“How To Win A Grassroots Media Rebellion“ - Caitlin Johnstone At Ron Paul Institute Conference
The mainstream media and its partners in government want to silence any non-regime voices. Australian renegade blogger joins the Ron Paul Institute's August 18th Washington conference to tell us how we can fight back!
The mainstream media and its partners in government want to silence any non-regime voices. Australian renegade blogger joins the Ron Paul Institute's August 18th Washington conference to tell us how we can fight back!
The mainstream media and its partners in government want to silence any non-regime voices. Australian renegade blogger joins the Ron Paul Institute's August 18th Washington conference to tell us how we can fight back!
So according to internetworldstats.com, as of the end of last year, there were nearly 4.2 billion internet users worldwide.
That's billion with a B.
The ubiquitousness of the mobile phone has meant that people of all races, colours, creeds, religions, nationalities and classes can now access the internet and add their voice to the global conversation.
4.2 billion.
That's more than the population of the entire world when I was born.
4.2 billion brains networked with each other like neurons in a giant planet-sized brain.
This is an unprecedented situation.
We have never been here before.
The world has literally never seen anything like this.
So I want you to take a moment to ingest that into your worldview.
When you're in an unprecedented situation, you don't know how it ends.
You just don't.
None of us do.
We can make models and we can try and look to history for clues, but in all honesty, it's just a huge unknown.
Seriously, when 4.2 billion people are suddenly hooked up together in a giant global brain that breaks through proximity and language barriers, national and tribal echo chambers, mows down various propaganda narratives particular to each country, and creates a conversation that at times might seem like white noise, we really don't know how and what that's going to manifest.
The internet has democratised information in such a way that there are no longer editors answerable to plutocrats who own them, keeping tabs on which journalists get the big gigs and which get sidelined into safer territory.
Anyone with a phone can join in.
And that is precisely what worries the elites around the world.
They know and have always known that those who control the narrative control the world.
If you have control over the story that everyone uses to make sense of the things that happen in their world, you can control the people.
Everyone from the Pope to Coca-Cola knows that, which is why the elected and unelected power establishments spend so much money on marketing, messaging, advertising, think tanks, social media bot farms and all manner of efforts to make sure that they retain the dominant narrative.
Now, I reckon we can safely name a point when the establishment lost control of the narrative and that was the election cycle of 2016.
Many strange things happened in that election cycle that were just not meant to happen.
Every mainstream media outlet across the board went all in for Hillary Clinton from the get-go.
But the grassroots left decided that they actually wanted Bernie.
Just by collaborating in Facebook groups, Reddit, Twitter, grassroots volunteers managed to create a campaign worth millions of dollars just out of sheer enthusiasm.
And it was a campaign that even the wealthiest owners of the wealthiest country in the world, using the best minds that money could buy, couldn't match.
People made content in such a volume that no marketing company could ever hope to produce, no matter what their budget was.
So who would have thunk a wiry old geezer from Vermont nearly felled the anointed queen by sheer people power alone?
And the DNC actually had to rig the primary to get her through.
And that wasn't the end for Hillary's Annu Harubilis.
I think the defining moment of the general election of 2016 was the looks on the pundits' faces as the tellies started to come through and it appeared that she was not going to win.
Their faces said everything.
This wasn't meant to happen.
It was just after a few WikiLeaks drops and some unauthorized opinions circulated on alternative media and they had lost control of the narrative.
So 2016 happened for two major reasons.
Trust in the mass media is at an all-time low.
We know that.
And our ability to share our own narratives is at an all-time high.
This poses a very real and direct threat to the ruling power establishment.
And the ruling power establishment knows that.
So they're doing everything they can to reverse it.
For them, that means they have two main goals.
They need to bring back trust in the mainstream media and they need to bring down our ability to share information and ideas.
That's a really big task that they've set themselves, especially because all the while they have to maintain the illusion of freedom and democracy.
The entire power establishment is built on war, exploitation and ecocide.
And it depends on manufacturing consent for those things.
So they don't look like what they are.
They have to maintain this illusion.
So they are fighting with their hands tied behind their back.
They can't just come out next Tuesday and say, guess what, everybody?
We're locking down the internet.
They have to do it really slowly, incrementally, starting with Alex Jones and Julian Assange, moving on to the smaller but important anti-war voices like Peter Van Buren, just working around the edges and knocking out the smaller profiles that support these kinds of anti-establishment voices, gradually manipulating the public into granting consent for more and more significant hits.
That's why it's so important to fight censorship of all voices, even for the voices you don't particularly like.
Alex Jones is not my cup of tea, but there is an obvious strategy being played out here.
You slowly manufacture consent by at first silencing the anti-establishment voices that are generally considered divisive and distasteful by the majority.
These are the soft targets.
Once they've primed people for censorship and got them talking not about whether there should be censorship, but who should be censored, from then on it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
So yeah, as Daniel was saying in the introduction, I've had an interesting 24 hours or so.
I woke up this morning to find out that my Twitter profile has been suspended indefinitely.
I won't go into all the facts and stuff because I don't have the time, but suffice to say that all my tweets, all my followers, every message I'd ever sent, all the energy I'd invested into Twitter all got disappeared.
That's 33,000 followers, 28,000 tweets, all gone.
Now, fortunately for me and perhaps unfortunately for the social engineers, the outcry was such that they were forced to reinstate me.
And then I was put on a so yeah, that was great.
But then they put me on a 12-hour suspension for no reason, no stated reason.
I think maybe just to disrupt my back parade and mitigate the damage on their mistake.
Because it really was a mistake.
I happen to have spent the last week now writing at length about how in a corporatist system, corporate censorship is state censorship.
And these Silicon Valley companies can't suddenly claim to be mum and pop shops who can decide for themselves who they censor when they have deep government ties going both ways and they are essentially operating as contractors for the government's surveillance state.
So, yeah, this is what I've been writing about.
So I'd inadvertently been prepping my readers all week for this exact scenario and just giving them tips on what they should do should it happen.
Serendipity really did go my way because I'd been saying all week, now, like, don't be happy about Alex Jones getting the axe because next week it will be me.
You just watch.
So I look totally psychic, but I'm not.
It wasn't a crystal ball.
That was just their strategy.
It's plain as day to see playing out and it's as easy as anything to forecast.
We know where this is going.
So this morning when the banhammer dropped on my Twitter account, people went really nuts.
And because of the Streisand effect, which is something you should look up if you haven't already, I've actually gained thousands of followers from just since this morning.
So even the article that I wrote about it got 10 times more retweets than usual.
And that's always the risk you take with censorship.
People are naturally curious animals and they will seek out what they're not allowed to see.
Censorship works best if people are unaware that it's happening.
So they have a very tricky task ahead of them.
So when people say our task is impossible, these corporations are too powerful.
There's no oversight.
What can one person do?
I think to myself, well, look at their task.
They have to slowly move the chess pieces into place without awakening the masses.
Every step of the way has to be carefully considered and coordinated so as not to look like the thing that it is.
One mistake, like the mistake they made today with banning me on Twitter, could actually boost their opposition.
And at all times, the invisible totalitarianism that we are ruled under risks coming out into the light.
And that would be the end game for them.
Without the illusion of freedom and democracy in place, they cannot propagandize us effectively.
And if they can't propagandize us effectively, then they cannot rule.
So I'd like to think about their task.
There's a few things they need to do.
They need to maintain a singular authoritative narrative.
The whole power structure relies on everyone being more or less in accord with the will of the plutocrats.
As regular people, we just have to point at truth when we see it.
That's all we have to do.
And we don't have to coordinate to do that.
They have to maintain an area of seriousness about everything they do.
They're like, it's like the emperor's new clothes.
They can't have people laughing at them.
It totally breaks the spell.
So we just have to laugh at them.
And the comedy of it all is just sitting right there.
Like, I don't know if you guys have been following the Scrapell case in the UK of late.
That's the one that Trump recently sanctioned Russia over, causing yet another escalation in the dangerous new Cold War.
But the Scrappel case is honestly one of the funniest things that ever made it onto the news.
Like Monty Python could not have written a better script for this thing.
Every single day they came back, they had to change the story because it kept getting debunked.
So like as like, oh, the Novichock, it was on the door handle.
I mean, it was on the air vent.
Like, oh, it's on the park seat.
Look, no, it was on the weaponized miniature drone.
So it just went on and on and got crazier and crazier every day.
It was just like pre-written satire.
It's really not very hard to make fun of them.
Another thing they have to do, they have to look cool and attractive while lying and being evasive.
Part of dominating the narrative means dominating the culture.
Being thought of as cool is surprisingly important to the empire.
When you consider that one of the reasons people give over their authority to other people is because they want to be like them.
If you're not cool, no one wants to be like you.
And it's hard to be cool when you're being really inauthentic and creepy.
So, but for us, that comes really naturally.
Like authenticity is always really cool.
So I think the key thing to remember is that they work so hard to manufacture consent because they absolutely require that consent.
If they fail to manufacture that consent, the mask of freedom and democracy will fall off and the plutocratic manipulators will be seen for the totalitarian oppressors that they are.
Think about it.
They really are treading a very thin line.
We will wake up to their manipulations if they control the narrative too little or if they control it too much.
Keep Shining, Fight On00:04:06
If it's too little and they fail to control the narrative, then we win.
Control is taken out of the hands of a few plutocrats and put back in the hands of the people, like as in democracy, like what we were sold in the first place.
The will of the people will be put back in charge and the giant planet-sized network of human brains will get to decide what to do with the resources and how to look after each other.
So they can't lose total control of the narrative, but if they get too ham-fisted and too totalitarian, the curtain over the oppressive regime that keeps most of the world toiling hand to mouth for the power lust of an insatiable few falls away.
We all wake up from the Matrix and they suddenly have billions of very angry humans who don't believe any of their stories anymore.
To my mind, winning a grassroots media rebellion is not only possible, it's actually very likely.
And how do we win it?
Well, we win it by taking the fight to the town square.
There's no point hiding away in some quiet back channel, avoiding censorship and public shunning for having ideas that don't conform to the mainstream narrative.
You've got to get loud, get proud, speak your truth using whatever means you have at your disposal.
Memes, songs, pictures, pithy statements, whatever your talent is, bring it to the revolution.
We need your thoughts and energy.
Don't get caught up in the fighting.
Remember, in the social media arena, content is king and the more quality content you can create, the better.
So pull as much energy as you can out of pointless internet arguments and put that energy into writing a blog, recording a video or making a meme that makes the argument that you see needs to be made.
If you find yourself hovering over that share or retweet button, wondering how your friends and family are going to perceive you, press it anyway.
As an anti-establishment voice, it's amazing how much silent support you have.
People have been shamed into silence and often don't feel brave enough to like or retweet you, but they are listening.
And as Julian Assange says, bravery is contagious.
Stand up, speak up, don't apologise, say it like it's true because you know it is.
Keep fighting, but most importantly, keep shining.
Shine as bright and as bold as you can so the others can find you.
Together, we can seize the means of producing the narrative to steal from an old socialist meme and thus take back democracy.
Not just for the US, but for all the other countries of the Western Empire that have been swept up in this corporatist, omnicidal, ecocidal surveillance state nightmare.
Now, I really love Americans, and I think one of the most beautiful and charming things about them is that they believe themselves to be superheroes ready to charge in and save the world.
And in the chaos of the white noise, I believe that's what's happening.
It's messy, but it's happening now.
Regular Americans are waking up to the system that they are oppressed by, and they are no longer trusting the poisonous mouth noises of the talking heads on their screens.
There is a lot of grief about that, and that's also what we're seeing now.
As the illusions fall away, the grief is palpable, and you can feel that even from across the seas.
But it's only a matter of time before Americans are leading the charge and taking back control of their country and its resources from the corporatist oligarchs, and in doing so, releasing the rest of the world from its clutches as well.