The Free Radical

May all deception be revealed and truth come to light.

The Establishment Media Has Made Reasonable Political Discussion Impossible… For Decades

(Note: This is not the next essay in this series that I had intended. However, circumstances have temporarily diverted my efforts. The establishment media has been a thorn in my side for as long as I can remember… so when the opportunity to challenge, ridicule and eventually tear down the whole whoring edifice came along, I jumped on it. And I’m still jumping… and stomping… and laughing all the way.)

There is nothing more important to the ruling class than controlling the flow of information among the masses. It is essential to elitism to be able to consistently dictate the social/political/economic narrative with impunity. They have been doing just this– covertly– for as long as civilization has existed, for centuries, even millennia.

My attention was first captured by candidate Trump when, early on in the campaign, he started calling out the media for being biased and dishonest. When shortly thereafter he threw most of the Washington establishment under the bus too, I was transfixed. Early in the campaign, like most everyone else, I thought “He’s not going to win… but at least he’s put out some important considerations for the mainstream public mind to consider… for the first time.” In calling out the media and systemic political corruption, he had already accomplished more good at that point than any politician had in the entirety of my life.

By the end of the summer 2016, I was convinced that he would actually win. I encapsulated that prediction rather accurately more than a month before the election in a short story published on my blog October 4th called “Election Results November 9th, 2016.” In that story, I predicted a landslide victory for Trump, but more importantly, I also predicted the hysterical reaction of the leftoid libtard zealots– it’s kinda what the story is really about. (I will admit that I thought Trump would win the popular vote too, although I didn’t say so in the piece. The ‘Russian hack’ must’ve helped Hillary in this regard– not to mention Obama giving the nudge-nudge-wink-wink to illegals two days before the election, assuring them that there would be no legal repercussions if they were to cast their votes… illegally.)

So, Trump wins. Now, let me be perfectly clear that I definitely DO have a vendetta against the establishment media. The presstitutes are the most vile and pernicious evil-doers in society. I liken their betrayal of the public trust to that of a bad cop. THEY are the ones charged with keeping the government honest, with fulfilling a vital role in keeping democracy viable and functional. It is universally agreed that without a robustly free press democracy cannot exist. They abandoned that sacred trust long ago, but absolutely solidified their unconscionable betrayal in September 2001. The establishment presstitutes have been lying and spouting pure unfiltered propaganda ever since 9/11 (and before… to a lesser degree). More than anyone, they are responsible for the gross dysfunctionality in our society today. God, I hate the establishment media!

Somewhat ironically, propaganda is actually pretty easy to spot– except for by those who consume only propaganda. Those who are informationally fed on nothing other than a diet of pure propaganda are hopelessly incapable of distinguishing obvious propaganda from fact-based reporting. That’s precisely how propaganda works: if you have nothing with which to compare a particular news narrative, or in other words, if you make no effort to look outside of the mainstream position, failing to take into consideration dissenting and opposing viewpoints, there will be little hope of correctly identifying even the most obvious propaganda.

Propaganda is most often threadbare of facts and relies heavily on incessant repetition. History has bourn out this simple mechanism of propagandizing that if you repeat a lie often enough, it will eventually be accepted in the public mind as truth. In the complete absence of a competing narrative, dissenting opinion, counter-argument and additional facts, it’s easy to imagine why propaganda is so effective… until now. The popularity of the alternative news media has at the very least brought to bear a degree of healthy skepticism on a longstanding situation.

Perhaps a couple of examples of blatant propaganda are in order. First, let’s consider the situation in Syria. Nearly the entire western establishment media narrative has been little else but naked propaganda. How could this be? There are, and have been, virtually no embedded western journalists participating and witnessing firsthand the military adventures in Syria. There’s a very good reason for this. Any western journalists caught in areas controlled by jihadists would face the very real consequence of being beheaded. So instead, western ‘journalism’ has had to rely almost exclusively upon third-party information in their reporting. The two primary sources of this third-party information have been the UN White Helmets and the SOHR (Syrian Observatory for Human Rights). The White Helmets have been discredited and shown to be dishonest in their fabricating and staging of numerous news items and events in Syria; videos from the group have been proven fraudulent. And the SOHR which has been the number one source for western news out of Syria operates out of the UK, is on the payroll of British intelligence, and is run by one guy, Rami Abdulrahman, who hasn’t been to Syria for 15 years. His contacts on the ground are all embedded with jihadists and ‘moderate rebels.’ Think about that. All of the news is coming from terrorist sources. Is it any wonder that the ‘news’ is invariably critical of Assad’s government forces and their Russian allies? Would sources embedded with terrorists be able to report anything damning about the terrorists themselves without fear of imminent beheading? Western media outlets make very little or no attempt to provide unbiased, critical reporting, dismissing any claims by the other side as purely fictitious propaganda. That’s how propaganda works: it is masterful at projecting its own shortcomings onto all detractors and naysayers… in an act of purest hypocrisy.

The second recent example of naked propaganda is the ‘Russian hacking and outright theft of the recent US election.’ Here we have the classic “according to anonymous intelligence sources…” Consumers of news have to realize that absolutely anything can follow such a phrase and remain forever unverifiable. Whatever the claims may be, they cannot be verified… in the absence of additional evidence, which is precisely what we have with this story: no names, no evidence, and not even a coherent story of exactly how the nefarious deed was accomplished– both the hacking and how it affected the election result. All we have is vague Washington gossip… but remember, if you repeat it often enough in public, eventually it will be accepted as the truth. Additionally, very compelling counter-arguments to the CIA narrative have been offered by Julian Assange and Craig Murray who were directly involved in receiving the ‘hacked’ (leaked) data from a DNC whistleblower, who have both stated unequivocally that neither the Russians– nor any other state actors– were involved. Also, former highly-placed intelligence operative at the NSA, William Binney, has stated definitively that a hack was not the case at all– as the NSA is able to trace and document any such cyber-breaches; rather it was an insider leak– perhaps Seth Rich. And finally, Congressman Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has stated that he nor anyone else in congress has been presented with any evidence backing up the CIA’s claims. These critical and damning facts countering the CIA’s anonymous claims are reported almost nowhere within the establishment media. Again, that’s how propaganda works: stick to the established narrative and ignore any information that arises to refute it.

And if there’s still any doubt that this story is pure propaganda consider this. The entire narrative has been obviously designed to make the whole story about WHO is responsible for leaking the truth to the American public… and not at all about what that revealed truth might be. The leaked emails provided concrete proof– in their own words– of corruption and collusion among deep-pocket democrats, the DNC, the Clinton campaign and the establishment media. To Trump supporters, and much of the rest of the world, THIS is the real story, and yet the presstitute propaganda media decided to report it not at all. Isn’t that curious?

These are two very obvious examples of state-sponsored propaganda. For those news consumers who are in the habit of seeking out differing points of view on any topic, it is very easy to see through the transparency of the propaganda. However, for those who are in the habit of only listening to the singular narrative offered by the many establishment media outlets repeating the same baseless, fact-free narrative, it simply does not occur to them to question it. And so it is uncritically believed.

Democracy, property rights, the free market, and the open exchange of ideas are the fundamental interlocking bricks from which western society has been built. The establishment press however, especially in recent years, has hamstrung the minds of millions of news consumers so that there is no longer an open exchange of ideas, the free market is neither free nor conceptually understood, and property rights and democracy are just quaint notions from a bygone era. Healthy discussion and debate have been replaced with the most divisive and pernicious identity politics, driven by a relentless and biased media blatantly flaunting the agenda of divide-and-conquer. The unavoidable result of this deliberate program of mutual alienation has naturally been to create vast unbridgeable caverns of total silence between all those with differing ideologies.

I visit with my elderly parents every Sunday. They are some of the last remnants of a dwindling demographic– the only demographic (over 70) where the majority still embraces the old establishment media as their primary (and often only) source for news. All discussion of a political nature has been banned in my parents’ house… and understandably so. Reasonable political discussion has become all but impossible.

My parents are only aware of the propaganda narrative. The only facts which exist– the only ones that CAN exist in their minds– are the easily-parroted talking points supporting the spoon-fed opinions doled out on the major news networks. To them, there are no valid opposing viewpoints; they simply don’t exist, and anyone expressing an alternative opinion (like me) is suffering from the delusion of ‘conspiracy theories’ and ‘fake news.’ On the occasions where I’ve sought to bring additional facts to bear on the popular (among old fogies) viewpoints, I’ve been consistently shot down before any meaningful discussion can ensue. Here’s what my Dad usually says: “Oh, c’mon! I’ve never heard of that. Where’d you get that? Off the internet?” And that’s it; the implication is crystal clear. There are no additional facts; there are no opposing viewpoints with any validity; CNN said so. End of story.

I could try to spend hours updating and informing their position with uncountable and verifiable pertinent facts, but in the end, they will simply reject them– presumably because the TV news anchors have already done all of the critical thinking required. Why should they waste their time with this nonsense of hearing the other sides of the debate? There’s only one side of the debate that matters: the right one. And my parents– who ironically both came out of NAZI Germany– are steadfastly convinced that the right opinion is always issued and fully vetted by the establishment media. Everyone else is obviously a crackpot.

My visits with my parents are, unsurprisingly, rather quiet. Last Sunday, they brought up the issue of climate change… and how Trump will be the death of us all. I didn’t say a word; I couldn’t say a word. To even suggest the possibility that there just might be another side to the story would have me branded as an idiotic Trump supporter and a hopeless denier of reality– yeah, you know, the ‘reality’ that everybody knows without question… because questioning reality outside of what the ‘authorities’ have approved is automatically stupid and a waste of everybody’s time. Yup, it’s pretty sad.

But I bet there are many among my readers who can relate all too well with what I’ve described here. It is exceedingly common– this inability to communicate with each other. I don’t much enjoy talking to a brick wall… and I bet you don’t either.

As I outlined in the first essay of this series, it really comes down to open-mindedness as opposed to closed-mindedness. There is only one external cure for closed-mindedness. Internally, the cure is ever-available to anyone who chooses to suddenly consider alternative possibilities lying outside of their current beliefs; the mind opens from the inside out as a matter of choice– the choice to learn. In the absence of such a choice, only reality can break the lock of closed-mindedness– and that is invariably an ugly process. It happens when reality begins to present events and circumstances which glaringly, and finally undeniably, fall outside of the propaganda narrative. Through unexpected events, the closed mind is shattered; reality and the vested narrative diverge too sharply; they can no longer be reconciled. A total breakdown ensues.

Thankfully, the world is changing rapidly– despite my parents’ oft-repeated phrase “Oh, that’ll never change.” And it appears that the majority has finally rejected the propaganda media in favour of their own research and critical thinking. Three recent surveys conducted by Fox, The Washington Post and The Washington Times, all found that most Americans did NOT believe that the Russians influenced the election.

I was happy when Trump won as the self-proclaimed destroyer of the establishment media. But initially I saw a major problem: How was Trump going to nail the last nail into the coffin of the dying media without looking like a heavy-handed fascist dictator? He can’t just shut them down or revoke their licenses. But fortunately, it appears that Trump doesn’t really have to lift a finger. Trump and the public at large need only to continue selling rope to the media… lots and lots of rope… for they are apparently quite determined to hang themselves with their ever-more-outrageous bias and lies. Their credibility turns to hysteria by the day… and all the open-minded folk can see it rather clearly. Only the closed-minded echo-chamber folk can’t yet see that there’s any problem at all– except that the rest of the world appears to have gone bat-shit crazy, holding all these impolite and bigoted views that don’t agree with the evening news.

The revelations are coming thick and furious. And in the end it doesn’t really matter what we each believe as individuals. It’s much more about whether our minds are open to a reality peeling off its encrusted layers like a homeless stripper, and being able to adequately adapt to the barrage of revelations… or if we continually choose to shut our minds from all alternative possibility… and await the shattering moment when reality triumphs over such insane rigidity.

All I ask is that you just consider the possibilities… it’s all about the possibilities…