Divide and conquer: The government’s propaganda of fear and fake news – Orange County Register
www.ocregister.com
We will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

…We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    So, while I am not at all dismissing some (imo valid) points presented here:

    • OC Register is a conservative rag
    • mentions of the “Deep State” in an unironic context smacks of the most obnoxious maga-ish narratives going all the way back to 2016
    • citing the “Ron Paul Freedom Report” is like… what. Come on. Really?
    • citing RT unironically, whose article itself is about Ron Paul: that’s a “nope” from me, dawg.
    • citing reason.com, which is a libertarian magazine

    And the icing on the cake:

    Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

    This is itself propaganda. And it’s also a sales pitch for you to buy this author’s book.

    At its roots, this isn’t progressive. It’s a conservative wingnut screed that just happens to align with the stopped clock principle. And I’m willing to bet the author would probably start ranting about how all this is aimed at making us more “woke”, if you lightly socially engineered them into thinking you agreed fully, simply to see which direction they were going to run with the narrative.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Hey, by and large, I agree with the vast majority of stuff that you post, and, I expect, your political stance overall. I don’t disagree that modern journalistic integrity can largely be described as spinelessly feckless.

        But using a well-known conservative source that quotes extremely conservative (not to mention, Russian) and libertarian sources and arguments isn’t something I would do. The argument can be made perfectly well using more legitimate and reputable sources that don’t lean in to conspiracy theory idiocy and general chaos-sowing anti-western narratives as a modus operandi.

        My point is that your argument is not wrong, but the article and the sources it cites are more than a bit bullshit, and that both the article and the linked sources have ulterior motives of their own that you or I find nakedly regressive and abhorrent.