By Trying To Silence Dissent, The Deep State Is Sowing Its Own Demise

The irony of oppression is that the worse it gets, the bigger risk the ruling powers create of an uprising. Outlawing dissent openly tells people that they aren’t free, which makes them rebel. So as American democracy has been taken over by corporate tyranny, the ruling class has decided to keep the appearance of the old democratic republic. This inverted totalitarian system, as Sheldon Wolin calls it, is different from the past despotisms in that it makes the people feel free.

Inverted totalitarianism depends on an illusion of open discourse. People should be allowed to vote, and they should be allowed to voice their opinions, but the mainstream political conversation needs to be made so narrow that no one gets to promote ideas that threaten the rule of corporate power. When the right to free expression is taken away, though-like when an election is rigged, or when a person is censored-that makes the illusion of freedom momentarily disappear. That illusion is disappearing right now like never before.

This is the cost of the online censorship, police militarization, and authoritarian propaganda that the global oligarchy has been carrying out in the last several years. By making their rule outwardly repressive, the ruling class are exposing their own lies about society being free. Inverted totalitarianism is being abandoned for blunt totalitarian rule.

To stop a backlash against this effort, corporate politicians and pundits have often tried to portray these actions as good for democracy. The massive censorship measures from online companies has been put in the context of “fighting fake news” in media reports, as part of the general charade about how the West needs to protect itself from “Russian subversion of our democracy.”

But these measures have come with more obviously repressive actions: American police have gotten more militarized than ever; CIA torture architect Gina Haspel has been confirmed as CIA director; the government is determined to unconstitutionally jail Julian Assange and other whistleblowers. Many people have looked at these developments, and have only been able to see a creeping fascism.

So there have been some signs of a growing resistance. There’s been a growth in social movements like the resistance to oil pipelines, the socialist movement, and the movement to end the police state’s war against  the poor. Anti-war sentiments have also grown with the rise in alternative media, giving hope for some revival of an American anti-war movement. The effort to free Julian Assange and other political prisoners has strengthened as well. All of these movements go against the agenda of the corporate/military complex which is the deep state. So all of them need to collaborate with each other for each of them to keep strengthening.

As the friendly mask of Big Brother disappears, so are the partisan and ideological divisions that make us unable to confront Big Brother. Leftists, libertarians, and right-wingers are increasingly collaborating to take down the unelected power establishment. If we make this trend spread, the deep state’s attempts to destroy freedom will backfire spectacularly.

Persistence Is The Key To Winning The Information War

The goal of the censorship, trolling, and media marginalization that the establishment has been using against independent online voices isn’t just to disable those voices, but to make them give up on fighting the war of ideas. At a time when, as Caitlin Johnstone assesses, “our governments become increasingly concerned that we are developing the wrong kinds of political opinions,” killing our will to resist the establishment propaganda onslaught is the best the deep state can hope for.

“Until there is an ideological framework that large numbers of people embrace to challenge the old ideological framework, nothing is going to happen,” said Chris Hedges in a 2015 interview about the possibility of a revolution. “Some things can happen; you can have sporadic uprisings as you had in Ferguson or you had in Baltimore. But until they are infused with that kind of political vision, they are reactive, in essence.” As we’ve since seen, the internet is the crucial thread that’s giving these outbursts of rebellion a coherent purpose. It’s let movements and independent journalists coordinate and spread their messages.

So the establishment has been attacking the open internet at a drastic rate in the last year or so: new Facebook algorithms that automatically punish users who post disfavored material; the demonetization of major YouTube users who make similar types of political videos, and the automatic unsubscribing of those users’ followers; shadow banning and the similar unsubscribing of certain Twitter accounts; Google algorithms that make websites like Truthdig and World Socialist Website harder to find; partnerships among these companies with the CIA, the Israeli government, and the Atlantic Council to police information that threatens the deep state’s agenda.

Troll attacks from these entities have also been part of it, ironically as the corporate media obsesses over Russia’s relatively small troll operation. Hillary Clinton’s Brock trolls have returned since the 2016 election, filling online threads with smears against Bernie Sanders and anyone else who criticizes corporate Democrats. Even more substantial is Israel’s troll army, whose strategy is to attack public figures who criticize Israel with negative comments so that they’ll be pressured into accepting pro-Israel narratives. Then there are the attacks by the Global Engagement Center, the State Department’s troll farm whose supposed purpose is to fight “Russian meddling.”

All of this, added onto the paranoid accusations of working for Russia that dissenters have been constantly targeted with, create a fascistic atmosphere. Speaking the truth is now associated with treason, and protecting the powerful is associated with upholding American civilization. We are being gaslighted into accepting the expansion of the police state and the eventual destruction of all liberties.

Nonetheless, as people are banding together to overthrow the Orwellian global oligarchy, they are creating a new cultural paradigm. This paradigm is one where partisan and ideological differences are no longer as important, where thinking independently is encouraged, and where opposing war, corruption and corporatism is the norm. The centers of power can’t survive amid this level of consciousness, so they’re using censorship and propaganda to try to shut down free thought. We can ultimately win out by being persistent in our efforts to counter establishment narratives, and by always trying to build each other up in the process.

The Democratic Establishment Is Panicking

The liberal elites are noticing a threat to their power. Why else would Politico, in tradition with its recent behaviors, go back to publishing smear pieces against the Bernie Sanders movement? This week, the website put out a transparently misleading article titled “Bernie’s army in disarray.” This was following a similarly biased anti-Sanders spin piece, published by The Tylt, titled “Has the Bernie Sanders revolution lost momentum?”

Every time clusters of media attacks against Sanders and his supporters have appeared, it’s coincided with the progressive movement being at an especially active point. Throughout spring 2017, when Bernie Sanders was becoming more popular than ever while activity surged in groups affiliated with his movement, Politico and other corporate media outlets put out a huge amount of fallacious material to discredit this growing political phenomena. Then there’s the empirically proven“Bernie Blackout” that happened throughout the 2016 primaries, whose intentions were revealed when the CIA-funded Washington Post famously published 16 negative articles on Sanders within 24 hours.

It’s clear that this has been coordinated. WikiLeaks has revealed that in 2007, George Soros, John Podesta, and other Democratic operatives partnered to form a self-described “robust echo chamber” of media messaging to help the Democrats in the 2008 elections. We have every reason to think this propaganda operation is still going on, since it explains the lockstep nature of recent media phenomena like the Russia sensation. And strategically assigning attacks against Bernie Sanders is just the kind of thing this media weapon could be used for.

So what can we do to fight back? We need to see through the propaganda that’s being used to discredit this movement, which is based in distortions. The winning ratio for Our Revolution candidates is currently over 40%, an incredible accomplishment since these candidates have been up against the establishment's massive amounts of corporate campaign money. The establishment wants to hide this fact from people so that they’ll be discouraged from helping the movement.

These candidates have been so successful because their ideas are supported by the majority of the American people. A Gallup poll from last year shows 56% of Americans support a government-run universal health care system. The same proportion of people support raising taxes on the corporations and the wealthy, as proven by a recent CBS poll. The fact that the Berniecrats represent these issues puts them at a massive advantage against the establishment Democrats, whose most notable recent accomplishments have been helping Republicans repeal Dodd Frank and passing an $80 billion military budget increase.

I have my reservations with Sanders and his movement. He and the politicians who affiliate with him have compromised to gain influence within the Democratic Party, particularly when it comes to opposing the dangerous Russia cold war narratives. But their goal of refusing corporate donations and defeating neoliberalism is terrifying for the political establishment, and their recent successes make the establishment visibly uneasy.

So the backlash against the movement will go on, like the elite’s larger backlash against dissent will go on. All we can do for now is keep fighting.

The Plot Against America

Only until now has media studies professor Mark Crispin Miller not thought that the American media deserves to be compared to the Nazi press. Just five years ago, he said in a recent interview with Chris Hedges, he wouldn’t have thought the analogy appropriate. But after the events of the last two years, he sees Joseph Goebbels as the best parallel to the deep state figures who are working to deceive the American people.

In 2013, under guise of fighting terrorism, the government repealed a 1948 law which banned the CIA from covertly spreading psyops within the U.S. Since then, the American media, already consolidated and subservient to government narratives, has become a monolith. The CIA, Miller describes, has taken over the country’s newspapers, airwaves, and other media in the same way the Nazis came to control Germany’s press. Even non-mainstream outlets like Vice News have been injected with the CIA’s narratives in the last few years.

The result, says Miller, is an era of government and media disinformation which is “unprecedented in American experience.” Never before have slogans like “fake news” and “election hacking” been so thoroughly hammered into the American psyche. Never before has the media tried to sell sweeping online censorship measures to the American people, under guise of “stopping Russian propaganda.” Never before has opposing official narratives been so stigmatized that pundits, ordinary people, and major news publications can acceptably smear people as “Russian bots.” The Nazi parallel is especially shown in how the media now presents foreign affairs; for instance, the U.S. narrative about Venezuela baselessly paints Venezuela as a “threat to national security,” similarly to how the Nazis claimed Poland was aggressing against Germany.

This is the real threat to America. This is what’s undermining our institutions. The blitz of CIA propaganda has been used to militarize society, like with the $80 billion military budget increase this year which was passed amid media fears of Russia overtaking America’s defense forces. It’s correlated with America’s descent into despotism, as military and intelligence officials have come under unprecedented command of the White House’s policies in the last year or so. It’s destroyed free discourse, with anyone who defies the establishment being demonized as a Kremlin agent.

“Being called a bot and Russian troll from high profile people is disturbing,” writescolumnist Peter McArthur about his recent experience with being publicly malignedas a “Russian bot” by the New York Times’ Charlie Savage. “We are being bullied, and they are trying to push anyone who refuses to unquestioningly accept their narrative to the margins of society. It’s sick. People like Charlie Savage ought to take a look at themselves before they accuse Russia of ‘sowing discord.’ They are dividing society in a way that no rinky-dink ‘troll farm’ ever could.”

This assault on independent thought is supported by the biggest and most sophisticated propaganda network in history. Since we don’t know who exactly the CIA’s propaganda program works with, it could be that many of the pundits and newscasters that Americans hear from each day are repeating propaganda that they’ve gotten directly from the government. These media personalities now mainly get their foreign affairs stories from the Atlantic Council, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Belfer Center for Science and International affairs.

These three neoconservative think tanks are funded by weapons contractors, and by NATO and GCC countries. These think tank donors are the qualifiable members of the deep state, who work with corporations, the intelligence community, politicians, and the media to control society. The partnership between all of these entities is more open than ever; since 2005, large corporations have been able to directly collude with the intelligence agencies through the Domestic Security Alliance Council. The plutocrat Jeff Bezos embodies this paradigm of corruption, as he partners with the military/intelligence complex while using The Washington Post to promote the government’s narratives.

Without sustained mass revolt, Bezos and the other oligarchs will keep eroding our freedoms, until the United States is essentially turned into a giant military base. This end goal of the oligarchs has been revealed in a leaked Pentagon training videowhich shows how the U.S. military plans to invade American cities by 2030, and it’s the logical conclusion of the worldview that the media is trying to impose on us.

“It's a big club, and you ain’t in it,” said George Carlin in his famous 2008 monologue. “You, and I, are not in the big club. By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice.”

How We’ll Defeat Israeli Apartheid

Things are changing about how our society chooses to handle the horrors being perpetrated by Israel. It’s more acceptable to acknowledge the truth about what’s happening than it was a few months ago. The massacre that Israel has been carrying out against Gaza demonstrators for the last eight weeks, with Israeli soldiers shooting at Palestinians who are either unarmed or only having rocks to use as weapons, has compelled people into speaking out. I’m asking people to keep up that intellectual courage, because it’s what we need to bring change.

We need to take this opportunity to speak against Israel’s actions loudly and unapologetically. We should be careful to avoid any anti-semitic language, including unintentional anti-semitism that implicates the Jewish people with Israel’s crimes. But it’s our responsibility to expose the realities of what’s happening, so that the tide can be turned against the apartheid state which is Netanyahu’s government.

Start conversations about this issue. Spread the truth about Israel’s ethnic cleansing operation online and elsewhere. Don’t stay quiet when you hear someone blame Israel’s latest massacre on Hamas (Hamas didn’t organize the Gaza protest, the people of Palestine did) or claim Israel is only defending itself (it’s most definitely not, since Israeli soldiers are armed with heavy weaponry and the Palestinians are only armed with rocks). Counter Israel’s narratives so that the oppressed people can be given as big a voice as possible.

These people, as Abby Martin says about the Palestinians in Gaza, are “born to die.” They aren’t allowed to leave the Gaza Strip, since Israel and its surrounding allies make sure to block all of their exits. They aren’t allowed any material that could be construed as a weapon, including concrete. Their food essentially consists of rations, and Netanyahu has worked to block off Gaza’s freshwater supply. Israel sendssoldiers to lure and kill Palestinian children in the area, assigns snipers at the guard posts around the city to gun down Palestinians, and bombs civilians in Gaza.

The Israeli and U.S. governments are doing all they can to ensure that the inhabitants of this open-air concentration camp don’t have allies, aren’t able to have their stories told, and don’t have the will to resist. They’re dehumanized as terrorists and portrayed as too dangerous to be let out of Gaza, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Their national identity and their right to live in their homeland is ignored under the colonialist view that Israel is entitled to all of the area’s land.

Not all Zionists support the atrocities taking place. But Zionism is the ideology that’s weaponized as a justification for Israel’s existence as an ethno-supremacist apartheid state, with Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Blacks, and essentially all other non-Jews in Israel being subject to persecution. The goal is to expel all disfavored ethnic groups from the country, and Israeli officials have expressed it’s the goal many times. The government has only been able to sustain public support for this all by telling people that they’re in a war for the survival of the Jewish state, a war that won’t end until the enemy is exterminated.

This mentality of war, which extends to many of Israel’s worldwide supporters as well, is enforced by the militarized and increasingly authoritarian nature of Israeli society. For the last seven decades, the people at the bottom of this society have been subjected to the eight stages of genocide, which are classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, extermination, and denial.

That last stage has been thoroughly entered into, as the Israeli government routinely puts out statements which invert the truth of how Palestinians and Arabs are treated by its army. These “Big Lies,” as Chris Hedges calls them, are then repeated by pro-Israel politicians and by the corporate media, while Israel’s extensive network of online trolling and propaganda also works to insert them into people’s consciousness.

This is what these protesters and their families are up against. But they’re still fighting for their freedom-why wouldn’t they be? Human beings aren’t built to accept abuse, and their impulse to fight back will always be the default. That’s what’s kept the Palestinians going until now, when it seems like they’re finally about to win.

To End The Oligarchy, All We Have To Do Is Organize

The purpose of all the media distractions, McCarthyite propaganda, and censorship the corporate state now uses is to stop people from organizing in big enough numbers. The population is more hostile towards war, more aware of corporate capitalism’s evils, and angrier at elites than it’s been in decades. And stopping Americans from translating this anger into a coordinated revolt is the establishment’s top priority.

As I’ve noticed in the last couple of months, the war against dissent has been getting more brutal. In March, Ecuador cut off Julian Assange’s internet access, totally isolating him from the outside world at a time when his imprisonment was severely damaging his health. When 78-year-old CIA veteran Ray McGovern protested the nomination of Gina Haspel last week, he was physically dragged and beaten by police while inside the Senate. Activist Rakem Balogun has become the first person to be arrested under the FBI’s new “Black Identity Extremist” label, with his crime having been making Facebook posts which criticized police.

This is a standoff. Many people are determined to force change to our system, and the ruling class is determined to hold onto its power. It’s similar to the Palestinian people’s struggle to reclaim their rights and their homeland, which goes up against an Israeli government that the U.S. empire is determined to keep supporting. This struggle is intensifying, as the Israeli army becomes more and more violent; this week, at least fifty-eight Palestinians participating in the Great March of Return were killed by Israeli troops, the latest massacre in the all-out war against Palestinian demonstrators that’s been going on for the last two months.

These demonstrators know that Israel is prepared to retaliate in this way. Like has always been the situation for the Palestinians trapped in Israel’s Gaza concentration camp, they know that many will need to sacrifice themselves so the fight for freedom can be won. “They’re quashing the protests so violently and so aggressively not out of self defense, but to dissuade such protests in the future,” Caitlin Johnstone has assessed. “All they have to do is be brutal enough to convince the Palestinians that such protests aren’t worth the cost of life, and whole generations could be dissuaded from future protests.”

It’s the job of the Palestinian resisters to not give in. As it’s our job to not be dissuaded by the war against dissent in America. These two struggles are directly linked with each other, since Israel, the U.S., and the other countries in the global empire are tools used by the same circle of plutocrats. And what can maintain and strengthen these revolutionary efforts is a drive to organize the population.

This means seeking out the local organizing groups in our areas. It means volunteering for the many candidates around the country who refuse corporate money. It means building our online platforms so that we can rally people towards strikes, boycotts, and other actions. At the most extreme, it means doing things like refusing to pay taxes in protest of war and staging occupations like the one at Standing Rock. At the most basic, it means refusing to believe the establishment’s propaganda. All of it helps though, and we need to do as much of it as possible.

Because if we keep fighting, the power dynamic will be switched over. The government will be unable to control society. The people will hold command, and the policies which support imperialism and corporate power will all like dominoes. The Gaza protesters know this, and they’re waiting to see how long they’ll have to work before the situation reverses.

The Democratic Party Has Become A Dictatorship

In these last few years, the Democratic Party’s leadership has reacted to their loss of political dominance by turning their sphere of influence into a dictatorship. This is not hyperbole, but a simple assessment of which form of government the DNC’s recent policies most resemble.

The following log of these policies shows the extent that bourgeois institutions like the Democratic Party will go to hold onto their control-something useful for us to know as we try to overcome the larger corporate oligarchy.

The party rigs its own elections

The electoral fraud, voter suppression, and backroom deals that the were used to steal the presidency from Bernie Sanders in 2016 were too visible for most people not to see them. This was proven, to my surprise, when a Rasmussen poll came out last year showing only around 30% of Americans think Hillary Clinton had won that primary contest fairly. But as long as the party’s leadership is being supported by a powerful plutocracy, they won’t care what the voters think.

So the party has lately served as a front that the centers of power use to keep populist insurgents out of elected offices. Last month, an audio was leaked of Democratic congressman Steny Hoyer pressuring congressional primary candidate Levi Tillemann to drop out of his race so that the DCCC could secure the win for its preferred candidate Jason Crow. This was no doubt just one of the dozens of similar conversations that have been happening inside private DC meetings lately, as the political establishment responds to this year’s unprecedented grassroots efforttowards running non-corporate candidates.

The DCCC has also worked to undermine James Thompson, Rob Quist, and many other Bernie Sanders-backed candidates, usually through underhanded tactics like refusing to sufficiently fund their campaigns. And the DNC’s refusal to stop using superdelegates for 2020 hints at what we’ll see next. When the party is confronted with its anti-democratic behavior, its spokespeople don’t even attempt to deny it anymore; they rationalize it by saying that it’s best for the party.

“These people are violently opposed to democracy, and yet they call themselves ‘Democrats,’” writes Caitlin Johnstone in reaction to all of this. “And Americans are so alienated from what democracy is that this is accepted as normal.”

The party accuses its opponents of being traitors, and seeks to shut down media that exposes it

Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein and Julian Assange are among the people that establishment Democrats have accused of being Russian agents. All of these charges are false, including the most widespread ones; there is still no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia, and even Obama has stated that there’s no proof Assange and WikiLeaks are working with Russia. As Glenn Greenwald wrote two years ago, when this McCarthyite campaign was starting, “Democrats’ tactic of accusing critics of Kremlin allegiance has [a] long, ugly history.” And it’s escalating to dangerous heights.

For instance, Greenwald was more recently forced to comment that the Democratic Party’s actions pose “a dangerous threat to press freedom.” He was referring to the lawsuit that the DNC filed last month against Trump, Russia, and WikiLeaks, as justified under the guise of the Democrats’ unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about all of them having conspired to steal the 2016 election. By suing WikiLeaks simply for publishing information that’s damaging to them, Greenwald describes, the DNC has violated the constitutional rules of a free press.

This is just part of a worldwide ruling class effort to crush dissent. RT has been forced by the Justice Department to register as a foreign agent; online companies are waging all-out war on anyone who opposes corporate power and the neocon war agenda; police have become militarized in anticipation of social unrest. The Democratic Party’s crackdown against free thought is ahead of the rest of the oligarchy, and we can know what to soon expect from our rulers by seeing the party’s current actions.

The party is starting to look into having its members do loyalty pledges

Last week, a county Democratic committee in New York voted down a measure to have its members do mandatory pledges of loyalty to the candidates that the party chooses. This proposal is just a step ahead of how the Democratic establishment has been treating nonconformity in recent years.

Bernie Sanders delegates were mistreated and excluded from the 2016 Democratic convention. Jill Stein, and Sanders to a lesser extent, have been subjected to wildly dishonest public attack campaigns from establishment Democrats. Most alarming has been the recent online habit from ordinary Democrats of accusing people they disagree with of being “Russian trolls” or “Russian bots,” a McCarthyite mindset that the media has no doubt propagated deliberately.

“Every single time I try to substantiate my argument with a link or a source when debating a neoliberal, they tell me my source is invalid unless it comes from one of the mainstream news sites that have consistently avoided covering anything that made Clinton look bad,” wrote Caitlin Johnstone in late 2016, when the current media psyop campaign against dissenting information was just getting started. “The talking heads on TV are telling them that it’s okay to do this now, that they no longer have to look at a news story and address its content anymore, because unless it comes from NBC, CNN or the New York Times, it’s fake.”

This war against dissent, both in and outside the Democratic Party, will go on for as long as the deep state sees its dominance threatened. And the people leading that effort to dethrone the deep state will keep disrupting the power structure until they get the freedom they demand. Until this conflict reaches a conclusion, we have to keep working.

The Future The Oligarchs Want

The end goal of the deep state is to drive the population into poverty and subjection, and to impose militarized totalitarian control. We can see this from the widening wealth inequality, police state expansion, increased corporate control, and escalating warfare that’s happening under the order of the global oligarchs. And as history has taught us, there’s no limit to how much despotic states will try to impose their control.

Today’s publicly visible billionaires often talk about the future in utopian terms, making promises that technology, free markets, or minor reforms to the corporate capitalist system will save civilization. Yet as long as the system that these ruling elites support exists, we’ll keep having the consequences of that system: destroyed liberties, expanding poverty, environmental collapse, escalating warfare. The real solution of dismantling the oligarchy is unthinkable to them, so they let these destructive forces continue indefinitely.

This is what the recent unprecedented media shift towards McCarthyism and Russia fearmongering is trying to conceal. The system is showing signs of falling apart, and the centers of power are reacting by tightly controlling the population.

Already, American police are more militarized than ever. The president has the authority, as given under Obama, to send in the military as a domestic police force; police can raid people’s private property with impunity. The Orwellian term “precrime” is applicable to law enforcement. The security state has filled the country with fusion centers, created an unparalleled surveillance system, and built “black sites” for torturing prisoners. Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other CIA-controlled online companies have escalated censorship of news sites that are deemed “pro-Russian,” and the media has taken to flippantly slandering people as “Russian bots.”

The oligarchs are preparing to create a drastically different future. This would be a future where the U.S. military, as revealed in a recent Pentagon training video, wages war on the American people by sending troops into metropolitan areas to solve social problems. This plan, projected in the video to take effect by 2030, has a propaganda strategy that’s been assessed by John C. Whitehead: “You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls. Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out.”

This slow conditioning towards a militarized future parallels every other despotic takeover in history, especially the years-long transition into tyranny that happened in the Soviet Union. The clues to where America’s ruling elite want to take things grow clearer all the time, yet as with all gradual takeovers, most people don’t see the changes in time. Right now, for instance, the senate is considering an Authorization for the Use of Military Force bill which would give the president total authority to declare war, and which would allow the president to detain American citizens permanently. The constitution and civil liberties are becoming obsolete, and are being replaced with the laws of a police state.

“Make no mistake about it,” writes Peter McArthur about the propaganda tactic the deep state is using of attacking dissenters as “Russian bots.” “This is dehumanization, and it’s the first ugly step in a set of increasingly ugly steps. This is an attempt normalize the idea that certain people and certain views need to be silenced, because they are a supposed threat to national security, democracy, and whatever other values our soon-to-be-obvious ruling class pretends to give a shit about.”

Fight the social engineering. Fight the creeping military, corporate, and governmental power. Don’t accept the attempts to delegitimize free thinkers as “Russian bots.” We’re real, we see what the deep state is moving towards, and we’ll do all we can to stop it.

When Democrats Support War, They Enforce White Supremacy

When Democrats help carry out U.S. wars and imperialism, the Americans they harm the most are the black and brown communities who they claim to be allies for. This is because white supremacy is the consequence of economic exploitation, which is enforced by militarism.

This truth about the source of racism and economic injustice is centuries old, since slavery was a crime of capitalism and colonialism. And it’s what Democrats are ultimately trying to distract Americans from as they focus on Russia, partisan politics, and Trump-related controversies. To see this truth, we only have to trace towards the factors that keep institutional racism in place.

The severe poverty that African Americans are in, for instance, comes from the corporate capitalist economic system, which has massively deepened black poverty in the last four decades. As does the mass incarceration that terrorizes the black community, which came from the corporatist drive towards expanding for-profit prisons. (The Democratic Party, naturally, represents these things in addition to imperialism.) Much of the racism in our society is, essentially, a crime of capitalism.

And capitalism is enforced by imperialism and war. Martin Luther King Jr. identified the racist effects of U.S. wars, having stated that “the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation” are what work together to keep blacks, and everyone else in the lower classes, oppressed. The central role that wars and militarism have had in expanding corporate profits, propagandizing the population into obedience, and using up money that could be used for social spending has proven this connection. The rule of the corporations and banks, and the subjugation of black people that this rule entails, depends on the existence of the U.S. military empire.

This connection between capitalism and racism is not vague or theoretical. It’s as direct as it was in earlier centuries. France still collects colonial taxes from fourteen African countries. The United States is still occupying 53 out of Africa’s 54 countries. Rich white families like the Clintons can still pillage poor black countries like Haiti. Imperialism still perpetuates black slavery, like how Obama and Clinton’s 2011 invasion and destabilization of Libya has created a massive slave trade in the country. The global power dynamic has changed little since modern western colonialism started six centuries ago.

This is how the Democratic Party holds its nonwhite constituents hostage to a racist system. It pressures vulnerable groups to vote for it under the threat of electing Republicans, and silences those who oppose its institutionally white supremacist policies. When Democratic operative Sally Albright tweeted last week that “History will view the Bernie Sanders phenomenon as the death rattle of the last vestiges of white supremacy in the Democratic party,” she was insulting the millions of black Sanders supporters who are trying to free themselves from her party’s imperialism and corporate capitalism. Or, more accurately, she was insulting them for trying to free themselves.

The rich whites in power, not like it’s anything new, don’t want their system to be upset. When will we carry out the uprising that they fear?

“Nothing We Do Will Change Things” Is An Excuse For Political Inaction

An unfortunate inevitability within online leftist circles is the type of people whose first impulse is to discourage an action as “futile.” Their criticisms go in the veins of “they don’t care about your protests,” “how do you expect to get this passed when the corporations are in charge?”, and so on. It goes past healthy introspection about strategies for activism, and has the effect of perpetually shutting down discussions about taking practical action. Not very many people have adopted this attitude. But it’s definitely not the mindset we need for overcoming the global oligarchy.

The people who hold those fatalistic views are reacting to how hugely our crises have piled up. America is now more militarized, more controlled by corporations, and more filled with sophisticated CIA-based propaganda than ever before. The opportunity for stopping major a climate upheaval passed a long time ago, as the planet moves close to more than two degrees Celsius of warming. The U.S. power establishment, in its struggle to regain its former world dominance, is close to starting a third world war.

Yet all the time, we see counterexamples. Teacher strikes are sweeping the world right now, and they’ve made some victories even as the media largely ignores them. The establishment’s propaganda machine is in a much weaker place than it was mere months ago, as was revealed with last month’s overblown media smear effort against people telling the truth about Syria. You can always find people who are working to fight our systems of corporate control and create a better world, and there are a lot more of those people than there were a few years ago. The recent growth in social movements has shown this.

If these positives seem trivial up against the power of the global oligarchy, remember how history’s repressed people have found ways, time and time again, to change their societies. We’re seeing this now in how the Palestinian people have been able to turn the tide on the issue of Israeli apartheid, with the Israeli and U.S. political establishments being no longer able to suppress discord about the genocide that’s going on. Outrage towards Israel’s human rights abuses, I’ve noticed, is increasing right now in both the public and social media realms.

This looming victory for the movement to liberate Palestine is paralleled around the world. Here are some recent events which prove this:

-Amid the collapse of the West’s latest “chemical attack” claims, the State Department has partially frozen funding for the White Helmets, signalling a surrender in the neocon drive for Syrian regime change.

-Amid recent scandals and bad press, the FBI is in a state of turmoil. This raises hopes for the abolishment of this American secret police agency.

-World renowned economist Yanis Varoufakis, among many others, says that capitalism is soon coming to an end. The unprecedented economic crash that all evidence says the world is soon headed for will exacerbate this revolution.

-Western media articles attacking “online conspiracy theorists” and “Russian disinformation” continue to pop up daily. This continued reaction to the efforts of independent journalists show how close we are to overcoming the establishment propaganda machine. As Caitlin Johnstone wrote last week: “The nationless power establishment which looked completely unshakeable a matter of months ago is now flipping out like a meth addict whose stash just got stolen and publicly overextending itself in an amazingly conspicuous way.”

There reasons to keep taking action, and to encourage others towards taking action, are too overwhelming. A transformation for our species is close to happening. We just need to feed the movement towards it.