Controlling not just what you say, but what you are to think

The power of information manipulation; the tools of the new left

We are living in such strange times. We are living in deeply troubling times from my lens. I got inspired to push out this rant coming off thoughts about our broken media which I refer to as The Truman Show. If you haven’t seen that flick, you need to. Once you grasp the concept, you’ll see ‘stars’ falling as cameras all around you. In our era of 24hr IV-in-the-arm mass-media, they can literally curate and broadcast a faux-reality that can completely envelope an individual’s entire life now. From the moment they wake up on the phone, to what they read online and listen to on their car radio, to the TV at night and back online and in social media in the evening, they can now fully exist in a Truman Show. And while I’ll never subscribe to the notion we have a Good Camp and a Bad Camp in this country, we clearly only have one apparatus that can do what I described above and they don’t even hide who it is they serve anymore. When a nation’s entire media apparatus (factor in Big Tech here) circles its wagons around a political party and much of the corporate sphere joins them, that populace is being dragged to a very dark place. This is the situation in America. This is precisely why there has been such a system-wide meltdown and attack over Elon buying Twitter. That is our first big push back against this coercive machine of information manipulation. Substack holding the line of free speech last year was big too.

Lulu Cheng Meservey @lulumeservey

At Substack, we don’t make moderation decisions based on public pressure or PR considerations. An important principle for us is defending free expression, even for stuff we personally dislike or disagree with. We understand principles come at a cost. 🧵

Our nation was once known for a fierce industry of investigative reporters that stood as a fortification for the people against the coercive ways of human beings in power. It was known as “The Fourth Estate” for a reason. It was one of the most vital layers of citizenship protection we had, and I speak in past-tense because The Fourth Estate is dead. Our reporters no longer dig to unearth the story for us the people, uniformly they now figure out how to present Their Story they want to tell the people. You see this transition in verbiage itself. Look around at legacy media these days and you won’t see language that is telling you what to know, you will see language that is telling you what to think…

That headline above was not an opinion piece. It was the front-page ‘news’ report from an outlet that once sold itself as “Our Most Trusted Name In News”. You aren’t to know the fact-pattern of events surrounding our Supreme Court, you are to know who The Good Guys are and that rage exists in our judicial from those evil Monsters who want what those behind these articles do not. That would be the very antithesis of “journalism”. That would be the role of North Korean media and outlets like Pravda in Russia. Welcome to our new America. This is why there has been such a surge in citizen journalism. They are quickly becoming our new Fourth Estate. I trust some anonymous accounts on Twitter more than I do every alphabet network we have, and it’s not even close. Many in this country would laugh at that and reframe it as me being lost in an abyss of disinformation. I laugh at you.

Because when the largest climate spending bill in US history can be sold as “The Inflation Reduction Act” until 24hrs after it passes and then same “news” outlets immediately backtrack and say “Well ok, it may not actually achieve the goal of its name… but this climate and health spending-bill is fantastic!” we ALL have a really big problem.

And understand, that wasn’t just a politician saying politician’y things, this legislation was explicitly sold as being for inflation reduction and they used the full might of The Truman Show to deliver that packaging. We’re talking our own President using his “team of expert economists” to tell us it will reduce inflation, which gets bull-horned around the entire nation to make anyone saying otherwise appear as a “disinformation” idiot. And then the morning after it passes, the entire media realm is referring to it only as a “spending bill” instead because they know that was all bullshit. Consider that for a moment. Not only is our media (that old Fourth Estate) not investigating the realities of this bill FOR US and telling us BEFORE it passes that it’s actually a “climate spending bill”, they are actively working with the DNC to help build their mirage and deceive the public. And the left, even those who are rational and claim to be moderates, seem to be perfectly ok with this because it benefits their tribe. I’ve engaged dozens of people in this category on this exact topic. Most won’t even admit there is anything wrong. Others will kind of “Yeah, bill titles never mean much”-it away. Very few will say “yes this is wrong” and of those that will, none will voice that in public. If the masses owned up and spoke up to what The Truman Show was doing, it would all end tomorrow. The power is solely in its ability to deceive and people riding the wave instead of calling it out. Like cheering for a cheap magic show that you know is fake… but here, one that keeps you in power.

These are the headlines from The Truman Show the very next morning. See anything missing?

That’s Pravda-level propaganda right there, in receipts and not theory. But much of the left does not care. Their bill got passed, so it’s any means to the end, I guess. It’s staggering people don’t realize how dangerous it is to watch this power-grip form and simply voice your approval, either directly or tacitly. It only leads to one place, it’s not a good place, and it’s an apparatus that won’t always be in your service.

Because this wasn’t the first time they used that propaganda method to pass a big spending bill, was it? Nope. Amazingly, they sold Build Back Better in the exact same manner. It’s surreal to even process that in October of 2022 as no one who cares about their reputation has argued that BBB will DECREASE inflation in months and months. In fact, anyone who cares about their reputation openly admits that BBB was a contributor to our current economic malaise. But that’s not what Team Biden and The Truman Show said at all back when they still needed the public on-board…

Well well well, there are those “Top Economists” again! Have to give the propaganda a coat of “expert” approval, right? Then, once again, any of those stupid right-wingers who say the legislation is a terrible move for this country and is going to really hurt our economy can be cast aside as the ignorant consumers of “disinformation” that they are. Of course, in this case and dozens just like it, the purveyors of the disinformation are the ones who have duped those rabid masses back into attack mode. Wash, rinse, and repeat. They deployed identical systemwide propaganda to cover-up the Hunter Biden story weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Here is a piece from Politico broadcasting that “More than 50 former senior intelligence officials” had signed a letter saying the laptop story was Russian disinformation.

That was enough for our own National Public Radio to not only elect to skip reporting on the story all together, but to tell the nation it is “not really a story”, “just a pure distraction”, and not something they want to “waste your time” on. A story with receipts about massive potential impropriety of the DNC candidate’s son that involves Ukraine and Burisma and China and quite possibly Joe himself. Weeks before the election this is a non-story, in fact a “distraction” that would just be a “waste of your time”. HO-LY SHIT! I’m not sure even Pravda could get away with that. That is right out of North Korea media right there. And to this day, much of the left (again, even the rational and “moderate”) will spin this away as a nothingburger. “Editorial decision”; Hunter isn’t running for office; maybe a lapse in judgment but not a conspiracy. It’s staggering. They know they’re lying to themselves. And this is happening at a population scale.

Theo Jordan @Theo_TJ_Jordan

So does everyone agree the Hunter Biden information is real now? I'm not asking this as a dunk. Is it understood nationwide that the pictures, videos and messages are real? And therefore this here 👇 was all a lie/systematic propaganda to cover for Biden?

They’ve now admitted the Hunter materials are legitimate (watch that clip above). Even the same outlet (Politico) has been forced to own up to that. They’ve confirmed the validity of the emails off the laptop on the other end. They still won’t talk much about it though, like why there is discussion about money going to “The Big Guy”. This is a “distraction” and “not really a story”?!? Wow. No, this is a five-alarm fire. Our entire media operating like this is a true national crisis. And see, once again, they gave this the blessing (the gift-wrapping) of “experts”. In this case, NatSec. Who would the Average Joe believe? 50 former US intelligence officials or the morons at the NY Post? Oh, and they blacked-out the NYP link across the internet so we couldn’t read it even if we had decided it was a story we should know. Nope, The Moral had decided it wasn’t worthy of our eyes or ears… information they now admit is true. Will there be follow-up pieces digging into who these 50 former intelligence officials were and why they said that when it was a bald-faced lie? Of course not, that “would just be a distraction” too. Those people have disgraced themselves and should never be trusted again, but that’s unimportant to our old army of reporters because it would make the wrong team look bad.

And while I don’t feel like getting into this now (I’m going to write a lot about COVID on here eventually), this is what the entire concept of the “Temple of Sanctimony” was about throughout COVID. They deployed the exact same combination of the deceptive “expert-class”-stamp with the systemwide media propaganda promulgated ultimately by the upper-brass of the DNC. All pandemic long we had deception reported as “fact-checked” which renders lies into “truth” and then the truth itself becomes “disinformation” which can be banned. It’s straight out of an Orwell novel and it happened for two years straight. It still is. Lab-leak, natural immunity, transmission, severity rate, you name it! This led to the disgusting mass-mania against “antivaxxers” we went through, which was unmoored from science and public-health at design and yet pushed relentlessly across our nation for two straight years. What we witnessed was downright abhorrent, historically abhorrent, and it was driven by this same propagandistic beast.

And they used it to sway the 2020 election. They admit to this openly! In fact, they damn near brag about it in this Time piece. Read this passage, it is simply jaw-dropping…

This entire piece makes my brain hurt because of what it is being described… openly.

TIME @TIME

The secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election

ti.meThe Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 ElectionFor more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions

It’s the same thing. They are owning up to the influence and operation of The Truman Show. In my opinion, that’s because they're priming the public for when they do it again. That was evidenced in Sam Harris’s recent words where he basically said we should be ok with our elites doing this, that it’s like saving the Earth from an asteroid. He really said that. So why is this headline about controlling thought and not the media? Well, before I could open this up to let some thoughts flow, I stumbled into a new story being pushed out on The Column over on the Bird this morning. A story about Kyrie Irving. I only dug a bit into it when it hit me… it’s the same damn topic! We are witnessing a society-wide machine that is actively working to police and control our own thoughts. It’s not even just speech anymore. Thoughts! Let’s step away from Kyrie for a minute and I’ll show you what I mean…

That was a statement put out by the head coach of the NFL team in Washington (I just can’t bring myself to call them the Commanders, they should have been permanently forced to be known as “The Washington Football Team”) regarding one of their high-paid assistant coaches, Jack Del Rio. What was Jack’s crime that necessitated his apology, this public verbal lashing, the punishment of a $100,000 fine, and a clear mandate that Jack will “have a greater understanding” the next time he encounters it? He said he didn’t subscribe to to all the Truman Show-hysteria about January 6th being an insurrection and the end of democracy and thought the summer’s worth of riots under the name of BLM was just as bad for this country. That’s it. He voiced a sensical view that millions of Americans agree with. I am one of one them. But not the jellyfish and compromised losers in the upper-brass of the Washington organization. They see this only as a morality binary and you will obey! Jack sure did. He turned in his man-card and agreed to be their bitch and mental slave real quick. I’ll never have a shred of respect for the man again. Reminds me a lot of how Drew Brees committed self-respect seppuku to appease the mob in 2020 and ultimately appeased no one and just disgraced himself. Same disgusting end-result from the same coercive social-engineering apparatus.

Now I wake up to see the owner of Kyrie’s team with these two tweets…

Joe Tsai @joetsai1999

I’m disappointed that Kyrie appears to support a film based on a book full of anti-semitic disinformation. I want to sit down and make sure he understands this is hurtful to all of us, and as a man of faith, it is wrong to promote hate based on race, ethnicity or religion.

Joe Tsai @joetsai1999

This is bigger than basketball

Now, while I haven’t seen Kyrie’s tweets or the film in question, I understand this involves some movie that is overtly antisemitic. So I’m not casting some mandate out here that Joe Tsai is inherently wrong. Perhaps you agree with Joe here and agree Kyrie should be sanctioned. I’m not necessarily arguing otherwise; rather, I am honing-in on what is the exact same engine as everything mentioned above. We are now living in a world that if you watch a movie and share its contents, you may face a public mob in the morning if not open lambasting from your employer and possible monetary/employment sanctions. There is a reason Tsai handled this in public and not behind closed doors. Now, it seems to ring easier when its in Kyrie’s context, right? But it’s no different than Jack Del Rio’s. You just might palate one context more than the other. In both cases, it is the controlling of one’s thought. It is establishing fixed social pressures that will herd people into conformity of… well, of whatever you want it to be: ideology, political fealty, acknowledgment of Party reality, dismissal of things you believe to be true, acknowledgment of things you believe to be false, calling human males “she”, genuflecting to leftist dogma gift-wrapped as “human rights”, acknowledging gender and sex categories that now number 40+, etc. It is literally endless, because the concept itself (The Truman Show) has no limits. It is horrifying. And here’s the final rub, even in the context of antisemitism and Joe Tsai…

See, there is no Council of human beings who are so pure they deserve to be our arbitrators of morality. Try as they might, these Moral Saints who want to sell themselves as our righteous warriors of everything good from the “anti-racists” to the gender-cultists always end up revealing themselves as frauds. They aren’t Moral Saints at all. They’re just people using that casting for power. And even in a situation like Tsai, what do we really have going on here? “This is bigger than basketball”, huh Joe? While that rings quite strongly in a vaccum, it starts to really lose its thunder when people realize you’re the same guy who has helped finance not just bad words about a race of people, but their open and overt persecution that is happening right now on this rock we live in…

So regardless of your opinion on Kyrie, who is the one casting moral judgment here? Maybe Joe should fire off some tweets denouncing his support for people who are herding an ethnicity from kneeled rows with shaved heads into railway cars to be taken to work camps for modern day ethnic cleansing. That was a statement of fact, and Tsai’s company is wrapped-up in it. But he needs to sit down with Kyrie and reach some moral clarity with him? And needs to lambast him publically about it? Really? This is why I don’t subscribe to all this purity-test bullshit.

And those last few topics I mentioned above are important to weave in here too. Think of doctrines like “anti-racism”, or gender ideology and rabid transactivism, or the increasingly-deranged LGBTQIA+ identity-cult dogma, etc. All of these are not theories being proposed or ideas to chew on, but rather they are presented as societal mandates. We are to agree with doctrines like systemic racism and white privilege, with utterly batshit crazy stories about gender being separate from sex and whether you’re actually a male or female being a mental decision, of never-ending queer categories being pushed on children and forced on society, etc etc etc, or else we are <enter label of abhorrence here>. It’s the same across every front from this sect; every “-ist” and “-phobe” you can imagine. What it truly is though is the controlling of thought. In this case forced thought, just like forced speech with pronouns. Another horrifying reality.

And yet, here we are.