Johnstone on Propaganda (and dangerous stupidity)

Most Propaganda Looks Nothing Like This. Caitlin Johnstone. May 28, 2023


When most people in the English-speaking world hear the word “propaganda”, they tend to think of something that’s done by foreign nations who have governments that are so totalitarian they won’t even let people know what’s true or think for themselves.

Others understand that propaganda is something that happens in their own nation, but think it only happens to other people in other political parties. If they think of themselves as left-leaning they see those to their right as propagandized by right wing media, and if they think of themselves as right-leaning they see those to their left as propagandized by left wing media.

A few understand that propaganda is administered in their own nation by their own media, and understand that it’s administered across partisan lines, but they think of it in terms of really egregious lies like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or babies being taken from incubators in Kuwait.

In reality, all are inaccurate understandings of what propaganda is and how it works in western society. Propaganda is administered in western nations, by western nations, across the political spectrum — and the really blatant and well-known examples of its existence make up only a small sliver of the propaganda that our civilization is continuously marinating in.

The most common articles of propaganda — and by far the most consequential — are not the glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy among the critically minded. They’re the mundane messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that people are fed day in and day out to normalize the status quo and lay the foundation for more propaganda to be administered in the future.

One of the forms this takes is the way the western political/media class manipulates the Overton window of acceptable political opinion.

Have you ever noticed how when you look at any mainstream newspaper, broadcast or news website, you never see views from those who oppose the existence of the US-centralized empire? Or those who want to close all foreign US military bases? Or those who want to dismantle capitalism? Or those who want a thorough rollback of the creeping authoritarianism our civilization is being subjected to? You might see some quibbling about different aspects of the empire, some debate over whether we should de-escalate against Russia so we can better escalate against China, but you won’t ever see anyone calling for the complete end of the empire and its abuses altogether.

That’s propaganda. It’s propaganda in multiple ways: it excludes voices that are critical of the established status quo from being heard and influencing people, it amplifies voices (many of whom have packing foam for brains) which support the status quo, and, most importantly, it creates the illusion that the range of political opinions presented are the only reasonable political opinions to have.

The creation of that illusion is propaganda. It’s not something solid that you can point to easily because it’s comprised of an omission of something rather than a concrete thing, but it warps people’s perspectives in ways that have immensely far-reaching consequences. It’s something that doesn’t stand out too sharply against the background, but because people are exposed to it continuously day in and day out, it plays a huge role in shaping their worldview.

Another related method of manipulation is agenda-setting — the way the press shapes public thinking by emphasising some subjects and not others. In placing importance on some matters over others simply by giving disproportionate coverage to them, the mass media (who are propagandists first and news reporters second) give the false impression that those topics are more important and the de-emphasised subjects are less so. As political scientist Bernard Cohen famously observed way back in 1963, the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. The world will look different to different people depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read.”

Ever noticed how the fact that our governments are increasingly tempting nuclear war seems like it ought to be a front-page story pretty much every day of the week, but instead the news is full of stuff like the US presidential race and people arguing over what products Target should sell during Pride Month? That’s agenda-setting.

The press could easily have spent the entire Trump administration screaming about the dangerous aggressions Trump was advancing against Russia instead of calling him a Putin puppet, and mainstream liberals would have fixated on Trump’s warmongering insanity instead of calling him Putin’s cock holster. But that wouldn’t have served the interests of the empire, which had been planning to ramp up aggressions against Russia for years. They set the agenda, and the public fell in line.

Another of the mundane, almost-invisible ways the public is propagandized from day to day is described in a recent video by Second Thought titled “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda“. We’re continually fed messages by the capitalist machine that we must work hard for employers and accept whatever standards and compensation they see fit to offer, and if we have difficulty thriving in this unjust system the fault lies with us and not with the system. Poor? That’s your fault. Miserable? Your fault. Unemployed? Your fault. Overworked? Your fault.

The continual message we’re fed every day is that there’s nothing to rebel against and nothing to oppose, because any problems we’re perceiving are our own fault and not the fault of an abusive, exploitative system which is built to extract profit from the working class and the ecosystem at the expense of both. The system cannot be a failure, it can only be failed.

Then there’s the ideological herding funnel we discussed recently, which herds the population into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful. Anyone who can’t be herded into either of these mainstream factions is instead herded into fake “populist” factions, which eventually corral them back into the mainstream factions. Those few politically engaged people who can’t be herded toward any of these groups are so small in number that they can simply be marginalized and denied any sizeable platform from which to spread their ideas, and “democracy” does the rest because the majority are supporting the status quo.

Maybe the most consequential of all the mundane, routine ways we’re propagandized is the way the mass media manufacture the illusion of normality in a dystopia so disturbing that we would all scream our lungs out if we could see it with fresh eyes. The way pundits, politicians and reporters will talk about the Biden administration surrounding China with war machinery without also talking about how freakish and horrifying it is that we’re looking at rapidly escalating brinkmanship between nuclear-armed countries. The way American cities are full of homeless people and it’s just treated as a normal and acceptable thing to simply let them stay homeless and push them out of wherever they try to be. The way nothing ever changes no matter who we vote for but we’re still herded into the voting booths and told to vote better.

As a character in the movie Waking Life puts it, “We all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no! Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven’t given us any other options outside the occasional purely symbolic act of voting — do you want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?”

They don’t just tell us what to believe about the world, they tell us what to believe about ourselves. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded on that test.

Over and over and over again, day after day, we are fed seemingly small messages which add up over time. Messages like,

• The world works more or less the way we were taught in school.
• The media have some problems but basically tell the truth.
• The status quo is working basically fine.
• Democracy is real and voting is effective.
• This is the only way things can be.
• Our government might have its problems, but it’s basically good.
• You can earn your way into happiness by working harder.
• You can consume your way into happiness with more spending.
• If you think the system is dysfunctional, you’re the dysfunctional one.
• Those who oppose the status quo are weird and untrustworthy.
• Things might get better after the next election cycle.
• Any attempt to change things is a silly waste of time.

By feeding us all these simple, foundational lies day after day, year after year from the time we are very young, they lay the groundwork for the more complex, specific lies we’ll be told later on. Lies like “Russia/China/Iran/etc is a real problem and its government needs to be stopped,” or “People are struggling financially right now, but it’s just because times are hard and it can’t be helped.”

All the mundane lies serve as a primer for the lies we’ll be told later, because once our worldview has been shaped by them, our basic human cognitive biases and predisposition to reject information which conflicts with our worldview will ensure that we’ll take on board the information which confirms our biases and reject any evidence against it. They construct our worldviews for us, then let our normal cognitive defense systems protect it.

Their messages don’t even need to be well-evidenced or well-argued, they only need to be repeated frequently due to a glitch in human cognition known as the illusory truth effect which causes us to mistake the feeling of having heard something before with the feeling of something being true.

Add to all this the recent development of things like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and the deck becomes stacked against truth even further, because someone’s odds of stumbling across information which conflicts with the propaganda they’ve been fed goes dramatically down. Even if they’re actively searching for information which conflicts the mainstream worldview, algorithms by Google and Google-owned YouTube often make it almost impossible to find.

So that’s what we’re up against. There’s a failure to appreciate just how pervasive and powerful the empire’s propaganda machine is, even among those who are very critical of empire, because propaganda in our society is like water for fish — we’re swimming in it constantly, so we don’t see it. You have to step way, way back and begin examining our situation from its most basic foundations to get any perspective on how all-encompassing it really is.

Finding your way out of the propaganda matrix takes a lot of diligent work, tons of curiosity, the humility to admit you’ve been completely wrong about everything, and more than a little plain dumb luck. But if you keep hacking away at it eventually you get there, and then you can help others get there too. It’s a hard slog, but if our chains are psychological that means they’re ultimately only made of dream stuff. All that needs to happen is for enough of us to wake up.

Everything’s Getting Way More Dangerous And Way More Stupid. Caitlin Johnstone. May 26, 2023

Moon of Alabama has an article out on how an uncomfortable number of relatively restraint-oriented foreign policy officials have been exiting the Biden administration, while a China hawk has just been appointed the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Antiwar has an article out about how New York congressman Jerry Nadler told an Epoch Times reporter that he “wouldn’t care” if Ukraine used US-made F-16s to strike Russian territory, and doesn’t find the possibility that they might do so concerning.

This comes days after we learned that the Biden administration has signed off on Ukraine getting F-16s while also greenlighting an offensive on Crimea using US-made weapons, a nightmare scenario which greatly escalates the risks of nuclear war.

There are no adults behind the wheel of the vehicle that’s driving us toward World War Three. We’re on a bus that’s being driven straight toward a cliff, and it’s being driven by infants. If we survive this it will not be because of the experienced leadership of western governments, but completely in spite of it. ...........

OK Doomer: Real Talk

Life at 2030: Real Talk. OK Doomer by Jessica Wildfire. May 27, 2023.



Like me, you’ve probably spent some time wondering what your life will look like by the year 2030. Conversations around climate change have settled into three main groups. You have the climate deniers who believe it’s all a scam. You have the climate activists who demand urgent action. Now we have climate minimizers, who assure us we’ll be okay in a world with 2-3C of warming.

Well, let’s consider what’s happening now:

Farmers in the U.S. have already abandoned more than 30 percent of their winter-wheat fields this year. It’s the biggest drop in production in 100 years. Grain traders predict it’s going to get worse over the summer. It was a hard winter across the midwest, hit by drought and severe cold.

Even Fox News calls it “devastating.”

It’s not looking good for beef, either. The nation’s cattle inventory is reaching all-time lows this year. As of April, inventory was down 4.4 percent. Again, drought is hitting pastures hard. It’s driving up the cost of feed. Worse, the long-term data shows a clear overall decline over the last 20 years. Even when the beef industry “expands,” we’re producing less than we did during the 1990s. Most agriculture experts will tell you: Beef is in decline, and prices will only go up from here.

For the first time ever, nations are seriously considering a plan to vaccinate chickens and turkeys against avian flu, during the worst outbreak in recorded history. During the last 18 months, the global poultry industry has culled 200 million birds. It’s been having a real impact on prices. All that sounds great for vegans, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that our breadbasket is slowly failing. If it’s not drought and heat waves, it’s the growing threat of disease.

It’s not just in the U.S., either.

Asian countries have already been seeing record-breaking temperatures as high as 112F. China is bracing for another summer of extreme heat, alternating between drought and flooding. Experts predict it will threaten “to disrupt more commodities, even niche ones like rubber and peanut crops.” As of April, drought has already caused delays at 80 percent of the country’s rubber plantations.

Back in February, Britain was rationing fruits and vegetables.

According to CNBC, stores were limiting the purchase of tomatoes, peppers, and cumbers “to three items per customer.” The cause? Extreme weather across southern Europe and northern Africa.

Experts predict that even coffee is going to become a luxury item as climate change kills off 50 percent of farmland by 2050. We’ve already seen coffee farmers in Central America abandoning their fields.

Does this sound like fearmongering?

These are all reported facts.

Here’s the big picture:

We haven’t even crossed over the 1.5C threshold yet. That’s the number climate scientists have told us to stay under, if we’re going to avoid the worst fallout of global warming. Recently, they predicted there’s a very good chance that we’ll breach that limit within the next few years, decades earlier than expected. Artificial intelligence models are predicting it’s guaranteed.

Climate scientists have held back from making detailed predictions about what our lives are going to look like by 2030. They hedge. They don’t want to get blamed for causing panic. They talk in relatively vague terms. Nobody wants to be wrong. Climate “alarmists” like Bill McGuire or Gaia Vince have painted vivid portraits of what to expect down the road. Meanwhile, we’ve seen the rise of climate minimizers over the last few years, people who consider themselves experts who go around insisting that 2C of warming won’t be that bad.

Increasingly, the mass media has started to condition us for life in a 2C world. They’re already working on their minimizer rhetoric.

Are we surprised?

For the last year, they’ve worked hard to convince everyone to accept mass death and disability at the hands of a virus. It’s starting to look like that’s the strategy of choice for unavoidable climate change.

I’m not afraid of sounding like a doomer.

Here’s what I think we can reasonably expect our lives to look like by the year 2030. I think it’s important to talk about. I’m not trying to scare anyone. I’m trying to prepare them, rationally and emotionally.

First, I think we can expect inflation to continue. The vast majority of politicians and economists still live largely in denial when it comes to climate change. They’re not factoring it into their models. It doesn’t matter how much the Federal Reserve keeps hiking up interest rates. That’s not going to help, either. The real problem here is twofold. First, there’s just straight-up corporate greed.

Second, the midwest and southwest are sinking deeper into a geologically predictable megadrought. Climate change is going to make it even worse.

We’re talking about a second Dust Bowl.

Large parts of the U.S. are already seeing the return of dust storms. Earlier this month, a dust storm caused a 72-car pileup in Illinois. More and more, farmers are reporting drought on par with the 1920s and 1930s. As a farmer in Nebraska told local news: “It’s just wildly dry here…and this is the wet season, so we should be soaking up a lot of rain… that’s a little bit scary.”

Severe weather in general will keep getting worse.

According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, severe weather in 2022 cost the U.S. more than $21 billion in crop losses. That’s a minimum estimate that doesn’t even include livestock, structural damage, or other factors. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration calls 2022 the third worst disaster year in American history, with the worst happening in 2017. So anyone trying to claim that we’re seeing less severe weather is…lying.

Meanwhile, lines at food banks keep getting longer. As pandemic SNAP benefits expire, demand is going up everywhere from Utah to California.

When you combine corporate greed with megadrought and soil depletion, it doesn’t take a genius to predict a vast expansion of poverty and hunger by the 2030s. Food is just going to keep getting more expensive.

Rationing and shortages will become the norm. We can cross our fingers and hope that the vegetation zones will simply shift, and that other states can take up the slack by growing more food.

That’s a big if.

Homelessness is going up, anywhere from 6 percent a year in some states to 23 percent in states like Oregon. Housing is just too expensive. It’s partly greed, but also driven by climate change as warmer weather brings disease and insect infestations to the world’s timber supplies. There just aren’t enough houses for people, and investors treat them more as commodities than living spaces. Again, we could adapt by replacing timber with bamboo.

We’re not doing that (yet).

Summers will become unbearable in large parts of the U.S. We’re talking about heat indexes in the 110s on a regular basis.

Forget going outside.

More people are going to rely on air conditioning 24/7. People in Arizona are already using oven mittens to open their car doors.

In an optimistic scenario, we’ll build more solar farms and wind turbines to handle the grid pressure from more people blasting their AC. In a more realistic scenario, you can expect power disruptions and curtailments.

If you’re lucky, it won’t be life-threatening.

Just extremely uncomfortable.

Severe weather is beating up our economy, despite what the deniers and minimizers say. In 2021, damage from natural disasters totaled $145 billion. Americans are feeling it, with 90 percent of us paying more for home insurance. A lot of insurance companies have started to abandon areas prone to extreme weather. They’ve been paying out more than $1 billion a year, a sixfold increase from the 1980s. Ten insurance companies went bankrupt in Florida just over the last two years. Contrary to logic, people are choosing to move to dangerous areas. They’re simply not thinking about their long-term future.

By 2030, you can expect to pay a lot more for insurance depending on where you live. It’s going to get so expensive and hard to find, a lot of Americans will simply start choosing to skip it altogether.

It’ll become another luxury.

We could go on, but I think you get the idea.

This is what the world kinda looks like now, and we haven’t even breached 1.5C of warming. So that’s what we can expect by 2030: We’re going to be paying far more for food. We’re going to be buying a lot less meat, and probably fewer fruits and vegetables. There’s going to be long lines at food banks.

A majority of Americans will be broke and food insecure. We’ll struggle to cool our homes. We’ll struggle to find insurance. We’re going to see people wind up poor and homeless than we didn’t expect.

The year 2030 is going to look a lot like 1930.

The difference is that we’ll already be in a prolonged war with China, because that’s what our politicians and military seem to want more than anything. We’ll very much feel like we’re living through a Second Great Depression, except it’s going to last longer. It will probably be the new normal.

So, a lot of us aren’t “doomed” just yet, especially if we start preparing now. That would mean moving to a plant-based diet. It would mean thinking about a tiny house or an earth-sheltered home with earth tubes instead of some huge structure on the coast or the middle of the Arizona desert. It would mean building or joining a climate-resilient community, and embracing a life that’s framed more around sustainability and homeostasis. On a larger scale, it would mean demanding better public housing and better public transportation. It would mean demanding more efficient use of resources, including water.

We’re in the business of climate adaptation now. Adapting to a hotter earth does two things at once. It helps us in the short term, but it also achieves a lot of the goals that climate optimists say they care about.

I’m writing this because climate minimizers are going around telling us not to worry about a world that’s 2C warmer. They’re trying to convince us that it’ll be fine, that it won’t really have an impact on us. You know, it sounds a lot like climate denial, just in a different outfit with different makeup.

They don’t want us to think about the future in concrete terms like food and housing shortages, and unaffordable home insurance.

If people did that, they would get angry.

They would demand action.

They would do something.

The Real Enemy is Normal. OK Doomer by Jessica Wildfire. May 26, 2023

Here’s the thing:

A Yale study on climate change communication found that 70 percent of Americans are worried about climate change. More than 30 percent of them are deeply worried. And yet, only 9 percent are talking about it.

That’s a huge gap.

Margaret Klein Salamon puts her attention on that gap in the second edition of her book Facing The Climate Emergency. It comes out in a few days. (Yes, she asked me to write about it. No, she’s not paying me anything.) Last year, I wrote about the first edition of her book and how it changed my life. Salamon’s writing has been there for me in the same way that my readers tell me my work has been there for them. When I get dragged through the mud for spreading doom, her book reminds me that it’s healthy to express our sense of grief and especially our outrage at the inaction and sanguine complacency that surrounds us.

People need to hear it. ............