This Is What A Pro-War Psyop Looks Like

Do the headlines shown above really seem like they’ve all appeared by coincidence? The factors surrounding them, as well as the numerous other news stories that also follow this “anti-war = white supremacist” theme, are good reasons to be suspicious.

Firstly, while many on the alt-right do seem to support Assad and Putin, these and other articles have deliberately tried to conflate this fact with the broader opposition to Western intervention in Syria. The pictured article from The Intercept, for instance, makes many logical leaps and unsound arguments to support its title. The article on the lower left of the image (featured on the website Haaretz) is a blatant attempt to conflate the anti-war movement with white nationalism. The Buzzfeedarticle on the top right shows its clear bias by calling Assad a “brutal Arab dictator,” a label which Assad’s actual policies have not
reflected.

The article on the bottom right is both based in a disingenuous dismissal of the idea that a false flag happened in Syria this April, and is part of the propaganda efforts of the pro-war Atlantic Council.  And generally, the mainstream media’s focus on white supremacists in relation to Syria has been oddly excessive, since white supremacists make up a tiny minority of the tens of millions of Americans who oppose the West’s ongoing assault on Syria.

It would be an overstatement to say that all of these articles were written at the direct request of the government. But when we see trends in the media like this one, it’s good to recall the The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012. Signed into law by Obama as part of the 2013 NDAA bill, the act’s official summary says that it:

Amends the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 to authorize the Secretary of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to provide for the preparation and dissemination of information intended for foreign audiences abroad about the United States, including about its people, its history, and the federal government's policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, the Internet, and other information media, including social media, and through information centers and instructors. (Under current law such authority is restricted to information disseminated abroad, with a limited domestic exception.)

This is the most mundane-sounding way to describe a policy that allows for the United States government to covertly put propaganda all throughout the media. The headline pattern I’ve pointed out is just the kind of thing that can appear under this chilling new paradigm, and there are many similar examples.

Didn’t it seem odd when mainstream media outlets suddenly started repeating the slogan “fake news” two years ago to delegitimize independent media? Or when CNN’s Chris Cuomo made the untrue and out-of-place statement that it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks? Or when much of the Western media put out a uniform and astonishingly frequent series of articles this April which attacked skeptics of the pro-war Syria narrative? When you see similar, subtly manipulative messages that support the agenda of the military corporate/industrial complex, it’s safe to assume that a coordinated effort is behind it.

Between this and the universal NSA surveillance, the encroaching corporate and governmental censorship of the Internet, and the vast network of U.S. intelligence spies whose jobs are to sabotage dissenting voices, we’re now living in an Orwellian dystopia where everyone is constantly being monitored or manipulated. The best we can do for now is try to recognize the state’s deceptions when they sneakily appear in front of us.