Tag Archives: Victims

The Propaganda War (And How To Fight It), Part II, by CJ Hopkins

Posted on August 18, 2021 | 1 comment

You fight propaganda with better propaganda. From CJ Hopkins at The Consent Factory via zerohedge.com:

The column you are about to read is propaganda. Yes, that’s right … propaganda. It isn’t political satire or commentary, or objective news or information, or unbiased, verified scientific fact. It is propaganda, pure and simple.

That isn’t a confession, a disclaimer, or a warning. I am not ashamed of writing propaganda. Most everything you see and read on the Internet, and in newspapers, and on television, and in textbooks, and novels, and on advertising billboards, and everywhere else, is propaganda. There is nothing wrong with propaganda. The question is who is doing it, and what they are doing it for. Here’s the definition in the Cambridge Dictionary:

“information, ideas, opinions, or images, often only giving one part of an argument, that are broadcast, published, or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people’s opinions”

That is what the column you are reading is … an attempt to influence people’s opinions.

Of course, that isn’t all it is. Nothing is ever only one thing. But it is absolutely propaganda. And so is everything else that you will read today.

I’m terribly sorry if this comes as a shock, but there is no “objective” fantasy-land in which no one is trying to persuade you of anything or pressure you or otherwise influence you to do something. It does not exist, this “objective” dreamworld, where “authoritative sources” report “the facts,” where “the facts” are “verified” by “neutral” “fact checkers,” where ex-NSA and CIA spooks are hired as commentators by MSNBC and CNN because they care about “the truth,” where “science” is immune to manipulation. This fantasy is the alibi of authoritarians, cult leaders, and assorted other control freaks, and the people they have brainwashed into believing in it.

Everyone — and I do mean literally everyone — is trying to persuade or convince you of something. Your friends, family, colleagues, your boss, advertisers, lobbyists, government officials, the media, artists, teachers, doctors, journalists, bloggers, Twitter bots, etc. This isn’t cause for paranoia. It’s a natural part of human social behavior. It is happening right now as you read this sentence. I’m trying to convince you of something. In a moment, I’m going to urge you to do something.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Insurrection, Law, Morality, Politics, Propaganda

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Who Precisely Are “the Vulnerable”? by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on July 20, 2019 | Leave a comment

Anyone can declare him or herself anything he or she wants, and then declare him or herself a victim. However, only certain claims to victimhood shall be recognized. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

Some readers, both male and female, wondered why I came to the defense of feminist Laura Tanner ( https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/07/17/free-speech-no-longer-exists-in-us-universities/ ).  Why not, I was asked, let a MeTwo babe experience the name-calling and stress  that feminists dish out to men and “women apologists for men”?

Justice is part of the answer.  Another part of the answer is that “Western civilization” is creating new victim groups so rapidly that older victim groups are becoming victims of the new.  The Tanner case is a case in which a feminist “victim” of male misogyny hasn’t the clout of a transgender advocate.  It is not clear whether Tanner’s persecutor, Kremina Youssef, is a transgender or just an advocate for transgender “victims.”

Regardless, it is Laura whose career is on the line for expressing an opinion, not the career of Kremina for expressing her opinion. 

The older terms “privileged minority” and “preferred minority”  are giving way to “vulnerable minority.”  The older terms had an honesty whereas the “vulnerable” designation resides in a lie. 

Those who are said to be “vulnerable” actually have all the power. Tanner, who expressed her opinion outside the university that it is not possible to be born into the wrong body and, therefore, a person in a male body is a male, has discovered that her free speech rights are null and void because Youssef is distressed.  It is Tanner, not Youssef, who is vulnerable.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Cronyism, Culture, Government, Horseshit, Law, Media

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Democrats’ America: The Heart of Darkness, by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on January 25, 2019 | 1 comment

Is there a person on the planet who isn’t a victim of something? Why are only certain victim groups, aligned with the Democratic party, sanctified? From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

If it was the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that black and white would come together in friendship and peace to do justice, his acolytes in today’s Democratic Party appear to have missed that part of his message.

Here is Hakeem Jeffries, fourth-ranked Democrat in Nancy Pelosi’s House, speaking Monday, on the holiday set aside to honor King:

“We have a hater in the White House. The birther in chief. The grand wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. … While Jim Crow may be dead, he’s still got some nieces and nephews that are alive and well.”

At the headquarters of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, wrote The New York Times, Jeffries’ remarks were “met with … much cheering.”

At a Boston breakfast that same day, Sen. Elizabeth Warren chose to honor King’s memory in her way: “Our government is shut down for one reason … So the president of the United States can fund a monument to hate and division along our southern border.”

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Posted in Government, Politics, race relations

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There Are No War Heroes. There Are Only War Victims. By Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on June 11, 2018 | Leave a comment

America’s war dead the last few decades have been defending “interests,” not country and kin. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Yesterday President Donald Trump tweeted, “My thoughts and prayers are with the families of our serviceman who was killed and his fellow servicemen who were wounded in Somolia. They are truly all HEROES.” Three hours later he tweeted it again, this time with the correct spelling of Somalia.

A few days earlier, at the climax of his phony, insipid feud with the Philadelphia Eagles, Donald Trump lectured Americans that they must always stand for the national anthem.

“We stand to honor our military and to honor our country, and to remember the fallen heroes who never made it back home,” the reality TV president bloviated. “We stand to show our love for our fellow citizens and our magnificent Constitution.  We stand to pay tribute to the incredible Americans who came before us and the heroic sacrifices they made.”

In both of these statements, President Trump was lying.

The US special operations soldier who was killed in Somalia (one of the “seven countries in five years” famously named in General Wesley Clark’s revelation of the US war machine’s plans for world domination) and the four others who were injured are not heroes. The US servicemen and women who have fought and died in America’s nonstop acts of military expansionism and wars of aggression are not heroes. They are victims. They are victims of a sociopathic power establishment which does not care about them, and never has.

If what I just wrote bothered you, it is because you have been conditioned to oppose such ideas by generations of war propaganda. If you believe that US soldiers are heroes, it means that you believe that they are fighting and dying for a noble cause; for your freedom, for democracy, for the good and the just. It turns the deaths of the fallen into a tragic but noble sacrifice in your eyes, which keeps you from realizing that they have actually been dying for the profit margins of war plutocrats, land and resource assets, and the neoconservative agenda to secure control of the planet.

To continue reading: There Are No War Heroes. There Are Only War Victims.

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Posted in Government, History, Horseshit, Military, War

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Counter-#Resistance? by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on April 27, 2018 | Leave a comment

The Democrats were the party of slavery during the Civil War (Lincoln was the first Republican president), the party of Jim Crow and the Klu Klux Klan in the Solid South afterwards, and Democratic Southern congressmen stifled civil rights legislation for decades. So why do blacks think the Democrats have done them any favors since Civil Rights legislation finally passed in the 1960s (with far more Republican support than Democratic) and why do blacks continue to  vote more than 90 percent for Democrats? From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

Who hit Kanye with that white privilege stick? The rapper / fashion maven / theologian / Kardashian arm candyman sent chills through the Twitterverse when he declared himself, somewhat elliptically, off-the-bus of the Progressive #Resistance movement and an admirer of the Golden One in the Oval Office. This came in his endorsement of YouTube blogger Candace Owen, who happens to not be down with the cause of the national victim lottery. Both Kanye and Candace have apparently crossed some boundary into a Twilight Zone of independent thought. Many probably wonder how they are able to get out of bed in the morning without instructions from Don Lemon.

Speaking as a white cis-hetero mammal, I’m not quite as dazzled by the president, but it’s a relief to see, at last, some small rebellion against the American Stasi who have turned the public arena into a giant holding pen for identity offenders — though it is but one corner of the triad-of-hysteria that also includes the Hate Russia campaign and the crusade against men. This nonsense has been going on long enough, while the country hurtles heedlessly into a long emergency of economic disarray.

Next in line after Kanye and Candace, a popular Twitter critter name of Chance the Rapper endorsed Kanye endorsing Candace, more or less, by tweeting “black people don’t have to be Democrats.” The horror this thought aroused! Slavery, these days, it turns out, has a lot of appeal — maybe not so much for laboring in the canefields under the noonday sun as for serving juleps in the DNC plantation house. It happened that Kanye’s mom was a college professor, Chance’s dad was an aide to Chicago Mayor Daley (Jr.), and later worked in Mr. Obama’s Department of Labor. Candace describes her childhood home in Stamford, CT, as “very poor,” but she rose far-and-fast out of college to become an executive on Wall Street in her twenties. What they seem to have in common is being tainted with bourgeois values, horror again!

To continue reading: Counter-#Resistance? 

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Posted in Culture, Government, Law

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