An off-the-cuff Twitter thread I tweeted yesterday has gotten a fair bit of play in the wake of the recent mass shootings.
Basically, I saw everyone in my timeline freaking out as per their conditioning, so I thought a reminder of how keeping everyone in a state of fear is the mass media’s job.
Point out the blatant propagandizing of the news today, and people of the Baby Boom generation and older will voice their nostalgia for the days of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. Back then, we’re told, they just reported the facts and let viewers decide.
Paeans to the golden age of journalism are, of course, pure fiction. The media has always been a powerful tool for shaping public opinion, and the people who’ve controlled it have invariably abused it.
The Hearst Syndicate starting the Spanish-American War is the favorite example. But Hearst wasn’t the first newspaperman to incite a war.
Contrary to popular belief, the French Revolution wasn’t a peasant uprising. The peasants were too weak and disorganized to take on a world power. It was defectors from the minor nobility and members of the ascending middle class who teamed up to topple the king. Pamphlets and newspapers passed around in the coffeehouses were their primary weapons.
Going back even further, the Protestant Reformation is often credited to the printing press, but the same technology helped ignite one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts in European history.
It’s no different today. The low-work, high-pay, incestuous character of the contemporary newsroom has just made the propagandists worse at hiding their intentions.
The latest spate of shootings by atheist Leftists egged on by fedposters is a great example. Five minutes on any news channel or social media feed will show you that the mainstream media is using these crimes as a handy club to beat white people–which the shooters were–and Christian conservatives–which the shooters were not.
So eager were the priests of the ruling death cult to condemn their sworn enemies that they were easily and hilariously duped, at length, by an obvious prankster.
It should be self-evident by now, but the mass media isn’t there to inform you. Its purpose is to keep people in a constant state of low-grade panic–fluctuating within tolerances.
Why keep everyone afraid? Ask any accomplished salesman. Scared people don’t think rationally. They’re far more suggestible and manipulable. Watch any insurance commercial.
What the Boomers miss are the days when the media would openly use this tactic to sell beer and toothpaste while keeping the real propaganda subtle. Now that the entire TV ad revenue model has been proven fraudulent, the corresponding decline in journo IQ has torn the curtain away from their whole operation.
While you’re better off not consuming news at all, here’s a surefire way to tell if you’re being manipulated. Is the lead story about some massacre/accident/natural disaster three states over? If so, and unless you have family in the affected area, the news is irrelevant. Act accordingly.
The Mainstream Media may be a Two-Dollar Whore, but danged if they don't work that moneymaker to deliver every penny's worth of propaganda for their Johns.
In other words, “stop giving views to those who hate you.”
Brian
I've stopped listening to the MSM where I live. They too use fear and othering to keep people in line..
It's a authoritarian dynastic polity. The propaganda isn't just brazen it's elite driven animus against the native population.
Ignoring the shills has been ver liberating.
xavier
As a former sales guy, my most potent sales tool was the knowledge that the largest companies in our industry all used our software. I never even had to point it out – all the prospect knew they were competing against companies that used our stuff. They were already afraid they were losing deals (our software helped ppl create complex financing quotes) to our users. It was an easy job, for the most part.
Point being: yes, fear is very useful in getting people to do what you want. Couple that with the neo-Marxist commitment to the destruction of anything that makes people happy and thus delays the Revolution, and you get what we have today: 24/7 fearmongering.
A perfect example of this principle in action. Thank you.
Maybe the most relevant social division is between those who listen to the media liars and those who unplug (more or less). Discouragement and a tendency to despair are traits the death cultists and the conservatives seem to have in common.
You might just be onto something…
What amazes me is people still act like they're not desensitized to these big, bloody spectacles these days. But really they're told to be outraged, so they pretend like they are. For a few days, anyway. Maybe even for a few weeks.
The outrage, and even the event itself, fades from memory when there's something new to be upset about, like the latest evil words Trump has tweeted.
But the legislation that results from these events stays with us forever, and the lemmings barely ever pay attention to that part. Especially if it's legislation that's controversial enough that it gets glossed over.
And the lemmings fail to see the patterns, every time. They don't wonder why these shootings tend to always happen at the beginning of an election cycle. They don't recognize that the shooter is almost always a Liberal who hates Trump. They don't recognize that the shooter is a criminal who wouldn't have followed gun laws in the first place. They don't recognize that the shootings take place in 'gun-free zones', or in states and countries with strict gun control laws. They don't recognize that the shooter is almost always stopped by Good Guys With Guns, that the deathtoll would be far greater if it were not for armed citizens or quick police response time. They ignore the fact that police shoot Caucasians more than 50% more often than African Americans, or that when guns are taken away from citizens in countries, knife crime soars even higher than gun crime ever could. They aren't outraged to find out that there were more shooting-related deaths in Chicago that very same night.
The media turns a blind eye when the shooter is a minority and under-reports the event, just like how they gloss over controversial legislation, the kinds of Acts that get passed on midnight of Christmas Eve when no one is looking.
No, they're waiting for a white male with an AK-47, because that sort of fits their agenda, actual beliefs of the shooter be damned. They'll just gloss over that part of it and scream: Christianity is to blame! Trump's words are to blame! Video games are to blame! No, in every case, mental insanity is to blame, with an honorable mention to mainstream media.
Bafflingly, we can add Trump to those pushing idiotic gun control laws.
As for the lemmings, they don't understand anything, nor do they want to understand anything. That's what makes them lemmings.
Trump is a Democrat from Manhattan. Folks from big cities have a handicap when it comes to thinking correctly about the right to keep and bear arms, as do Democrats generally. They might not have grown up in a gun culture, so they offer up as a compromise something that they never valued in the first place. Yankee Democrats from big cities have really drawn the short straw in this regard.
"Trump is a Democrat from Manhattan."
Who is also the leader of the Republican party.