“Nothing is real,” noticed John Lennon, and that’s very true of politics.
Very like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 movie The Truman Show, by which a person’s life is the premise for an elaborately staged tv present geared toward promoting merchandise and procuring scores, the political scene in the USA has devolved over time right into a fastidiously calibrated train in the right way to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and management a inhabitants.
Take the media circus that’s the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the general public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, maintaining the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.
That is the magic of the truth TV programming that passes for politics right now.
All the things turns into leisure fodder.
So long as we’re distracted, entertained, often outraged, at all times polarized however largely uninvolved and content material to stay within the viewer’s seat, we’ll by no means handle to current a unified entrance in opposition to tyranny (or authorities corruption and ineptitude) in any kind.
Research recommend that the extra actuality TV folks watch—and I might posit that it’s all actuality TV, leisure information included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what’s actual and what’s fastidiously crafted farce.
“We the folks” are watching lots of TV.
On common, Americans spend five hours a day watching tv. By the point we attain age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that quantity will increase as we become old. And actuality TV programming persistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers each season by an nearly 2-1 ratio.
This doesn’t bode properly for a citizenry in a position to sift by masterfully-produced propaganda with a view to suppose critically in regards to the problems with the day.
But look behind the spectacles, the truth TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that’s politics right now, and one can find there’s a methodology to the insanity.
We’ve grow to be guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, fastidiously orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in the right way to management a inhabitants and advance a political agenda with out a lot opposition from the citizenry.
That is the way you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and one another): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one fastidiously calibrated disaster at a time, and educating them to mistrust any who diverge from the norm by elaborate propaganda campaigns.
Unsurprisingly, one of many biggest propagandists right now is the U.S. authorities.
Add the federal government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you’ve got the makings of a restructuring of actuality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, the place the Ministry of Reality polices speech and ensures that info conform to no matter model of actuality the federal government propagandists embrace.
This “policing of the thoughts” is precisely the hazard creator Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “info and communication sources are progressively being linked collectively right into a single computerized community, offering a chance for unheralded management of what’s going to be broadcast, what will probably be mentioned, and in the end what will probably be thought.”
Chances are you’ll not hear a lot in regards to the authorities’s function in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven pretend information—often with the help of the corporate news media—as a result of the powers-that-be don’t need us skeptical of the federal government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.
Nevertheless, when you could have social media giants colluding with the federal government with a view to censor so-called disinformation, all of the whereas the mainstream information media, which is meant to behave as a bulwark in opposition to authorities propaganda, has as an alternative grow to be the mouthpiece of the world’s largest company (the U.S. authorities), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.
This has been within the works for a very long time.
Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA marketing campaign began within the Fifties to plant intelligence experiences amongst reporters at greater than 25 main newspapers and wire businesses, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the truth that they have been being fed authorities propaganda.
In some situations, as Bernstein showed, members of the media additionally served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters truly finishing up assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Instances and Time journal additionally labored carefully with the CIA to vet the information.
If it was occurring then, you’ll be able to wager it’s nonetheless occurring right now, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.
In its article, “How the American authorities is attempting to regulate what you suppose,” the Washington Submit points out “Authorities businesses traditionally have made a behavior of crossing the blurry line between informing the general public and propagandizing.”
That is mind-control in its most sinister kind.
The top purpose of those mind-control campaigns—packaged within the guise of the better good—is to see how far the American folks will enable the federal government to go in re-shaping the nation within the picture of a totalitarian police state.
The federal government’s fear-mongering is a key aspect in its mind-control programming.
It’s a easy sufficient method. Nationwide crises, international pandemics, reported terrorist assaults, and sporadic shootings depart us in a relentless state of concern. The emotional panic that accompanies concern truly shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational pondering a part of our brains. In different phrases, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.
A populace that stops pondering for themselves is a populace that’s simply led, simply manipulated and easily controlled whether or not by propaganda, brainwashing, thoughts management, or simply plain fear-mongering.
This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us by concern into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays known as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
To this invisible authorities of rulers who function behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we’re mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and managed.
But as I clarify in my e-book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to alter the channel, tune out the truth TV present, and push again in opposition to the true menace of the police state.
If not, if we proceed to take a seat again and lose ourselves in political programming, we’ll stay a captive viewers to a farce that grows extra absurd by the minute.
Constitutional legal professional and creator John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His newest books The Erik Blair Diaries and Battlefield America: The War on the American People can be found at www.amazon.com. Whitehead could be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Government Director of The Rutherford Institute. Details about The Rutherford Institute is on the market at www.rutherford.org.
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