Why are “conspiracy theories” always attributed either to American right-wing extremists, or to Russian left-wing extremists? Even more confusingly, sometimes the very same “conspiracy theories” are credited to both groups! Groups which, on their face, you would expect to be on opposite sides of everything. Yet it's true-- both groups were equally supportive of the conspiracy theories swirling around the laptop belonging to poor, innocent Hunter Biden back in late 2020. How strange!
Even stranger, it turned out that their conspiracy theories were true, and the misinformation/disinformation was actually just plain old information. It turned out that poor, innocent Hunter was anything but poor-- and anything but innocent. But we never received any apologies from the people who imposed their “Russian disinformation” explanation of Hunter's laptop on the American public. And those people never received any punishment. And the oligarchy, which by now included the corporate media, shoved it all down our national memory hole. And the American public said, “Sure, okay, whatever.”
The same people who attributed the laptop to Russian/Trumpian disinformation, had attributed Trump's first election (back in 2016) to... you guessed it... Russian/Trumpian disinformation. “Russia hacked the election!” To make sure there were no loose cannons rolling around the deck, Seth Rich and Julian Assange had to be silenced. Rich was murdered, and Assange sought asylum in foreign embassies. He is currently in a maximum-security prison in Britain, although he has been convicted of no crime. ( In fact, not even charged.)
The Dems then spent three long years, hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of billable hours, thousands of Congressional hours, and hundreds of hours of tv-network time proving their theory, and came up with... nothing. They even broke laws when necessary, to achieve their goal. But still.... nothing. On a cold day in April 2019, special counsel Robert Mueller reported that unwelcome reality, and the formerly lionized prosecutor disappeared instantly and permanently from public life. For a whole coupla days, American progressives were in the doldrums. Reality was refusing to conform to their fantasies.
But hope springs eternal. So, a few months later in August 2019, the New York Times held a staff meeting and decided that the news during the rest of Trump's term (2019-2020) was going to be racism, racism, and more racism! That would keep Americans nervous, guilty, off-balance, vaguely angry, thus easily manipulated. Luckily for the NYT (and its wannabes from Savannah to Seattle), George Floyd happened just nine months later, in May 2020. Conveniently, the month of May is the start of riot season. (Before that, it's too cold in much of the country!) But Floyd was killed right at the beginning of the riot season, so that people could riot all summer long.
And riot they did. They were the most destructive riots in American history (according to the insurance industry, which keeps track of such things). Dozens of people were killed. Scores of small businesses which supplied daily necessities to deprived neighborhoods closed forever. Meanwhile, speakers at the Democratic National Convention in July solemnly echoed the rioters' slogan “No justice, no peace,” and Kamala Harris opened a bail fund for the few rioters who got arrested.
Recently, the city of Seattle actually paid a bunch of former rioters some kind of multi-million-dollar settlement because some of them had gotten injured or something. The 2020 rioters were the most pampered rioters in American history. And, of course, no matter what they did... nobody ever called them nasty names like “insurrectionist.” They were just simple, good-hearted “mostly peaceful protesters”.
Most importantly, after George Floyd happened, the racism-obsessed American news media and DEI industry were off and running in full cry. They told us that racism is what America is all about, and that America has always been all about racism (implying that Donald Trump was the personification of this heinous history). The “solutions” they offered were: riots, Black Lives Matter bullying, Chinese Cultural Revolution-style struggle sessions in “white fragility,” and of course... defunding the police. All of which were put immediately into practice with no national discussion, no testing against reality or experience, or even in light of mainstream academic research to date... and all of which resulted in making the lives of ordinary black people just that much more miserable.
Meanwhile, another event was adding to American jitters: the onslaught of the COVID virus. After it “appeared” in 2020, the oligarchy followed very weird protocols to deal with it-- protocols unlike any ever used before on any previous health problem. But they didn't tell us that. They said (or implied) that they were using tried and true “best practices” of pandemic amelioration. That was misinformation of the first order. But it was the people who questioned the official narrative... not the people who propagated it... who were accused of misinformation.
That's pretty much been the story ever since. By now, a huge censorship apparatus has been lavishly funded (where did all that money come from?) and that censorship apparatus has inserted itself into every nook and cranny of American life-- from social media to Hollywood to TV news to Wikipedia to medical journals to public libraries. Primary sources are disappeared or tampered with. Databases are permanently altered. We now live in a Potemkin cognitive universe.
Every time the self-appointed guardians of “trusted information” have been proven dead wrong, they have responded-- not with growth in self-awareness or transparency—but by doubling down. They give no evidence of having the slightest worry that they could ever be brought to any reckoning. That right there, should give us all serious pause.
So here we are. We never hear about Chinese disinformation; we never hear about Islamist disinformation. We only hear about “Russian disinformation.” We never hear about left-wing disinformation, only about right-wing disinformation. We are told to be on our guard against Fox News-- but not against CNN or NBC or NPR. We are told to be on our guard against Glenn Beck and Glenn Greenwald and even Glenn Youngkin, but not Bill Gates or George Soros or Larry Fink or Klaus Schwab.
The people currently running our country are, to a great extent, people who attained position and power by gaming the system-- every system. The financial system, the educational system, the legal system, the medical system, the defense system, the industrial system. Now, they have just a few more systems to finish gaming, to be home free: the security/surveillance system(s), the currency system, and – most important of all—the information system(s).
One ring to rule them all.
That ring is Information.