263) Day 31 -- Reason #31 to revolt against Predatory Capitalism: Manufacturing Consent, Part 3 -- We are in the fight for our lives.

In 1988, two distinguished scholars, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, published a monumental, scathing critique, exposing the way that mass communication like the media, “the news”, can be abused to propagandize a society into believing what “the powers that be” want people to believe. And thereby, control us all.

With sufficient control over the systems of communication, with sufficient control over WHAT information reaches the public, HOW OFTEN various pieces of information reach the public, and the NARRATIVE that is constructed out of that information, an entity, like a government, can steer their population in directions that the public-at-large, with a full appreciation of what they are getting themselves into, would never agree with.

The propaganda model described in Manufacturing Consent can be used to great effect to understand seeming social mysteries, such as how could free-thinking, intelligent Germans end up accepting the Third Reich’s Holocaust and war against the world?  Or how could Western democracies end up accepting the narrative that Israel’s decades-long atrocities against the Palestinians that they themselves imprisoned, is “self defense”?  Or how could Americans, after the first disastrous Trump presidency that pushed America to the extremes of chaos and mass death in their country, ever elect him again?  

In short, “Manufacturing Consent” provides crucial answers to the questions we all ask, like “What the hell were people thinking?”, “How could they be so stupid?”, “Doesn’t anybody learn anything from history?”  And things like that. I know you have asked these questions in the past two weeks. We all have.

At this critical moment in Canadian history (not to mention world history), when the United States has already declared economic war on us, when their President has openly and repeatedly threatened to annex us and destroy our sovereign nation, when their President has openly promised to his voting base before the election that, if they voted for him this one last time, they would “never have to vote again”, when their President is following the playbooks of Viktor Orban and Adolf Hitler on how to take-over a democracy and install oneself as Supreme Ruler, when we are facing, literally, the biggest existential threat to our existence in the entire history of Canada as a nation, it is deadly necessary to learn more about “Manufacturing Consent.” 

This is life-and-death necessary because we need, as a nation, to come together in solidarity.  We have an imminent election in our biggest province in a few weeks, and a federal election to choose a new national leader in a few months.  The leaders who will face, or fail to face, the threat of the MAGA-States literally taking over our country, are about to be chosen.  And we will therefore face a propaganda campaign the likes of which we have never seen. 

And oh boy, is that ever saying a lot.  Because we’ve been propagandized to for our whole lives. As a few examples:

• The gender war — I have photographic proof which I took myself, and which I talked about on Facebook a couple of years ago, that the Conservative Party of Canada uses fake protesters and hired stooges to mount fake protests in order to demonstrate to the public apparent widespread resistance to treating LGBTQ+ people with respect and teaching the science of gender in schools. This is a “small” example of propaganda, but I was stunned and utterly appalled that day, in Queen’s Park in Toronto, when I realized, and caught on film, the truth that much of the apparent “controversy” about gender education in schools is an illusion, a politically-funded propaganda campaign with photo-ops manufactured by ACTORS.

• The carbon tax — We just had our Prime Minster resign after a concerted, years-long, well-funded-mostly-by-foreign-agents, effort to poison Canadians’ beliefs about both Trudeau, and the carbon tax that his government brought in to help fight climate change.  The details of this are long, and will have to wait for another post.  But it stands for me as another example of how Canadians are ALREADY divided in an information war that most of us don’t even know we’re in the crossfire of.  We believe that the news we watch and the information we gather online, is, if not true, at least pretty close.  And we are utterly naive and vulnerable to the manipulations of people who put millions of dollars into manipulating the public’s perceptions.

• COVID and vaccine skepticism and the Freedom Convoy — As discussed in the previous part of this “Manufacturing Consent” mini-series, Canadians were subject to a well-coordinated, well-funded, extremist campaign during COVID, designed to foment a possible insurrection against the Canadian government. And most of us had no idea what was happening.  Even when the truth came out, many Canadians either never learned it, or didn’t believe it.

• Similarly with COVID.  The amount of utterly unscientific rejection of basic medical research that happened as a result of COVID and the vaccination campaigns to protect the public, is mind-spinningly crazy.  But the public, the vast majority of whom are not medical doctors or researchers and are not educated in the deep complexities of such research, found vast amounts of information shared online about the horrors of vaccines, their ineffectiveness, and the heightened risks of experiencing health problems from the vaccines rather than the COVID virus itself.  Uncountable numbers of YouTube videos, newspaper articles, “expert” analyses, “documentaries” exposing the corruption in the medical industry, etc.etc.etc., times a million.  And all the doctors in the world, literally, all the decades of medical research on vaccines, decades of expertise held by thousands and thousands of MDs and PhDs who spent their entire lives studying the complexity of the human body, weren’t enough to overcome the tide of bullshit that washed over the public, and made the already challenging task of minimizing the deaths from a global pandemic, unimaginably harder.  The COVID experience was, frankly, fucking ridiculous.

• Similarly with climate change.  Atmospheric physics and chemistry that had been understood for 150 years, decades and decades and decades of international collaborations amongst tens of thousands of scientists working in research institutions all over the world, and yet, industry-funded propaganda was able to derail all that, to the point that ecological collapse due to accelerating climate change literally threatens the very foundation of organized human existence on this planet. 

How. The. Fuck. Can. People. Be. So. Stupid.?

* * * * *

The thing is, people aren’t stupid.  They are just misinformed.  And the reason so many end up misinformed is because, without sufficient training, such as education that teaches you critical thinking and media literacy, people are extremely easy to manipulate and control.  ESPECIALLY if you can control the information that reaches them. 

And sadly, people convince themselves that they know what they are talking about because they “did their research”, without realizing that the entire field of “research” they found readily available online was professionally crafted misinformation campaigns, using sophisticated language, complicated, fake science, fake experts or paid-for mouthpieces who sacrificed their morals to spread lies and get well paid for it.  As a result, millions, literally millions of otherwise intelligent people, were duped.  Brainwashed.  Made to believe utterly stupid, easily disprovable shit.  

And the consequences?  Accelerating climate change, ecological collapse, genocidal wars, polarized democracies with little trust in the system, a pandemic that caused millions of deaths despite being a relatively mild virus, and now, a dictator in the White House who is, all jokes aside, THREATENING to take over Canada.  Not to mention already rapidly destroying the democratic institutions built over TWO CENTURIES in the United States.

THIS is what Manufacturing Consent is all about.  

I encourage you, like your life depends on it, to read this book, or at least, learn about it in depth.  It’s a tough challenge.  It’s not fun.  But it will blow your fucking mind and open your eyes to the ways you’ve been lied to for your entire life, and lulled into a worldview that quite simply, isn’t true.  The more people who read, and understand, and internalize, the truth of how they have lived in an environment of pervasive deceit by the powerful, the more hope we, all of us, have in reaching that boiling point of rage and “fuck this shit”, and finally, finally, doing something to force things to change, to bring down the power hierarchy that has imprisoned all of us, and to rally together before people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk and their foot-soldiers destroy our society, take away our freedom, and thrust us into a very, very dark future.  

* * * * *

A full unpacking of Herman and Chomsky’s work is beyond this essay; after all, they wrote a whole goddamn book about it which has stood the test of time in scholarly circles for the past 4 decades.  So read it.

But the short version, a primer, is that we, especially those of us who live in post-World-War-2 Western civilization, have been manipulated through 5 key mechanisms of control, for our entire lives.  (Similar processes would be relevant to other parts of the world, but this is specifically about “the West”.).  Herman and Chomsky call these the 5 “editorial filters”.  Just like you can take light and pass it through a filter to change its colour and make the world look blue, or green or whatever colour you want, these 5 filters have been applied, for our whole lives, to take the complex story of Reality that we live in, and turn it into something that CONTAINS truth, but isn’t “the truth”.  It is a filtered, cherry-picked, massaged, twisted, spun version of the truth.

Who does that filtering?  Good question.  As you read through these filters, the answer to that becomes horrifyingly obvious.

Filter #1:  Ownership of information flows:  

Whoever owns the media can decide what that media says, what information it shares, how that information is spun, and can bombard the public with ideological bombs that become increasingly difficult, over time, to resist.  Because with enough mind-bombardment of certain ideas, the media narrative becomes “the truth” that people believe.  

Of course, it’s not quite that simple, because in a society like ours, there are multiple sources of media, and therefore, multiple narratives that get exposed to.

But in conjunction with simple ownership of media sources, is the SCALE of the media sources, which in turn is related to the overall DIVERSITY of media sources. Are there tons of diverse media voices giving the population lots of different perspectives?  Or are there relatively few, gigantic networks of umbrella organizations that own many different media outlets, who all say the same things and promote the same story?

What story might that be?  Well, the owners of media in North America are, for the most part, billionaires and corporations.  (google “Rupert Murdoch” and “the Koch brothers”). In other words, profit-oriented entities.  They want to make money.  And they use their media control to help them do exactly that.  

Take these three sub factors together — media ownership, media scale, and the universal profit motivation — and you start to get a sense of how “the news” isn’t really the news at all.  It’s a carefully selected, carefully crafted STORY, designed to program the public to buying into the military-industrial-corporate complex’ domination of the world.  I.e., domination of us.  So they get wealthier, and we stay relatively complacent, good, docile workers, cogs in the machine, who play our roles but never really shake things up and change things.  We are, in effect, slaves, albeit with more freedom than the slaves of the past.  But our lives are far less under our control than we believe. And our own minds, our own beliefs, are far less FREELY CHOSEN than we can probably imagine.

This control of our minds is extremely hard to resist, because it happens every day, for our entire lives.  And as media gets increasingly homogenized, as corporate ownership or government control increase in power and scope, there will be fewer narratives for the public to consider.  An extreme example is a totalitarian government that literally controls ALL the media, and feeds its population “the official story” and nothing else.  Like North Korea.  

The United States, over the past few decades, has experienced a profound simplification of their media ecosystem.  Extremely wealthy individuals like Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers, have bought up thousands of newspapers and radio stations, and websites, etc., across the country, so that whatever people turn to for ‘the news’, the toxicity of Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers’ ideology WILL be something that they hear, over and over and over again.  From newspapers to radio hosts, “expert” panels on TV to podcasters, the population hears the Murdoch/Koch message.  Which happens to also be the right-wing message.  The oil industry message.  The military-industrial message.  They are all part of an overarching, interconnected worldview.  And they bombard us through countless channels of media ownership.

In the “good ol’ days”, like before the 1980s let’s say, there were limits on the integration of corporate/military interests and media ownership.  Companies in the 1960s and 70s, like International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), that tried to acquire media outlets tended to run into huge resistance, huge outcries.

People were, rightly, afraid that a huge multinational corporation like ITT, one with deep investments in industries like the nuclear industry, with deep investments in other countries, with business activities that spanned the globe, could abuse its power enormously if also given control of major media outlets that informed the public of “the news”.  

(In the specific case of ITT, this resistance was vindicated as people discovered later that ITT had been involved in extensive political bribery that attempted to overthrow the government of Chile.)

Unfortunately, after the Reagan era of mass corporate deregulation (because of “efficiency” and “profit”), multinational companies got bigger and bigger, richer and richer, and the safeguards that prevented them from gaining control over media enterprises, were largely demolished.  This led to the profound concentration of major media in the hands of the ultra-wealthy that we now have today.  

In order words, “the news” is now spoon-fed to us by unbelievably wealthy people who are, for the most part, protecting their investments.  And the United States is, of all Western, “free” countries, the worst, because it experienced the greatest amount of deregulation of any democracy that I know of.  After all, Reagan was the architect of this absurd game of Monopoly.  (And anyone who has played Monopoly knows how that game ALWAYS ends….)

Canada’s media landscape is somewhat more diverse.  We have the CBC which is funded through taxes and theoretically at least, free from corporate and political control.  We have a variety of media sources with less concentration in the hands of the Uber-wealthy.  But we also have a vast, sprawling network of right-wing, “Conservative” outlets that are owned, not by the public, not even by Canadians, but by American corporations with deep roots in the Republican Party.

If you don’t believe this, just google, “Who owns Postmedia”?  Which includes everything from the various Sun newspapers, to the National Post, and many other outlets of “Canadian news”. 

Yes, Canadian media is increasingly owned by non-Canadians, and not only non-Canadians, but EXACTLY THE SAME non-Canadians that own or ally with the right-wing media landscape of the Republican Party.  Trump’s party.  The ones that are threatening to take us over.  

THIS was at the very heart of the Freedom Convoy that we talked about in the last essay.  It was never a “Canadian citizens’ uprising.”  It was a well-funded attempt by the people who have empowered the Republicans and Trump, to overthrow democracy in North America and establish a terrifying dictatorship.  No fucking joke here.  Look it up.  “Who owns Postmedia?”

Filter #2:  Advertising

Newspapers, TV stations, and other media organizations are expensive to run.  A lot of raw materials, a lot of salaries for all the employees, printing presses, cameras, news helicopters, legal teams, fancy sound and lighting equipment, conferences, travel expenses, website designers and programmers and security experts.  Etc.etc.etc.  From the earliest newspapers to the modern satellite-fed TV shows that can broadcast live from any “hotspot” in the world, it takes a lot of money to make “the news”.  

Some of that money comes from rich people with an agenda, like the Koch brothers.  Some of that money comes from users paying for information through purchasing a newspaper, buying a subscription or otherwise handing over their hard-earned dollars for “the news”.

But the rest of it, the majority of it historically, comes from advertising.  Everybody knows this.  Everybody knows that advertising is everywhere, from billboards to websites to million-dollar slots of time during the Super Bowl.  But we rarely stop to realize just what that means.

Because what it means, is that if your “news” pisses off advertisers, if corporations are threatened by the information you share, then your funding will disappear, and you will be out of business.  

This is why it was SO DIFFICULT in the 90s for the truth about sweatshops and “3rd-world” slave camps in the “export processing zones” that existed between countries and were subject to no laws, no rules, no oversight, no human rights, were so bloody difficult to get across to the population.  Most people still barely know about them, despite them being utterly and devastatingly exposed by investigative journalists like Naomi Klein. It’s wasn’t just that some single corporation was doing bad things; it’s that the entire corporate megalopoly was exploiting the world’s poorest for dirt-cheap labour, so that “consumers” in wealthy countries could head down to the mall, or Walmart or wherever, and buy their shoes and microwaves and sweaters and plastic toys for their kids, etc., and pay a fraction of the cost they would have to pay if everyone involved in the supply chain was paid a living wage, was protected by workers’ rights and was treated with fundamental human dignity. But they weren’t. They were treated like disposable garbage, and they suffered. For our cheap products.  

This was a difficult thing to share with the public.  It took independent investigations by activist journalists like Naomi Klein, who wrote No Logo to expose this horrible abuse of humanity by Western corporations, to expose it.  And anyone who read that had a bomb go off in their mind.  This work informed an entire generation of activists.  And it hit the general public through the anti-sweatshop campaigns and such that tried to encourage consumer boycotts.  It was a small, but significant victory of true freedom of information.  

But relatively few people read No Logo.  Sure, lots of people did, but relative to the number of people who watch the Super Bowl, (plus all the other sports, plus the Oscars, plus sitcoms, plus etc.etc.etc.)? Relative to the soma-consumers of popular entertainment culture, not all that many delved into the horror-reality of Naomi Klein’s work.  Not enough to start a revolution. 

Although we tried.  The anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s, just before 9/11 put an ironclad vice around public protest and instead launched the Western world into a “war against terrorism”, were inspiring as fuck to those of us who were waking up to the corporate prison the world was living in.  There were successes.  The Battle of Seattle.  The protests against Free Trade agreements.  We tried.  Just not enough of us.

Much of the David vs. Goliath nature of this battle for human rights vs. corporate profits, is DIRECTLY because advertisers don’t want you to know that their products are built out of human suffering.  That would, indeed, be bad for business.  So, as much as possible, news outlets focus us on the “soma” of sports, human interest stories, political scandals, celebrity bullshit, and whatever else people will glue their eyes to, rather than opening them to the shitty, horrifying underbelly of the world, and then organizing, and doing something to change it.  

Preventing a true uprising of the people is in large part due to the power of advertisers to control the narrative, to control what we see, what we hear, and therefore, what we believe, what we feel, and what we do with our lives. 

Filter #3:  Sourcing the mass media

This is, in part, a repeat of the previous two points:  whoever owns the media, and funds the media, can control the media to a large degree.  But “sourcing” is even more subtle.

Imagine being a taxi driver, trying to make a living.  You could either drive around the city randomly, hoping to get lucky and pick up random fares because you happen to be at the right place at the right time.  OR, you could save your gas, and hang out by hotels, and airports, and outside bars near closing time.  In other words, you could concentrate your resources on going where you KNOW the customers are reliably going to be.

The news works the same way. Imagine how EXPENSIVE it would be to have reporters driving and flying all over the place, zooming around the world looking for breaking stories.  Versus, cultivating relationships with reliable sources of information — like police departments, governments agencies, spokespeople, bureacracies that regularly produce information bulletins and reports, so that you, the news agency, can report on them.

This is exactly what happens.  And not only do reporters “hang out” near bureaucratic sources of information, but those same bureaucracies entice them to do so, by hiring public relations experts and communications specialists who CRAFT press releases that reporters can easily report on.  It’s like giving someone a ready-made, mostly-written script of a story, rather than forcing the reporter to run around discovering all the facts for themselves.  

This symbiotic relationship between, therefore, governments, defense agencies, police departments, and corporate “media relations” professionals, has a profound impact on what we get fed as “the news”.  It’s just easier, and WAY cheaper, for news agencies to rely on the reliable releases of reports and information by the major bureaucracies.  So that’s what they report on.

And it goes deeper than that.  Because news agencies also want to interview credible experts.  So governments and corporations and such employ experts, fund research, give grants to academics and scientists and public intellectuals, in order to have readily-available experts on hand to talk to reporters about the story of the day.

As those experts gain more media exposure, they even become known to the public, and therefore trusted as “the experts”.  They appear on “expert analyst panels” and talk shows and podcasts, to talk about their expertise.  And they are well paid for this.  

The SCALE of this cultivation of expertise is hard to wrap your head around.  It’s like an entire invisible army, fighting an information war behind the scenes.  Which is exactly what they are doing.  And nowadays, with the internet, and “think tanks”, and podcasts, and influencers and all the rest, the scale of this cultivated expertise is simply unknown.  But it’s vast, far more vast than the public realizes.

Consider, for example, just one branch of the US military, a long time ago in the much simpler 1970s, when it was still reasonably possible to quantify these things.  At that time, in just one branch of the US military, the Air Force, a HUGE staff was directly paid to engage in “media relations”. 

• 1305 full-time employees working directly with the media.  THOUSANDS more in subsidiary and supportive roles.

• A reach of 140 newspapers.  Almost 700,000 weekly copies of an Airforce-produced magazine.  34 radio stations.  17 TV stations.  Annual production of 650,000 news releases, 6600 interviews with the media, 3200 news conferences, 11000 speeches.  Etc.  

• After that year (1979-1980) the US Military stopped releasing such information.  But THAT was the scale of their media relations, in one year, almost 50 years ago.  

• And that was just the AIR FORCE.  You’d have to add the rest of the military to get a full picture.  And THAT is still just the military.  Major corporations do the same thing.  Billionaires like the Koch brothers, do the same thing, employing vast numbers of academics, authors, historians, scientists, statisticians, health professionals, who manufacture the majority of “the news” that we are fed.

• As one more example, the ultra-conservative media figure, Ben Shapiro, just one tiny arm of right-wing rage machine, has a full-time staff of 200 (as of the year 2022), and produces 250 pieces of content EVERY SINGLE DAY.

That’s “the news”.  That’s what the public hears and sees and reads and watches.  And therefore, believes.  

And THAT is what leads to MAGA.  And Freedom Convoys.  And Donald Trump.  And anti-vaxxer movements.  And the “gender wars”.  And a profound lack of enraged activism in the general public.  And a pro-corporate, pro-capitalism mentality that is now so invisible to us, we barely can even recognize it as an ideology.  It’s just, for most people, “the way the world is.”  It’s REALITY.  

Unless you do the terribly difficult work of researching, through independent sources, independent journalists, a huge diversity of media sources, the peer-reviewed academic literatures of scientists and researchers, and learn, truly, what the hell is going on in the world.  

And who has time for that?  Who has the education for that?  The critical thinking skills honed through years of study?  

Not very many people.  Not even 1% of the voting population.

Which gives us the shit-show we are in today, in which a dictator was voted into power by a largely uneducated population who truly DID NOT UNDERSTAND what they were voting for, as the debacle of tariffs and rising grocery prices and farm-crops rotting in fields as migrant workers don’t show up for work anymore, and as the social security and Medicaid and other critical public programs disappear, clearly illustrates.

We have sleep-walked into catastrophe.  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.  

Filter #4:  Flak and Enforcers

If you are a pissed-off citizen, and you want to speak truth to power, you can try and talk to the media.  Write a letter to the newspaper editorial staff.  Write a blog post like this one.  Start a petition.  Phone your political representative.  

This is “Flak”, although here I am emphasizing your own, minuscule “Flak” ability as an individual.  It’s the dissent that YOU have available to you.  It’s how you, a citizen, can try to change the system.  And indeed, if you get enough citizens on your side, write enough letters, make enough phone calls, get enough signatures on your petition, MAYBE you can gain some Enforcement capabilities, and force the powers-that-be to listen to you.  Heck, you might even get on the news.

But what Manufacturing Consent emphasized was the massive Flak capabilities of the power-brokers, the corporate, government and military institutions. They can produce high-production-value videos, hire experts, write and publish editorials in their own newspapers.  They can produce millions of human-hours of content, every year. These much-more-powerful-than-you entities have created, since at least the 1970s, entire organizations and think tanks and media institutions and such, to CRITICIZE stuff, and people, they don’t like.  

Like climate scientists.  Environmentalists.  Doctors.  Educators.  Transgender and LGBTQ+ advocates.  And most definitely anti-corporate, anti-capitalist activists.  

If you use your own little, minuscule “flak” power and manage to gain any sort of attention, you will be ASSAULTED by a well-paid army of people who tear you to shreds in the media.  Who denigrate and ridicule you.  Paid online trolls will threaten you.  Hired “experts” will “question the validity” of your arguments.  Hired media figureheads like FOX news hosts will literally ridicule and make fun of you to their audiences of millions. They will invite you to hostile interviews that are stacked against you, and that are then edited to make you look like a fool. Editorials will be written about how stupid, or evil, or corrupt you are, and comments threads online? Holy fuck. What a nightmare of abuse you are signing up for.  

They can bring down anyone.  They brought down Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, by burying the public in an avalanche of misinformation, ridicule, sensationalized scandals, and outright lies about his activities, and especially the now-hated-even-though-it-was-a-pretty-good-idea-and-effective-economic-tool, the “carbon tax”.  I’ll write about the specifics of this at some point in the future.  But for now, let it stand as an example that anyone who dares to rock the boat of the military-industrial complex and the corporate world of the ultra-wealthy, is putting themselves in a firing line against a professional army and a population of mind-poisoned trolls.  

This has ruined the lives and mental health and families of countless doctors, educators, climate scientists and others, not to mention well-meaning politicians, people who were trying to make a difference, were trying to make the world a better place, were trying to share their expertise and best ideas with the public.  And instead, got crucified. Metaphorically of course.  Or sometimes, literally, assassinated. Like Martin Luther King. Jr. Like Bobby Kennedy, Sr. Like Malcolm X. Heck, like John Lennon, for god’s sake.

Some few heroes are able to withstand the onslaught and keep going.  Usually they are the successful few who gain enough of a following and enough resources and allies that they can fight back.  People like David Suzuki, and Naomi Klein, and climate scientists like James Hansen and Michael Mann.  But their lives, so often, are hell.  Their work is attacked so outrageously that they waste vast amounts of their precious time simply combating disinformation campaigns.  Their social media feeds get flooded with trolls and “skeptics”, and at the worse end of things, especially if they are women, or LGBTQ+, they get threats of violence against themselves and their families, rape threats, you name it.  

When I was arrested as part of the G20 debacle of 15 years ago, in the largest mass arrest in Canadian history, and I was charged with “conspiracy” for standing on a street singing Oh Canada with a crowd of about 1000 people, I realized that the “flak” that we have as individuals to launch against the State and the corporate powers, is nothing relative to what they can hit us back with.  I realized that night, standing in a downpour for many hours with handcuffs making my fingers go numb behind my back, that in our society, protest is not really, in practice, a “right” that we have.  It is a privilege that the powers-that-be allow us, when it serves their own interests.  It’s a way of making the public FEEL that they can make a difference, when in reality, as soon as there are enough of you to actually make a difference, the hammer comes down, and you have no power to resist the overwhelming technology of The State.  

From directly arresting people, to smearing their reputations, to discrediting their expertise, to hiring “experts” and influencers to ridicule them on TV or websites or podcasts or blogs or radio programs, the powers-that-be have near-infinite powers of “flak” to control dissent and maintain power.  

And they can wield this against not just individuals, but organizations as well.  Just ask anyone who works for an environmental organization, how they’ve been treated by the corporate world.  Ask any doctor who spoke up for vaccine mandates, how they were treated by the popular media, how safe they felt their online presence was, how safe they felt in their own homes or as they travelled to work. Ask any trans person who has dared to speak out online or have a YouTube channel.  

And you’ll start to gain an appreciation for how “Flak” is wielded by the powers-that-be, to control us.  By controlling “the news”.

Filter #5:  Control ideologies that marginalize dissent:  Anti-communism, Anti-Marxism, The War on Terror, Anti-immigration, Anti-Diversity, Anti-Wokeism

Throughout the past century, at least, of Western society, there have been large, overarching ideologies that, if they were adopted by the population at large, would threaten the power hierarchy.  

For example, our society is heavily capitalist.  Everybody knows that.  And one of the biggest bogeymen that we’ve been warned against since at least World War 2, is “communism” and more commonly nowadays, “Marxism” and “socialism”.

Because communism, socialism, Marxism, are not super-friendly to a highly-vertical power hierarchy in which The Few have everything, and The Many fight over the crumbs.  If we truly embraced socialist ideals as a society, the ultra-rich would find their caste-like superior status, deeply threatened, and eventually erased.  And so, they become “control ideologies”, buzz words that the powers-that-be use to continually install FEAR in the population. As long as we’re afraid enough of these horrible spectres, we will stay obedient; we will participate in the system; we will allow ourselves to be controlled. Just look at The Patriot Act after 9/11, as one example of how an entire “free” people allowed their rights to be taken away, because of the spectre of “terrorism”.

Cultural diversity, human rights, and “wokeism” as civil rights are now often called, would similarly upend the power hierarchy.  Because if society TRULY was a meritocracy, like Conservative ideology pretends it is, we wouldn’t have people like Donald Trump with vast wealth even though he cheats on everything, fucks up all his businesses, and over and over and over, declares bankruptcy.  We wouldn’t have Elon Musk becoming the richest man in the world by pretending to be an expert on everything, when really, his accomplishments are the result of predatorily taking over enterprises, and ruling teams of actual experts with an iron fist.  We wouldn’t have people like Jordan Peterson getting insanely wealthy and famous by spreading intellectual garbage that would be taken down in 2 minutes by the relevant experts in the many fields he pretends to be an expert in.  

Jordan is a good example though, of Filter #5, which is about how the people who promote the dominant ideologies of the power hierarchy, get amplified and rewarded with “success”, whereas the people who promote ideas that would threaten the power hierarchy, get ignored, marginalized, or attacked.  

Just think of some of Jordan’s key messages:  

• Socialism is a great evil that leads to mass slaughter and death camps (when history shows us clearly that it’s the opposite of socialism, namely, totalitarianism, that leads to death camps and mass slaughter);

• Judeo-Christian values are pillars of a healthy Western society (when history shows us clearly that Judeo-Christian values, married to powerful institutions like The Church and backed up by governments, gave us half a millennium or more of slavery and global suffering under colonialism);

• Humans are “naturally” predisposed to dominance hierarchies, as illustrated by our inner lobster-like nature (when evolutionary biology shows us that humans are a deeply social species focused on interdependence, compassion, empathy, kindness and other pro-social values, whereas lobsters are a very poor choice of animal for illustrating human nature relative to countless other species with whom we have far more in common; not to mention that Jordan commits the elementary error of the “naturalistic fallacy” which any first-year university student in biology, psychology, philosophy, etc., should be able to spot easily);

• Men are under threat, and “feminism”, “wokeism”, and “Postmodern NeoMarxism” is to blame.  (Whereas, in reality, men have most of the power in society even today, and their feelings of “threat” are the result of other groups gaining SOME power, not of men having theirs taken away.)

Etc.  It’s interesting that Jordan rose to stratospheric fame, his messaging amplified by countless right-wing media outlets and followers, after attacking human rights legislation in Canada that was designed to protect trans people.  (And did so incorrectly, misinforming the public about the intent and consequences of the legislation while ignoring nearly all legal experts who weighed in on the matter and said he was wrong.)

So yes, people who promote ideals like socialism, realities like LGBTQ+ people existing and being healthy and not “mentally ill”, anti-capitalist ideals like universal basic income, race-realities like the inherent injustices built into our institutions as explained by Critical Race Theory, and other such things that are taken to be a threat to the power hierarchy, get attacked, denigrated, or ignored so that they labour in obscurity.  While people like Jordan who spread lies that link those same ideals to the worst horrors of society, get amplified and put on a pedestal and selected as “the expert” who, through the countless channels of media control, the public hears from.  Endlessly.  Even if they, like Jordan Peterson, make little goddamn sense and can easily be proven wrong about almost everything they argue for.

It’s interesting, when you stop for a moment and realize that Jordan Peterson, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Pierre Poilievre not only have much in common ideologically, but they sure get a lot of media exposure, separately AND together.  After all, it was Jordan Peterson who gave Pierre Poilievre’s big interview a few weeks back.  And who attended Trump’s inauguration.  And who regularly tweets back and forth with Elon Musk.  And it’s Poilievre, of all Canadian politicians, who Elon Musk endorses.  And, etc.etc.etc….  You see where all this points, right?

* * * * *

The bogeyman of the day

In the 1950s, the United States was rocked by the paranoia of “McCarthyism”, an anti-communist fear campaign that was designed to quell any notion of “socialism” taking hold of the American imagination.  McCarthyism was an absolute terror for America, threatening not only people who would fight for ideas like civil rights or workers’ rights or public health care, but even academics who would want to RESEARCH these things.  Under the guise of “protecting Western freedom”, the United States was downright authoritarian in its brutal suppression of socialist ideas, and weaponization of police forces and the FBI and such to “root out the communists”. 

And now, 70+ years later, Americans still don’t even have universal health care, although every other advanced economy in the world has figured THAT one out by now.  Because “socialism is bad.”

In the 1990s, as the anti-globalization protests were gaining power and galvanizing more of the public into activism, 9/11 came along and the Patriot Act and the War on Terror, and sure put a stop to that!  No more threatening the capitalist power hierarchy; we’re at war against The Terrorists!  

Now, in the 2020s, not long after the first Black man was President of the United States, while progressive ideals like cultural diversity and women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights were championed increasingly in universities and governments and increasingly accepted by the general population, the right-wing and Christian Nationalists and people like Donald Trump came along and warned us all, through their countless media channels of influence, that immigrants were causing a crime wave (despite all evidence to the contrary). And to boot, children were being influenced to “mutilate themselves” because of “gender ideology” infiltrating the public school system (despite all evidence to the contrary).  And medical professionals were part of a “conspiracy” to control the public and make us all sicker through vaccinations (despite all evidence to the contrary).

As society becomes more accepting of diversity, the regressive voices create more and more “Enemies of the state”, “Enemies of Freedom”, “Enemies of Good Christian values”, to divide the population, spread fear, spread confusion, and regain CONTROL.

These progressive ideals, of socialism and community, feminism and human rights, gender and cultural diversity, have become, like communism in the 1950s and “radical Islam” of the 2000s’ War on Terror, key targets for attack by the Powerful, in order to quell dissent and control the population.  

Because not only is it handy to sow discord and to polarize people with “culture wars” so that we spend so much of our time and energy simply fighting for our rights and dealing with the ignorance of a largely prejudiced and misinformed and educated population, but FEAR of the other — the gays, the Blacks, the commies, the trans people, the Marxists, the immigrants, the feminists, the critical race theorists, etc. — is a really useful way of cowing people into submission, AND gaining support from the elements of the population who themselves feel threatened by these things.  Like White Supremacists.  Hyper-capitalists.  White people (although yes, not all White people).  And sadly, men (although yes, not all men. But just look at the voting demographics of who supported Trump, and in Canada, who supports Poilievre.  There is something deeply troubling about the far-right slide of men in general, and especially young men, and ESPECIALLY uneducated young men, in our society.  This will be a topic of an upcoming post, soon.) 

Just look at the rolling-back of civil rights and freedoms following 9/11.  Look at the censorship of gender education in the United States.  Look at the CONSTANT anti-trans advertising of politicians like Donald Trump and Pierre Poilievre.  (One large-scale analysis concluded that a full 40% of Trump’s advertising budget for his election campaign went to anti-trans ads, as though trans people are one of the very biggest threats facing America as a nation; not climate change, not war, not corruption — trans people).  And look at ALMOST EVERY SINGLE ANSWER that Trump gave during his debate with Kamala Harris.  Whether the question was about the environment or the economy or international policy or pretty much anything, Trump’s answer was about “millions and millions of illegal aliens causing a crime wave in the United States and it’s the fault of the Democrats”, right to the ridiculous lie that immigrants and refugees were EATING the cats and dogs of their neighbours.  

As long as the power hierarchy can create FEAR OF THE OTHER, they can impose total authoritarian control over their population.  With the support of cheering crowds.  In the name of “Freedom”.  

This is the world we live in now. 

THIS, is Manufacturing Consent.

* * * * *

And make no mistake about it.  This authoritarian, regressive insanity is coming for me.  And you.   

I mean seriously, I’m so fucked.  I’m a trans woman.  If Donald Trump, or Pierre Poilievre for that matter, gains control over Canada, I will live in constant fear. 

And you?  Well, if you’re a working-class person, Black, Brown, Indigenous, a woman, disabled, a feminist, a socialist, gay, an immigrant, or indeed, a Canadian, then yeah, you too.  

We have to fight back.  The time is now.  There’s no more time to be complacent.  There’s no more time for fucking around and just making jokes about how dumb Trump is.  

We need a revolution.  Now.  This year.  Large scale.  All hands on deck.  

A revolution against what? Well, as a start, against ignorance. Against absorbing the messages of the power hierarchy. Against the FEAR that they create to control us, using everything from terrorism and Islamaphobia, to trans people in bathrooms, to divide and conquer the population.

Going deeper, we have to revolt against this system of Predatory Capitalism. It doesn’t work. It steals wealth, time, and labour from the 99% and funnels it directly into the pockets of the 1%. It creates a militarized world where human rights are ALWAYS in jeopardy while the wealthy can do whatever they want and literally live above the law.

There are many, excellent ideas out there for how to reform society. From environmentalists’ “just transition to a sustainable future”, to Bernie Sanders’ and AOC’s “Green New Deal”, from defunding the police and refunding community-support organizations, to greening cities and diversifying the food supply away from the Industrial Mega-farms, to even more radical ideas of how to transfer power back down to The People, instead of The Oligarchs. There are lots of ideas, because society is complicated and there is a lot of work to do.

But a better world awaits. Or, a horrible, horrible, dystopian nightmare, if we, this generation, this decade, now, fail to revolt and start The Revolution. A true, progressive, democracy revolution.

I really mean this.  And please, look more deeply at the ways that we have all been misled, lied to, propagandized to, and manipulated.  Get pissed off. You’ve been fucking lied to your whole life. By the people who say “trust us”, and promise you that their wealth will trickle down to make your life better. It won’t. It hasn’t for decades and decades and decades. And at the whim of an unhinged lunatic, like Donald Trump, all the PROGRESS that generations fought for, all the human rights, all the celebration of diversity, all the international friendships and trade agreements and everything — all of it — simply vanishes, and authoritarianism sticks its fucking boots back in our faces. Like it is, right now.

It’s not that “the government” is evil.  But there are very, very bad actors in our governments whose predominant agenda is authoritarian control. This is not me now fear-mongering. This is fact. And we all know it. We have all the evidence we need.  We have their own words, their own speeches, their own voting records.  And now, a country like America attacking its best friends and allies. Their knife is now in our Canadian backs. And it’s our SYSTEM that allowed this absurd power take-over, to happen.

The authoritarian horror is on full display now in the United States.  The whole world is now watching this shit-show of corruption.

But it’s also true in Canada.  And if you take a few minutes and look, with an open mind, at the RHETORIC, the messaging, the allies, of our various political figures, look at those they make out to be enemies, look at those they admire and conspire with.  It’s very clear who is fighting for our democracy.  And who is fighting for their own agenda of control.  Just look at who they hate. It’s very clear to me what political party hates people like me. It’s very clear who wants control, and who wants an educated, diverse, thriving, free population. Start there and take a hard, honest look at your own politics. Your own values. What DO you stand for, anyway?

You have critical, life-changing voting opportunities coming up. It’s time to use them, and your brain, to vote against this system of control, and vote for visionary, real change.

Politics is not a game.  It’s life or death.  Especially now.

So revolt.  Fight, for everything you have believed in your whole life.  Fight your own absorption of propaganda. LOOK at the sources of media that you consume, and THINK about who funds them, and what messages they are making you internalize as “reality”. LEARN. Use the critical thinking skills our high school teachers taught us.

And like you’ve promised your whole life, “Stand on guard” for our nation.  For genuine freedom.  For your family and your friends and your neighbours.  For reason.  For science.  For human rights.  For fairness and kindness, and love.  This is the time.

If we lose this, we lose the future.  We lose the freedom we’ve always believed in, the freedom our soldiers have died for, and that our ancestors bestowed upon us.

“To you from failing hands we throw,
The torch,
Be yours to hold it high,
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep….”

So fight back.  Get involved.  Now.