Have You Lost a Loved One to Propaganda? It’s Not Too Late
Most people are victims of Great Reset and Agenda 2030 propaganda – but they’re not hopeless causes, and they need our help.
For most people the word propaganda conjures images of Josef Goebbels, ranks of swastika banners and grainy old black and white films portraying stereotypical semitic noses and hordes of scurrying rats. And those are just the nominally educated folk who even know what the word means.
Most people think of propaganda as something that used to happen in the bad old days, before our great progressive enlightenment, and fail to see that it never went away, it just rebranded itself. It’s called PR now (public relations) and is deployed on society directly but also through the subtler mediums of marketing and advertising, news media and entertainment.
Edward Bernays ‘The Father of Public Relations’ who famously cracked the female tobacco market by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom" said:
“The conscious manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
Even more chillingly, he said, “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.”
Cornell professor Dr David Collum, speaking recently on James Delingpole’s podcast said, “The average person has no idea how much they are marinading in propaganda.”
At the time of listening this struck a chord with me because I’d been ruminating on the very same idea only a few hours earlier as I emerged from the shower and began dressing for a day in the office and the treacly mundanity of the Today Show came seeping through the early morning calm of the apartment.
My girlfriend gets up at the crack of dawn every day and the first thing she does without fail is switch on Channel 9. Nine is Australia’s preeminent free-to-air TV network, a glib, sparkling entity that presents itself as a trendy, friendly, middle-of-the-road liberal news and entertainment channel and whose marquee programmes include the most-watched ‘news’ and ‘current affairs’ shows in the country, and of course the most popular reality TV sensations, such as Married at First Sight or MAFS as it is gushingly known.
Channel 9 is owned by the predictable line up of asset management firms, including Vanguard, and in this sense is indistinguishable from any large media company the world over. They toe the standard neoliberal line on everything, stopping just short of the type of outright partisanism espoused by the likes of MSNBC and CNN.
In short, Channel 9 is a mouthpiece for woke globalism, masquerading as a purveyor of balanced and reliable news, and feel-good, chummy Australiana.
I despise Channel 9 and most of its programming, so much so that some days it antagonises me to the point of ranting, stamping, and slamming of kitchen cupboard doors. More than once its smug pronunciations have precipitated spats between me and my girlfriend, and during the summer of vaccine mandate marches in Melbourne (2021-2022), its coverage of the protests and characterisation of myself and the other protestors as ‘far right extremists’ drove me incandescent with rage.
But I, like you, have spent the past several years fine tuning my propaganda radar. I have in fact become so proficient in detecting it that I believe I have now largely inoculated myself against even my own side’s propaganda – the holy grail of objectivity! I have found that it is best to operate from the position of ‘I don’t know’ and be sceptical about everything – basing one’s views less on the opinions of those one is inclined to agree with and more on the tangible, measurable events that we can observe from day-to-day. For instance: locking down the world to protect healthy people from a virus with a 99.98% survival rate resulting in the biggest transfer of wealth in history from the working and middle classes to the top 1%. I don’t need anyone to tell me what that was about, I can form a credible thesis on my own.
But you and I, dear reader, are in the minority. Most people, such as my girlfriend, God bless her, do not have the capacity to filter out the bullshit. And this is largely because they marinate themselves unthinkingly in media like Channel 9’s Today show.
To this end – they need our help.
My girlfriend is a good case study – we’ll call her Elizabeth. Elizabeth is a good example to examine because she is not actually woke. She understands on a fundamental level what is wrong with this ideology, and she adheres to a largely traditional Christian world view.
So it is fascinating (and disturbing) for me watching the effect that the Channel 9 propaganda has on her (to say nothing of Instagram – thank God she’s not on Tik Tok, I think that would be the deal breaker).
Being close to someone who has one foot in reality and the other stuck in the bog of corporate propaganda, the sole aim of which is to advance the goals of the World Economic Forum and the UN’s Agenda 2030, is like having a friend who is in an abusive relationship (read my article on how The Media Is Like an Abusive Partner). You’ll see them for dinner, or drinks and they’ll reluctantly conceded that there is a problem, and maybe even approach some kind of commitment to extricating themself from the situation. But once they’re back home with the other, and comfortable in their routine, the denial starts up again.
It's a constant tug of war and ground gained on one day can be swiftly retaken by the machine on the next. Perhaps you know what I mean, and have someone in your life with whom you are engaged in the same prevaricating dance? It is quite something to behold, is it not?
For instance, Australia’s far-left Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese who unseated the supposedly ‘conservative’ Scott Morrison in last year’s general election has been receiving fawning press coverage since his ascendance. Again, it is not quite as overt as the adulation that America’s major networks lavish on the craven and demented Joe Biden, but Albanese is unremittingly framed in a positive light. I sense it viscerally; the clever way the anchors massage their language whenever speaking of him; the softball questions the reporters lob at him – it congeals and pulses and reaches out to tantalise my propaganda antennae as I pass through the living room during the short window of time each morning that Elizabeth and I have agreed she can have the TV on.
It repulses me, but Elizabeth’s antennae are malformed, barely existent. To this end she is ripe for the positive Albanese spin, carefully crafted for her by the producers at the Today Show. But here’s the thing – Elizabeth and I have had conversations about Anthony Albanese. As recently as the election aftermath last May, I explained to her what his Prime Ministership heralded for Australia, and she listened objectively and ostensibly understood my logic. Having just lived through the world’s longest lockdown and been outraged and disgusted by the dictatorial cavorting of the Victorian state premier Daniel Andrews – a high ranking Labor Party crony of Albanese – Elizabeth understood in a rudimentary layman’s way, that anyone cut from the same cloth as Andrews would likely be a step in the wrong direction for the federal government.
Last month, Daniel Andrews went on a junket to China and forbade the Australian media (for what little it is worth) from travelling with him. Andrews’ nod and wink relationship with the Chinese Communist Party is no secret, having been a hearty proponent of their Belt and Road initiative and the subject of much speculation regarding CCP kickbacks, and conservative Australia was outraged at this cloak and dagger trip at the taxpayers’ expense.
Elizabeth raised it with me last week, expressing her dismay at Daniel Andrews’ latest stunt. Then she said: “I just don’t see why Anthony Albanese can’t do something to rein him in.”
Wow. Edward Bernays would be so proud.
I said to her “Are you kidding? They’re on the same team! Albanese does not give a damn about what Andrews does because their goals are 100% aligned – not least when it comes to the ongoing surrender of our sovereignty to the interests of the Chinese government.”
To this she went blank – the look someone gets when their brain has encountered an unresolvable incongruity and glitched out. That, my friends, is propaganda at work.
Elizabeth had been passively soaking up the positive Albanese spin – the folksy, down-home chitchat, kindly avuncular aphorisms, the open collar shirt and the bushman’s hat, all neatly packaged into three-minute bites, at regular intervals for the past ten months.
I had helped her catch a glimpse of practical reality, but she had been reprogrammed by the TV. She had been manipulated into accepting the vanilla, family-friendly construct of the Prime Minister – a likeable old chap; softly spoken, blokey, down to earth, and a little bit vulnerable; a pastiche that I suspect triggers emotional associations with her father.
Elizabeth had defaulted to the feel-good idea of Anthony Albanese as a sensible and altruistic guy who cares about his country and would pull Daniel Andrews into line, despite her having engaged in a rational examination of the political realities of the man. Because this is the thing – the propaganda does feel good.
I used to consume the daily TV news in the same way Elizabeth does – because it feels good, it is calming when you allow it to work on you the way it is intended: the jaunty jingle that precedes the grinning anchors; the soothing cadence of their voices; the clever interspersing of anxiety-producing scare stories and happy human puff pieces; the reassuring financial experts; the bright, striking supers and the familiar colour swatches; the contrived laughter and the awful jokes…
It all has a coffee house conviviality about it as common to our daily human experience as cornflakes and toast – and indeed, often closely associated. The daily news is a rock for people, something certain and eternal to which they can anchor themselves. A north star from which they can navigate the confusion. And it is all propaganda.
I despair at times at the sheer volume of humanity hopelessly ensnared in this cocoon of lies and obfuscations. It feels like a losing battle – for the fact of the matter is Elizabeth spends more time soaking up political propaganda from the TV than she does engaging in rational discourse about the same subjects with me, and the results are evident in the example I have just presented – and this is but one of many.
It's not all black pills though. I do feel I’ve gained a beachhead with Elizabeth. Just the other day her work sent out an email announcing the latest round of Covid vaccine boosters. A colleague of Elizabeth’s replied-all saying, “No vaccine for me thanks!” Elizabeth, previously the subject of two doses of the Moderna experimental gene therapy, proudly jumped onto the thread replying-all with two simple words that gave me hope: “Nor me.”
The propaganda is thick and unrelenting, and at times it does feel like we’re losing the half-awake people in our lives to the clutches of the machine. But they need us, and our input can and does make a difference, so we must persevere.