Propaganda Scrambles Our Minds: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Caitlin Johnstone
4 min readSep 17, 2021

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America is a unipolar superpower governed by octogenarians who work for corporations and banks where military weapons are made by prison slaves to be launched at impoverished foreigners while celebrities attend lavish galas and police guard food in dumpsters from the homeless.

Propaganda warps people’s perspectives so drastically their own opinions don’t even adhere to the values they’ll tell you they hold. A liberal will get angrier about a random member of the public circulating a conspiracy theory than about government agencies killing children with bombs. Political Twitter got angrier about Joe Rogan taking ivermectin than the Pentagon murdering an entire Afghan family and lying about it. All sense of proportion and perspective has been scrambled.

Facebook has had a two-tiered system where famous people won’t be censored or suspended for posts normal people would be. Politicians and celebrities freely ignore mask rules while their servants are forbidden to. They all think they’re better than us, and our systems agree with them.

If you rise to a position of influence in the western world you will immediately find yourself surrounded by people who are very interested in making sure you support status quo power structures, whether you’re a celebrity, a politician, or a social media executive.

It’s weird how nobody’s even saying the vaccine isn’t working as well as they’d hoped it would. You’re not even allowed to say that. Everyone’s really disappointed but they’re pretending they’re not because anything but 100 percent big-smile cheerleading gets you branded an anti-vaxxer. Everyone’s gotta do this weird, super tense, phoney happy smiley dance about how perfect and not-at-all-disappointing the vaccine is, because being truthful about how disappointed you feel hurts the vaccination campaign and therefore means you’re worse than Hitler.

The world is ruled by plutocrats and secretive government agencies and propaganda has enslaved public consciousness to ensure our compliance with their agendas. Global capitalism will grow ever more abusive until it is dispensed with. This was all already true long before Covid.

“The Great Reset will let corporate elites rule the world!”

They already do.

“They’ll be able to surveil us for state control!”

They already are.

“They’re taking our freedom!”

Your freedom was illusory.

“The vaccine is mind control!”

No that’s what the media’s for.

If it wasn’t the World Economic Forum and the “Great Reset” it would be something else. Capitalism will always inevitably become more unjust, oppressive and corrupt and will keep taking on new forms to continue its cancerous spread. The ultimate problem is human behavior being driven by profit.

At some point we’re going to realize that market forces and the profit motive do not have the wisdom to navigate through the existential crises humanity now faces. Only question is whether we’ll realize this in time to do something or realize it in our final gasps as a species.

If Australia were to pivot its loyalty from Washington to Beijing, western media would suddenly take an interest in Aboriginal human rights and news cycles would be flooded with stories about the need for blockades to punish the Canberra regime for its brutal lockdown oppression.

The worst thing about Australia is America.

The most evil thing Biden has done as president is continuing Trump administration policies. The most evil thing Trump did as president was continuing Obama administration policies. If you can’t see this, it’s because you are blinkered by a manufactured partisan reality tunnel.

Contemplating the very real possibility of nuclear war is good personal practice. Nothing gets you rearranging your priorities in your day-to-day living like an acute awareness that you could look out your window at any moment and see a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon.

Most of the horrors in our world are man-made, and most of those man-made horrors are born out of a desire to control. A desire to control outcomes. A desire to control other people. A desire to control entire populations. A desire to control wealth. A desire to control the world. It’s all born of an egoic inability to let life be as it is.

Your elections are fake. Your politicians are puppets. Your species is driven by the interplay of preceding forces stretching back throughout our entire evolutionary history and all the way into the Big Bang. The self is an illusion. No one is in charge. This is all made of love. You are love.

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