Alternative Media Is Rising Because It Actually Seeks To Inform

Comedy Central has a new show called The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, whose purpose is essentially to marginalize alternative media. In it Klepper plays an Alex Jones-like character who quotes Trump while lambasting “fake news” (wink wink, he’s joking!) outlets like New York Times and the Washington Post. Isn’t it funny how Alex Jones says crazy things, like everyone else that doesn’t like the “facts” the media reports? Isn’t it funny how Trump calls the media “fake news?” See, it’s is all very amusing.

Of course Jones, Trump and the rest of their kind should be pilloried. They’ve taken the misery that people are feeling amid decades of elite-manufactured decline and turned it toward creating a broken psyche of hatred and fear. I’d say this pyche has emerged because of establishment condescension like that of The Opposition, but comedians aren’t what’s driven the underclass to this state. It’s been the hundred people that are now dying each day from the opioids they’ve turned to to escape their new reality of poverty. It’s been the tens of thousands of Americans that have died in the endless counterinsurgency wars of the last few decades, with the scarred surviving veterans mainly being left to live in poverty or commit suicide. These things, despite the smug denial of the types of elites behind Comedy Central, have been the experience of quite a lot of Trump supporters.

The role the corporate pundits and comedians have in this is one of almost subliminally feeding the resentment of the masses. Added to how these media figures promote power-serving narratives, I notice there’s a corporatized and even forced aura to how their material is presented. The buzzwords and bland content that often appear in corporate state-run media gives it a sense of being constrained, a platform where ideas and creativity are tightly guided by unseen forces above. So when Klepper and the other Celebrity Clowns try to attack the fascists, they give off an air of phoniness and elitism and that lets the fascists continue to rise.

Hope comes in the inverse effect that this all has had, which is the enormous humanity and creativity from those on the better side of the effort to end the establishment. These are the ones who’ve been working in local revolutionary groups, participating in the rise of the Bernie Sanders movement, and building the infrastructure for a new major media through all of this. They’ve become more successful in recent years, with viewership of corporate outlets going steadily downwhile alternative media viewership has in some cases started to surpass those outlets. But they’re motivated by something unaffected by how well the revolt actually goes, which is the urge to keep a narrative of compassion and virtue alive.

These types present their media completely the opposite of how the corporate state does, as they put real efforts into informing and amusing. Their content isn’t made for getting ratings while helping a despotic agenda. It’s instead independent and, because of that, often brilliant journalism. This journalism can be found on sites like Counterpunch, Consortiumnews, Truthout, Truthdig, RT, and in the work of Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, and so many similar heroes. I urge people to subscribe to these sources and tell others about them, because they’re needed right now more than ever.

The defenders of “facts” are trying to lie us into a series of wars that could end the planet as we know it. North Korea, which has offered a peace negotiation to Washington’s consistent rejection, is being threatened with nuclear annihilation by President Trump, neocons like John McCain, and the MSNBC panelists who’ve praised these threats. Russia, which has been proven not to have hacked the DNC and was recently proven not to have hacked into U.S. voting systems, has been surrounded by American nuclear bases and NATO troops. And while the regime change mission for Syria is in retreat, the government has this year started spreading lies about Iran and Venezuela while greatly increasing the military budget. 

We’re being conditioned for this war in everyday society, as Trump has lifted the ban on military equipment for local police and the security state has been expanded amid the recent climate change hurricanes. And it’s only until the next major terrorist attack that the war will be able to start, as the government no doubt tries to blame a regime change country for that attack. 

This war can be stopped, but only if we go into a frenzy of exposing the mentioned corporate state deceptions. Then the American people won’t be supportive enough of the war for it to be started, and a new, better world will be able to emerge in the old belief systems’ absence.

Neoliberals Should Be Seen As The Tyrants They Are

The despots operating this genocide-based global hierarchy try everything to make themselves look respectable. They present themselves as realists or enforcers of a noble, disciplined order. They address their opponents with condescension and contempt, treating them as inferiors that can’t grasp how things really work. They use the media to engineer language in a way that makes what they do seem acceptable. Their goal is to have a total revolution toward oligarchy be seen as what makes sense.

We need to take away the neoliberals’ ability to legitimize themselves. Whenever someone in a position of power fights people’s right to health care, or promotes war propaganda, or voices the toxic Randian views about wealth reflecting integrity, they should be viewed as the tyrants they are. This harsh rejection of the elite’s worldview needs to be solidified in our minds, because it’s what can counter the tools being used for assimilating us into it.

These tools are uniquely dangerous among the propaganda of oppressive regimes, because they present society in a way that makes it impossible for the oppressed to recognize there’s an oligarchy. Neoliberal propaganda teaches that money is what defines a person’s worth, making wage theft, unlimited money in politics, and all other parts of the repressive system justifiable in the minds of whoever believes the propaganda. The basis for there being any kind of systemic inequity is negated under this logic, and any arguments that inequity is there can be responded to by accusing the arguer of wanting repressive government control.

It’s the fulfillment of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a story where the pigs turn all other animals into second class citizens while assuring them with how no animal calls any another one “master.” Because the humans, it’s pointed out, wanted to be called “master” when they were running the farm. The socialist states that have turned into tyrannies, which the neoliberals always warn we’re moving dangerously close toward, are as different from our current society as Animal Farm under human rule was different from rule by the pigs. Oppression is always oppression, injustice is always injustice. And more and more of the American people are realizing that.

We will continue raising awareness of “neoliberalism,” the term that describes a system which puts profits above all else. We will keep using the term “Deep State,” which was coined to describe an unelected government. We won’t let the Washington Post, among the 90% of media in this country that’s controlled by five powerful corporations, make us believe their propaganda by featuring the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

We’ll do this because we see where things are going under this system, and we want a different future. Right now in Puerto Rico, as an infrastructure weakened by austerity has put the island into pre-modern conditions after being hit by two hurricanes, corporations are carrying out a takeover. Electric companies are negotiating with a Puerto Rican government struggling through massive debt to privatize the area’s power grid, meaning when the electricity comes back in Puerto Rico months from now, it will likely be controlled by racketeers. At the same time the Trump administration has used the Hurricanes to increase police militarization, try to cut social services, and pass an NDAA bill that greatly expands the military budget and the president’s surveillance powers.

These are glimpses of the future we’ll have unless drastic changes are made. Climate change and economic crises have been increasing the militarization and corporate control of society for many years now. The rise in terrorism caused by the destabilization of the Middle East is being used to expand wars, suppress free speech, and persecute Muslims and refugees throughout western countries. Civilization is being divided into the “Green Zones” of the economically secure and the “Red Zones” of the majority who are now living in poverty. The oligarchy’s power is being rapidly consolidated and shut off from everywhere below the very top, with five men now owning as much wealth as half the world compared to eightmen at the start of this year and sixty-two at the start of 2016. 

These elites are building luxury survival bunkers in rural land and on the ocean, from which they’ll try to leverage their influence into creating a one-world totalitarian state in the coming years and decades. The 21st century’s converging crises are exacerbating the corporate takeover, and that takeover could become total as the collapse accelerates.

When that takeover is attempted, we’ll be bombarded with propaganda that reflects another one of Orwell’s assessment’s: that fascism’s appeal comes in its invitation to participate in danger and struggle, to satisfy the human urge for fighting which lets us survive and have strength. Except in this future, we won’t be fighting for survival. We’ll be fighting a war that’s meant to last forever, and that will need to end before we actually get the catharsis fascism claims to offer. We can get that catharsis by not fighting an endless sequence of enemies, but for what we want-living wages, single payer universal health care, an end to perpetual war, climate justice, social equality, a genuinely functioning democracy. Focus on these things even more than on fighting the neoliberals, and they’ll more likely be realized.

This Cannot Go On

As I watched the recent video made to manufacture consent for an apparent coming war with Russia, as hosted by Morgan Freeman and produced by the zealous neocon Bob Reiner, my main reactions were sadness and anger. Not at where the McCarthyite propaganda was voiced, as that was expected. But at where Freeman ended the message by saying, “we owe it to the brave people who have fought and died to protect this great nation and save democracy. And we owe it to our future generations to continue the fight.”

So that’s how it’s going to go? Endless supplies of human life being disposed of to maintain a hierarchy that will continue into the far future? There’s something deeply wrong here, and you don’t need to disbelieve the Russia narrative to sense that from watching Reiner’s clip. We’re being told these things about how “we are at war” as an encompassing effort goes on to make us forget the past times we’ve heard them. The new Ken Burns film about the Vietnam War buries the lies the government told to have us commit that unprovoked act of genocide. The last war in Korea, where America dropped more bombs than it did in the Pacific Theater in World War II and nearly three million were killed, is blacked out from the mainstream discussions about North Korea. War criminals like Hillary Clinton, who’s violated international laws of war by helping in the barbaric 2011 Libya invasion, are able to spend their retirements going on talk shows and writing memoirs.

Our history gets taken away, because if it weren’t, the populous would revolt in outrage. For most people there’s instead a dim sense of resentment toward the state of the world, to be distracted from with constant orders to fight some all-threatening enemy abroad. To save this history, and with it the people’s will to revolt, we’ll need to expose it.

A vital part of exposing it is illustrating the nature of modern warfare. Imperialism and false flag attacks have always been part of civilization, but it wasn’t till the nineteenth century that war as Americans now know it emerged. This was a dynamic where wars are fought not to be won but to be controlled dramas, whose outcomes are worried about only by citizens told to see them as battles between the patriots and the enemies. The function of these wars has rarely been to expand territories, as the U.S. already dominates the globe, but to enrich those profiting from oil and weapon production while destroying resources that could be used for educating the populous.

This warfare model has dominated society since the Pearl Harbor attack in 1937, which U.S. officials are revealed to have known about beforehand and had every reason not to have tried to stop. Militarism exploded after that, and was articulated into a plot for global domination when business leaders met with government officials in 1940. From there these leaders planned an area of control that would reach into the British Empire, the Far East, and the Western Hemisphere.

This correlated with a rise of authoritarianism that had manifested in every major political movement by the 1930’s, which was defined by a renewed support for many undemocratic and inhumane practices that had been outmoded before then. These strains allowed for the new war empire to form a cult around itself, demonstrated most viciously in the 1950’s effort to detain all dissenters of it as Russian agents. Until the recent reintroduction of that effort, this impulse to call dissidents traitors has persisted in American culture.

Throughout this post-World War II period the U.S. has attempted nearly sixty regime change missions around the world, nearly all the successful ones resulting in periods like that of the U.S.-installed Pinochet dictatorship. Starting with the fabricated testimony about opened incubators in 1990, more than four million Muslims have died in mideastern American wars since that year. The CIA, a benevolent agency when it was started seventy years ago, has created a crack-cocaine epidemic and provided the false intelligence for most of those military efforts. The abuses have gotten far worse in the last decade as, under Obama, the U.S. has rained depleted uranium onto the Middle East that’s hideously deformed newborn babies and started a drone warfare program that’s been used every week to assassinate people without trial.

These regime change operations and the efforts to glorify war have grown more blatant in recent decades. This was made possible by the corporate takeover of government and media, rise in psy ops and surveillance, establishment of corporate-run public schools and payment-requiring universities, and cultural deification of weaponry and violence that’s happened in the last half century. 

Then there’s the new wave in authoritarian sentiments that’s risen amid the destitution and tribal rage that neoliberalism has caused. This wave is shown in the disdain for constitutional liberties and the Geneva conventions that’s emerged since 9/11; in the nationalistic outrage toward whistleblowers like Edward Snowden; in the new enthusiasm for an all-encompassing security state and practices like torture; in the explosion of hostility toward higher education, the arts, and people of different ethnicities or beliefs; in the surveys that show more people than in recent memory do not believe in democracy, a free press, or open debate. This has been a global phenomenon, and monsters like Donald Trump are here to enact its demands.

Yet in recent years, disruptions have appeared in the system. People have used their vast new social networking powers for exposing the state’s deceptions. Progressive institutions have grown massively, putting many towns and cities under new leadership and enacting policies like living wages and tuition-free college in those places. Fractures have come up in the U.S. empire as well: Russia has blocked the plans for redrawing the Middle East, and public pressure on the Trump administration to stop war Syria and Russia has solidified that; the U.S. has been outmaneuvered by North Korea and lost its control there; forebodings of a collapse in American power are showing up, supported by the projections of some scholars that this empire will be over by 2030.

The Deep State’s reaction has been extreme to the point of seeming self-endangerment. Washington is determined to have war in North Korea; this has shown in its keeping troops on the Korean Peninsula since the last war there, its refusal to sit down with North Korean leaders while rejecting their peace offers, and its spreading misinformation about Kim Jong Un being an unprovoked madman. So the neocons have supported Trump’s psychotic ultimatum to attack North Korea with nukes, with John McCain now advocating North Korean “extinction.”

Similar tactics are present around the world. The U.S. has encircled Russia and China with nuclear missiles while the American Pacific fleet commander said in July that he will nuke China if ordered to. Using the by now thoroughly debunked lie about Russians having hacked the DNC as a cover, America is using NATO to get nations like Britain and France supportive of their new Cold War against Russia. In recent years, NATO has been positioning troops along Russia’s borders, a fact that’s never mentioned by the western media outlets that always report on Russia’s war games. Three years ago the U.S. installed an aggressive neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine, and has continued to support it since, with the clear intent of threatening Russia.

The goal here, as neocon senator Eric Swalwell has revealed in an interview, is regime change in Russia, with the planned fate for North Korea no doubt being the same. Meanwhile Iran is being brought into this operation as the government liesabout it not complying with the nuclear deal, and war with it is seemingly being prepared for as $600 billion have been added to the military budget this month. Regime change is being worked on in Venezuela as its leader is falsely portrayed as an illegitimately elected dictator. Most strains of the Deep State remain set on regime change in Syria, despite their claims of Assad perpetrating gas attacks in 2013, 2014, and this year having all been debunked. These add onto how Trump has already dropped almost as many bombs as Obama did in 2016, with the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen being expanded.

And the brandishing of nuclear weapons has to mean something even more ominous. Luxury shelters from doomsday scenarios are being built for the super rich in rural land and the ocean. And the ways things have collapsed so far, such as with climate change and the financial crisis, have allowed for massive expansions in the security state and the power of the big banks. If nuclear weapons are used, they’ll likely be arranged to go off in a limited proportion that lets the elites safely take control of a destabilized global society. The Deep State isn’t endangering itself, it’s readying to move to a new role.

What can we dissidents do about this as people who are guaranteed to be shut out of powerful positions? Obviously we can build new systems to be influential with, as the independent media contributors, local democratized business creators, and local-scale political revolutionaries have been doing. But amid my participation in those efforts, I’ve known some people who revolt by working to improve themselves intellectually and emotionally, or by creating paintings and music. 

Revolt may not be the right term for what these people are doing though, as they’re simply attuning to the fact that nothing in the universe is permanent-and that this oligarchy, like everything else we know, will eventually be replaced with something else. The oligarchs have tried to crush art and enlightenment because these things lead to the overthrow of fascists, and on a long enough time scale, we all know that overthrow will happen.

Elites Are Suppressing Dissent Because They Know Their Regime Is Ending

As despotic regimes lose the people’s consent, they take ever more brutal measures for keeping their hold over the narrative. The corporate state’s transition into this has been more dramatic than in past oligarchies, because for many decades it’s operated through the system of staged “democracy” that Sheldon Wollin calls inverted totalitarianism. Not all the ruling elites have agreed on how much repression should happen. And even at this stage, many of them think little of it is necessary because they arrogantly assume most of the public shares their worldview. But these seem to usually be the pundits, academics and politicians on the outer rungs of the power structure, whose employers deeper in the system know what needs to be done to maintain control.

The suppression of dissent started with the introduction of free speech zones and the violent police tactics that were used against dissidents in the WTO protests. It was then expanded to the creation of a surveillance state that reviews all of Americans’ electronic communications, and the surge in construction of private security facilities that happened across the country after 9/11. In 2005, an agency called the Domestic Security Alliance Council was formed at the request of corporations which would “bridge the information divide between America’s private and public sectors.” That meant corporate executives could use it to collude with America’s intelligence agencies. This resulted in the FBI spying on Occupy Wall Street protesters in 2011, an addition to the unnecessary mass arrests that law enforcement used to kill the movement. The militarization of police departments around the country in the last decade has exacerbated it all.

This has happened as the state’s propaganda becomes more coordinated and monolithic. In 2007, reveals WikiLeaks, Rachel Maddow, John Podesta and others formed a media “echo chamber” that interconnected their messaging efforts. In 2013 the now corporate-controlled CIA was freed from a 1948 law which prohibited the agency’s psychological operations, meaning unknowable CIA propaganda workers are now stationed in media posts around the world. Last year through Obama’s Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, an agency was created for fighting undesired information. This has made deceptions possible on a scale that may not have been feasible just ten years ago.

The electoral fraud and voter suppression in the 2016 Democratic primary has been hidden from the minds of most Americans through encompassing media propaganda. The deceptions being used to manufacture support for war with Syria, Russia, and North Korea are so formidable that they’re getting a tiny fraction of the resistance 
that the Iraq WMD claims did. Paranoia about Russia, founded on the fraudulent DNC Russian hacking claim, pervades the mainstream consciousness. Paranoia that was enshrined into the official record last year when the CIA-funded Washington Post accused the top twenty leftwing alternative media sites of being run by Putin. Wikileaks has naturally been the prime target of McCarthyite demonization, so much that I recently saw an online corporate propaganda troll write "Wikileaks is information for traitors."

This has allowed for the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act to be passed under the guise of fighting Russia. Companies like Facebook and YouTube have been using it to suppress what they judge as “fake news.” And after the intelligence agencies declared war on the alternative media in January by implicating them and their dissenting views with Russian sedition, the FBI has legally attacked them this month. Reporters from RT and its “associates” are now required to register as foreign agents from Russia, with the penalty for not doing so being removal from the airwaves. The repression will get far worse when the next major terrorist attack happens, which the government will doubtless blame on one of the current regime change countries. The first measure they’ll try in that moment is likely the repeal of net neutrality, which would make the corporate media sites the only news left online as everyone is required to pay large fees for an internet presence.

There are a lot of people who will no doubt comment on this piece’s hopeful message with “if only you were right.” But I’m referencing history when I say what we’re experiencing is an oligarchy’s reaction to its looming death. In April 1989, anti-Soviet demonstrations were met with police retribution that killed 21 people through gas attacks and beatings. The Soviet government blamed the protesters, saying they’d been “abusing democratization to the detriment of our new policy of openness and of our very society." And a lot of Russian citizens at the time no doubt believed that. Two years later, the Soviet regime was over.

This is how tyrants are resisted, and how profound strength and wisdom are found in the process. The aftermath of a failed repressive state is almost never utopian-it’s usually a chaotic landscape where new demagogues can fill the vacuum. But in the wake of every overthrown dictatorship, there’s someone who's supported the regime, and who seeks amends after being freed from the propaganda system that got them to participate in atrocities. This dynamic of evil and redemption is probably the most powerful human story that can be told, and it’s how we can keep up the will to revolt in these times.

Adopt the mindset some attribute to Bernie Sanders to explain his unending drive, which is one of constant focus on stopping injustice. Never stop being outraged at how over thirty million Americans are without health care while nearly all of people’s tax dollars go to funding perpetual wars. Stay angry about how our government has hidden the history of a Korean war that killed nearly three million people, and is now blaming the Korean people for war provocations that the U.S. is responsible for and that could kill 25 million more. Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re obligated to support entities like the Democratic Party, which recently rained depleted uranium bombs onto tens of thousands of innocent people while dropping a bomb around every three hours in 2016 alone. Or that you should to trust in agencies like the CIA, which has created a crack-cocaine epidemic, installed dozens of brutal regimes around the world, and repeatedly lied us into wars that have killed millions.

And always do so while working toward the ways we’ll actually be able to end the regime. Reading online articles about these problems is productive, as are even the smallest acts of revolt, but the circumstances may soon require us to be creative. Transcript the knowledge the corporate state wants buried onto private data stashes, preferably paper ones, so that it can be accessed when they try to take it off the internet. Start underground revolutionary newspapers or pamphlets to keep an alternative press alive amid roiling censorship measures. Fight for an open internet and discourse at the same time, as one should surrender nothing to fascists. Take these actions now, and when the oligarchy is defeated, we’ll be able to finally bring the real history of this era into the open.

The Neoliberals Will Fall Because You Can't Maintain A System Based On Lies

To complete their revolution, the corporate capitalists, warmongers, and nationalist demagogues who control the government will need to totally redefine reality. We know this because they’ve had to deceive themselves before working toward this oligarchic future. James McGill Buchanan, the economist who helped create the modern plutocratic worldview, said neoliberal capitalism is needed to free the rich from having to share their wealth with an inferior underclass. From this he concluded in his book The Limits of Liberty that “Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe.”

Building on the control that the military industrial complex had already gained during the decades before neoliberalism’s rise in the 1970’s, Buchanan’s movement has since become dominant. Dominant not just in politics, but in the tactics the ruling class uses to justify their actions. Unlimited corporate money in politics and massive economic exploitation are celebrated as freedoms. Events like the massive election fraud in the 2016 Democratic primary are hidden from the public so that it can look like the neoliberals rule democratically. The Washington Post, which is controlled by the CIA and has strategically attacked nonconformists like Bernie Sanders, can profane the very idea of the truth by making its recently adopted slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.” And all these lies are enforced more insidiously than ever through the coordinated media echo chamber started in 2007, the legalized CIA psy op program started in 2013, and the Ministry of Truth designed for “countering propaganda” that was started last year.

In June 1934, as Germany was run by fanatics who’d vowed to continue their rule for a thousand years, the dissenting vice-chancellor Franz Papen said in a speech that “If one desires close contact and unity with the people, one must not underestimate their understanding. One must not everlastingly keep them on leading strings. No organization, no propaganda, however excellent, can alone maintain confidence in the long run.” This expectation of totalitarianism inevitably being overthrown, as agreed by George Orwell with his implication that even a global dictatorship couldn’t last more than a century, may sound suspiciously like faith. But it’s this supposed faith in the resilience of truth and humanity that’s made all the repressive regimes throughout history eventually end. And it’s what we’ll need to carry on during the current one.

It’s what we’ll need because this regime is different from the past ones. It’s using its presence in the United States and the NATO countries to try to become global. To the compliance of even foreign or “independent” media outlets like The Guardian and NPR, an operation is going on to make the American oligarchy all-powerful.

Elaborate hoaxes have been perpetrated in recent years to try to overthrow the Syrian government and exploit the results. In 2014, the government had agents stage and report a supposed attack from Assad that a U.N. investigation confirmed never happened. This April Assad was claimed to have perpetrated a sarin attack that provoked U.S. missile strikes, despite a treaty having been made earlier that month which secured Assad’s exemption from American intervention. The implausibility of that claim was vindicated this month when damning inconsistencies were revealed about the circumstances of the attack. Then the lies on Syria escalated to the Bana Alabama soy op, wherein a Twitter account dispensing sophisticated war propaganda on Syria was presented through the guise of it belonging to a seven-year-old Syrian refugee girl.

This campaign extends to Syria’s ally Russia, which the government has been trying to conquer since Putin’s disobeying U.S. interests with the 2014 Crimea invasion. That same year, the U.S. helped install and has continued to support an aggressive and unstable neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine which threatens Russia. NATO troops and U.S.-related nuclear bases have been quietly amassing around Russia’s borders in recent years. The neocons’ aim, as explicitly said by senator Eric Swalwell in a March interview, is to replace Putin with a U.S.-obedient leader, though some think it’s also the elimination of the Russian Federation. 

This campaign extends to Syria’s ally Russia, which the government has been trying to conquer since Putin’s disobeying U.S. interests with the 2014 Crimea invasion. That same year, the U.S. helped install and has continued to support an aggressive and unstable neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine which threatens Russia. NATO troops and U.S.-related nuclear bases have been quietly amassing around Russia’s borders in recent years. The neocons’ aim, as explicitly said by senator Eric Swalwell in a March interview, is to replace Putin with a U.S.-obedient leader, though some think it’s also the elimination of the Russian Federation. 

Politicians and pundits have stopped using the Russian DNC hacking claim to justify these actions after the intelligence agencies themselves admitted there’s no hard evidence for the claim, that metadata was shown to have been manipulated in the government reports to implicate Russia in the leak, that an investigation has shown the emails could only have come from an inside leaker, and that another investigation has confirmed there’s no basis for Russia’s involvement. But those behind these Cold War escalations aren’t going to let that stop them.

The other current regime change countries are North Korea, which has been mischaracterized as the provocateur in a conflict that only the U.S. is creating. Then Venezuela, whose leader and recent election have been falsely portrayed as illegitimate so that a regime change project can happen. Then Iran, which the Trump administration and corporate Democrats are lying has defied the nuclear deal in an apparent mission to start war. Then potentially China, which has also been encircled with nuclear bases, could get involved in the planned Russia-NATO conflict, and was threatened two months ago with nuclear attacks by the U.S. Pacific fleet commander. 

A war is being engineered that could end with the western billionaire class controlling an essentially one-world government whose propaganda and policing systems are omnipotent. This project is being advertised to the public through the corporate media’s gladly covering things like the Russian war games while ignoring the NATO aggressions that provoked those war games. It’s being prepared for with this year’s military budget increases and attempts to destroy the social safety net. The elites are taking precautions against its potential outcomes by building luxury survival bunkers in rural land and on the ocean. And the efforts to stop it are being fought with this last month’s increased social media company censorship of dissenting views, thickened police militarization, and manufacturing of outrage at the very idea of peace with Russia.

Yet I mention all this not to discourage, but to do what’s needed for defeating the Deep State: exposing its lies. Fascism always creates a litany of problems, and salvation comes through us not becoming overwhelmed by those problems so that we can focus on the fight for justice. The Syria war attempt and the Russia war propaganda narrative were both dealt grievous harm last month from the efforts of undeterred online alternative media journalists. And our ability to move history in a better direction improves each day as those journalists’ following keeps steadily growing. 

In the coming years, the independent media outlets and the social movements they support could expand to sizes that overwhelm the establishment, or we’ll have to wait for the expected impermanence of totalitarianism to destroy the establishment much later. Don’t let that faith in the unsustainability of fascism make you passive-take action now, or lies may continue to reign for the rest of our lifetimes.

Healing Can't Happen Till Clinton Democrats Acknowledge Their Role In American Wars

Defeating the old systems isn’t enough. We need to reconcile with our past involvement in them. To make amends for our participation in a social pathology that’s slaughtered millions in the global south, deprived people of basic needs while telling them they deserve it, incarcerated people and shot them on the streets for their skin color, and ravaged our planet in ways that won’t be reversed for millions of years. We’ve all in some way been part of this, and we all should to take part in that healing process. But Clinton Democrats need this reconciliation especially.

I’m not talking about emails, or the Democratic primary, or anything from that distant series of election events which got us to this state. I’m talking about how horrific acts have been committed, and how Democratic loyalists have been complicit in them. I read the reports of the mass human dismemberment and death as Obama’s military dropped an average of three bombs every hour in 2016 alone. I saw the pictures of the babies that have 

been born horribly disfigured from the depleted uranium that Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton rained onto mideastern countries. I’ve learned about the record seven wars and drone war expansions that were carried out under the last administration, the million or so deaths that happened from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which Democrats helped start, the incomprehensible destruction the neocons are threatening to create right now by instigating conflict with Russia.

And I’ve seen you, Clinton Democrats, the supporters of those neocons, not take responsibility for this. I’ve seen you deny any of those things happened. I’ve seen you deflect from them by turning the conversation to things like Bernie Sanders’ tax returns. I’ve seen you try to excuse it through statements like “we’re always at war, what’s one more?” and “‘interventionism’ is just a word.” A lot of people have suffered and died from what that word means, and those people deserve a healing for what’s been done.

That felt good to say. But what do I mean by a healing, and what good would it do in a moment like this? Both parties are trying to lie us into regime change wars with Russia, Syria, North Korea, and possibly Iran and Venezuela as well. The conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen have been greatly expanded this year, with Trump already dropping almost more bombs than Obama did in 2016. This is resulting in attempts to cut the social safety net to near nonexistence so that the wars can be paid for, and growth for the fossil fuel industry when we have an estimated three years to safely bring down carbon emissions. Action to end perpetual war and the neoliberal order it enforces is needed now. And the way we bring about the healing process I’m talking about correlates with how we take that action.

We’ll achieve this healing-by which I mean a collective effort, on the part of Clinton Democrats and all other Americans, to reckon with the atrocities we’ve committed as a nation-by creating a society based on compassion and social awareness. By getting rid of the profit-worshipping, violence-glorifying, blindly tribalist old systems that get people to support horrific acts in the ways I mentioned. When the system goes, the mentalities that support the system will go with it.

We can make it go by looking the Deep State in the face as tries to consume us in its current spasm of deceptions and totalitarian takeovers, and unflinchingly striking a death blow to it. By speaking the truth about its propaganda and organizing to stop its goals till the corporations have their power taken away, there’s no longer a surveillance or police state, and things like war for profit are in the past. In that ecologically sustainable, socially just, non-imperialist social democracy, the societal mistakes of the previous era will all become open to learning about and studying. And if not all the current participants in those mistakes experience a sense of remorse and then emotional growth in that coming era, their children will.