Pretending to believe official propaganda is like the membership requirement for entrance into the establishment. From CJ Hopkins at cjhopkins.substack.com:
OK, here’s one from the archives for you. It’s a column I wrote way back in 2017, when CounterPunch was still running my columns. I’ve pulled it out of the archives because (a) I think it’s particularly apropos, given the amount of ridiculous official propaganda we are being barraged by at the moment, (b) I am down with a nasty bug, and thus (c) I don’t have the energy to attempt to deceive you into believing that I just came up with this analysis today by rewriting what I wrote back in 2017 but replacing the references to Russiagate with references to Israel’s liquidation of Gaza.
If you’ve been following the news — which I suspect you have — you’re familiar with the ridiculous official propaganda that the State of Israel has been brazenly pumping out, which at this point has gotten so blatantly ridiculous that even the BBC has been forced to debunk it.
So I trust you can switch those references yourself. If you need a little inspiration, you can watch this Mehdi Hasan interview with Mark Regev, a senior advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu, which could hardly be more brazenly ridiculous, especially the part where Regev denies that the IDF has killed any Palestinian children, and implies that Hamas has killed them all.
Of course, if you’re one of the scores of people who have furiously unsubscribed from my Substack because I’ve suddenly morphed from the anti-Covidian freedom-fighting satirist that you knew and loved into an anti-Semitic Hamas-loving commie with a big portrait of Osama bin Laden in my office (but you’re still secretly reading my columns, despite your furious unsubscription), you probably want to give that interview a miss.
OK, without further ado, here’s that old column.
For students of official propaganda, manipulation of public opinion, psychological conditioning, and emotional coercion, it doesn’t get much better than this. As Trump and his army of Goldman Sachs guys, corporate CEOs, and Christian zealots slouch toward inauguration day, we are being treated to a master class in coordinated media manipulation that is making Goebbels look like an amateur. This may not be immediately apparent, given the seemingly risible nature of most of the garbage we are being barraged with, but once one understands the actual purpose of such official propaganda, everything starts to make more sense.
