling stories about things which never happened and we base our entire culture on this.

In Hollywood they make horror movies about a murderous psychopath running around slashing people, instead of making horror movies about the fact that murderous psychopaths rule our entire world right this very moment.

In Hollywood they make movies about good guys fighting bad guys, but it’s never the real kind of good guys and it’s never the real kind of bad guys.

In Hollywood they make movies about heroes fighting powerful villains with ambitions of global domination, but it’s always imaginary villains in an imaginary world and not the real-life villains who are doing exactly that in this world.

In Hollywood they make movies about cops and soldiers fighting on the side of justice to rescue good people from bad people, instead of about the real kind who do the very opposite.

In Hollywood they make movies about a band of protagonists fighting to save the world from disaster, but it’s always some far-fetched imaginary disaster and not the actual disasters our world is hurtling toward right this very minute.

In Hollywood they make movies about superheroes punching supervillains into buildings and supervillains punching superheroes into buildings, never about superheroes using their powers to to do the things real heroes do like leak evidence of corporate and government malfeasance, defy unjust laws, free the unjustly imprisoned, or conduct investigative journalism.

In Hollywood they make movies about imaginary billionaires who use their wealth to fight crime and injustice, instead of about real billionaires who do literally the exact opposite.

In Hollywood they make movies about protagonists who start off happy and then something bad happens so they have to get things back to normal, but it’s a fictional normal that normal people have never experienced in their lives because our society is gravely dysfunctional.

In Hollywood they teach us to expect clear linear stories with easily recognizable good guys and bad guys, and then in Washington and Langley they exploit these expectations by telling fake linear stories about targeted governments with easily recognizable good guys and bad guys.

In Hollywood they train you to think in terms of hard linear narrative and then propagandists exploit that training, when real life follows no hard linear narratives, and awakening from this delusion exposes the whole deceitful puppet show.

~via CaitlinJohnstone.com

August 5, 2020

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE: “America, Behind the Facade of ‘Freedom'”

“Plutocrats not only exert control over America’s media and politics, they also form alliances with the secretive government agencies whose operators remain amid the comings and goings of the official elected government. The fact that this same plutocratic class also owns America’s media, which is now so consolidated that it’s almost entirely run by just six corporations, means that the people who run the government also run the media. We also see it in the sexual blackmail operation which was facilitated by the late Jeffrey Epstein in connection with billionaire Leslie Wexner and Israeli intelligence, along with potentially the FBI and/or other US intelligence agencies. Strip away the phony two-handed sock puppet show of US electoral politics and look at how power actually moves in that country, and you just see one more tyrannical regime which propagandizes its citizens, brutally cracks down on protesters, deliberately keeps its populace impoverished so they don’t get powerful enough to change things, and attacks any nation which dares to disobey its dictates. Beneath the thin layer of narrative overlay about freedom and democracy, the US is just one more despotic, bloodthirsty empire. It’s no better than any of the other despotic, bloodthirsty empires throughout history. It just has good PR.”

~Caitlin Johnstone

In a corporatist system of government, where no hard lines are drawn between corporate/financial power and state power, corporate media is state media. Since bribery is legal in the US political system in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations, America’s elected government is controlled by wealthy elites who have money to burn and who benefit from maintaining a specific status quo arrangement.

The fact that this same plutocratic class also owns America’s media, which is now so consolidated that it’s almost entirely run by just six corporations, means that the people who run the government also run the media. This allows America’s true rulers to set up a system which promotes narratives that are favorable to their desired status quo.

Which means that the US has state propaganda. They just don’t call it that themselves.

Strip away the phony two-handed sock puppet show of US electoral politics and look at how power actually moves in that country, and you just see one more tyrannical regime which propagandizes its citizens, brutally cracks down on protesters, deliberately keeps its populace impoverished so they don’t get powerful enough to change things, and attacks any nation which dares to disobey its dictates.

Beneath the thin layer of narrative overlay about freedom and democracy, the US is just one more despotic, bloodthirsty empire. It’s no better than any of the other despotic, bloodthirsty empires throughout history. It just has good PR.

Plutocrats not only exert control over America’s media and politics, they also form alliances with the secretive government agencies whose operators remain amid the comings and goings of the official elected government. We see examples of this in the way new money tech plutocrats like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Pierre Omidyar have direct relationships with the CIA and its proxies.

We also see it in the sexual blackmail operation which was facilitated by the late Jeffrey Epstein in connection with billionaire Leslie Wexner and Israeli intelligence, along with potentially the FBI and/or other US intelligence agencies. Today the internet is abuzz as newly unsealed court documents relating to Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell reveal witness testimony regarding underage sex trafficking, with such high-profile names appearing in the documents as Alan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton, and Prince Andrew.

In the old days you used to be able to tell who your rulers were because they’d sit on thrones and wear golden crowns and make you bow before them. Human consciousness eventually evolved beyond the acceptability of such brazen indignities, so it became necessary for rulers to take on more of a background role while the citizenry clap and cheer for the illusory puppet show of electoral politics.

But the kings are still among us, just as cruel and tyrannical as ever. They’ve just figured out how to mask their tyranny behind the facade of freedom.

But 2020 has been a year of revelations, a trend which seems likely to continue accelerating. Truth cannot stay hidden forever.

~via Medium.com