US Presidential Elections Are Children’s Entertainment: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Caitlin Johnstone
4 min readApr 26, 2023

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

So Democrats mostly don’t want Biden to run again, but he is running again, and also there won’t be any Democratic primary debates while he runs again? That seems even more undemocratic than most US presidential elections.

Possible campaign slogans:

“Biden 2024: Eh you know you’ll vote for me anyway ya losers.”

“Biden 2024: Because fuck you, that’s why.”

No I will not be supporting any US presidential candidate. Not because I don’t think Australians have any business involving themselves in US political affairs (we absolutely do), but because the elections are fake and the next president will with absolute certainty be another corrupt imperialist monster. I won’t be picking any favorites in the next WWE event either.

The only reason to pay attention to a US presidential election is to highlight the elite manipulations that go into it to help people understand that the game is rigged. Once you get sucked in to cheering for actual candidates you’ve lost sight of what’s really happening, like someone who got so drawn in to the movie that they forget they’re sitting in a theater.

Only the most trustworthy empire managers get anywhere near the presidency, because the stewardship of a globe-spanning empire is too important to be left in the hands of the voters. Being in that office is itself the greatest sign of corruption you’ll ever see. People talk about CIA involvement in presidents like Bush Sr or Obama and I’m like, “It gets so much worse than that, mate: did you know he was the president of the United States?”

The clear message from the US security state is that intelligence cartel insiders like Mike Morell are allowed to interfere in US elections and orchestrate brazen psyops to circulate disinformation because they want a particular candidate to win, but ordinary Americans are not. If you do it it’s disinformation and a threat democracy which calls for more internet censorship and possible criminal charges; when Mike Morell does it it’s no big deal.

Tucker Carlson is a virulent empire propagandist who’s probably responsible for more anti-China sentiment in the US than anyone alive. He’s got well-documented overlaps with the CIA and has helped keep Americans roped into the mainstream two-party system. That said, his firing suggests that he probably did become unacceptably inconvenient for the powerful in some way. The mass media are for propaganda first and profit second, and if you’re not useful enough at the first it doesn’t matter how good you are at generating the second.

Carlson is not antiwar in any meaningful way, but from an antiwar perspective I can’t see any reason to be happy about his ouster. The guy who opposed brinkmanship with Russia because he wants to focus on brinkmanship with China will be replaced by someone who wants brinkmanship with both.

Murdoch is not your friend. The Murdoch media empire did not oust Carlson to advance human interests or make the world a nicer place. That seems a safe bet to me.

Every time I criticize Tucker Carlson I get all these wounded and upset responses from people reacting like I just punched their best friend. Don’t cultivate parasocial relationships with rich TV pundits, it’s gross.

It’s crazy how US empire managers are talking about war with China more as a probability than a possibility, and it’s also crazy how they’re talking about it like it’s just something that would passively happen (like rain or an earthquake) instead of something they’re knowingly accelerating toward.

It’s like saying “Yeah unfortunately it looks increasingly probable that I’m going to get into a fight with the guy sitting in front of me on the plane, he really takes exception to the way I keep slapping the back of his head,” or “It appears that I’ll be crashing into the brick wall up ahead in a few seconds; there is nothing I can do about this problem but keep my foot on the gas and brace for impact.”

If there’s a war between the US alliance and China it won’t be something that just passively “happens”, it will be the result of US empire managers knowingly choosing to steer things in that direction day after day, year after year, while refusing every off-ramp that comes up.

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Featured image via Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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