Language Is Everything When There Are Official Narratives to Defend
How the leftist-globalist alliance has weaponized language in an attempt to stop Donald Trump.
In a recent article, Caitlin Johnstone commented on the illusory truth effect. It’s also called the reiteration effect. Wikipedia gets this right:
When truth is assessed, people rely on whether the information is in line with their understanding or if it feels familiar. The first condition is logical, as people compare new information with what they already know to be true. Repetition makes statements easier to process relative to new, unrepeated statements, leading people to believe that the repeated conclusion is more truthful.
Put more simply, the more a word or phrase or sentence is repeated, the more it puts your brain to sleep so that you believe it uncritically.
Caitlin’s example is the constant use of unprovoked to describe the Russian attack on Ukraine. Virtually every corporate media outlet uses this word repeatedly, although even superficial research on the events that led up to that attack will realize that it was anything but unprovoked.
What provoked it were numerous actions of the U.S./NATO axis as the latter crept eastward towards Russian territory since the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite pledges not to. The most recent major event was the 2014 coup in Kyiv, orchestrated by neocons such as Victoria Nuland and the CIA, replacing a Russia-friendly government with a Russia-hostile one. The latter began a systematic assault on ethnic Russians living in the Donbas who, in response, sought to leave Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.
Caitlin reviews the use of unprovoked as a propaganda device in one corporate newspaper, The New York Times, relying on Jeffrey Sachs’s earlier research which I also recommend. In fact, we can find hundreds of uses of this term all across corporate media, often as part of longer phrases such as unprovoked war of aggression.
My point is about language. It is no coincidence that Sachs, who used to be a creature of the mainstream (I guess he has a conscience and it began to gnaw at him), opens his essay with one of George Orwell’s best known adages from 1984:
“Who controls the past, controls the future. And who controls the present controls the past.”
Power elites learned over a hundred years ago that the way to control the past and present is to control the language used to describe current events. One of the best ways to accomplish this was to gain control over the press. Thus Owen Callaway, a Senator, had entered into the Congressional Record for 1915 a vivid description of how a powerful corporate entity of his day, JP Morgan, gained control over newspapers:
“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, ship building and powder interests and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press in the United States.
“These 12 men worked the problems out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.
“This contract is in existence at the present time, and it accounts for the news columns of the daily press of the country being filled with all sorts of preparedness arguments and misrepresentations as to the present condition of the United States Army and Navy, and the possibility and probability of the United States being attacked by foreign foes.
“This policy also included the suppression of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served. The effectiveness of this scheme has been conclusively demonstrated by the character of the stuff carried in the daily press throughout the country since March, 1915. They have resorted to anything necessary to commercialize public sentiment and sandbag the National Congress into making extravagant and wasteful appropriations for the Army and Navy under false pretense that it was necessary. Their stock argument is that it is ‘patriotism.’ They are playing on every prejudice and passion of the American people.
Contrary to national mythology, we’ve not had a free press for over a hundred years!
Hence the weaponized use of unprovoked to describe Putin’s response to violence against ethnic Russians by Kyiv.
Hence the use of conspiracy theory, the phrase weaponized by the CIA back in the 1960s to discredit criticism of the Warren Commission Report, and which has proven effective in demonizing criticisms of official narratives (political assassinations, the 9/11 attacks, so-called free trade agreements, globalism generally, covid-19 and the mRNA shots, and a multitude of lesser events for which an official narrative has been desirable for those in power).
Hence the creation of mantras such as war on poverty, war on drugs, war on terror, etc. None were anything of the sort, of course.
January 6, 2021 was the same: corporate media repeatedly calls this an insurrection, led by a president trying to overturn the results of Election 2020 which he lost.
See how this works?
An equivalent claim is that President Trump attempted a coup (or: attempted a violent coup).
The Constitution is clear: no one convicted of engaging in an insurrection can run for elected office. From the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3 (passed in the wake of the War Between the States):
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
So, what this comes down to: will the official narrative based on the official language of Jan 6 hold?
The present assigned tasks of both the controlled legal system and controlled corporate media are making sure it does. That means doing whatever they can to convict Trump in the media.
Thus: hundreds of uses of insurrection or deadly riot or some such, even if Trump actually told his supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically,” the memory-holed phrase.
Trump never told anyone to enter the Capitol. That was Ray Epps (possibly among others)!
This matters! Very, very much, does this matter!
Official narratives ruin lives!
Not only have official narratives resulted in the incarceration of over a thousand people now, most of them nonviolent and very few with previous brushes with the law, the outcome of the next election and possibly the future of the country itself turns on what might happen between now and early 2024, not just in the court of law but in the court of corporate media controlled “public opinion” (another mantra-like phrase concocted back in First World War days)!
Trump remains the frontrunner for the GOP nomination. Court dates (e.g., next January) are already being arranged in ways that will interfere with his ability to campaign. One thing I think all parties will agree upon: he can’t be in two places at once. If his days are tied up in court, he can’t make public appearances.
This matters because Trump’s only presently serious competitor, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, is struggling. Other announced candidates are polling in single digits. Chris Christie would not even be a blip on the radar except that he’s building a campaign around attacking Trump. Trump’s own best bet (though it goes against his natural inclinations) would be to ignore Christie altogether.
The Establishment — billionaire-owned corporate media, academia, Big Tech, the integrated complex of intel agencies and war machine Trump and others designated as “the deep state” — is absolutely terrified of a second Trump term. I don’t blame them. A second Trump term would be quite unlike the first one. Trump has doubtless figured out that there is only one way to deal with would-be totalitarians, and that is by strongarming them, using the same measures someone such as Viktor Orbán used in Hungary to great effect. The leftist-globalist axis has been stymied there.
Academic leftists in Hungary were called out. They retaliated by moving their Soros-founded Central European University to Vienna, Austria. Naturally corporate media does not describe it this way. The mantra here is academic freedom, which has meant freedom for leftists to do as they please and cancelation for anyone who disagrees with them.
But Hungary has border controls. Its policies place Hungarians first, and even provide advantages for young married couples who have children. Orbán has no patience with dangerous “gender affirming care” nonsense. Small wonder he is demonized.
Hungary is a small nation, of course. Only 9.8 million people live there. Its effect on the worldwide dominance of the leftist-globalist alliance is therefore small.
Imagine this happening in the U.S., a country of perhaps 330 million people (who knows the actual number, since so many are in the country illegally)!
This understandably scares the leftist-globalist ruling class to death!
Thus the use by their corporate media shills of terms like authoritarian, autocrat, protofascist, fascist, and others as epithets which once had precise meanings.
More weaponized language.
We, say the shills (whoever we are), need to safeguard our endangered democracy.
There are, again, many variants on that theme.
Truth: the U.S. became a plutocracy (or plutocratic oligarchy) during its first Gilded Age; its first generation of plutocrats seized control over the economy when they created the Federal Reserve System in 1913 having engineered the Woodrow Wilson presidency the preceding year.
Plutocracy (or plutocratic oligarchy) means: rule by wealthy interests. JP Morgans, Rockefellers, etc. The elites, the Establishment (institutions enumerated above), call them what you will.
It is common to hear Patriots say that the Founders did not create a democracy, they created a republic: “A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin famously said.
It’s neither. But we’re supposed to believe the U.S. is a democracy because we the peasants can vote (usually for carefully vetted candidates) every two and four years.
No one I know of voted to send hundreds of billions to Ukraine! No one I know of voted for the U.S. wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq!
Donald Trump remains the biggest existential threat to this machine in our lifetimes! Not just in his person but in the movement surrounding him, which includes tens of millions of Americans who are now awake (not “woke”)!
Hence the fierce attempts to take Trump down, sometimes with legal precedents not used in a U.S court of law in over a hundred years.
The best result, for the ruling elites, would be to prevent him from running on Constitutional grounds.
They can do this only if they can make the insurrection official narrative stick by getting a conviction. The ball will then be in Trump’s court.
If he proceeds to run anyway — expressing not in words but deeds that he considers the conviction as illegitimate as he considers the Bidenista presidency — this will create the biggest crisis of legitimacy in U.S. history!
The Establishment would have trouble jailing him. As a former president he is entitled to Secret Service protection wherever he goes. House arrest is the most they could accomplish. That would not be sufficient to stymie his massive support which is already a ticking time bomb.
Real scholars such as Peter Turchin (in End Times referenced in my last article) are comparing our present era to the late 1850s.
This is potentially larger, because even if had the Confederacy won the war that ensued, the Washington government would have stayed intact.
Trump’s determination to remain a candidate for president despite an insurrection conviction and being supported by those millions of Americans planning to vote for him threatens the very legitimacy of the plutocrat-controlled government behind a conviction on grounds those millions deem a false narrative.
To make this more nuanced, what this would threaten is not the government the Founders tried to give us roughly 235 years ago, which Ben Franklin called “a republic.”
It would threaten the Establishment and war machine that began to develop much later, which was emerging around the time the Federal Reserve was created and the mainstream press was hijacked.
This distinction is bound to be over the heads of most controlled media pseudo-pundits. One major difference between the two, though, is easy to spell out.
The former promoted noninterference with the internal affairs of other nations (e.g., George Washington’s Farewell Speech).
The latter destroys other nations with efficiency and enthusiasm!
The first of the new millennium were the disastrous incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq. Among Trump’s “offenses” regarding the classified documents at Mar-A-Lago include his apparent sequestering of a war machine scenario of a projected attack on Iran, a much bigger country than either Afghanistan or Iraq. Had this taken place, it would have been a proportionally bigger disaster than those were.
The proxy war against Russia is just the latest of these catastrophes.
War machine plans appear to know no bounds. There is never an off-ramp, never a sense of what these wars are intended to accomplish besides making money for defense contractors. There is never a sense of how things are supposed to look afterwards.
But imagine a multipolar world without the extremely power-consolidating (not to mention immensely profitable!) Anglo-American / CIA / NATO war machine, and the Establishment behind it!
I know, I have a hard time imagining it, too. We all grew up with this “complete and total disaster” (Trump’s words, from his 2016 campaign).
During his first term, Trump was the first president not to involve the U.S. in any new wars, or oversee the destruction of countries by some war machine entity (such as Hillary Clinton singlehandedly destroying Libya and Honduras when she was Obama’s Secretary of State).
All of which is why I do not think Trump will be allowed a second term.
The legal branch of the Establishment is throwing felony allegation after felony allegation at him in the hopes that by the law of averages something will stick. Their efforts are spilling over onto lawyers who worked for Trump, a major disincentive for lawyers to work with him down the road. They are trying to drain his resources (one PAC, Save America, has shrunk from over $100 million to just $3.6 million from paying Trump’s legal fees).
Summing up: expect controlled corporate media to keep hammering us with the insurrection narrative.
If the controlled legal system either don’t get a conviction, or if they get one and Trump tries to run anyway, we go to the next stage in the crisis of legitimacy: the Establishment (or particular deep-pocketed players such as Soros) covertly sends angry mobs of leftists to protest his appearances and physically assault his supporters.
We know this is possible because it happened back in 2016: Black Lives Matter blocking major thoroughfares, etc., with extremely high legal penalties for anyone who runs through one of these blockades and injures or kills one of the mostly peaceful protesters (another propaganda phrase; are we getting how these kinds of phrases have proliferated over time?).
We know they will loot and burn, because they did it during the George Floyd melee in 2020, and corporate media protected them both with the above phrase and demonizing truth-tellers as racists.
If those ploys fail, and as Election 2024 nears….
Well, here is where multiple scenarios are possible, as I’ve noted many times previously. Cyberattack? Another plandemic? Climate lockdowns? A hoaxed invasion by space aliens? I have no idea what might be used, but of one thing we can be sure: if it looks like Trump could win the presidency back next year, the panicked leftist-globalist alliance — and its many servile types in corporations, academia, elsewhere — will do something able to solidly lock the country down.
We know they are capable of this, because they did it also in 2020, via a 24/7 corporate media and governmental campaign of nonstop scare tactics that proved massively effective on a global scale.
Should this somehow fail…. Or if the leftist-globalist alliance lacks the collective nerve….
They may simply steal Election 2024. Jay Valentine has documented how it might happen.
Should that fail, because this time it is credibly exposed, however that happens?
Trump wins, officially at least, in the Electoral College.
The leftist-globalist alliance will then use every resource at its disposal to launch riots in every major American city, starting sometime in mid-November of 2024, prior to Trump’s getting into the White House making it impossible for him to do anything legally. The riots will continue until Trump either steps aside or is forced to do so — thus ending, for careful observers, any remaining pretenses that they were living in an actual democracy.
I’ve not factored in every conceivable gambit here, such as the possibility (likelihood?) that the Democrat Party will nudge Joe Biden aside and run Gavin Newsom instead. Newsom has all of Biden’s leftist-globalist bona fides and none of his tendencies to lapse into dementia-caused word salad. Gavin has succeeded in California: assuming the goal was finishing transforming the place into the kind of neo-feudal dystopia envisioned by the leftist-globalist alliance for the entire planet: Silicon Valley billionaires contrasted with homeless encampments in every major city.
Newsom would have a better chance of defeating Trump than Biden. (No one, of course, not even the elite-controlled DNC, thinks Kackling Kamala is qualified to be president, which is probably the only reason Biden’s handlers are allowing him to finish out his term.)
Whatever happens, 2024 may still be over four months away, but it is already shaping up to be a pivotal year — possibly more so than 1860 was. Remember the adage about an irresistible force meeting an immovable object? The Establishment collectively considers itself immovable, but the forces besieging it — armed with the truth, including truths about official narratives and how language is used as a weapon of mind control — are proving, if not irresistible, extremely difficult to put down. Probably because there are a lot of peasants out there in red state hinterlands who do not believe they have anything left to lose.
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In 2021 I published my book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory. Here, in three parts, are reasons you should think about reading the book if you’ve interest in the role worldviews play in civilization, and in shaping our lives:
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