When Your Rulers Ignore Voters But Are Terrified Of Protesters, That Tells You Something

by Caitlin Johnstone | May 12, 2024

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Politico reports that the DNC is planning to move the Chicago convention partially online in order to “tamp down demonstrators” against Biden’s genocide in Gaza. The Democratic Party’s apathy toward this election is almost as blatant as its support for police crackdowns on political dissent.

When nobody in power will lift a finger to earn your vote but they’re falling all over themselves trying to stomp out a robust protest movement, that tells you what the powerful are actually afraid of and where you should really be focusing your political energy.

Your votes don’t matter, but your activism does. These freaks are terrified that one day the people will stop playing with the toy steering wheel of voting that they were given to divert their political energy and use the power of their numbers to grab the real steering wheel.

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If I were Jewish I would be enraged that the world’s most powerful governments and the world’s most influential media outlets keep telling everyone over and over again that opposing mass murder is anti-Jewish.

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Israel supporters pretend to believe pro-Palestine protesters have a genocidal hatred of Jews when their real crime is that they don’t share Israel’s genocidal hatred of Palestinians.

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The difference between liberals and rightists on middle east policy is that rightists openly believe middle easterners are apelike savages who should be beaten into submission or eliminated, whereas liberals believe exactly the same thing but have the decency to lie about it.

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The way to see past the distortions of the imperial propaganda matrix is to learn to distinguish between empty narrative fluff and the raw data of where weapons, money and resources are moving to. Antiwar.com is probably the best resource at documenting the day-to-day raw data of these movements. I also keep a public Twitter list with a bunch of journalists, commentators and public figures who provide information about the daily movements of the imperial machine.

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It’s hard to understand the tyranny of a system that relies on propaganda and manipulation as opposed to overt totalitarianism, in the same way it can be harder to recognize a psychologically abusive relationship than a physically abusive one.

You grow up learning that if a man puts his hands on a woman she needs to get the hell out of there, but you can live your entire adult life in a relationship where your partner twists your mind into knots to bend you to his will without recognizing what’s happening. In exactly the same way, we grow up learning about Evil Dictatorships in other countries where dissent is banned and the government controls the populace with an iron fist, but we can go our entire lives without recognizing that we are ruled by powerful people who use mass-scale psychological manipulation to exert an even greater degree of control over us.

The truth is we live in a highly abusive mind-controlled dystopia where people’s thoughts, words and actions are largely predetermined by an information system controlled by powerful plutocrats and empire managers, and the genius of it is that it controls us to a greater degree than overt tyranny ever could while at the same time giving us the collective delusion that we are free.

We are indoctrinated from childhood by corrupt education systems which construct the mainstream empire-authorized worldview inside our skulls, and that worldview is continually bolstered, steered, and added onto throughout adulthood from every direction we’ve been trained to get our information from. The news media are controlled by wealthy oligarchs with a vested interest in preserving the political status quo upon which their wealth is premised. Silicon Valley tech plutocrats quickly learn that living the high life is a lot easier for them if they collaborate with US government agencies and help protect the information interests of the US-centralized empire. Wealthy elites control mainstream culture by restricting which people and what ideas are given a platform in the culture-manufacturing centers of New York and Los Angeles.

We grow up thinking we are free, but in a very real sense people are less free in our society than they are under a proper dictatorship: under a standard dictatorship people’s minds are freer, because people know they are not free. In our society people think, speak, vote, shop, work and behave exactly how the powerful want them to, mindlessly regurgitating political opinions that were inserted into their brains by their rulers and sincerely believing they came up with it themselves.

A quote from Chomsky:

“Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.”

Another quote from Chomsky:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

Another:

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”

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