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May 3, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:18
221 Brave Media Warriors!

A tale of near-limitless courage and integrity...

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Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
It's, gosh, what is it?
Wednesday, May the 3rd, 2006.
That's probably within spitting distance, so we'll call that accurate enough for this show.
So I hope you're doing well.
I am going to chat this morning about the media.
This will probably be a two-parter, even though I had a very small amount of sleep last night.
I had a nap when I got home from work.
I was just kind of I'm tired and unfortunately I over-napped, which skidded into my night sleep, which sometimes happens.
Naps are a good servant and a terrible master.
So I ended up getting up really early this morning and hit the gyms and I'm on my way to work.
It's a little bit further. We might have a little more time, but hey.
You know that I still won't cover the entire topic.
The media is a very complicated topic, and I'm only going to touch on it briefly and wait for the rapt and applause-laden listener feedback before deciding whether to continue with it.
Based on the poll that's on the website, it would seem that the rants about philosophy seem to be...
Just about the most popular rants that there are, and so I'm going to spend a little bit more time on those over the next little while.
The listeners are my lords and masters, and I hope to constantly please you all.
And there's a reminder I'm going to put out there, if you'd be so very kind.
I'm sort of curious about figuring out the number of listeners, and so I would like, if you wouldn't mind, to go to feedblitz.com, Look up Free Domain Radio and subscribe.
Or you can go to www.freedomainradio.com and you can subscribe there.
Just on the bottom left, there is a...
A little yellow box with a submit button or a subscribe button or something like that, and put your email in there.
You can unsubscribe at any time, but it would certainly help me track the number of listeners.
I'd appreciate that. On the very same page, now that I've lured you there with a minor favor, I'm going to ask for a bigger one, which is on that same page, is the wonderful donate button, which allows you to hurl some cash my way.
I'm using it for Google AdSense words, for bandwidth requirements.
We're up to about 350 gigs a month, A frick of a lot of shows.
And so I would really appreciate it if you could hurl some cash my way to cover some of those costs.
And that would be beyond pleasurable.
Now, we're going to talk a little bit about the media because the media is something that annoys me.
You know, unlike everything else I talk about.
Which leaves me so common.
But the media is one of these whiny and irritating and cowardly aspects of society and criticism of power within society that really just bothers me.
I have no problem with people critiquing institutions of power.
But really, is Dan Rather the guy you should be troubled about, or is George Bush the guy you should be troubled about?
Well, actually, of course, neither. It's the institutions themselves which are the problem.
And these institutions always have problems based on the power of the state.
So I'm going to give you a little bit about sort of what the general critique of the media is, and then we'll talk about sort of why I think about it.
And it's one of the things Christina was asking me the other day, which is, you know, do you think we have a free press?
And it's a very interesting question.
I don't know that I will get to it this morning or even this afternoon, but it's something we'll talk about at some point.
It is, of course, a very interesting question.
Now, the general critique of the media that has occurred over the past maybe 10 to 15 years, maybe a little bit longer, but really 10 to 15 years, really peaked in the last five years, is this issue that You have more and more multinationals controlling fewer and fewer media outlets.
And this is the result, in general, of changes in FCC legislation that came in And the FCC was chaired, if you didn't know, just for sort of funsies, by Colin Powell's son.
I can't remember his name.
Kickback Powell or something like that?
I think that was his nickname, but it's something like that.
And what happened was, when the FCC was first created in the 1930s, they had this, you know, quote, problem, right?
Always a problem of public ownership.
Like, things have never been enclosed in commons before.
And so when radio first came out as a commercial entity...
Then there was a sort of scramble for airwaves and so on, and people were jamming each other in.
This is the story. I mean, I'm sure that if you dig into it, this won't be the fact of the matter.
But there were no clear property rights in the media, in airwaves and so on.
This was before cable and satellite and all this stuff.
So the frequency that you broadcast on was very important.
People could jam you and so on. And so what happened was the government in its infinite wisdom of course stepped in to help out society.
And so then what happened was the FCC took over the airwaves and licensed it back on an annual basis, right?
Because you can't just have the government take over and sell it to people because that wouldn't be allowing the government to retain the kind of power that helps it help us just so much.
And so this has been really the case ever since, that media, public media, which relies on things like cable and airwaves and so on frequencies, The government is under the governance of the state, and so the state gets to impose particular kinds of use restrictions on it.
So you can't swear, there's a whole bunch of words you can't say, and so on.
And so you keep having to reapply for this license every year, and this is one of the ways in which the government sort of slowly throttles the throat of the media ownerships.
How did the government get thousands of media companies, which were the case?
Probably hundreds in the 1930s, but it grew to thousands.
How did it get their cooperation?
Why did people even listen to it?
This is sort of an important thing.
As we know, when the government, as we talked about last Monday, earlier this week, I think it was Monday, as we know, when the government ups the taxes, everybody just troops on over to the grey market, or the black market, and when the government makes drugs illegal, people just start selling drugs illegally.
There's no reason to believe that any particular government program is going to achieve the intended effect.
So of course the question becomes, why, oh why, would people listen to the government in this way?
So if the government suddenly says, well you can't use this bandwidth and you can, why would anybody listen?
Why would they even bother to listen?
Why wouldn't you just call these pirate stations and so on?
Well, the reason, of course, is that the government grants a monopoly in return for obedience.
I mean, this is basically how the government gets companies to agree and sell us all down the river for the sake of a couple of shekels, 30 pieces of silver, however you want to call it.
The government basically gets people to agree to this by bribing them.
And the way that it often bribes them is through monopolies.
And so the way that the government got all of these smaller media companies to go along with it was it basically granted them a monopoly, and it did not charge them, other than a small nominal license fee, it did not charge them for the use of these frequencies.
And I'm sure that if you kicked over the stones of what happened originally and could actually get the facts, which may or may not be possible anymore, you'd have all the kickbacks and bribery, all the normal stuff that goes over with the allocation of public resources.
And so... These smaller media companies got a monopoly, a long-lasting monopoly.
They didn't have to bid for these airwaves, right?
Because normally what would happen in a free market situation, and I think Ayn Rand has a good article on this.
I can't remember what it's called, but just look at Airwaves and Rand.
I'm sure you'll find it. But normally what would happen is if you had a highly valuable commodity like an airwave going up for sale, and I'm not saying I have any idea who would sell it, but I imagine it would be something like domain names now, right?
Whoever stakes the claim owns it.
Whoever broadcasts on it verifiably first owns it and then can sell that to whoever wants.
It doesn't really matter who first owns it.
What matters is who gets to bid on it, right?
Whoever gets to bid on it is the person who can create the best use of it from an economic standpoint.
The person who can create the most popular programming, which can reach the widest audience, which can deliver the most ear canals or eyeballs to advertisers, is the person who's going to be able to bid the most, win the business, and provide the most economic value.
And that's how it would sort of normally work.
And that's not how it did work, of course, because the government didn't allow people to bid but just handed these things out as political favors.
And so you get this sort of ensnarement of the media very quickly by the government because now the media is highly fragmented.
And, I mean, that's not a bad thing if that's what the market ends up dictating, but I don't suspect that it would be the case.
The media's fragmented.
It's in the hands of people who haven't paid for it.
So they've set themselves up a nice, tidy living, and they owe it all to the government, and they owe it all to their annual renewal of their FCC license.
And the FCC license is pretty much like taxes, in that someone can always find something that you've done that's incorrect.
Or they can change the rules and sort of make them so complicated and say, don't worry about it, and then it turns out that you violated something.
So... You're pretty dependent on the government, and so nobody really wants to cross the government, and so this is sort of how the media is first enslaved by the government.
Now, you don't see the media saying, well, this is wrong, right?
I mean, and again, I'm just talking about this in a collective sense, so forgive me for putting this sort of collective moral judgment, but it just makes it a little bit easier to explain from an ethical standpoint.
But in general, the media is first ensnared by the government and there's a stampede to get all of these frequencies as quickly as humanly possible.
And they're overjoyed that they don't have to pay for it, that they don't have to have a bidding war to pay for these frequencies.
So everybody's happy and everybody takes that.
And nobody has any problem with state power in that way.
And this is very similar to a lot of other things that we've talked about.
It always follows the same pattern, right?
Whoever pays the piper ends up calling the tune.
So you have these funding.
So, for instance, in education, you have these funds that come from the federal government.
I'm talking about the U.S. here.
I'm not sure it's the same all over. These funds that come from the federal government, and when they first come along, the schools are all overjoyed.
Universities are, oh, look at all this money.
Oh, we owe them programs and happy and blah, blah, blah.
And then, of course, slowly the noose begins to tighten, and then you get used to that additional money, you expand your programs, now you're completely dependent on it, and the government now says, well, now we want to have a say about curriculum, and now we want this, and now we want that, and you're basically hosed.
It's exactly the same as the way that, I mean, if The Sopranos is true, and maybe it is, maybe it isn't, But it's exactly how the Mafia end up taking control of you as they sort of extend credit and then everything's funsy-funsy and then they begin to control you through the credit that they've extended and the lifestyle that you've expanded to join up with that credit and then they begin to reel you in and end up destroying you completely.
It's exactly the same with the state because the state is just the Mafia with commercials or the Mafia with pamphlets.
And so... The media had no particular issues with state power in this particular process.
So you don't get a lot of criticism of the depression and the depression policies, which we talked about last November or December, I think.
You don't get a lot of criticism of state policies that are continuing to talk about depression because you have people or institutions that are completely dependent upon state largesse and state benevolence, quote benevolence.
They end up not...
Not ever calling for a reduction in state power, but for an expansion in state power, right?
So the red thirties, everyone's out there saying, well, the depression's getting worse.
The fact that the government controls the money supply and controls the minimum wage and is putting in these huge welfare programs and controls, you know, increasing aspects of the economy and is still unable to solve the issue of the depression never strikes anyone.
And these people are old enough that they can remember what it was like before The government took over, like the Fed took over the money supply in 1913.
So they can remember what it used to be like.
Or if they can't, their parents can.
So they're not in this sort of 1984 scenario when Winston Smith goes into a bar to talk to this old guy about what life was like before the revolution.
They remember, they know, they see...
And yet they still don't look into the facts, look into the truth.
I mean, if you look at the amount of energy that Woodward and Bernstein spent ferreting out stupid, innocuous crap about Nixon, right?
Nixon is perpetrating genocide in Cambodia and Vietnam, and the important thing is whether he bugged the opposition in a hotel.
That's the moral compass that I've always found that to be just the worst kind of fatuous and pompous self-aggrandizement and, oh, aren't we brave because we took on an unpopular president about an innocuous moral nothing, and we never took on the popular president, i.e. Kennedy, about the genocide he was initiating and expanding throughout Asia.
But we'll get mad at the unpopular guy for placing a few recording devices in a hotel, because that's really the moral issue that needs to be dealt with.
I mean, oh my God.
And the amount of heroism that they pat themselves on the back for, and how brave they are, and oh, the secrecy, and oh, I mean, they're never going to get thrown in jail.
You want to talk brave? You talk about an unarmed and half-naked Cambodian child standing up to the napalm, descending from the heavens like God's fiery net of death.
That's bravery. You know, skulking around in a relatively open society, trying to dig up dirt on an unpopular president and meeting with bureaucrats who want his downfall.
Got to tell you, not really that brave.
And the funny thing is, if you ever watch the movie, and I remember watching it when I was a kid, it's just so anticlimactic, you know?
Like the big drama thing is, you know, don't say anything if this is true.
You know, all this, the horns of doom and so on.
It's just so funny, right? I mean, it's just such a non-event.
But anyway, we don't have to go into that at a time, but...
This issue that as soon as the media is captured in the net of state power, they're all running around trumpeting about how we need more state, more state, more state, and they're close enough to no state to recognize how bad it's gotten since the state took control of the money supply and so on.
So no particular points for the media there.
And also no particular points for the media's enslavement of not only themselves to some degree.
I mean, they were well-paid slaves, right?
So they jumped into their gold-lined, fur-lined pens with alacrity and whoops of joy.
So they're sort of well-paid slaves.
But they sold the rest of us down the river, right?
Because everyone who comes after them doesn't get nearly quite as much money and gets a little bit more enslavement each time.
And so the media doesn't really have, to me, any particularly relevant history other than sort of slavish and embarrassing obsequence to state power.
But the important thing is sort of as the state power grows, then the requirements of people to find out about what the state is doing grow too.
And that's fairly important.
The growth of lobbyists, the growth of state spending and military contracts and so on, especially in the post-war period, right?
The permanent standing army and all the military contracts that go along with it.
Well, the media doesn't really examine that stuff too carefully.
We think that we have sort of a left-leaning media, which is, I guess, fine to some degree.
I mean, it doesn't really matter one way or another whether it's right-leaning or left-leaning.
They're all pro-statist, right?
I mean, that's sort of natural.
You can't rise to positions of prominence within this culture without being pro-statist in one way or another.
Like, if Noam Chomsky was actually an anarcho-capitalist, he would not be particularly well-known, no matter how intelligent he was.
But he is somebody who says, well, no, we should use the ultimate power of the state to help the elderly, as if you can, as if he's never seen the Sorcerer's Apprentice, right, the Mickey Mouse thing, as if you can control that apocalyptic and genocidal level of violence and make it do your bidding.
I mean, it's just kind of funny, right?
Wagging your fingers at the Marines is not going to do you a whole lot, no matter how well paid and state-based and public intellectual you are.
But as state power grows and as more money and decisions and legislation and regulations and so on begin to be tied up in the state decisions, then people really need to find out about those state decisions and they really need to influence those state decisions so more and more media and publicity begins to center around...
The state, and so media is sort of pointing to and disseminating information from the government at all times, and they need to, in order to be read, they kind of need to be first, right?
In order to be first, they have to have people inside the government who are feeding them information, and so if you were to ever criticize the very institution of a state, everyone would clam up, and you'd very quickly go out of business.
And if you didn't go out of business, then the FCC would not renew your license, and then you would go out of business.
So, that is sort of the brief history of the media.
And now, of course, the media, the smaller holders of media licenses, smaller practitioners and so on, they are all up in arms, right?
These sort of weasley media guys who were perfectly happy to rely on state power to give them a monopoly and perfectly happy to pocket all the extra cash that Cummings from have a monopoly on a valuable good that you never had to pay for.
But simply have to pay a small amount as a licensor or licensee of the FCC and also to pay tribute or obsequious tribute to the state.
Those are the two conditions.
A little bit of money and a whole lot of knee bending and knee crooking is what you need in order to keep your license.
And so these small media outlets, the sort of local media outlets, had no problem with all of that.
They're very happy about the profits that they made over and above that which they would have made had they had to bid for this resource.
And so no problem with state power.
State power is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.
And then, of course, it turns around, and the restrictions on media ownership are lifted.
I mean, I don't know the exact degree, but it was a pretty significant reduction in the limitation on conglomerate ownership of local media.
So before, it was something like you could only own five newspapers and not all in the same market, and you could own the newspaper or the TV station in the same market.
All of that stuff was lifted.
And suddenly, oh my heavens, the media, the little media guys all start scurrying around like cockroaches with the lights switched on, and they start crying havoc, and oh, woe is us, and state power is so bad.
Oh, we'd never noticed it for the last 50 years, but now it's just awful, the state power, and oh, I mean, it's just hilarious.
It's just hilarious.
I mean, I would have some respect for these weasels if at least they stood up.
Oh, wouldn't you just love to see this just once?
Wouldn't that just make your nipples go bawango?
To just see it once, some guy to stand up and say, well, you know, okay, so I kind of relied on the government for my income.
And now I'm selling out to a conglomerate.
And I'm sorry about everyone who comes after me, but I can sort of see which way the wind is blowing.
And the conglomerate can sort of overreach me now with cable and satellite and so on.
And so I'm not really worth that much.
I'm going to sell out as quickly as I can.
And so I just...
Sorry to sell you down the river to this big evil international capitalist concern or whatever you want to call it.
But I kind of had this unjustly state power was my friend.
It protected me from competitors for relatively little money.
And so I'm just going to sell out and leave.
And all the people who then get fired, if you could just have them say, well, we're mad at the government because, you know, we thought we were really valuable and we knew that, you know, we were sort of telling you that we were really valuable and it was sort of all based on state coercion and we were really a big fan of the state when it was protecting us from competition, but now it's exposed us to competition and we proved to not be that valuable.
Sorry, but we'd really like the state power to be changed now, to benefit us again.
I mean, wouldn't you just love to hear that once?
Just someone being honest. That's all we're asking for.
Just stop with these false arguments for morality.
Just be honest. Just be frank with us and say, you know, without this, like the union guys, you know, without this state protection, I'm not pulling in the big bucks.
And so, I'd like the state power to come back in my favor.
I mean, that would be great for me.
I'd really appreciate that.
Thanks so much. But you never hear that.
I mean, nobody can ever say anything that honest because of the shame and the moral horror of what they've been doing.
And so you end up with, oh, democracy is threatened and the people aren't getting the right information.
And, oh, we just need to not have so many conglomerates because the voices are stifled.
It's like, well, what about all the voices of the people that could have been on the air if you guys didn't have this FCC ruling and get all this stuff for free?
Oh, well, we don't really notice that, but, you know, so they've just got to drape themselves in these most heroic and noble of flags and, oh, we're doing it to revitalize democracy and to keep the people's voices and the local perspectives and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, oh, for Christ's sake, will you shut up?
You just got thrown out of work after sucking off the state for, you know, a generation or two.
You just turned out, once the state opened up the market, turned out you really weren't that valuable and once the state protection was taken away, you lost your job or you lost your income or your income was seriously reduced.
And so now you want state power back to protect your Weasley-ass job, and please just say that, and don't insult us by saying, well, it's for democracy and this and that.
I mean, that's just so pathetic, it's ridiculous.
So I have very little patience with the media, especially those aspects of media criticism, which is around evil, big, bad conglomerates, right?
I mean, of course, if you're really into the evils of capitalistic monopolies, and let's take mercantilism into account here and just say, well, maybe they can't see mercantilism and so on, and we can, so we know that certain, quote, capitalist monopolies are based on state coercion, but... It's kind of funny to me that, of course, if you're at all interested in destructive monopolies, I'm not sure that you'd really start with Rupert Murdoch.
I'm not sure you'd really start with Fox News, because that's all just an effect, folks.
All of that. The media is just an effect of public school education.
That's just the shadow that is cast by the evil of the state.
The media is absolutely mistaking cause for effect, absolutely putting the cart before the horse to criticize the media.
The media is just serving up what people want to hear, and what people want to hear is twisted, mutated, and undermined and corrupted by state power, the state power that they're subjected to and coerced by during all of the formative intelligent years of their life.
I mean, are you blaming the media for satisfying people's appetites, however shallow and ignorant those appetites may be?
I mean, if people's appetites are shallow and ignorant, wouldn't you get mad at the public school system just a little bit first?
Just a little bit, maybe?
If you're really upset and bothered by coercive monopolies, are you really going to bother with somebody who's buying up local TV stations and delivering news that people voluntarily want to tune into?
Is that the person who's got the really ugly monopoly in this kind of situation?
Is that the person that you really have to worry about?
I gotta tell you, I can't see it.
And of course, it's just such an obvious thing that you just know that these people are just sickeningly twisting any kind of moral argument that might be valid to suit their own selfish, money-grubbing instincts for survival.
And they know that state power is the enemy, but they can't turn on state power From any philosophical, moral, or logical standpoint because they benefited from state power for so long at everybody else's expense.
So they can't go the anarcho-capitalist route because the first thing that people will say is, well, wait a minute, didn't you get a whole license and didn't you submit to all this regulation and pay all this money and get all these resources for almost no money from the state?
And now that that's all changed, suddenly you're against the state?
I mean, that would just be an argument that wouldn't stand...
30 seconds. That would be too obvious, right?
But it's very hard to see that kind of argument.
It's easy to see it once it's opened up and then these people would fold like a bad hand of poker.
When they start draping themselves in the flag of democracy and information and the people's right to know and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Oh man, I'm telling you, it just turns my stomach.
It really, really does.
Because it's just such an obviously ridiculous argument.
I stated this once before, but I think it's important enough to mention again.
Not exactly filler, but close, but not exactly.
But I mentioned this once before, that if you wanted to gain the power of propaganda...
Over a population that was nominally free in some ways, and a society that was nominally open in some ways, Would you choose either A, control to some small degree over people's voluntary participation in television, radio, and so on, and movies, and whatever?
Would you choose that?
And this would really only impress itself upon them when they chose to go, and pretty much you would only be able to use heavy propaganda on them when they got older, and if you did use heavy propaganda, people wouldn't go because they'd recognize, like, there was some Denzel Washington film about public health care and so on.
It was always just a Such ham-fisted socialist propaganda that nobody went to see it.
Would you take that power, the power of having to try and convert people without using ideas, without having them forced to sit in your theater, without being able to pass or fail them, without being able to have the ticket held out to them for a bright economic future or a life working in McDonald's?
Would you really go for that power, the power of the media, or...
Would you go for the power which said, we get to herd these children into these pens, these learning gulags, quote learning gulags, these indoctrination camps, for 14 years, 14 formative years, and we get to drone at them for six hours a day and assign another hour or two of homework at night.
And the way that we're going to work it, you see, is that we hold the entire path to their economic future in our hand, and if they don't obey us, we can ban their economic future, destroy their economic future, or if they continue to have problems, we can kick them out, or we can drug them.
We can force the parents to drug them into submission.
And if they don't show up at these gulags, we can have the parents thrown in prison or shot.
And anybody who's going to end up with any kind of influence, the more influence they have, the more time they're going to spend in these learning gulags trying to get ahead or trying to get their degrees and so on.
So by the time somebody with an advanced graduate degree floats up to some position of prominence, they've had 20 or 25 years of indoctrination at the hands of the state, and they have to do it.
They've forced to for the first 14 years, and if they want to get anywhere in life, they have to, for the next couple of years, And we control the entire curriculum, their whole economic future.
They have to be there, and we can shoot anybody who doesn't fund it.
I mean, to me, that's just such a ridiculously unbalanced way of looking at propaganda that it always just astounds me.
I've got to tell you, it just astounds me.
This stuff, I swear, it's not brain surgery.
It's really not that difficult to figure out.
You have to really work to not see this stuff.
Like you have to really get up and concentrate and really let your mind just sort of float away like a helium balloon in a high wind.
You have to really squeeze your muscles, grit your teeth, and leap for this kind of vacuous moral and intellectual emptiness that you can't see this kind of stuff, which is just so patently obvious.
I mean, if you want to talk about propaganda, is it really that hard to see the public schools?
I mean, is it really that hard to see the fact that kids get stuck in these gulags for 14 years and get taught the most abysmal and evil and corrupt collectivist nonsense and filth?
I mean, is it really that hard to see if you're really interested in propaganda?
If you were to sort of go over to the Soviet Union, I mean, if you look over at the Soviet Union or look over at these sort of totalitarian societies of today...
Would you say, well, you see, those educational facilities that they have over there are really serving state power.
I remember seeing some 60 Minutes where they're over in, I can't remember, North Korea, I think it was.
And they're looking at the public school system over in North Korea, and the kids are all repeating how wonderful the leader is, and they're all...
You know, just sitting in rows and dutifully raising their hands and all these empty-headed state-indoctrinated zombie children.
I mean, it's frightening. It's like children of the con, right?
Those sort of eyes like a Camaro's high beams at night and so on.
I mean, it takes a long time to recover your soul from this kind of moral rubble.
But... They're showing this and then, you know, they ask a question and then the kid sort of paralyzes, is sort of frozen and paralyzed and then he has to, I think the girl has to consult with the teacher who then whispers the answer and then, oh, the leader is great and so on.
And they show this kind of stuff and it's like, you know, wow, look how indoctrinated those children are.
I mean, they know it.
You ask anyone about whether indoctrination is...
Better and more effective and easier to inflict upon children or adults, I swear it's not going to take them more than a tenth of a second to say, yeah, well, kids, obviously, right?
And then if you want to indoctrinate people, should they be allowed to voluntarily participate in an interaction that many people are competing for their attention with and they can do it or don't do it, it's absolutely up to them, and they have to voluntarily pay for it at the same time?
Would you say that that is the effective way to indoctrinate?
Or do you force children to sit in rows and drone the answers back and destroy their economic futures or drug them into submission if they don't give you the right answers?
Or if they ask questions that you don't like?
Well, of course, no sane human being is going to say, yeah, you want to voluntarily offer stuff to adults, and that's how propaganda works really well.
So it's not that people don't know this stuff.
I mean, they absolutely know it.
It's completely clear to them.
And so they really, they're peddling mightily.
To not see this stuff.
Like, they're absolutely poking their own eyes out with sharp sticks to not see this stuff.
Because you ask them questions and they absolutely know the answers.
Like, there's no doubt that they know the answers.
They know the answers when they go and look at other societies and they hear about these indoctrinations as public school is just, you know...
But they think... But they never make the connection.
The connection is so obvious.
This is public school. It's there to indoctrinate the children about how great the state is.
I mean, there's no question about that.
I mean, that's absolutely inevitable.
And it's a coerced situation and people are killed if they don't or shot if they don't fund it and if they don't go.
And the kids who are problem cases, who aren't doing well, who are either too bright or not being taught right or not bright enough.
Actually, the not bright enough kids do relatively well because they're not threatening to the state in any way.
But they get drugged or disciplined or their futures get thrown away and they end up on drugs or criminals and so on.
And this happens a lot to sort of ghetto kids in these terrible schools.
So it's completely, absolutely, and obviously, and totally clear, and everyone can give you the correct answer in about a millisecond.
So it's not that this knowledge is hard.
Like, you asked me to speak fluently in Latin.
I mean, I can't give you the right answers in a millisecond.
You asked me to translate ancient Aramaic.
I can't give you the answers in a millisecond.
You ask me if indoctrination is more effective when practiced on the young versus the old, I can give you the answer right away.
If it's voluntary versus coerced, I can give you the answer right away.
This is not difficult stuff.
And so it really is.
And if anyone out there has a strong idea about this or a good idea about why everybody's just so blind to this stuff, I would be absolutely fascinated to hear it.
I have a really tough time figuring it out.
I mean, maybe I've got some ideas, but I don't think I have anything particularly conclusive.
But this stuff that's so obvious and everybody's so aware and can give you the answer immediately, not like neurosurgery.
Neurosurgery takes a little while to figure out.
This stuff that people just know so well and just don't ever make any sort of clear connections or communicate any clear connections, but spend all their time going after corporations.
Can't imagine why people just have such trouble with this.
Or here's another one.
What about the little institution we call organized religion?
When it comes to propaganda, when it comes to people being exposed to ideas that are very destructive to themselves, when they're very young, they're forced to go, dragged there by their parents, and heavily punished if they don't go in a way that only parents can provide, and social sanctions or possibly even physical or emotional violence.
And they are threatened with hell, they're threatened with being thought of as bad children, as corrupt, as evil, as base, as tempted by Satan.
Is this propaganda that would maybe be a little higher on your list than, say, a news show?
Which you can tune into or not.
I mean, if you want to just, you know, say theoretically look at issues around something like propaganda against children that was problematic in terms of their intellectual or emotional development, or that presented falsehoods, or even if you don't want to say falsehoods at best, questionable truths in a matter that was both destructively abusive in terms of hell and so on.
And even if it wasn't in terms of hell, as I talked about with the parable of the apple a couple of months ago, it's very destructive to the child's cognitive development and is portrayed as perfect and moral, and if you don't believe it, it's evil.
Well, would you say that that maybe would be having a stronger effect on children than a newspaper that they get to read when they're, say, 20?
Which they can buy or not, which isn't in their faces, which they're not dragged to, which doesn't use the argument for morality, which can't apply...
Both significant corporeal and supernatural sanctions against them, some of which are considered to be completely or would be considered completely psychotic, i.e.
an eternity of burning in hell and so on.
I mean, just if you were interested in propaganda, if you wanted to sort of look at something like propaganda and its deleterious effects upon people, Wouldn't you sort of first look at the stuff that was aimed at kids, where they were brutalized and forced into participating, and which would warp their minds from here to eternity?
I'm just saying, you know, like if you wanted to, right?
So of course the question is, why don't they?
And the answer is pretty simple.
Because they're ranked cowards.
Because... Rupert Murdoch isn't going to do smack to you if you complain about his media empire.
You're not going to get into any trouble whatsoever for complaining about Rupert Murdoch or some sort of media conglomerate place or dude or Ted Turner or whoever you want.
These people aren't going to fight you back.
You're not going to get into a particular kind of hot water for that.
You criticize the state.
You criticize organized religion, especially in some fundamental and moral sense.
Well, you're going to have a bit of a rougher time of it if you're in the media.
And that's why the great thing about podcasts is that I'm, for instance, not dependent on anyone for my paycheck in the media.
And so I can say actually the truth, and I can actually be honest and open and forthright without feeling the chilling effect of wondering what's going to happen to my job or my career.
So, this kind of cowardice, we'll talk about it a little bit more this afternoon, but I think it's sort of very important to understand that these people are just cowardly bullies, right?
They pick on people who can't pick back, who aren't even really the issue, and they completely ignore the two major institutions that are corrupting children and have the real fist around the throat of the population in terms of propaganda, which is the state schools and the organized religions.
And they won't talk about any of that, but instead they'll pick on some Australian guy who bought some TV stations.
I just think that's too funny for words.
Anyway, we'll talk about it more this afternoon.
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