On December 15, the night that the Biden administration released some of the remaining JFK files while withholding others with another half-assed excuse, Tucker Carlson, the most-watched cable news television host, delivered a monologue about the JFK assassination. It garnered a great deal of attention.

Although I don’t watch Carlson’s television show, I received messages from many friends and colleagues, people I highly respect, about his monologue’s great significance, so I watched that episode. And then I watched it many more times.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a man whom I hold in the highest esteem, tweeted that it was “the most courageous newscast in 60 years. The CIA’s murder of my uncle was a successful coup d’état from which our democracy has never recovered.”

While I completely agree with his second sentence, I was underwhelmed by Carlson’s words, to put it mildly. I thought it was clearly “a limited hangout,” as described by the former CIA agent Victor Marchetti:

Spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting, sometimes even volunteering, some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.

Or listens carefully.

Carlson surely said some things that were true, and, as my friends and many others have insisted, he was the first mainstream corporate journalist to say that “the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.”

But “involved” is a word worthy of a lawyer, a public relations expert, or the CIA itself because it can mean something significant or nothing. Or a little of both. It is a weasel word.

And the source for Carlson’s claim was an anonymous source, someone who he said “had access” to the JFK files that were never released. We know, of course, that when The New York Times and its ilk cite “anonymous sources,” claiming that they have told them this or that, this raises eyebrows. Or should. Anyone who closely follows that paper’s claims knows that it is a CIA conduit, but now, those who know this are embracing Tucker Carlson as if he were the prophet of truth, as if a Rupert Murdock-owned Fox TV host who is paid many millions of dollars, has become the Julian Assange of corporate journalism.

In a 2010 radio interview, Mr. Carlson said, “ I am 100 % his bitch. Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do.”

The obvious question is: Why would Fox News allow Carlson to say now what many hear as shocking news about the JFK assassination?

So let me run down exactly what Carlson did say.

For five minutes of the 7:28 minute monologue, he said things that are obviously true: that Jack Ruby killed Oswald and that the claim that both acted alone is weird and beyond any odds; that the Warren Commission was shoddy; that the CIA weaponized the term “conspiracy theory” in 1967 according to Lance De Haven-Smith’s book Conspiracy Theory in America; that the CIA’s brainwashing specialist psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West visited Jack Ruby in jail and declared him insane, contrary to all other assessments of Ruby’s mental state; and that the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that there was probably a conspiracy in the president’s assassination.

All of this is true but not news to those knowledgeable about the assassination. Nevertheless, it was perhaps news to Carlson’s audience and therefore good to hear on a corporate news site.

But then, the next few minutes – the key part of his report, the part that drew all the attention – got tricky.

Carlson said that just that day – December 15, 2022 – when all the JFK documents were due to be released but many were withheld, “we spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents.” Who would have such access, and how, is left unaddressed, but it is implied that it is a CIA source, but maybe not. It is strange to say the least.

Carlson then said he asked this person, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy?” And the answer was “I believe they were involved.” Carlson goes on to say, “And the answer we received was unequivocal. Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.”

Note the words “hand,” “believe,” “involved,” and then “unequivocal.”

“Hand” can mean many things and is very vague. For example, in front of his wife, a man tells his friend, “I had a hand in preparing Christmas dinner.” To which his wife, laughing, replies, “Yes, he did, he put the napkins on the table.”

To “believe” something is very different from knowing it, as Dr. Martin Schotz, one of the most perceptive JFK assassination researchers, has written in his book, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy

On Belief Versus Knowledge

It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.

And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth — as opposed to only believe the truth — is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility. It is precisely in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness and hopelessness to action, with the ultimate aim of being empowered and confident in one’s rational powers.

“Involved,” like the word “hand,” can mean many things; it is vague, slippery, not definitive, and is used by tabloid gossip columnists to suggest scandals that may or not be true.

“Unequivocal” does not accurately describe the source’s statement, which was: “I believe.” That is, unless you take someone’s belief as evidence of the truth, or you wish to make it sound so.

Note that nowhere in Carlson’s report does he or his alleged source say clearly and definitively that the CIA/National Security State murdered President Kennedy, for which there has long been overwhelming evidence. Such beating-around-the-bush is quite common and tantalizes the audience to think the next explosive revelation will be dispositive. Yet no release of documents is needed to confirm that the CIA killed Kennedy, as if the national security state would allow itself to be pinned for the murder.

Waiting for the documents is like waiting for Godot; and to promote some hidden smoking gun, some great revelation is to engage in a pseudo-debate without end. It is to do the killers’ bidding for them. And it is quite common. There are many well-known “dissident” writers who continue to claim that there is not enough evidence to conclude that the CIA/national security state killed the president. And this is so for those who question the official story. Furthermore, there are many more pundits who maintain that Oswald did the deed alone, as the Warren Report concluded and the mainstream corporate media trumpet. This group is led by Noam Chomsky, whose acolytes bow to their master’s ignorant conclusions.

Maybe we’ll know the truth in 2063.

While it is true that some people change dramatically, Tucker Carlson, the Fox Television celebrity, would be a very unlikely candidate. He defended Eliot Abrams and praised Oliver North; supported the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; went to Nicaragua to support those Contras; smeared the great journalist Gary Webb while defending the CIA; supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq; and much more. Alan MacLeod chronicled all this in February of this year for those who have known nothing of Carlson’s past, including his father’s work as a U.S. intelligence operative as director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the body that oversees government-funded media, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio and TV Martí and Voice of America – all U.S. propaganda outlets.

Now we are being asked to accept that Carlson is out to show how the CIA is “involved” in the murder of JFK. Why would so many fall for such rhetoric?

No doubt any crumb of national news coverage about the CIA and the assassination by a major corporate player elicits an enthusiastic response from those who have tried for many years to tell the truth about JFK’s murder. One’s first response is excitement. But such reactions need to tempered by sober analyses of exactly what has been said, which is what I am doing here. I, too, wish it were a breakthrough but think it is more of the same. Much ado about nothing. A way to continue to foster uncertainty, not knowledge, about the crime.

I see it as a game of false binaries in the same way the Democrats and Republicans are portrayed as mortal enemies. Yes, there are some differences, but all-in-all they are one party, the War Party, who agree on the essential tenets of U.S. imperial policy. They both represent the interests of the upper classes and are financed by them. They both work within the same frame of reference. They both support what Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst, rightly calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).

If one asks a dedicated believer in the truthfulness of The New York Times Corporation or NPR, for example, what they think of Tucker Carlson, they will generally dismiss him with disdain as a right-wing charlatan. This, of course, works in reverse if you ask Carlson’s followers what they think of the Times or NPR. Yet for those who think outside the frame – and they are all non-mainstream – a different picture emerges. But sometimes they are taken in by those whose equivocations are extremely lawyerly but appeal to what they wish to hear. This is exactly what a “limited hangout” is. Snagged by some actual truths, they bite on the bait of nuances that don’t mean what they think they do.

Left vs. right, Fox TV vs. The New York Times, NPR, etc.: Just as Carlson’s father Dick Carlson ran the CIA-created U.S. overseas radio propaganda under Reagan and George H. W. Bush, so too the present head of National Public Radio, John Lansing, did the same under Barack Obama. See my piece, Will NPR Now Change its Name to National Propaganda Radio. Birds of a feather disguised as hawks and sparrows in a game meant to confuse and create scrambled brains.

Lastly, let me mention an odd “coincidence.” On December 6 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., nine days before the partial JFK files release and Tucker Carlson’s monologue, the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an organization devoted to JFK research, gave a presentation showcasing what was advertised as explosive new information about the Kennedy assassination. The key presenter was Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and prominent JFK assassination researcher who has sued the CIA for documents involving Lee Harvey Oswald and CIA operative George Joannides.

On November 22 Morley had published an article titled “Yes, There is a JFK Smoking Gun.” It was subtitled: It will be found in 44 CIA documents that are still “Denied in Full.” The documents he was referring to allegedly concern contacts between Oswald and Joannides in the summer and fall of 1963 in New Orleans and in Mexico City. “They [the CIA] were running a psychological warfare operation, authorized in June 1963, that followed Oswald from New Orleans to Mexico City later that year,” wrote Morley.

Well, the “smoking gun” documents were not released on Dec 15, although on November 20 and then again at The National Press Club on December 6, Morley spoke of them as proving his point about the CIA’s involvement with Oswald, which has been obvious for a long time. Although he said he hadn’t seen these key documents but was awaiting their release, he added that even if they were not released that will still prove him correct. In other words, with this bit of legerdemain, he was saying: What I don’t know, and may not soon not know, supports what I’m claiming even though I don’t know it. And even if the files were released, he writes, “As for the conspiracy question, the massive withholding of documents makes it premature to draw any conclusions. The undisclosed Oswald operation was not necessarily part of a conspiracy. It might indicate CIA incompetence, not complicity. Again, only the CIA knows for sure.” So the smoking gun is not a smoking gun and the waters of uncertainty roll on and on into the receding future.

CIA incompetence, not complicity. Of course. It ain’t necessarily so. Or it is, or might be, or isn’t.

Morley is one of many who still cannot say that the CIA killed the president. Tucker Carlson can speak of its “involvement” just like Morley. We need more information, more files, etc. But even if we get them, we still won’t know. Maybe by 2063.

My question for Tucker Carlson: Who was your anonymous source? And did your source see the documents that were never disclosed? What specific documents are you referring to? And do they prove that the CIA killed Kennedy or just suggest “involvement”?

Finally, as I said before, even as there has long been a mountain of evidence for the CIA’s murder of JFK (and RFK as well, although that is never mentioned), many prominent people continue to play as if there is not. Listen to this video interview between Chris Hedges and former CIA officer John Kiriakou. It is all about the nefarious deeds of the CIA. Right toward the end of the interview (see minutes 32:30-33:19), Hedges says, “So I have to ask [since he has to answer] this question since I know Oliver Stone is convinced the CIA killed JFK … I’ve never seen any evidence that backs it up …” and they both share a mocking laugh at Stone as if he were the village idiot when he knows more about the JFK assassination than the two of them put together, and Kiriakou says he too has not seen such evidence. It’s a disgusting but typical display of arrogance and a “limited hangout.” Criticize the CIA only to make sure you whitewash them for one of their greatest achievements: the murder of President John F. Kennedy. This is straight from Chomsky’s playbook.

Beware double-talkers and the games they play. They come in different flavors.

Neurosis to a greater or lesser degree is the norm in western industrialized societies. Drawing on this fact is the key to effective propaganda. It is well known that neurotics always return to the place they are running away from. It’s a circle game of frustration in which being frustrated is actually the “solution,” because the real problems cannot be faced. The Donald Trump phenomenon is an example of this on a social level.

Everybody knows that Trump is loved or hated in equal measure. And everyone knows he dominates the minds of those who love or hate him, just as the media endlessly focuses on him in a way that only very obtuse people would fail to analyze. The media made Trump and he is their gold mine and the key to the effective propaganda they run for their masters in high finance and the intelligence agencies. Although his image seems big and bold and brazen, it is like an Impressionist painting that, as the art critic John Berger writes in “The Eyes of Claude Monet,” “… is painted in such a way that you are compelled to recognize that it is no longer there …. You cannot enter an Impressionist painting; instead it extracts your memories. In a sense it is more active than you – the passive viewer is being born; what you receive is taken from what happens between you and it. No more within it.”

Like Trump, the impression is fugitive, here and gone, vague and precise. It’s meaning is fleeting. Mutation and flux and the evanescence of appearances are its essence. As with Trump, nothing is really clear, although many claim it is. Monet was painting at a time (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) when, due to technological and economic changes, an old world was dissolving into the modern. Jump a century or more and we have Trump and the electronic media where vagueness and flux rule perceptions.

Celebrity Culture

For Trump is a product of celebrity culture that has come to dominate our world that reminds you that the world of the past has become a reality television show and all the talk about the good old days is an illusion and that we are now living in a society where experience has been reduced to meaningless and ephemeral gestures. The politicians of all stripes play ghosts.

America will never be great again, for it is corrupted to the core and the mass media present it in images that have no bearing on reality. This is something neurotics cannot face, so they still follow the circle game played by the media and fight political battles that are exercises in frustration. But it keeps them busy. Like a sports fan whose favorite team has just lost a game or had a losing season, there is always tomorrow, next season, or the upcoming election.

Before Donald Trump emerged on the national scene with his 2015 announcement that he was running for the presidency, he was known as a wealthy real estate operator who had often declared bankruptcy and a comical reality-television host with a strange hairdo. In short, he was a wealthy celebrity with huge mansions who cavorted with the rich and famous, including former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, among many others.

How such a billionaire celebrity could ever have become president and have such a large following among the white working class – the “deplorables” in Hillary Clinton’s elitist lingo – has its roots in the transformation of American culture from the late 1950s to today when illusion and performance have replaced any semblance of reality.

Boorstin, Postman, and Gabler

Daniel Boorstin described this transformation in its early days in his brilliant book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962). He dissected the radical change taking place whereby images and manufactured pseudo-events – “however planned, contrived, or distorted – have become more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.” What I describe as neurotic circling, Boorstin called tautologies. In this new theatrical world of mirrors, people imitate themselves by looking into the mirror of themselves imitating the famous people of all stripes: actors, politicians (excuse the repetition), celebrities, et al. Boorstin writes:

Our very efforts to debunk celebrities, to prove (whether by critical journalistic biographies or by vulgar ‘confidential’ magazines) that they are unworthy of our admiration, are like efforts to get ‘behind the scenes’ in the making of other pseudo-events. They are self-defeating. They increase our interest in the fabrication …. The hat, the rabbit, and the magician are all equally news.

Thirty years after The Image, Neil Postman added to this critique by showing how the new computer technology was tyrannizing over all human values and ways of knowing. In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, he showed how the ecology of technology, wherein “One significant change generates total change,” creates a totally new world where cultural and personal coherence become nearly impossible. In a Technopoly where technology and technique rule over all life, any sense of truth dissolves like soap bubbles. “That it why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words ‘A study has shown … ‘or “Scientists now tell us that … ‘” Scientism and gibberish blend with technological tricks to create an electronic digital society where, in Boorstin’s words, “the news behind the news” – or the creation of the illusions – becomes the most interesting news of all, even as its debunking is a tautology like the definition of a celebrity: Someone who is known for being known.

Finally, in 1998 Neal Gabler put the finishing touches on these developments with his book, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. Drawing on Boorstin and Postman, he argued that in the United States life itself had become an ongoing movie in which the manipulation of reality and real life melodramas, the movies and the new information technologies, had melded into a cultural transformation so profound that it marked the end of traditional values and/or the start of a brave new world. When fiction replaced facts and everything became entertainment in a technological kaleidoscope, “life itself was gradually becoming a medium all its own, like television, radio, print, and film, and that all of us were becoming at once performance artists in and audience for a grand, ongoing show…” The traditional media turned from some semblance of reporting actual news to become conveyors of “lifies” (a predecessor of “selfies”) – a flood of entertainments taken from soap-operatic events hyped to the teeth – while theatrical techniques were applied to politics, religion, war, etc., and everything became show business, including the presidency and the national sitcom of political reporting.

Political Theater and Propaganda

This is the context for Trump’s rise to prominence. It makes clear that he is not an aberration but part of a long development that gave us the acting president Ronald Reagan and all the presidential performers who have followed. One could say, if Trump never existed, he would have to be invented, which of course he has been, as was Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Biden. Is it surprising that the Ukrainian president Zelensky is a comedic television and movie actor? Performers such as these follow their Director’s orders.

Furthermore, all these developments omit the crucial part played by government propaganda apparatuses in conjunction with the media and technology conglomerates. The growth of such massive propaganda is entwined with all these cultural changes, although it is not the primary focus of the three books mentioned. When all these threads are woven together, we arrive at our current situation – a vast tapestry of lies.

There are various schools of thought on the Trump phenomenon, and most say more about the thinkers than their thoughts. I am referring to Trump’s rise to prominence, his 2016 election, his presidency, and all that continues to transpire around him in 2022 and into the future. (And although Trump will be an old man in 2024 – the same age that Biden is today – you can be assured he will be garnering the headlines then.)

Monet Paints Trump

These diverse impressions of what it all means fall into at least four categories, which I will sketch as I see them.

Trump supporters seemingly came out of nowhere in 2016, but this is false. If anything, they have been smoldering for many decades and their complaints have been mounting for many good reasons. In 1969, Pete Hamill, the New York journalist, wrote an article for New York Magazine called “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class.” He said:

They call my people the White Lower Middle Class these days. It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I suppose, of the missionary zeal of those sociologists who still think you can place human beings on charts. It most certainly does not sound like a description of people on the edge of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt. And yet, that is the case. All over New York tonight, in places like Inwood, South Brooklyn, Corona, East Flatbush, and Bay Ridge, men are standing around saloons talking of their grievances, and even more darkly about possible remedies. Their grievances are real and deep; their remedies could blow this city apart.

The White Lower Middle Class? Say that magic phrase at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and monstrous images arise from the American demonology. Here comes the murderous rabble: fat, well-fed, bigoted, ignorant, an army of beer-soaked Irishmen, violence-loving Italians, hate-filled Poles. Lithuanians and Hungarians (they are never referred to as Americans) …. Sometimes these brutes are referred to as ‘the ethnics’ or ‘the blue-collar’ types. But the bureaucratic, sociological phrase is White Lower Middle Class. Nobody calls it the Working Class anymore.

He went on to quote various white working-class New Yorkers, their quiet bitterness, their ignorant racism fueled by a media that emphasizes “the politics of theatre, its seeming inability to ever explain what is happening behind the photographed image,” which results in a superficial understanding of what is really behind their frustrated complaints Neurosis to a greater or lesser degree is the norm in western industrialized societies. Drawing on this fact is the key to effective propaganda. It is well known that neurotics always return to the place they are running away from. It’s a circle game of frustration in which being frustrated is actually the “solution,” because the real problems cannot be faced. The Donald Trump phenomenon is an example of this on a social level.

Everybody knows that Trump is loved or hated in equal measure. And everyone knows he dominates the minds of those who love or hate him, just as the media endlessly focuses on him in a way that only very obtuse people would fail to analyze. The media made Trump and he is their gold mine and the key to the effective propaganda they run for their masters in high finance and the intelligence agencies. Although his image seems big and bold and brazen, it is like an Impressionist painting that, as the art critic John Berger writes in “The Eyes of Claude Monet,” “… is painted in such a way that you are compelled to recognize that it is no longer there …. You cannot enter an Impressionist painting; instead it extracts your memories. In a sense it is more active than you – the passive viewer is being born; what you receive is taken from what happens between you and it. No more within it.”

Like Trump, the impression is fugitive, here and gone, vague and precise. It’s meaning is fleeting. Mutation and flux and the evanescence of appearances are its essence. As with Trump, nothing is really clear, although many claim it is. Monet was painting at a time (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) when, due to technological and economic changes, an old world was dissolving into the modern. Jump a century or more and we have Trump and the electronic media where vagueness and flux rule perceptions.

Celebrity Culture

For Trump is a product of celebrity culture that has come to dominate our world that reminds you that the world of the past has become a reality television show and all the talk about the good old days is an illusion and that we are now living in a society where experience has been reduced to meaningless and ephemeral gestures. The politicians of all stripes play ghosts.

America will never be great again, for it is corrupted to the core and the mass media present it in images that have no bearing on reality. This is something neurotics cannot face, so they still follow the circle game played by the media and fight political battles that are exercises in frustration. But it keeps them busy. Like a sports fan whose favorite team has just lost a game or had a losing season, there is always tomorrow, next season, or the upcoming election.

Before Donald Trump emerged on the national scene with his 2015 announcement that he was running for the presidency, he was known as a wealthy real estate operator who had often declared bankruptcy and a comical reality-television host with a strange hairdo. In short, he was a wealthy celebrity with huge mansions who cavorted with the rich and famous, including former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, among many others.

How such a billionaire celebrity could ever have become president and have such a large following among the white working class – the “deplorables” in Hillary Clinton’s elitist lingo – has its roots in the transformation of American culture from the late 1950s to today when illusion and performance have replaced any semblance of reality.

Boorstin, Postman, and Gabler

Daniel Boorstin described this transformation in its early days in his brilliant book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962). He dissected the radical change taking place whereby images and manufactured pseudo-events – “however planned, contrived, or distorted – have become more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.” What I describe as neurotic circling, Boorstin called tautologies. In this new theatrical world of mirrors, people imitate themselves by looking into the mirror of themselves imitating the famous people of all stripes: actors, politicians (excuse the repetition), celebrities, et al. Boorstin writes:

Our very efforts to debunk celebrities, to prove (whether by critical journalistic biographies or by vulgar ‘confidential’ magazines) that they are unworthy of our admiration, are like efforts to get ‘behind the scenes’ in the making of other pseudo-events. They are self-defeating. They increase our interest in the fabrication …. The hat, the rabbit, and the magician are all equally news.

Thirty years after The Image, Neil Postman added to this critique by showing how the new computer technology was tyrannizing over all human values and ways of knowing. In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, he showed how the ecology of technology, wherein “One significant change generates total change,” creates a totally new world where cultural and personal coherence become nearly impossible. In a Technopoly where technology and technique rule over all life, any sense of truth dissolves like soap bubbles. “That it why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words ‘A study has shown … ‘or “Scientists now tell us that … ‘” Scientism and gibberish blend with technological tricks to create an electronic digital society where, in Boorstin’s words, “the news behind the news” – or the creation of the illusions – becomes the most interesting news of all, even as its debunking is a tautology like the definition of a celebrity: Someone who is known for being known.

Finally, in 1998 Neal Gabler put the finishing touches on these developments with his book, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. Drawing on Boorstin and Postman, he argued that in the United States life itself had become an ongoing movie in which the manipulation of reality and real life melodramas, the movies and the new information technologies, had melded into a cultural transformation so profound that it marked the end of traditional values and/or the start of a brave new world. When fiction replaced facts and everything became entertainment in a technological kaleidoscope, “life itself was gradually becoming a medium all its own, like television, radio, print, and film, and that all of us were becoming at once performance artists in and audience for a grand, ongoing show…” The traditional media turned from some semblance of reporting actual news to become conveyors of “lifies” (a predecessor of “selfies”) – a flood of entertainments taken from soap-operatic events hyped to the teeth – while theatrical techniques were applied to politics, religion, war, etc., and everything became show business, including the presidency and the national sitcom of political reporting.

Political Theater and Propaganda

This is the context for Trump’s rise to prominence. It makes clear that he is not an aberration but part of a long development that gave us the acting president Ronald Reagan and all the presidential performers who have followed. One could say, if Trump never existed, he would have to be invented, which of course he has been, as was Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Biden. Is it surprising that the Ukrainian president Zelensky is a comedic television and movie actor? Performers such as these follow their Director’s orders.

Furthermore, all these developments omit the crucial part played by government propaganda apparatuses in conjunction with the media and technology conglomerates. The growth of such massive propaganda is entwined with all these cultural changes, although it is not the primary focus of the three books mentioned. When all these threads are woven together, we arrive at our current situation – a vast tapestry of lies.

There are various schools of thought on the Trump phenomenon, and most say more about the thinkers than their thoughts. I am referring to Trump’s rise to prominence, his 2016 election, his presidency, and all that continues to transpire around him in 2022 and into the future. (And although Trump will be an old man in 2024 – the same age that Biden is today – you can be assured he will be garnering the headlines then.)

Monet Paints Trump

These diverse impressions of what it all means fall into at least four categories, which I will sketch as I see them.

Trump supporters seemingly came out of nowhere in 2016, but this is false. If anything, they have been smoldering for many decades and their complaints have been mounting for many good reasons. In 1969, Pete Hamill, the New York journalist, wrote an article for New York Magazine called “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class.” He said:

They call my people the White Lower Middle Class these days. It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I suppose, of the missionary zeal of those sociologists who still think you can place human beings on charts. It most certainly does not sound like a description of people on the edge of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt. And yet, that is the case. All over New York tonight, in places like Inwood, South Brooklyn, Corona, East Flatbush, and Bay Ridge, men are standing around saloons talking of their grievances, and even more darkly about possible remedies. Their grievances are real and deep; their remedies could blow this city apart.

The White Lower Middle Class? Say that magic phrase at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and monstrous images arise from the American demonology. Here comes the murderous rabble: fat, well-fed, bigoted, ignorant, an army of beer-soaked Irishmen, violence-loving Italians, hate-filled Poles. Lithuanians and Hungarians (they are never referred to as Americans) …. Sometimes these brutes are referred to as ‘the ethnics’ or ‘the blue-collar’ types. But the bureaucratic, sociological phrase is White Lower Middle Class. Nobody calls it the Working Class anymore.

He went on to quote various white working-class New Yorkers, their quiet bitterness, their ignorant racism fueled by a media that emphasizes “the politics of theatre, its seeming inability to ever explain what is happening behind the photographed image,” which results in a superficial understanding of what is really behind their frustrated complaints that they too are victims of the system and are not respected. In an article ostensibly about New Yorkers, Hamill explained where such anger came from, not to justify misdirected racism or ignorance of how things actually work in this country. Update his account, and you have a good portion of Trump’s followers today. His description is just as apt today: “The working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”

The perplexing thing, only explained by the rise of celebrity culture, the Internet, and the dumbing-down of the general public, is how Trump, a billionaire reality-TV buffoon could garner their devoted allegiance. A man so different from them, many of whom come from states with large rural populations and Trump a quintessential New Yorker who probably never got his hands in the earth. Of course he said many of the things they were desperate to hear about making the U.S.A. great again, no foreign entanglements, etc., many appealing things after they spent so many years hearing the politicians talk the same jive talk about invading this country and that and fighting Russia to the death. His message appealed to many. They bought his spiel as if he would save them; a claim that all politicians use, but he was touching the suppressed underbelly of the American delusion. An upper class politician talking about, among others things, class matters.

Then there is the liberal counterpoint to Trump, which is essentially the Democratic Party’s interpretation that Trump represents a shocking neo-fascist resurrection of the historically racist, isolationist strain in American history. This position is ironically consonant with the extremist 1950s claims of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk – Nixon and Trump’s lawyer friend Roy Cohn, who represented McCarthy – who claimed there were communists under every bed and the Russians (U.S.S.R.) were coming to seize our liberties. The accusations against Trump, being led by The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, etc., are that he is a Russian-connected operative, a stooge, and that he is intent on undermining American democracy and establishing an American totalitarianism; that he stole the 2016 election with the help of Russia; and that he always has been in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. The liberals who hold this assessment of Trump, what some critics call “Trump derangement syndrome,” are as devoted to their assessments as are Trump’s supporters. Both groups look to Trump as an angel or devil; he transfixes both in equal measure.

Aside from those who see Trump as a savior or Satan, there are various other opinions of him that cross ideological divides. Most are equivocal, at best. Some leftists admire him for his less belligerent stance toward Russia and understand the totally debunked Russia-gate accusations against him and the impeachment proceedings as confirmation of his sincerity, although they do not endorse some of his other positions. Others view him as the personification of the rise of neo-fascist, far-right Christian fundamentalism, while also seeing Biden and the Democrats as perfidious fools leading the country to disaster. Some conservatives like aspects of his agenda, as do a small number of libertarians, but they remain very wary. There are many variations on these opinions with most falling somewhere between a rock and a hard place. A sort of pox on both contestants in the electoral game, but most are based on the presupposition that the show must go on, even as both sides claim electoral fraud when their side loses. This is the frame within which impressions of Trump and his opponents are formed.

Rarely is it considered – and this is the take of a tiny minority – that with the rise of celebrity culture, pseudo-events, image-making, and the vast, sophisticated, electronic, intelligence, propaganda apparatus, that Donald Trump is not the impressions he gives off but a creation of hidden forces manipulating reality to an unimaginable extent. That Trump is not the arch-enemy of Biden or Clinton or any Democrat, but that he is a partner in a great game of deception in which the good guys and bad guys play their parts for the Great Director. It is worth remembering what Barbara Honegger, who was present in the West Wing of the White House in February 1981, overheard that day:

We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the American public believes is false. – William J. Casey, CIA Director

It is also worth considering a different version of the point the psychologist James Hillman and the writer Michael Ventura raised with their book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. People might ask themselves if over the past fifty or five years their lives have gotten better or worse under all the American presidents, including Biden and Trump. The answer is obvious. Therefore, maybe it is time to imagine the most extreme possibility: That Casey’s statement has come to fruition.

It is not just painters and comedians who do impressions.that they too are victims of the system and are not respected. In an article ostensibly about New Yorkers, Hamill explained where such anger came from, not to justify misdirected racism or ignorance of how things actually work in this country. Update his account, and you have a good portion of Trump’s followers today. His description is just as apt today: “The working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”

The perplexing thing, only explained by the rise of celebrity culture, the Internet, and the dumbing-down of the general public, is how Trump, a billionaire reality-TV buffoon could garner their devoted allegiance. A man so different from them, many of whom come from states with large rural populations and Trump a quintessential New Yorker who probably never got his hands in the earth. Of course he said many of the things they were desperate to hear about making the U.S.A. great again, no foreign entanglements, etc., many appealing things after they spent so many years hearing the politicians talk the same jive talk about invading this country and that and fighting Russia to the death. His message appealed to many. They bought his spiel as if he would save them; a claim that all politicians use, but he was touching the suppressed underbelly of the American delusion. An upper class politician talking about, among others things, class matters.

Then there is the liberal counterpoint to Trump, which is essentially the Democratic Party’s interpretation that Trump represents a shocking neo-fascist resurrection of the historically racist, isolationist strain in American history. This position is ironically consonant with the extremist 1950s claims of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk – Nixon and Trump’s lawyer friend Roy Cohn, who represented McCarthy – who claimed there were communists under every bed and the Russians (U.S.S.R.) were coming to seize our liberties. The accusations against Trump, being led by The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, etc., are that he is a Russian-connected operative, a stooge, and that he is intent on undermining American democracy and establishing an American totalitarianism; that he stole the 2016 election with the help of Russia; and that he always has been in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. The liberals who hold this assessment of Trump, what some critics call “Trump derangement syndrome,” are as devoted to their assessments as are Trump’s supporters. Both groups look to Trump as an angel or devil; he transfixes both in equal measure.

Aside from those who see Trump as a savior or Satan, there are various other opinions of him that cross ideological divides. Most are equivocal, at best. Some leftists admire him for his less belligerent stance toward Russia and understand the totally debunked Russia-gate accusations against him and the impeachment proceedings as confirmation of his sincerity, although they do not endorse some of his other positions. Others view him as the personification of the rise of neo-fascist, far-right Christian fundamentalism, while also seeing Biden and the Democrats as perfidious fools leading the country to disaster. Some conservatives like aspects of his agenda, as do a small number of libertarians, but they remain very wary. There are many variations on these opinions with most falling somewhere between a rock and a hard place. A sort of pox on both contestants in the electoral game, but most are based on the presupposition that the show must go on, even as both sides claim electoral fraud when their side loses. This is the frame within which impressions of Trump and his opponents are formed.

Rarely is it considered – and this is the take of a tiny minority – that with the rise of celebrity culture, pseudo-events, image-making, and the vast, sophisticated, electronic, intelligence, propaganda apparatus, that Donald Trump is not the impressions he gives off but a creation of hidden forces manipulating reality to an unimaginable extent. That Trump is not the arch-enemy of Biden or Clinton or any Democrat, but that he is a partner in a great game of deception in which the good guys and bad guys play their parts for the Great Director. It is worth remembering what Barbara Honegger, who was present in the West Wing of the White House in February 1981, overheard that day:

We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the American public believes is false. – William J. Casey, CIA Director

It is also worth considering a different version of the point the psychologist James Hillman and the writer Michael Ventura raised with their book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. People might ask themselves if over the past fifty or five years their lives have gotten better or worse under all the American presidents, including Biden and Trump. The answer is obvious. Therefore, maybe it is time to imagine the most extreme possibility: That Casey’s statement has come to fruition.

It is not just painters and comedians who do impressions.

While the so-called liberal and conservative corporate mainstream media – all stenographers for the intelligence agencies – pour forth the most blatant propaganda about Russia and Ukraine that is so conspicuous that it is comedic if it weren’t so dangerous, the self-depicted cognoscenti also ingest subtler messages, often from the alternative media.

A woman I know and who knows my sociological analyses of propaganda contacted me to tell me there was an excellent article about the war in Ukraine at The Intercept, an on-line publication funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar I have long considered a leading example of much deceptive reporting wherein truth is mixed with falsehoods to convey a “liberal” narrative that fundamentally supports the ruling elites while seeming to oppose them. This, of course, is nothing new since it’s been the modus operandi of all corporate media in their own ideological and disingenuous ways, such as The New York Times, CBS, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, Fox News, CNN, NBC, etc. for a very long time.

Nevertheless, out of respect for her judgment and knowing how deeply she feels for all suffering people, I read the article. Written by Alice Speri, its title sounded ambiguous – “The Left in Europe Confronts NATO’s Resurgence After Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine” – until I saw the subtitle that begins with these words: “Russia’s brutal invasion complicates…” But I read on. By the fourth paragraph, it became clear where this article was going. Speri writes that “In Ukraine, by contrast [with Iraq], it was Russia that had staged an illegal, unprovoked invasion, and U.S.-led support to Ukraine was understood by many as crucial to stave off even worse atrocities than those the Russian military had already committed.” [my emphasis]

While ostensibly about European anti-war and anti-NATO activists caught on the horns of a dilemma, the piece goes on to assert that although US/NATO was guilty of wrongful expansion over many years, Russia has been an aggressor in Ukraine and Georgia and is guilty of terrible war crimes, etc.

There is not a word about the U.S. engineered coup in 2014, the CIA and Pentagon backed mercenaries in Ukraine, or its support for the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and Ukraine’s years of attacks on the Donbass where many thousands have been killed. It is assumed these actions are not criminal or provocative. And there is this:

The uncertain response of Europe’s peace activists is both a reflection of a brutal, unprovoked invasion that stunned the world and of an anti-war movement that has grown smaller and more marginalized over the years. The left in both Europe and the U.S. have struggled to respond to a wave of support for Ukraine that is at cross purposes with a decades long effort to untangle Europe from a U.S.-led military alliance. [my emphasis]

In other words, the article, couched in anti-war rhetoric, was anti-Russia propaganda. When I told my friend my analysis, she refused to discuss it and got angry with me, as if I therefore were a proponent of war. I have found this is a common response.

This got me thinking again about why people so often miss the untruths lying within articles that are in many parts truthful and accurate. I notice this constantly. They are like little seeds slipped in as if no one will notice; they work their magic nearly unconsciously. Few do notice them, for they are often imperceptible. But they have their effects and are cumulative and are far more powerful over time than blatant statements that will turn people off, especially those who think propaganda doesn’t work on them. This is the power of successful propaganda, whether purposeful or not. It particularly works well on “intellectual” and highly schooled people.

For example, in a recent printed interview, Noam Chomsky, after being introduced as a modern day Galileo, Newton, and Descartes rolled into one, talks about propaganda, its history, Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, etc. What he says is historically accurate and informative for anyone not knowing this history. He speaks wisely of U.S. media propaganda concerning its unprovoked war against Iraq and he accurately calls the war in Ukraine “provoked.” And then, concerning the war in Ukraine, he drops this startling statement:

I don’t think there are ‘significant lies’ in war reporting. The U.S. media are generally doing a highly creditable job in reporting Russian crimes in Ukraine. That’s valuable, just as it’s valuable that international investigations are underway in preparation for possible war crimes trials.

In the blink of an eye, Chomsky says something so incredibly untrue that unless one thinks of him as a modern day Galileo, which many do, it may pass as true and you will smoothly move on to the next paragraph. Yet it is a statement so false as to be laughable. The media propaganda concerning events in Ukraine has been so blatantly false and ridiculous that a careful reader will stop suddenly and think: Did he just say that?

So now Chomsky views the media, such as The New York Times and its ilk, that he has correctly castigated for propagandizing for the U.S. in Iraq and East Timor, to use two examples, is doing “a highly creditable job in reporting Russian crimes in Ukraine,” as if suddenly they were no longer spokespeople for the CIA and U.S. disinformation. And he says this when we are in the midst of the greatest propaganda blitz since WW I, with its censorship, Disinformation Governance Board, de-platforming of dissidents, etc., that border on a parody of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Even slicker is his casual assertion that the media are doing a good job reporting Russia’s war crimes after he earlier has said this about propaganda:

So it continues. Particularly in the more free societies, where means of state violence have been constrained by popular activism, it is of great importance to devise methods of manufacturing consent, and to ensure that they are internalized, becoming as invisible as the air we breathe, particularly in articulate educated circles. Imposing war-myths is a regular feature of these enterprises.

This is simply masterful. Explain what propaganda is at its best and how you oppose it and then drop a soupçon of it into your analysis. And while he is at it, Chomsky makes sure to praise Chris Hedges, one of his followers, who has himself recently wrote an article – The Age of Self-Delusion – that also contains valid points appealing to those sick of wars, but which also contains the following words:

Putin’s revanchism is matched by our own.

The disorganization, ineptitude, and low morale of the Russian army conscripts, along with the repeated intelligence failures by the Russian high command, apparently convinced Russia would roll over Ukraine in a few days, exposes the lie that Russia is a global menace.

‘The Russian bear has effectively defanged itself,’ historian Andrew Bacevich writes.

But this is not a truth the war makers impart to the public. Russia must be inflated to become a global menace, despite nine weeks of humiliating military failures. [my emphasis]

Russia’s revanchism? Where? Revanchism? What lost territory has the U.S. ever waged war to recover? Iraq, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, etc.? The U.S.’s history is a history not of revanchism but of imperial conquest, of seizing or controlling territory, while Russia’s war in Ukraine is clearly an act of self-defense after years of U.S./NATO/Ukraine provocations and threats, which Hedges recognizes. “Nine weeks of humiliating military failures”? – when they control a large section of eastern and southern Ukraine, including the Donbass. But his false message is subtly woven, like Chomsky’s, into sentences that are true.

“But this is not a truth the war makers impart to the public.” No, it is exactly what the media spokespeople for the war makers – i.e. The New York Times (Hedges former employer, which he never fails to mention and for whom he covered the Clinton administration’s savage destruction of Yugoslavia), CNN, Fox News, The Washington Post, the New York Post, etc. impart to the public every day for their masters. Headlines that read how Russia, while allegedly committing daily war crimes, is failing in its war aims and that the mythic hero Zelensky is leading Ukrainians to victory. Words to the effect that “The Russian bear has effectively defanged itself” presented as fact.

Yes, they do inflate the Russian monster myth, only to then puncture it with the myth of David defeating Goliath.

But being in the business of mind games (too much consistency leads to clarity and gives the game away), one can expect them to scramble their messages on an ongoing basis to serve the U.S. agenda in Ukraine and further NATO expansion in the undeclared war with Russia, for which the Ukrainian people will be sacrificed.

Orwell called it “doublethink”:

Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality one denies – all this is indispensably necessary….with the lie always one step ahead of the truth.

Revealing while concealing and interjecting inoculating shots of untruths that will only get cursory attention from their readers, the writers mentioned here and others have great appeal for the left intelligentsia. For people who basically worship those they have imbued with infallibility and genius, it is very hard to read all sentences carefully and smell a skunk. The subterfuge is often very adroit and appeals to readers’ sense of outrage at what happened in the past – e.g. the George W. Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Chomsky, of course, is the leader of the pack, and his followers are legion, including Hedges. For decades they have been either avoiding or supporting the official versions of the assassinations of JFK and RFK, the attacks of September 11, 2001 that led directly to the war on terror and so many wars of aggression,and the recent Covid-19 propaganda with its devastating lockdowns and crackdowns on civil liberties. They are far from historical amnesiacs, of course, but obviously consider these foundational events of no importance, for otherwise they would have addressed them. If you expect them to explain, you will be waiting a long time.

In a recent article – How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy – Christian Parenti writes this about Chomsky:

Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to “remove themselves from society,” and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit.

Parenti’s critique of the left’s response (not just Chomsky’s and Hedges’) to Covid also applies to those foundational events mentioned above, which raises deeper questions about the CIA’s and NSA’s penetration of the media in general, a subject beyond the scope of this analysis.

For those, like the liberal woman who referred me to The Intercept article, who would no doubt say of what I have written here: Why are you picking on leftists? my reply is quite simple.

The right-wing and the neocons are obvious in their pernicious agendas; nothing is really hidden; therefore they can and should be opposed. But many leftists serve two masters and are far subtler. Ostensibly on the side of regular people and opposed to imperialism and the predations of the elites at home and abroad, they are often tricksters of beguiling rhetoric that their followers miss. Rhetoric that indirectly fuels the wars they say they oppose.

Smelling skunks is not as obvious as it might seem. Being nocturnal, they come forth when most are sleeping.

It’s been raining incessantly for three days. It is a cool early morning in the beginning of July and I have just made a cup of coffee. Now an electrical power outage has occurred and so I am sitting in a rocking chair in the semi-darkness savoring my coffee and feeling thankful that I made it in time. I have a close relationship with coffee and the end of night and the break of day. As for time, that is as mysterious to me as the fact that I am sitting here in its embrace. The electric clocks have stopped. I think: To exist – how amazing!

More than the coffee, however, I am luxuriating in the sound of the tumbling rain. Its beautiful music creates a cocoon of peace within which I find temporary joy. The joy of doing nothing, of pursuing no purpose. Of knowing that whatever I do it will never be enough, for me or anyone, and the world will continue turning until time stands still, or whatever time does or is according to those who invented it. I will be gone and others will have arrived and the water will flow from the skies and the clocks will still tell people what they don’t know – time – although they will continue to tell it.

Humans are the telling animals.

A few weeks ago, when this area was in a mini-drought, the local newspaper, in the typical wisdom of such cant, had a headline that said “there is a threat of rain later this week.” They are experts at threats. This is the corporate media’s purpose. Rain is a threat, joy is a threat, doing nothing is a threat, the sun is a threat – but the real threats they conceal. To create fear seems to be their purpose, as they do not tell us about the real threats. Their purpose is not to tell the truth, but if you listen closely you can hear it.

In the middle of the night I woke up to go to the bathroom, and outside the small bathroom window I watched the rain engulfing the lower roof and sluicing down the shingles in two heavy streams. I thought how the desiccated mind of the headline writer must be feeling now, but then I realized that he or she was asleep, as usual. There is a moist world and a dry one, and the corporate media is run by arid souls who would like to make the world a desert like their masters of war in Washington.

Then as I sit here my brief peace is roiled by the memory of reading Tacitus, the Roman historian, and his famous quote of Calgacus, an enemy of Rome:

These plunderers of the world [the Romans], after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

I think of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on his recent deathbed. Here was a man whose entire life was dedicated to the American Empire. He spent all his allotted time making war or making money from the spoils of war. He was a desert maker, a slaughterer for the Empire. No doubt he died very rich in gold.

I can no longer hear the rain because my mind is filled with the loud thought of what Rumsfeld thought as he lay dying. Was he sorry? Did he believe in God or was his god Mars, the Roman god of war? Did he smile a bloody smile or say he was sorry and beg for forgiveness from all his innocent victims? Did he see the faces of the children of Iraq that he slaughtered? Or did he pull an Eichmann and say, “I will leap into my grave laughing”?

Your guess is as good as mine, but mine leans toward the bloody smile of a life well spent in desert making. But that is a “known unknown.”

Rolling thunder and a lightning strike in the east jolt me back from my deaf dark thoughts. The sound of the rain returns. The coffee tastes great. Peace returns with the unalloyed gift of the ravishing rain.

Yet the more I sit and listen and watch it soundly stipple the garden and grass, the more thoughts come to me, as my father once told me: Thoughts think us as much as we think thoughts. It’s what we do with our thoughts that count, he said, and like lightning, if we don’t flash when we are given the gift of life, when we’re gone, it will be as if we never were, like the lightning before it flashed.

Thomas Merton’s prophetic words from his hermitage in the Kentucky woods in 1966 think me:

Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.

There are moments in many lives when, if one is lucky, they are initiated into a ritual that sustains them throughout life. To others these experiences can easily seem paltry and meaningless, but to the receiver they offer a crack into deeper dimensions of being and becoming. For me it was my introduction to coffee during a hurricane.

My father had driven my mother, three of my sisters, and me to Jones Beach on Long Island. This was before people checked the weather every minute. The sky in the southwest grew darker as we drove, but on we went. The beach was deserted except for some gulls and the parking lot empty. My father parked the car close to the beach and while my sisters and mother sat in the car, and my mother, listening to the weather reports, issued warnings to us, my father and I ran like wild dogs into the heavy surf despite her admonitions that the hurricane from the south was arriving sooner than expected. It started to rain hard. The surf picked up. We swam and got battered and shouted exultantly and came out shaking with the chills. A pure white sea gull landed on my wet head and my father laughed. Awe-struck, I stood stock still and my shaking stopped. In its mouth the sea gull held a purple ribbon, which it dropped at my feet as it flew off. I grabbed the ribbon and we jogged up to the concession building where there was one man working. My father ordered coffee and a hot chocolate for me. But they had run out of hot chocolate. So my father ordered two coffees and filled mine with three or four sugars. I had never sampled coffee and didn’t like the smell, but my father said to drink it, with the sugar it will taste good and it will warm you up. It strangely tasted like hot chocolate. We toasted our adventure as I drank my Proustian madeleine at eleven-years-old.

I had put the ribbon on the counter as we drank. When we were going back to the car, I noticed there were words on the ribbon. They said: Rest in peace. I have long lost the ribbon but retain its message.

So now every morning between the end of night and the break of day, I sit with my coffee and listen. And even when it isn’t raining, I watch the birds emerge from their nightly rests to greet the day with their songs. They tell me many things, and they are all free.

This morning I am wondering if Donald Rumsfeld ever heard them.

I suspect their message was an “unknown unknown” for him, just like the gift of rain. He preferred the rain of death from the skies in the form of bombs and missiles. He was only doing his job.

He made a desert and called it peace.

In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine. My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil devil, Satan, the Lord of the underworld, the Trickster, the Grand Master who rules the pit of smelly death, the place below where bodies go.

The psychoanalytic literature is full of examples of death anxiety revealed in anal dreams of shit-filled overflowing toilets and people pissing in their pants. Ernest Becker put it simply in The Denial of Death:

No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat because it reminds people of death.

The theological literature is also full of warnings about the devil’s wiles. So too the Western classics from Aeschylus to Melville. The demonic has an ancient pedigree and has various names. Rational people tend to dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense. This is hubris. The Furies always exact their revenge when their existence is denied. For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again.

Since excremental visions and the fear of death haunt humans – the skull at the banquet as William James put it – the perfect symbol of protection is toilet paper that will keep you safe and clean and free of any reminder of the fear of death running through a panicked world. It’s a magic trick of course, an unconscious way of thinking you are protecting yourself; a form of self-hypnosis.

One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines. People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.” They are worse than toilet paper. At least toilet paper serves a practical function. Real vaccines, as the word’s etymology – Latin, vaccinus, from cows, the cowpox virus vaccine first used by British physician Edward Jenner in 1800 to prevent smallpox – involve the use of a small amount of a virus. The RNA inoculations are not vaccines. To say they are is bullshit and has nothing to do with cows. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.

These experimental inoculations do not prevent the vaccinated from getting infected with the “virus” nor do they prevent transmission of the alleged virus. When they were approved recently by the FDA that was made clear. The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe. Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does. What does that tell us?

Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are evil and have ulterior motives. Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions. Does this sound too extreme? Radically evil? Come on!

So what drives the refusal to consider that demonic forces are at work with the corona crisis?

Why do the same people who get vaccinated believe that a PCR test that can’t, according to its inventor Kary Mullis, test for this so-called virus, believe in the fake numbers of positive “cases”? Do these people even know if the virus has ever been isolated?

Such credulity is an act of faith, not science or confirmed fact.

Is it just the fear of death that drives such thinking?

Or is it something deeper than ignorance and propaganda that drives this incredulous belief?

If you want facts, I will not provide them here. Despite the good intentions of people who still think facts matter, I don’t think most people are persuaded by facts anymore. But such facts are readily available from excellent alternative media publications. Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky has released, free of charge, his comprehensive E-Book: The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup D’Etat, and the “Great Reset.” It’s a good place to start if facts and analysis are what you are after. Or go to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Childrens Health Defense, Off-Guardian, Dissident Voice, Global Research, among numerous others.

Perhaps you think these sites are right-wing propaganda because many articles they publish can also be read or heard at some conservative media. If so, you need to start thinking rather than reacting. The entire mainstream political/media spectrum is right-wing, if you wish to use useless terms such as Left/Right. I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens. Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.

I am interested in asking why so many people can’t accept that radical evil is real. Is that a right-wing question? Of course not. It’s a human question that has been asked down through the ages.

I do think we are today in the grip of radical evil, demonic forces. The refusal to see and accept this is not new. As the eminent theologian, David Ray Griffin, has argued, the American Empire, with its quest for world domination and its long and ongoing slaughters at home and abroad, is clearly demonic; it is driven by the forces of death symbolized by Satan.

I have spent many years trying to understand why so many good people have refused to see and accept this and have needed to ply a middle course over many decades. The safe path. Believing in the benevolence of their rulers. When I say radical evil, I mean it in the deepest spiritual sense. A religious sense, if you prefer. But by religious I don’t mean institutional religions since so many of the institutional religions are complicit in the evil.

It has long been easy for Americans to accept the demonic nature of foreign leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Easy, also, to accept the government’s attribution of such names as the “new Hitler” to any foreign leader it wishes to kill and overthrow. But to consider their own political leaders as demonic is near impossible.

So let me begin with a few reminders.

• The U.S. destruction of Iraq and the mass killings of Iraqis under George W. Bush beginning in 2003. Many will say it was illegal, unjust, carried out under false pretenses, etc. But who will say it was pure evil?
• Who will say that Barack Obama’s annihilation of Libya was radical evil?
• Who will say the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and so many Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was radical evil?
• Who will say the U.S. war against Syria is demonic evil?
• Who will say the killing of millions of Vietnamese was radical evil?
• Who will say the insider attacks of September 11, 2001 were demonic evil?
• Who will say slavery, the genocide of native people, the secret medical experiments on the vulnerable, the CIA mind control experiments, the coups engineered throughout the world resulting in the mass murder of millions – who will say these are evil in the deepest sense?
• Who will say the U.S. security state’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, et al. were radical evil?
• Who will say the trillions spent on nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them to annihilate the human race is not the ultimate in radical evil?

This list could extend down the page endlessly. Only someone devoid of all historical sense could conclude that the U.S. has not been in the grip of demonic forces for a long time.

If you can do addition, you will find the totals staggering. They are overwhelming in their implications.

But to accept this history as radically evil in intent and not just in its consequences are two different things. I think so many find it so hard to admit that their leaders have intentionally done and do demonic deeds for two reasons. First, to do so implicates those who have supported these people or have not opposed them. It means they have accepted such radical evil and bear responsibility. It elicits feelings of guilt. Secondly, to believe that one’s own leaders are evil is next to impossible for many to accept because it suggests that the rational façade of society is a cover for sinister forces and that they live in a society of lies so vast they the best option is to make believe it just isn’t so. Even when one can accept that evil deeds were committed in the past, even some perhaps intentionally, the tendency is to say “that was then, but things are different now.” Grasping the present when you are in it is not only difficult but often disturbing for it involves us.

So if I am correct and most Americans cannot accept that their leaders have intentionally done radically evil things, then it follows that to even consider questioning the intentions of the authorities regarding the current corona crisis needs to be self-censored. Additionally, as we all know, the authorities have undertaken a vast censorship operation so people cannot hear dissenting voices of those who have now been officially branded as domestic terrorists. The self-censorship and the official work in tandem.

There is so much information available that shows that the authorities at the World Health Organization, the CDC, The World Economic Forum, Big Pharma, governments throughout the world, etc. have gamed this crisis beforehand, have manipulated the numbers, lied, have conducted a massive fear propaganda campaign via their media mouthpieces, have imposed cruel lockdowns that have further enriched the wealthiest and economically and psychologically devastated vast numbers, etc. Little research is needed to see this, to understand that Big Pharma is, as Dr. Peter Gøtzsche documented eight years ago in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, a world-wide criminal enterprise. It takes but a few minutes to see that the pharmaceutical companies who have been given emergency authorization for these untested experimental non-vaccine “vaccines” have paid out billions of dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations.

It is an open secret that the WHO, the Gates Foundation, the WEF led by Klaus Schwab, and an interlocking international group of conspirators have plans for what they call The Great Reset, a strategy to use the COVID-19 crisis to push their agenda to create a world of cyborgs living in cyberspace where artificial intelligence replaces people and human biology is wedded to technology under the control of the elites. They have made it very clear that there are too many people on this planet and billions must die. Details are readily available of this open conspiracy to create a transhuman world.

Is this not radical evil? Demonic?

Let me end with an analogy. There is another organized crime outfit that can only be called demonic – The Central Intelligence Agency. One of its legendary officers was James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence from 1954 until 1975. He was a close associate of Allen Dulles, the longest serving director of the CIA. Both men were deeply involved in many evil deeds, including bringing Nazi doctors and scientists into the U.S. to do the CIA’s dirty work, including mind control, bioweapons research, etc. The stuff they did for Hitler. As reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, when the staunch Catholic Angleton was on his deathbed, he gave an interviews to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento. He confessed:

He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest….’Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,’ he told Trento in an emotionless voice. ‘The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted…. Outside this duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.’ He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day – Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were ‘the grand masters,’ he said. ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’ Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. ‘I guess I will see them there soon.’

Until we recognize the demonic nature of the hell we are now in, we too will be lost. We are fighting for our lives and the spiritual salvation of the world. Do not succumb to the siren songs of these fathers of lies.

Resist.

2. Marty says:

   Another good column. Don’t let the criticism get you down. There are many who pretend they are left ,but are anything but. Don’t waste your time on them.
   The original critics of the Warren report were people like Bertrand Russell and M.S.Aroni.

3. Louis N Proyect says:

   “I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens. Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.”

   You don’t seem to get that you are a conspiracy theorist. As for being a left-wing nut, the real question is your utter lack of familiarity with a Marxist class analysis. Off-Guardian has pretty much evolved into a wing of the Trumpist right, following its propaganda on COVID-19. By writing for it, you are helping to shore up Tucker Carlson and all the other nut-jobs that helped make it possible for a half-million Americans to die from the illness. It could have been a much lower number if Trump hadn’t been saying the same thing as the dingbats who put out Off-Guardian. “It was just a cold…” “Masks don’t work…” “Our liberties are being suppressed…” Blah-blah-blah. Do you think that your articles don’t line up with the far right? Then, you need to develop a sense of self-awareness that is typically absent in tenured professors.

   1. Newton E. Finn says:

      I, too, think that Ed and some others on the more radical left have gotten this pandemic wrong. A long string of deep state/mass media deceptions from the killing of JFK to and through the World Center Atrocity created a comfortable framework in which the pandemic was understandably viewed, at least at first, as just the latest plutocratic plot to entrench and expand their interests. And there was indeed evidence that could be marshalled in this direction. At some point in the pandemic’s progress, however, it should have become apparent that we were dealing with a real phenomenon that threatened the entire world including the plutocrats, who while exploiting the pandemic to get ever more obscenely rich and powerful, were also scared shitless on a personal level that they too (or their loved ones) could get sick and die. That said, I think you’re being disrespectful to a man who has stuck his neck out for a lifetime in telling us the truth (as he saw it) about the machinations of entrenched evil in our midst, so often doing its dirty work behind the scenes. With regard to the Off-Guardian, you are engaging promiscuously in guilt by association, a favorite way in which the left has eaten its own since its inception. The real tragedy here IMHO is that the pandemic and the neoliberal destabilization and paralysis it has brought (and will likely continue to bring) may well offer a genuine revolutionary/evolutionary opening, one which the marginalized radical left could never have generated on its own. Thus many who should be at the forefront of “seizing the time” are instead missing it entirely and unwittingly lending credence to reactionary forces, who want nothing more than a speedy end to the pandemic so that we can return, pedal to the metal, to exploitative and ecocidal neoliberal capitalism.

4. Lorie says:

   I don’t know much about Karl Jung, but his idea of the shadow includes the notion that if you don’t recognize your own shadow, if you don’t develop “an imagination for evil” then you project it outward (as Sanjoy said above), and you remain innocent, but your very “innocence” (which is really just denial) enables the shadow, or the evil, to take hold in bigger ways. Paul Levy says it better than I just did:
   “We still go on thinking that we are “simplex and not duplex,” to use Jung’s words. We thus imagine ourselves to be “innocuous, reasonable and humane.” We don’t deny that terrible things are happening, but since we regard ourselves as harmless, Jung points out, “it is always ‘the others’ who do them.” When we are not in touch with the potential evil that dwells within us, we project it outside of ourselves in a futile attempt to disown it, thereby falling prey to and unknowingly acting out in the external world the very evil that we are turning away from within ourselves. Evil thrives on our turning a blind eye towards it.” https://www.awakeninthedream.com/articles/carl-jung-imagination-evil
   This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t put the billionaires etc on trial for crimes against humanity (they absolutely should be on trial) or that we can’t organize (oh except we can’t because everyone’s afraid to come out of the house), but I think it’s important to realize that each of us has a kind of totalitarian inside, and we need to understand that. Or we’ll never defeat the madness. That’s not at all a popular stance in a world view without shade (or shadow).
   It reminds me of Father Zossima in _Brothers Karamazov_ who said something like (i’m paraphrasing) Everytime there’s a crime, tell yourself that YOU are responsible for that crime. That’s also not a popular stance because it’s seen as defeatism, or “acceptance”. But it isn’t.
   Anyway, obviously your article resonated a lot–this is something I’ve been thinking about recently–calling evil what it is. But not thinking that I’m particularly innocent.

   1. ALBERT L ROSSI says:

      Well said, Lorie. Whether inflected through Jung or Dostoevsky, or Sartre’s _mauvaise foi_, we are indeed all guilty. The very bad faith which lay unacknowledged, or better, purposely suppressed, in my own daily armchair criticism (perhaps whining is more precise), was one of the realizations that shook me to the core when reading «Seeking Truth». And yes, an examination of conscience is only the first step, as all lapsed Catholic atheists like myself know.

5. ALBERT L ROSSI says:

   Brilliant and powerful, even moving––everything I have come to expect since I discovered Ed’s writing. «Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies» was a real highlight of my pandemic year reading list.

   I just wanted to address one particular thing Ed brings up in this essay: the way critics who once classified him as a left-wing nut now call him a right-wing nut.

   This hits solidly home. It has long been for me a struggle to reconcile (at least for my dogmatic colleagues) my own progressive-to-radical views (if those labels truly denote anything, or ever did) with those I hold concerning the assassinations of the 60s, let alone the more recent instances of “pure evil” noted here. How, indeed, did claiming JFK was assassinated by the National Security State come to be a specifically “right-wing” conspiracy theory?

   But this is nothing compared to how that label has been weaponized to shut down discussion of the pandemic among a broad sector of the populace.

   I have been saying for some time now that this was, among other things, an ingenious ploy to get the “opposition” (the “so-called Left”, as Douglas Valentine would say) on board. You can’t really fool them too much any more with the threat of Islamic terrorism (though many of them seem to be lapping up the China/Russia b.s.). But a humanitarian crisis? Perfect! In the interest of humanity, we will simply look the other way when it comes to corporate malfeasance and profiteering, and totalitarian strictures, even censorship. (Don’t be distracted by conspiracies: we need to fight the system as a whole. That has to be one of the most hackneyed false oppositions in political and social science.)

   And isn’t it funny how the “anti-science” shibboleth, once aimed at supporters of the megalithic fossil-fuel industry, is now aimed at critics of the megalithic pharmaceutical industry?

   It has long been a goal of our intelligence community to build an “acceptable”, controllable Left. Seems like that goal has finally been achieved.

   Allen Dulles is laughing his burning ass off in hell.

   1. Barbara says:

      Condolences from another former left-wing transformed to a right-wing nut. It’s really laughable once you stop crying.

6. ab says:

   I’m trying to get into this but I’m not getting anywhere. What does it do for us to think of this regime as evil instead of criminal? At war crimes tribunals you don’t get hanged for evil. You don’t get nuked for evil. You… go to hell? I do not see these assholes shaking in their boots. Angleton’s just bragging.

   They’re certainly unencumbered by ethical or moral structures. But to avoid the fundamental attribution error we ought to look for a circumstance that elicits that sort of misbehavior. And one jumps out at you right away. Impunity.

   They do what they want because they can get away with it. In this case crime pays.

   That’s the way the outside world sees this. Bolton, certainly one of the poster boys, carried out a massive neoSoviet obstruction campaign to keep the word impunity out of the relevant sections of the World Summit Outcome Document. He would have loved to substitute evil because that’s not a term of art. Impunity is. Arbitrary conduct is. Hostis humani generis is.

   This government’s the enemy of everyone on earth. When we depose them and make a pyramid of their skulls, that will be why.

   1. Andy says:

      Hi ab, I love your post. As an atheist I tend to agree with your premise:
      “What does it do for us to think of this regime as evil instead of criminal?”
      One answer, perhaps overly simple, is that the concept of “crime” is often created by criminals. The Gulag Archipelago has hundreds of stories of innocent civilians getting arrested by the police for “crimes” against the Soviet. They would then spend ten or twenty years getting worked to death in a labor camp for their “criminal” behavior.
      It’s interesting that organized religion, for all its faults, at least offers meta-governmental view of morality. The American founding fathers recognized this and tried to create a government free *from* religion, not because they were atheist (although some were) but because they knew the dangers of ascribing moral authority to government.

   2. Skip Scott says:

      The problem with using the word criminal instead of evil is that it implies that we have “rule of law” that punishes criminals. In fact for the evil ones who have all the power, there is no justice; it’s JUST US. Raw power is all they react to or understand. Although the word “evil” has religious connotations for some, I believe it is more accurate. To be a criminal there has to be effective “rule of law” for them to violate. In fact for the truly powerful evil ones there is no effective “rule of law.” They will never face prosecution by the current system. My hope is that Karma is real, and they will engender their own punishment by the evil ways sometime soon. “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”- MLK.

      1. Gary Weglarz says:

         I quite agree Skip. Sadly over the last 500+ years of the West’s rule over the entire planet, much of the absolute barbarity and genocide and plunder undertaken has all been completely – “legal” – rather than being considered – “criminal” except by those on the receiving end. I find that the concept of “evil” touches more closely the presence of an amoral abyss so vast that it can defend bringing about the “legal” deaths of a half-a-million Iraqi children as worth it – and then today claim concern for the welfare of Syrian children in order to justify yet another – “legal” – “humanitarian regime-change war” – while simultaneously facilitating the mass starvation of children in Yemen all in the same breath. The West is now basically a large interconnected criminal enterprise desperately attempting to retain power over the planet.

“The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.

This is true. The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience. We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.

Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.

For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team, The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World__; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket. All this is documented and not disputed. It is shocking only to those who don’t do their homework and see what is happening today outside a broad historical context.

With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and went on the defensive. It therefore should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves. Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.

Just the other day The New York Times had this headline:

Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims.

Notice the lack of the word alleged before “false virus claims.” This is guilt by headline. It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook that owns Instagram. That ban should follow soon, as the Times’ reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. “makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers” at Facebook. Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and The Boston Globe.

This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.

Which brings me to the recent work of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, both of whom have strongly and rightly decried this censorship. As I understand their arguments, they go like this.

First, the corporate media have today divided up the territory and speak only to their own audiences in echo chambers: liberal to liberals (read: the “allegedly” liberal Democratic Party), such as The New York Times, NBC, etc., and conservative to conservatives (read” the “allegedly” conservative Donald Trump), such as Fox News, Breitbart, etc. They have abandoned old school journalism that, despite its shortcomings, involved objectivity and the reporting of disparate facts and perspectives, but within limits. Since the digitization of news, their new business models are geared to these separate audiences since they are highly lucrative choices. It’s business driven since electronic media have replaced paper as advertising revenues have shifted and people’s ability to focus on complicated issues has diminished drastically. Old school journalism is suffering as a result and thus writers such as Greenwald and Taibbi and Chris Hedges (who interviewed Taibbi and concurs: part one here) have taken their work to the internet to escape such restrictive categories and the accompanying censorship.

Secondly, the great call for censorship is not something the Silicon Valley companies want because they want more people using their media since it means more money for them, but they are being pressured to do it by the traditional old school media, such as The New York Times, who now employ “tattletales and censors,” people who are power hungry jerks, to sniff out dissenting voices that they can recommend should be banned. Greenwald says:

They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous ‘disinformation.’

Thus, the old school print and television media are not on the same page as Facebook, Twitter, etc. but have opposing agendas.

In short, these shifts and the censorship are about money and power within the media world as the business has been transformed by the digital revolution.

I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power hungry reporters at the Times or CNN or any media outlet. All these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled. These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so. If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer. They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core. For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many. The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal conspiracy.

To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense. These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc. They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control, use, and infiltrate the media. Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.

In Surveillance Valley, investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden’s revelations. Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.

Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of The New York Times, etc. The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives it its marching orders.

That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.

But for whom do these intelligence agencies work? Not for themselves.

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world’s wealth through the stories they tell. It is a symbiotic relationship. As FDR put it bluntly in 1933, this coterie of wealthy forces is the “financial element in the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” Their wealth and power has increased exponentially since then, and their connected tentacles have further spread to create what is an international deep state that involves such entities as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, those who meet yearly at Davos, etc. They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship.

As is well known, or should be, the CIA was the creation of Wall St. and serves the interests of the wealthy owners. Peter Dale Scott, in “The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld,” says of Allen Dulles, the nefarious longest running Director of the CIA and Wall St. lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell:

There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles’s influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director.

It was Dulles, long connected to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, international corporations, and a friend of Nazi agents and scientists, who was tasked with drawing up proposals for the CIA. He was ably assisted by five Wall St. bankers or investors, including the aforementioned Frank Wisner who later, as a CIA officer, said his “Mighty Wurlitzer” was “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.” This he did by recruiting intellectuals, writers, reporters, labor organizations, and the mainstream corporate media, etc. to propagate the CIA’s messages.

Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges are correct up to a point, but they stop short. Their critique of old school journalism à la Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing of Consent model, while true as far as it goes, fails to pin the tail on the real donkey. Like old school journalists who knew implicitly how far they could go, these guys know it too, as if there is an invisible electronic gate that keeps them from wandering into dangerous territory.

The censorship of Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an exemplary case. His banishment from Instagram and the ridicule the mainstream media have heaped upon him for years is not simply because he raises deeply informed questions about vaccines, Bill Gates, the pharmaceutical companies, etc. His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.

To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues. To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.

This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state’s assassinations of his father and uncle, JFK. It is why his wonderful recent book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, that contains not one word about vaccines, was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces. These worms must be kept in the can, just as the power of the international overlords represented by the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset must be. They must be dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories not worthy of debate or exposure.

Robert Kennedy, Jr., by name and dedication to truth seeking, conjures up his father’s ghost, the last politician who, because of his vast support across racial and class divides, could have united the country and tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords.

So they killed him.

There is a reason Noam Chomsky is an exemplar for Hedges, Greenwald, and Taibbi. He controls the can opener for so many. He has set the parameters for what is considered acceptable to be considered a serious journalist or intellectual. The assassinations of the Kennedys, 9/11, or a questioning of the official Covid-19 story are not among them, and so they are eschewed.

To denounce censorship, as they have done, is admirable. But now Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges need go up to the forbidden gate with the sign that says – “This far and no further” – and jump over it. That’s where the true stories lie. That’s when they’ll see the worms squirm.

“Yeah, like [in] a church. Church of the Good Hustler.”

– Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman) in The Hustler

At the end of Henrik Ibsen’s classic play, A Doll’s House, Nora, the aggrieved wife, leaves her husband’s house and all the illusions that sustained its marriage of lies. She chooses freedom over fantasy. She will no longer be played with like a doll but will try to become a free woman – a singular one. “There is another task I must undertake first. I must try and educate myself,” she tells her husband Torvald, a man completely incapable of understanding the social programming that has made him society’s slave.

When Nora closes the doll’s house door behind her, the sound is like a hammer blow of freedom. For anyone who has seen the play, even when knowing the outcome in advance, that sound is profound. It keeps echoing. It interrogates one’s conscience.

The echo asks: Do you live inside America’s doll house where a vast tapestry of lies, bad faith, and cheap grace keep you caged in comfort, as you repeat the habits that have been drilled into you?

In this doll’s house of propaganda into which America has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.

Americans who voted for either Trump or Biden in the 2020 election are like Torvald clones. They refuse to open that door so they might close it behind them. They live in the doll’s house – all 146+ million of them. Like Torvald, they are comforted. They are programmed and propagandized, embracing the illusion that the electoral system is not structured and controlled to make sure no significant change can occur, no matter who is president. It is a sad reality promoted as democracy.

They will prattle on and give all sorts of reasons why they voted, and for whom, and how if you don’t vote you have no right to bitch, and how it’s this sacred right to vote that makes democracy great, blah blah blah. It’s all sheer nonsense. For the U.S.A. is not a democracy; it is an oligarchy run by the wealthy for the wealthy.

This is not a big secret. Everybody knows this is true; knows the electoral system is sheer show business with the presidential extravaganza drawing the big money from corporate lobbyists, investment bankers, credit card companies, lawyers, business and hedge fund executives, Silicon Valley honchos, think tanks, Wall Street gamblers, millionaires, billionaires, et. al. Biden and Trump spent over 3 billion dollars on the election. They are owned by the money people.

Both are old men with long, shameful histories. A quick inquiry will show how the rich have profited immensely from their tenures in office. There is not one hint that they could change and have a miraculous conversion while in future office, like JFK. Neither has the guts or the intelligence. They are nowhere men who fear the fate that John Kennedy faced squarely when he turned against the CIA and the war machine. They join the craven company of Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. They all got the message that was sent from the streets of Dallas in 1963: You don’t want to die, do you?

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, its vast intelligence apparatus, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites? The answer is obvious.

It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, or Jimmy Carter. The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why.

All the while, the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful. It is now essentially an electronic prison that is being “Built Back Better.” The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population through their corporate mass-media stenographers. Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other.

Only those backed by the wealthy power brokers get elected in the U.S.A. Then when elected, it’s payback time. Palms are greased. Everybody knows this is true. It’s called corruption. So why would anyone, who opposes a corrupt political oligarchy, vote, unless they were casting a vote of conscience for a doomed third-party candidate?

Leonard Cohen told it true with “Everybody Knows”:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

And yet everybody who voted for the two men backed by the super-rich owners of the country knew what they were doing, unless they live under a rock and come out every four years to vote. Perhaps they were out buying stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey, so they can give thanks for the farce (stuffing: Latin: farcire ).

They have their reasons. Now the Biden people celebrate, just as Trump’s supporters did in 2016. I can hear fireworks going off as I write here in a town where 90% + voted for Biden and hate Trump with a passion more intense than what they ever could work up for a spurned lover or spouse. This is mass psychosis. It’s almost funny.

At least we have gotten rid of Trump, they say. No one can be worse. They think this is logic. Like Torvald, they cannot begin to understand why anyone would want to leave the doll’s house, how anyone could refuse to play a game in which the dice are loaded. They will deny they are in the doll’s house while knowing the dice are loaded and still roll the die, not caring that their choice – whether it’s Tweedledee or Tweedledum – will result in the death and impoverishment of so many, that being the end result of oligarchic rule at home and imperialism abroad.

Orwell called this Doublethink:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.

And while in Nineteen Eighty-Four Doublethink is learned by all the Party members “and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox,” today in the U.S.A., it has been mastered even by the so-called unintelligent.

To live in the U.S.A. is to live in the Church of the Good Hustler.

People often ask: What can we do to make the country better? What is your alternative?

A child could answer that one: Don’t vote if you know that both contenders are backed by the super-rich elites, what some call the Deep State. Which of course they are. Everybody knows.

The so-called left and right argue constantly about whom to support. It’s a pseudo-debate constructed to allow people to think their vote counts; that the game isn’t rigged. It’s hammered into kids’ heads from an early age. Be grateful, give thanks that you live in a democracy where voting is allowed and your choice is as important as a billionaire’s such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Charles Koch. In the voting booth we are all equal.

Myths die hard. This one never does:

“Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams, will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.”

— Donald Trump, January 20, 2017.

“With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation. It’s time for America to unite. And to heal.”

— Joe Biden, November 7, 2020.

“Above all else, the time has come for us to renew our faith in ourselves and in America. In recent years, that faith has been challenged.”

— Richard Nixon, January 20, 1973.

Your voice – our faith – it’s time to unite and heal.

Ask the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Afghanis, the Libyans, the Palestinians, et al. They sing a different tune, one not heard In the Church of the Good Hustler.

After campaigning hard for the losing presidential candidate in 1972, I nearly choked when I heard Richard Nixon’s inaugural address in January 1973. Clinging to the American myth the previous year, I had campaigned for a genuine anti-war Democrat, Senator George McGovern. The war against Vietnam was still raging and Nixon, who had been first elected in 1968 as a “peace candidate,” succeeding the previous “peace candidate” Lyndon Baines Johnson, was nevertheless overwhelmingly elected, despite Watergate allegations appearing in the months preceding the election. Nixon won forty-nine states to McGovern’s one – Massachusetts, where I lived. It was a landslide. I felt sick, woke up, got up, and left the doll’s house.

“Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness,” wrote the French sociologist Jacques Ellul in 1965 in Propaganda:

It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness…. It also corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps, than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear fables, to communicate in the language of myths.

In a country where loneliness is widespread, the will to believe and the power of positive thinking are far more powerful than the will to truth. Unlike Nora, who knew that when she left the doll’s house she was choosing the loneliness of the solitary soul, Americans prefer myths that induce them to act out of habit so they can lose themselves in the group.

This is so despite the fact that In the Church of the Good Hustler, when you play the game, you lose. We are all Americans and your vote counts and George Washington never told a lie.

This is an updated and revised version of the full cover-story that appeared in the important publication, garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 003. Issue 004 is due out this week and I urge readers to purchase it. You will read articles there that you will find no place else, brilliant, eye-opening analyses of issues that the MSM will never touch.

“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” – Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005

While truth-tellers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sit inside jail cells and Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia, the American people hole up in an illusionary dwelling constructed to reduce them to children afraid of the truth. Or is it the dark? This is not new; it has been so for a very long time, but it has become a more sophisticated haunted doll’s house, an electronic one with many bells and whistles and images that move faster than the eye can see. We now inhabit a digital technological nightmare controlled by government and corporate forces intent on dominating every aspect of people’s lives. This is true despite the valiant efforts of dissidents to use the technology for human liberation. The old wooden doll houses, where you needed small fingers to rearrange the furniture, now only need thumbs that can click you into your cell’s fantasy world. So many dwell there in the fabricated reality otherwise known as propaganda. The result is mass hallucination.

In a 1969 interview, Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans and the only person to ever bring to trial a case involving the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, said that as a result of the CIA’s murderous coup d’état on behalf of the military-industrial-financial-media-intelligence complex that rules the country to this day, the American people have been subjected to a fabricated reality that has rendered them a nation of passive Eichmanns, who sit in their living rooms, popping pills and watching television as their country’s military machine mows down people by the millions and the announcers tell them all the things they should be afraid of, such as bacteria on cutting boards and Russian spies infiltrating their hair salons. Garrison said:

The creation of such inanities as acceptable reality and unacceptable reality is necessary for the self-preservation of the super-state against its greatest danger: understanding on the part of the people as to what is really happening. All factors which contribute to its burgeoning power are exaggerated. All factors which might reveal its corrosive effect on the nation are concealed. The result is to place the populace in the position of persons living in a house whose windows no longer reveal the outside but on which murals have been painted. Some of the murals are frightening and have the effect of reminding the occupants of the outside menaces against which the paternal war machine is protecting them. Other murals are pleasant to remind them how nice things are inside the house.

But to live like this is to live in a doll’s house. If life has one lesson to teach us, it is that to live in illusion is ultimately disastrous.

In the doll’s house into which America gradually has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory. [i]

Fifty years have disappeared behind us since the eloquent and courageous Garrison (read On the Trail of the Assassins) metaphorically voiced the truth, despite the CIA’s persistent efforts to paint him as an unhinged lunatic through its media mouthpieces. These days they would probably just lock him up or send him fleeing across borders, as with Assange, Manning, and Snowden.

It is stunning to take a cue from his comment regarding the JFK assassination, when he suggested that one reverse the lone assassin scenario and place it in the U.S.S.R. No American could possibly believe a tale that a former Russian soldier, trained in English and having served at a top Soviet secret military base, who had defected to the U.S. and then returned home with the help of the K.G.B., could kill the Russian Premier with a defective and shoddy rifle and then be shot to death in police headquarters in Moscow by a K.G.B. connected hit man so there would be no trial and the K.G.B. would go scot free. That would be a howler! So too, of course, are the Warren Commission’s fictions about Oswald.

Snowden, Assange, and Manning

If we then update this mental exercise and imagine that Snowden, Assange, and Manning were all Russian, and that they released information about Russian war crimes, political corruption, and a system of total electronic surveillance of the Russian population, and were then jailed or sent fleeing into exile as a result, who in the U.S., liberal, libertarian or conservative, would possibly believe the Russian government’s accusations that these three were criminals.

Nevertheless, Barack Obama, the transparency president, made sure to treat them as such, all the while parading as a “liberal” concerned for freedom of speech and the First Amendment. He made sure that Snowden and Manning were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, and that Assange was corralled via false Swedish sex charges so he had to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (a form of jail). He brought Espionage Act prosecutions against eight people, more than all former presidents combined. He hypocritically pardoned Manning on his way out the door as if this would polish his deluded liberal legacy after making her suffer terribly through seven years of imprisonment. He set the stage for Trump to re-jail Manning to try to get this most courageous woman to testify against Assange, which she will not do, and for the collaborationist British government to jail Assange in preparation for his extradition to the United States and a show trial. As for Snowden, he has been relegated to invisibility, good for news headlines once and for a movie, but now gone and forgotten.

Obama and Trump, arch political “enemies,” have made sure that those who reveal the sordid acts of the American murderous state are cruelly punished and silenced. This is how the system works, and for most Americans, it is not happening. It doesn’t matter. They don’t care, just as they don’t care that Obama backed the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras that has resulted in so many deaths at the hands of U.S trained killers, and then Trump ranted about all these “non-white” people fleeing to the U.S. to escape a hell created by the U.S., as it has been doing throughout Latin America for so long. Who does care about the truth? Has anyone even noticed how the corporate media has disappeared the “news” of all those desperate people clamoring to enter the U.S.A. from Mexico? One day they were there and in the headlines; the next day, gone. It’s called news.

The Sleepwalkers

But even though a majority of Americans have never believed the government’s explanation for JFK’s murder, they nevertheless have insouciantly gone to sleep for half a century in the doll’s house of illusions as the killing and the lies of their own government have increased over the years and any semblance of a democratic and peaceful America has gone extinct. The fates of courageous whistle-blowers Assange, Manning, and Snowden don’t concern them. The fates of Hondurans don’t concern them. The fates of Syrians don’t concern them. The fates of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Palestinians don’t concern them. The fates of America’s victims all around the world don’t concern them. Indifference reigns.

Obviously, if you are reading this, you are not one of the sleepwalkers and are awake to the parade of endless lies and illusions and do care. But you are in a minority.

That is not the case for most Americans. When approximately 129 million people cast their votes for Donald Trump and HilIary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, you know idiocy reigns and nothing has been learned. Ditto for the votes for Obama, Bush, Clinton, et al. You can keep counting back. It is an ugly fact and sad to say. Such a repetition compulsion is a sign of a deep sickness, and it will no doubt be repeated in the 2020 election. The systemic illusion must be preserved at all costs and the warfare state supported in its killing. It is the American way.

It is true that average Americans have not built the doll’s house; that is the handiwork of the vast interconnected and far-reaching propaganda arms of the U.S. government and their media accomplices. But that does not render them innocent for accepting decades of fabricated reality for so-called peace of mind by believing that a totally corrupt system works. The will to believe is very powerful, as is the propaganda. The lesson that Garrison spoke of has been lost on far too many people, even on those who occasionally leave the doll house for a walk, but who only go slightly down the path for fear of seeing too much reality and connecting too many dots. There is plain ignorance, then there is culpable ignorance, to which I shall return.

Denying Existential Freedom

One of the first things an authoritarian governing elite must do is to convince people that they are not free. This has been going on for at least forty years, ever since the Church Committee’s revelations about the CIA in the mid-seventies, including its mind-control program, MKULTRA. Everyone was appalled at the epiphany, so a different tactic was added. Say those programs have been ended when in fact they were continued under other even deeper secret programs, and just have “experts” – social, psychological, and biological “scientists” – repeat ad infinitum that there is no longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind; it is an illusion, and it all comes down to the brain. Biology is destiny, except in culturally diversionary ways in which freedom to choose is extolled – e.g. the latest fashions, gender identity, the best hair style, etc. Create and lavishly fund programs for the study of the brain, while supporting and promoting a vast expansion of pharmaceutical drugs to control people. Do this in the name of helping people with their emotional and behavioral problems that are rooted in their biology and are beyond their control. And create criteria to convince people that they are sick and that their distress has nothing to do with the coup d’état that has rendered them “citizens” of a police state.

We have been interminably told that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). How convenient! George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump — what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world. Science for idiots.

Drip by drip, here and there, in the pattern of the best propaganda, as the French sociologist Jacques Ellul says – “for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates conviction and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition”[ii] – articles, books, media reports have reiterated that people are “determined” by biological, genetic, social, and psychological forces over which they have no control. To assert that people are free in the Sartrean sense (en soir, condemned to freedom, or free will) has come to be seen as the belief of a delusional fool living in the past , a bad philosopher, an anti-scientist, a poorly informed religionist, one nostalgic for existential cafes, Gauloises, and black berets. One who doesn’t grasp the truth since he doesn’t read the New York Times or watch CBS television. One who believes in nutty conspiracy theories.

The conventional propaganda – I almost said wisdom – created through decades-long media and academic repetition, is that we are not free.

Let me repeat: we are not free. We are not free.

Investigator reporter John Rappoport has consistently exposed the propaganda involved in the creation and expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) with its pseudo-scientific falsehoods and collusion between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry. As he correctly notes, the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control program has morphed into modern psychiatry, both with the same objectives of disabling and controlling people by convincing them that they are not free and are in need of a chemical brain bath.[iii]

Can anyone with an awareness of this history doubt there is a hidden hand behind this development? Once you have convinced people that they are not free in the most profound sense, the rest is child’s play. Convinced that they are puppets, they become puppets to be willingly jerked around.

“He played with me just as I used to play with dolls,” says Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

Now who would want to get people to believe they were not free? The answer is obvious given a minute of thought. It is not just Nora’s husband Torvald.

Perfect examples of the persistence of the long-term, repetitive, impregnating propaganda appear in news headlines constantly. Here is an egregious example concerning the little understood case of the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. On Friday, August 30, 2019, Sirhan, who has been in prison for fifty-two years for the murder of RFK that he did not commit, was stabbed by another prisoner. A quick click through the MSM headlines reporting this showed the same words repeated by all the corporate media as they fulfilled their function as CIA stenographers. One example, from CBS News, will suffice: “Robert Kennedy assassin hospitalized after prison stabbing.”[iv] RFK assassin, RFK assassin, RFK assassin … all the media said the same thing, which they have been doing for fifty-two years. Their persistency endures despite all the facts that refute their disinformation and show that Senator Kennedy, who was on his way to becoming president, was murdered, like his brother John, by forces of the national security state.

Sartre and Bad Faith

Lying and dissembling are ubiquitous. Being deceived by the media liars is mirrored in people’s personal lives. People lie and want to be deceived. They choose to play dumb, to avoid a confrontation with truth. They want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked. They want to tuck themselves into a safe social and cultural framework where they imagine they will be safe. They like the doll’s house. They choose to live in what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi): In Existential Psychoanalysis he put it thus:

In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. But with this ‘lie’ to myself, the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.

Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind the government’s and corporate media’s lies and propaganda, even as the shades of the prison house ominously close around us and the world edges toward global death that could arrive in an instant with nuclear war or limp along for years of increasing suffering.

Those of us who write about the U.S. led demented wars and provocations around the world and the complementary death of democracy at home are constantly flabbergasted and discouraged by the willed ignorance of so many Americans. For while the mainstream media does the bidding of the power elite, there is ample alternative news and analyses available on the internet from fine journalists and writers committed to truth, not propaganda. There is actually far too much truth available, which poses another problem. But it doesn’t take a genius to learn how to research important issues and to learn how to distinguish between bogus and genuine information. It takes a bit of effort, and, more importantly, the desire to compare multiple, opposing viewpoints and untangle the webs the Web weaves. We are awash in information (and disinformation) and both good and bad reporting, but it is still available to the caring inquirer.

The problem is the will to know. But why? Why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference? Stupidity? Okay, there is that. Ignorance? That too. Willful ignorance, ditto. Laziness, indeed. Careerism and ideology? For certain. Upton Sinclair put it mildly when he said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.” Difficult? No, it’s almost impossible.

But then there are many very intelligent people who have nothing to lose and yet adamantly refuse to entertain alternative possibilities to the reigning orthodoxies that have them in their grip. As do many others, I know many such people who will yes me to death and then never fully research issues. They will remain in limbo or else wink to themselves that what may be true couldn’t be true. They close down. This is a great dilemma and frustration faced by those who seek to convince people to take an active part in understanding what is really going on in the world today, especially as the United States wages war across the globe, threatens Russia, China, and Iran, among many others, and expands and modernizes its nuclear weapons capabilities.

As for Assange, Manning, and Snowden, their plight matters not a whit. In fact, they have been rendered invisible inside the doll’s house, except as the murals on the windows flash back their images as threats to the occupants, Russian monsters out to eat them up. As the great poet Constantine Cavafy wrote long ago in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” and they never come: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.” Then again, for people like U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, who knows the Russian barbarians have and will come again, life must be terrifying as he tries so manfully to bar the gates. The Russians have been the American solution in this fairy tale for so long that it’s hard for many Americans to believe another story.

The Two-Headed Monster

On the one hand, there is the massive propaganda apparatus operated by American intelligence agencies in conjunction with their media partners.

On the other, there is the human predilection for untruth and illusions, the sad need to be comforted and to submit to greater “authority,” gratefully to accept the myths proffered by one’s masters. This tendency applies not just to the common people, but even more so to the intellectual classes, who act as though they are immune. Erich Fromm, writing about Germans and Hitler, but by extension people everywhere, termed this the need to “escape from freedom,” since freedom conjures up fears of vertiginous aloneness and the need to decide, which in turn evokes the fear of death.[v] There are also many kinds of little deaths that precede the final one: social, career, money, familiar, etc., that are used to keep people in the doll’s house.

Fifty years ago, the CIA coined the term “conspiracy theory” as a weapon to be used to dismiss the truths expressed by critics of its murder of President Kennedy, and those of Malcom X, MLK, and RFK. All the media echoed the CIA line. While they still use the term to dismiss and denounce, their control of the mainstream media is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, etc., the coups disguised as color revolutions in Ukraine, Venezuela, Bolivia, Hong Kong, the downing of the Malaysian jetliner there, drone murders, the Iranian “threat,” the looting of the American people by the elites, alleged sarin gas attacks in Syria, the anti-Russia bashing and the Russia-gate farce, the “criminals” Assange, Manning, Snowden – everything. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Fox News, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. – all are stenographers for the deep state.

So much of the ongoing propaganda travels under the banner of “the war on terror,” which is, of course, an outgrowth of the attacks of September 11, 2001, appropriately named and constantly reinforced as 9/11 in a wonderful example of linguistic mind-control: a constant emergency reminder to engender anxiety, depression, panic, and confusion, four of the symptoms that lead the DSM “experts” and their followers to diagnose and drug individuals. The term 9/11 was first used in the New York Times on September 12, 2001 by Bill Keller, the future Times’ editor and Iraq war cheerleader. Just a fortuitous coincidence, of course.Jacques Ellul on Propaganda

Jacques Ellul has argued convincingly that modern propaganda in a technological mass society is more complicated than the state and media lying and deceiving the population. He argues that propaganda meets certain needs of modern people and therefore the process of deceit is reciprocal. The modern person feels lost, powerless, and empty. Ellul says, “He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair.” But he can’t live in despair; desires that life be meaningful; and wants to feel he lives in a world that makes sense. He wants to participate and have opinions that suggest he grasps the flow of events. He doesn’t so much want information, but value judgments and preconceived positions that provide him with a framework for living. Ellul wrote the following in 1965 in his classic book Propaganda:

The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them the feeling of participation. For they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a ‘key’ that will permit them to take a position, and even ready-made opinions….The man who keeps himself informed needs a framework….the more complicated the problems are, the more simple the explanations must be; the more fragmented the canvas, the simpler the pattern; the more difficult the question, the more all-embracing the solution; the more menacing the reduction of his own worth, the greater the need for boosting his ego. All this propaganda – and only propaganda – can give him.[vi]

Another way of saying this is that people want to be provided with myths to direct them to the “truth.” But such so-called truth has been preconceived within the overarching myth provided by propaganda, and while it satisfies people’s emotional need for coherence, it also allows them to think of themselves as free individuals arriving at their own conclusions, which is a basic function of good propaganda. In today’s mass technological society, it is essential that people be convinced that they are free-thinking individuals acting in good faith. Then they can feel good about themselves as they lie and act in bad faith.

Culpable Ignorance

It is widely accepted that political leaders and the mass media lie and dissemble regularly, which, of course, they do. That is their job in an oligarchy. Today we are subjected to almost total, unrelenting media and government propaganda. Depending on their political leanings, people direct their anger toward politicians of parties they oppose and media they believe slant their coverage to favor the opposition. Trump is a liar. No, Obama is a liar. And Hillary Clinton. No, Fox News. Ridiculous! – it’s CNN or NBC. And so on and so forth in this theater of the absurd that plays out within a megaplex of mainstream media propaganda, where there are many shows but one producer, whose overall aim is to engineer the consent of all who enter, while setting the different audiences against each other. It is a very successful charade that evokes name-calling from all quarters.

In other words, for many people their opponents lie, as do other people, but not them. This is as true in personal as well as public life. Here the personal and the political converge, despite protestations to the contrary. Dedication to truth is very rare.

But there is another issue with propaganda that complicates the picture further. People of varying political persuasions can agree that propaganda is widespread. Many people on the left, and some on the right, would agree with Lisa Pease’s statement in her book on the RFK assassination, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, that “the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time.” [vii] That is also what Garrison thought when he spoke of the doll’s house.

If that is so, then today’s propaganda is anchored in the events of the 1960s, specifically the infamous government assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK, the truth of which the CIA has worked so hard to conceal. In the fifty or so years since, a vast amount of new information has made it explicitly clear that these murders were carried out by elements within the U.S. government, and were done so to silence the voices of four charismatic leaders who were opposed to the American war machine and the continuation of the Cold War. To turn away from this truth and to ignore its implications can only be described as an act of bad faith and culpable ignorance, or worse. But that is exactly what many prominent leftists have done. Then to compound the problem, they have done the same with the attacks of September 11, 2001.

One cannot help thinking of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called these people in the 1950s: “the compatible left.” He felt that effective CIA propaganda, beside the need for fascist-minded types such as Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton, depended on “courting” leftists and liberal into its orbit. For so many of the compatible left, those making a lot of money posing as opponents of the ruling elites but often taking the money of the super-rich, the JFK assassination and the truth of September 11, 2001 are inconsequential, never to be broached, as if they never happened, except as the authorities say they did. By ignoring these most in-your-face events with their eyes wide shut, a coterie of influential leftists has done the work of Orwell’s crime-stop and has effectively succeeded in situating current events in an ahistorical and therefore misleading context that abets U.S. propaganda. They truncate the full story to present a narrative that distorts the truth.

Without drawing a bold line connecting the dots from November 22, 1963 up to the present, a critique of the murderous forces ruling the United States is impossible.

Among the most notable of such failures are Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Howard Zinn, and Chris Hedges, men idolized by many liberals and leftists. And there are many others who have been deeply influenced by Chomsky, Cockburn, and Zinn and follow in their footsteps. Their motivations remain a mystery, but there is no doubt their refusals have contributed to the increased power of those who control the doll’s house. To know better and do as they have is surely culpable ignorance.

From Bad to Worse

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites? The answer is obvious. It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter. The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why. All the while the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful with the growth of electronic media and cell phone usage.

The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population. This fragmentation of consciousness prevents people from grasping the present from within because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data. Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other. The latter, whose bibles are the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, Democracy Now, The Guardian, etc. – can only see propaganda when they can attribute it to Trump or the Russians. The former see everything as a liberal conspiracy to take down Trump. The liberals have embraced a new McCarthyism and allied themselves with the deep-state forces that they were once allegedly appalled by, including Republicans. Their embrace of the formerly despised war-monger John Bolton in the impeachment trial of Trump is a laughable case in point, if it weren’t so depraved and slimy. It surely isn’t the bloodthirsty policies of the Trump administration or his bloviating personality, for these liberals allied themselves with Obama’s anti-Russian rhetoric, his support for the U.S. orchestrated neo-fascist Ukrainian coup, his destruction of Libya, his wars of aggression across the Middle East, his war on terror, his trillion dollar nuclear weapons modernization, his enjoyment of drone killing, his support for the coup in Honduras, his embrace of the CIA and his CIA Director John Brennan, his prosecution of whistle-blowers, etc. The same media that served the CIA so admirably over the decades became the liberals’ paragons of truth. It’s enough to make your head spin, which is the point. Spin left, spin right, spin all around, because we have possessed your mind in this spectacular image game where seeming antinomies are the constancy of the same through difference, all the presidents coined by the same manufacturer who knows that coin flipping serves to entertain the audience eager for hope and change.

This is how the political system works to prevent change. It is why little has changed for the better over half a century and the American empire has expanded. While it may be true that there are signs that this American hegemony is coming to an end (I am not convinced), I would not underestimate the power of the U.S. propaganda apparatus to keep people docile and deluded in the doll’s house, despite the valiant efforts of independent truth-tellers.

How, for example, is it possible for so many people to see such a stark difference between the despicable Trump and the pleasant Obama? They are both puppets dancing to their masters’ tunes – the same masters. They both front for the empire.

In his excellent book, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State, Jeremy Kuzmarov assiduously documents Obama’s crimes, including his CIA background.[viii] As Glen Ford, of Black Agenda Report, says in the first sentence of his forward, “Barack Obama may go down in presidential history as the most effective-and deceptive-imperialist of them all.” Read the book if you want all the details. They form an overwhelming indictment of the con artist and war criminal that is irrefutable. But will those who worship at the altar of Barack Obama read it? Of course not. Just as those deluded ones who voted for the reality television flim-flam man Trump will ignore all the accumulating evidence that they’ve been had and are living under a president who is Obama’s disguised doppelganger, carrying out the orders of his national security state bosses. This, too, is well documented, and no doubt another writer will arise in the years to come to put it between a book’s covers.

Yet even Jeremy Kuzmarov fails to see the link between the JFK assassination and Obama’s shilling for the warfare state. His few references to Kennedy are all negative, suggesting he either is unaware of what Kennedy was doing in the last year of his life and why he was murdered by the CIA, or something else. He seems to follow Noam Chomsky, a Kennedy hater, in this regard. I point out this slight flaw in an excellent book because it is symptomatic of certain people on the left who refuse to complete the circle. If, as Kuzmarov, argues, Obama was CIA from the start and that explains his extraordinarily close relationship with the CIA’s John Brennan, an architect, among many things, of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, and that Obama told CIA Director Panetta that the CIA would “get everything it wanted,” and the CIA killed JFK, well, something’s amiss, an enormous gap in the analysis of our current condition.

The doll’s house is a mind game of extraordinary proportions, orchestrated by the perverted power elites that run the show and ably abetted by their partners in the corporate mass media, even some in the alternative press who mean well but are confused, or are disinformation agents in the business of sowing confusion together with their mainstream Operation Mockingbird partners. It is a spectacle of open secrecy, in which the CIA has effectively suckered everyone into a game of to-and-fro in which only they win.

Our only hope for change is to try and educate as many people as possible about the linkages between events that started with the CIA coup d’état in Dallas on November 22, 1963, continued through the killings of Malcolm X, MLK, RFK and on through so much else up to September 11, 2001, and have brought us to the deeply depressing situation we now find ourselves in where truthtellers like Julian Assange, Chelsey Manning, and Edward Snowden are criminalized, while the real perpetrators of terrible evils roam free.

Yes, we must educate but also agitate for the release of this courageous trio. Their freedom is ours; their imprisonment is ours, whether we know it or not. The walls are closing in.

Lisa Pease is so right: “The way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time, and too few recognize this. We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.”

If we don’t follow her advice, we will be toyed with like dolls for a long time to come. There will be no one else to blame.

The banal, 1967 hit song, “San Francisco (Be sure to wear flowers in your hair)”, which was influential in enticing young people to come to San Francisco for the Summer of Love, was written by “Papa” John Philips, who attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis and whose father was a Marine Corps Captain.

“Papa” John’s wife had worked at the Pentagon and her father was involved in covert intelligence work in Vietnam.

His neighbor and Laurel Canyon (Los Angeles) buddy was Jim Morrison of Doors fame, whose father US Navy Admiral George Morrison commanded U.S. warships in Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf during the “Tonkin Gulf Incident.”

Frank Zappa, the father figure of Laurel Canyon’s many musicians who just happened to converge in one place at the same time where a covert military film studio operated, had a father who was a chemical warfare specialist at Edgewood Arsenal.

Stephen Stills, David Crosby and many other soon to be famous musicians all came from military and intelligence backgrounds and frolicked in Laurel Canyon. Although they were draft age, none of them was drafted as they played music, dropped acid, and created the folk-rock movement whose music was catchy but innocuous and posed no threat to the establishment.

But “shit happens.”

In his disturbing book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, David McGowan raises the question:

…what if the musicians themselves (and various other leaders and founders of the ‘movement’) were every bit as much a part of the intelligence community as the people who were supposedly harassing them? What if, in other words, the entire youth culture of the 1960s was created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray….What if, in reality, they were pretty much all playing on the same team?