“Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will…To believe yourself above the influence of propaganda, is to become more susceptible to propaganda.”
We as a civilization are screwed if we don’t get better at identifying propaganda real fast. Yet, do we stand a chance?
Really understanding the world is a full time job and my estimate is you need at least a decade of that (10,000 hours+) to even come close. The rat race, or trying to escape the rat race, keeps you occupied so you’re unable to do that.
The honest and mature thing to do is to recognize you’re being controlled no matter your beliefs. Start here. It’s like facing addiction or any other major problem. Recognizing your awash in propaganda is the first step.
From that recognition you can start to make your way through the dense jungle of misinformation and narrative, but be aware that it’s a very long, very hard journey. In doing it you’ll likely think you’re winning…but realize you’ve been led down wrong paths sometimes for years.
Getting duped hard and coming to realize that’s the case is part of the journey. It’s an initiation. Be proud when you come out the other side. (Show me a person that has never been absorbed into propaganda and later realized they were wrong, and I’ll show you someone that is naively convinced they not possessed of an ideology!)
Learn from the experience. How were you duped? How can you avoid that next time?
Yet, realize it will happen again…
It’s hard to face this. Really hard.
This is why so many buy into the consensus narratives. That’s so much easier.
This is why those that realize that it is all BS simply opt out of following news or current events. It’s so much easier to disengage and go about your life.
These are easy choices. Or you can then walk the road less traveled. Once again, we need a lot of people doing this much better and much faster if we want a good future.
Bread and Circuses
Yes, this has happened before…
“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”
Some say we’re repeating the Roman experience right now. Indeed, there are many parallels.
Learn from history, but not just the popular history. Remember that history is written by the victor. (In other words, telling you the truth behind how they were victorious is not always in their best interest.) Conspiracies have happened from at least the time there was money.
Speaking of Goebbels, don’t forget Operation Paperclip, where we brought over Nazi scientists giving them positions in our scientific institutions. Where our intelligence communities worked hand-in-hand with them, learning their methods…
Trends come and go. Patterns repeat. Some patterns last longer than human lifetimes. These may be especially useful to know about right now.
Is the Roman Empire still around? Nope.
And so too shall the American Empire fall…for better and/or worse depends…
Narrative Control
Is your head spinning from what is happening in the world?
Just when I felt like I and others were getting a handle on facts behind the coronavirus…the narrative completely changed.
Wait, were not focused on the virus anymore but now there’s rioting across the world against racism and police brutality?
(I’m aiming to be sensitive to matters at hand and yet focus on what I perceive as the bigger picture. What happened to George Floyd was an atrocity. Same with Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor…on and on it goes. I am against racism. I am against policy brutality. Personally, I was at two protests in Santa Cruz. We absolutely do need reform of institutions regarding these things. Justice needs to be served and would not have been without this popular uprising. Even now it still may not be. But I’m also worried that these events are being manipulated for dubious purposes…)
What the hell happened to social distancing?!?
Watching the media do what has to be of the most massive about-faces ever is fascinating.
Just two weeks ago, the anti-lockdown protests were vilified. Those who partook were selfish bastards, “covidiots,” even “granny killers” that would spread the disease.
Yet, now if you’re not out protesting you’re basically a racist.
Dr. Tom Friedan, former CDC director and sexual abuser, said this regarding the lethality of the virus with any group gatherings (skip to the second part).
Yet now…
Again, I’m not saying people shouldn’t be protesting. I was suggesting protesting back in April. I’m pointing out the hypocrisy of the media and our so-called health leaders.
Here’s another comment from a Senior Scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security:
Seems to me this just as easily was “In this moment the public health risks of economic shutdown impacts greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”
But that thoughtcrime was not allowed.
Even so, the virus narrative is still strong. At both protests I was at, at least 99% of people were wearing masks. I even had a man mutter something about me spreading the virus, because I was not one of them.
Making Sense of the Downward Spiral
I must share another video from Rebel Wisdom with Daniel Schmachtenberger. I’d recommend watching it, but I’ve pulled out some of the most important quotes below if you don’t have time, along with my thoughts. They’re in italics through the rest of this post.
“There’s like a gazillion hypotheses. I think the problem is the people who aren’t buying the mainstream media narrative are buying the first alternate narrative that appeals to their sensemaking desire to not have uncertainty and put the pieces together, before there is adequate evidence that that alternate narrative is much better.”
You must become more comfortable with uncertainty. You need to hold competing narratives as possibilities within your mind. Reaching conclusions is something you need to do very carefully over time.
A book I read recently was Annie Dukes’ Thinking In Bets. It helped gave me a framework of thinking about both decisions and narratives. “I’d give XYZ a 30% chance of going this way. There’s a 5% chance ABC is true.” This is extremely helpful as you hold multiple possible and sometimes mutually exclusive narratives in mind.
Here’s another tip. Perhaps, instead of looking for answers, you are better spent looking for questions. Like who benefits?
“Warfare is mainly not fought with bullets. Like the kinetic warfare that we think of as warfare that’s fought with weapons is maybe 1% of warfare. 99% of warfare is diplomatic warfare, political warfare, economic warfare, narrative warfare, information warfare. All of this comes together to what we call hybrid warfare, or really just politics, or game theory or the game of power…In this war, the treasure being fought over is people’s minds and the battleground is people’s minds. The primary weapons are tools of narrative influence, and emotional evocation and control of the information flows. And in these wars, they’re asymmetric wars because you have some actors that have access to billion or trillion dollar level information technologies, AI empowered micro-targeting. And then you have other people just trying to figure out shit on their own and they don’t even know they’re in a war. And they don’t even know their own mind is the battleground of the war. And they think they believe the shit they believe. And they think they came to it on their own. And they think they’re doing a good job sensemaking.”
One of the things I recognized is that we’re dealing with advanced technology. Here is what I mean by that. Our governments (and public partners of course) absolutely have hidden technology. It is not a matter of if they do or not. It is a question of how much more advanced?
That’s one piece. But another is that just the public technology is very much beyond the sensemaking of most people, myself included.
Here is a great analogy I heard regarding what is called artificial intelligence, machine learning or algorithms. Imagine yourself as compared to the best chess player in the world. They’re magnitudes of scale beyond your ability, right?
Now, imagine that grand champion player against AI. The AI is a similar magnitude beyond them.
That level of AI is what controls your social media feed.
“Given enough data, the algorithm was better able to predict a person’s personality traits than any of the human participants. It needed access to just 10 likes to beat a work colleague, 70 to beat a roommate, 150 to beat a parent or sibling, and 300 to beat a spouse,” writes a New York Times article from five years ago. Algorithm maybe able to predict your actions better than you consciously can…
Does the government have more powerful algorithms than that? Are these hooked into not only social media but other things? It’s scary to think about but the answer is probably yes. The question again being to the degree of what is available.
You are in an information war and you are so insanely outnumbered and outgunned it is not even funny.
Meanwhile most people are blindly walking down the battlefield thinking they’re strolling in the park.
The Upcoming Election
“We have an election coming up in the US that will be radically consequential for the world. Either way. No matter who wins currently, whether the election is illegally tampered with and stolen or not, half of the population will think it was. This is a real problem.”
Let that sink in for a moment. Last week before I saw this video, I echoed a similar point regarding the election: “How long until we see the “radical left” clashing with the “Q Anon Church”? After all, each side knows with 100% certainty that they’re trying to stop ultimate tyranny from occurring.”
After that, one person asked me about Q Anon. I’m sure other people were wondering too.
If you’re not aware of Q Anon…you’re missing a huge piece of HOW the information war is being fought.
I’m not saying to be a Q Anon “follower”. I’m not saying to dismiss it out-of-hand as a right-wing conspiracy theory either as is the mainstream narrative. I’m saying to be aware of it, because it is important either way (neither are these the only two options). I’ll dive deeper into the subject at some point, but I feel like more groundwork needs to be laid to even be able to talk about that mindscrew in a coherent way.
(For those that are aware and want to know where I stand, I think it’s a limited hangout psy-op. I give it only about 1% chance of being what it says it is all about.)
“I don’t find that most successful politicians that I’ve encountered near the top of the power actually believe red vs. blue ideology. They just believe in the game of power and signal red vs. blue ideology as part of their mimetic warfare to control people that are going to vote for them.”
Politics is a dirty, dirty business. Us vs. them is a powerful means of control and it’s used in more ways than most people give credit.
Remember how even the science of the virus got split by political lines? Watch it happening again, because both red and blue ideologies have things to gain from doing so.
Upregulation and Downregulation
“When I look at the counterculture movement as a whole and I look at the green revolution, the sexual revolution, and the civil rights process, and women’s rights, all the various things, the deeper story that I see, most of the activists who were there don’t know. The deeper story I see is actually understanding COINTELPRO, and how the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies actually infiltrated the progressive movements to very specifically derail them. And get them focused on shit that would be ineffective, that we’re still doing today. So I happen to believe there was intentional upregulation by those power structures of postmodernism as a structure of thought. Because if the people that only studied social science only studied how to critique the game of power, without actually knowing how to effectively organize, then they would make sure they could never actually really do anything. So if every time someone’s organizing well you call it imperialism, you won’t end up organizing well, becoming an imperialist, or you’ll just be noise and that’s fine. And the social sciences that are actually studying the history of military theory and political theory and strategy itself, got very downregulated in exchange for something that would make people feel more righteous, while being less effective. So I want to make sure that we’re learning the right lessons from the right periods of history.”
This goes back to what I was saying earlier about learning from history, but the right history, or as Daniel calls it here, the deeper story.
Let me take some time to explain this a bit more because I doubt it is clear to most. Postmodernism is basically the idea that all truths are relative. It has been used to criticize morality, hierarchy, reason, logic and truth.
Some people, such as Jordan Peterson, argue that it has come to be the dominant ideology behind much of what is taught in college to the detriment of higher learning and the people that go through it.
What Daniel is saying is that intelligence operations made these ideas bigger than they otherwise would have been. They upregulated them so that would more embrace the philosophy.
At the same time they took other ideas, that might better challenge existing structures (aka those in power), and downregulated them.
If you have not learned that intelligence agencies did this back then, you wouldn’t know that they’re doing it today…and likely have much better tools, such as AI, to do so.
If they did it with postmodernism, what else have they done it too. What kinds of science? What kinds of spirituality? What other philosophies?
Identity politics, that of oppressor and oppressed, is based in postmodernism. What I believe Daniel is saying here, without coming right out and saying it, is the following.
Are the Protests and Riots Being Upregulated?
The murder of George Floyd went viral.
Why did it go viral? It is particularly brutal and in your face. The video is about nine minutes long, the cops clearly seen. In fact, I’ve seen some question the validity of it based on it just being so blatant. But the sheer incredulity of it certainly seems to be a piece of its virality.
(An aside but interesting point that this has a parallel between ideas of a natural virus vs. one worked on for gain-of-function or other purposes in the lab…)
And you have to imagine that virality can be up and down regulated. A small tweak to an algorithm and something that is viral to any degree could be put to the top of everyone’s feed. A small tweak in the other direction and something would not make the same kind of rounds.
The use of bots and other methods is an easier way this can be done without actually having the social media companies in on it. In the mainstream narrative, these bot armies are always blamed on China and Russia, which I don’t deny they use. But if you don’t think US and other intelligence agencies and their private partners, nor multi-billion dollar foundations, would make use of the same, that’s naïve.
Then there’s what gets play on the mainstream news. “If it bleeds it leads.” Of course there is this old exhortation that is true. It’s a big part of why the past three months have been nothing but coronavirus 24/7.
But bleeding doesn’t always lead. Media coverage of Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t there much at all. We also see it being stamped down on in several places (downregulated) despite it being one of the most interesting stories ever if the news actually covered the details and all the ramifications.
In other words for something to become huge it has to fit the desired narrative.
Why no protests or riots for the underage girls abused by Epstein? Why no protests over the obvious miscarriages of justice there, including no charges, not even an investigation against against Ghislaine Maxwell, Prince Andrews and others involved?
If we accept the hypothesis that media is manipulated (previous posts here and here), of which we have tons of evidence for, then we have to ask, why this narrative? Why now?
Some Theories On Where This is Headed…
The following are some ideas on what is going on and where this all might be headed:
Patsy Hypothesis
This one is my favorite hypothesis. It’s to let off steam from the lock down. It was starting to open up, it seemed not so bad to many, the virus narrative was getting weaker or perhaps just going stale.
People would be angry at the politicians, health leaders and economists if it was lifted and all we had to focus on was the economic ruin.
But instead we are given the authority figure of the police to aim our frustrations at.
The police are a patsy, a misdirection from the larger criminals., the looting of our economy and transfer of wealth to the already extremely rich.
(Again, not to take away from any racism and brutality they do engage in that should be reformed.)
Regardless of how the protests and riots play out, no one is looking at the bigger picture because we’re absorbed in this crazy story, justifiably so.
Military in Streets Hypothesis
This is to get US citizens used to military in the streets. Even for people to start asking for the military to help.
This seems to only be a possibility if it continues to get worse and in select areas. But if it happens in some it’s easier for it to happen more later.
That gives another possibility down the road. If the military is already deployed…well, then they could more easily be used to distribute the vaccine.
Second Wave Hypothesis
The lockdowns were growing stale. The second wave has long been promised.
Is that because cases are actually rising, or more testing shenanigans? Regardless, now the protests can be blamed as the cause. Therefore, we’ll need to do more and longer lockdowns as the second wave hits…once again, until the vaccine is here to save us.
Preparation for Stage 3 Hypothesis
I wonder with this level of protests and riots are the American people MORE or LESS likely to engage in the same in the near future?
I’d lean towards more, especially if they’re effective. (The charges against cops have escalated thus far and various proposals for police reform are up in the air. But time will tell…)
So then I ask is this a preparation for the next phase? If phase 1 was the coronavirus and phase 2 is the protests and riots, what is phase 3? I don’t know but I wonder.
Assuming there are some sort of central planners, do they have something up their sleeves?
The US election is coming up in November (or is it? Some theories that it could be postponed or canceled in some way.) More big stuff will happen before that absolutely 100% guaranteed! Something else on the scale of corona or these protests/riots.
Since it happens every year, I would expect some natural disasters. Fires in California. Maybe earthquakes. Hurricanes elsewhere. These have been quite devastating over the last few years, so they’ll probably be again.
How much worse will natural disasters be with the current tensions and economic problems?
Q Anon Hypothesis
This is not really my hypothesis but one of the narratives out there. The virus and the race riots are all ploys to try to steal the election from Donald Trump by the Deep State/Democrats.
I have to wonder about putting Biden up as their candidate. I understand he has been an establishment player for a long time now (aka someone who doesn’t really believe in blue ideology).
But compared to other candidates he had a fraction of popular support. Do they want to lose against Trump?
Or, as others have proposed, will there be some late stage shenanigans of Clinton or Obama becoming vice president? Or Cuomo? Does Biden die and someone must step in to fill his shoes?
One thing Q shared that which is very interesting is the Google Trend for “black lives matter”. It originally blew up in 2015 about the same time before an election. (Again, I’m not saying this detracts in any way from the fact that black lives matter, just that it is an interesting point.)
American’s Great Leap Forward
Hanlon’s razor is an aphorism “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
I don’t know but the more I hear people use that to explain what is going on in the world, the less I think it adequately explains a lot of things. Do you really believe that all the most powerful people in the world are stupid?
And, if indeed there are central planners, they probably have phase 4, 5 and beyond too. I covered not how we’ll get there but what seems to be in the plans in this post.
Please note that these hypothesis aren’t mutually exclusive.
The best operation would be to have positive results no matter how things turned out. Smart people look at possibilities and adapt as the situation unfolds.
The propaganda is adapting as such…are you?
Great post. You are one of the ones working towards a great future for this country. Thanks.
Thanks. I’m trying!
I agree with Tom! We need more people with the intelligence and courage that Logan is displaying to speak up. And then others to jump in and get behind the leaders that are standing for truth.
Wow this is fantastic Logan, thanks for posting!