For the record, I am not right-wing or left-wing. As far as I am concerned, they are merely the two wings of the same bird. Let us suspect that the real power is so hidden by the kaleidoscopic mind control media machine that is all around us that we cannot perceive it. Lou
Politics
Donetsk’s civic chamber urged the head of the republic to hold a referendum on joining Russia soon, following Lugansk’s lead
“All of us feel and know for a long time that Donbass is Russia, we have been fighting for this for eight long years. For this, we daily suffer strikes on our homes, streets, hospitals, schools, and kindergartens,” the head of the chamber, Aleksander Kofman, said in a statement.
https://www.rt.com/russia/563122-dpr-wants-to-join-russia/
Sept 20, 2022
FILE PHOTO. © RIA/Konstantin Mikhalchevsky
The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) must “immediately” hold a “referendum” on joining Russia, its civic chamber said on Monday. The call came shortly after a similar move was made by the equivalent body of the neighboring Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR).
Addressing the head of the DPR, Denis Pushilin, the chamber said the time for “decisive actions” has come, urging him to hold the vote as soon as possible.
“All of us feel and know for a long time that Donbass is Russia, we have been fighting for this for eight long years. For this, we daily suffer strikes on our homes, streets, hospitals, schools, and kindergartens,” the head of the chamber, Aleksander Kofman, said in a statement.
We want the border of the Russian Federation to lie between us and Ukraine! We want to become again a part of one big Motherland – Russia. The people of Donbass deserve it!
Earlier in the day, a similar call was made by the civic chamber of the LPR. It urged the head of the republic, Leonid Pasechnik, as well as the local legislature, to hold a referendum on joining Russia as soon as possible.
Donbass republic eyes vote on joining Russia
A similar stance has been set out by the authorities in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson, which is currently controlled by Russian forces. The head of the so-called military-civilian administration, Kirill Stremousov, said the region’s residents “want guarantees that we will become a part of the Russian Federation.”
“Residents of Kherson Region call upon… and want to hold a referendum as soon as possible, because they are afraid that Russia might leave,” Stremousov told RIA Novosti.
Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.
It’s, Let us pick on Justin Trudeau Day!
Sept 18, 2022
460,000 Canadians have jumped on Marty’s #TrudeauMustGo campaign, but that’s only Canadians who are on Twitter. Millions more feel the same way. The momentum is building and Trudeau will soon have to address the anger he has caused. He is naked before Canada’s jury…all of us.
***
Yo, Justin, do you take requests? Do, “I am a little teacup”.
WATCH: Alternate worse angle showing @davidakin’s outburst. Is MSM meltdown & extreme unprofessionalism due to fear of Poilievre govt defunding media corporate welfare?
The so-called journalists in Canada are trembling because they believe Poilievre will defund them. I hope he does. If you cannot survive without government subsidies you should not exist at all. They received close to a billion dollars last year from the Trudeau gov. No wonder they are supporting him. Fake support if you ask me. The so-called legacy media in Canada is a joke, a propaganda outlet for the Libs. Lou
Global’s parent company Corus Entertainment tapped into Canada,s Wage Subsidy program.
Welcome to the world of the elites.
We’ve lost it. Prince Andrew paid off the woman suing him for sexual abuse Up to £12m And was stripped of military titles as a result Both imply guilt And yet he walks free & will face no justice While a 22-year-old who heckled him is charged with a breach of the peace.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-60393843
Prince Andrew has settled a civil sexual assault case brought against him in the US by Virginia Giuffre. Ms Giuffre had been suing the Duke of York, claiming he sexually assaulted her on three occasions when she was 17, allegations he has repeatedly denied.Feb 15, 2022
Sky News host Rita Panahi says New Zealanders are finally waking up to the “gross ineptitude” of their “lockdown happy Prime Minister”.
“After enjoying one of the longest political honeymoons in modern politics, thanks largely to adoring media coverage,” she said. “Jacinda Ardern and her Labour party are facing some ugly poll numbers and protests.”
Jean Charest’s message of moderate conservatism failed to resonate in party leadership contest
As a university student, Pierre Poilievre won $10,000 for an essay explaining how, as prime minister, he would build his government on a platform of freedom — a message he just used to move a step closer to that job by becoming leader of the Conservative Party.
Poilievre also said he would ban all future vaccine mandates related to work and travel — a message that aligned his campaign with the stated goals of the trucker protests in Ottawa and across the country earlier this year.
CBC News
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-campaign-freedom-anit-otoole-1.6577412
Posted: Sep 09, 2022
As a university student, Pierre Poilievre won $10,000 for an essay explaining how, as prime minister, he would build his government on a platform of freedom — a message he just used to move a step closer to that job by becoming leader of the Conservative Party.
During his campaign for leadership, Poilievre promised to make “Canada the freest country on Earth” by limiting the reach of government.
It was a theme lifted straight out of that 2,500-word essay he wrote while a 20-year-old student at the University of Calgary.
“The most important guardian of our living standards is freedom,” he wrote. The government’s job, he argued, “is constantly to find ways to remove itself from obstructing such freedoms.”
Poilievre echoed that theme during his campaign in part by promising to repeal Bill C-11, which he said would give the CRTC too much authority to regulate online content and restrict freedom of speech.
Poilievre also said he would ban all future vaccine mandates related to work and travel — a message that aligned his campaign with the stated goals of the trucker protests in Ottawa and across the country earlier this year.
Christopher Cochrane, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said that while he was surprised Poilievre chose to align himself so closely with the messages of the trucker protests, it doesn’t appear to have damaged him in the race for the Conservative leadership.
“From a strategic standpoint, it’s almost as if they saw a greater threat in the People’s Party than they did in losing the progressive element of their party to the Liberals,” he said of Poilievre’s campaign strategy.
“There’s absolutely nothing in his messaging that suggests he is anything other than a Conservative and those sorts of messages have advantages and disadvantages in the electoral context, but the classic advantage is that they appeal to the party base.”
An ‘unapologetic conservative’
In appealing to that party base, Poilievre has been fishing for votes among those who knew him as an early Harper Conservative first elected at the age of 24 under the banner of the merged Conservative Party.
“He was there when he was young and he was always perceived as somebody enthusiastic, charismatic, willing to fight, and willing to engage on the level that was maybe abrasive. But they always liked this kind of combativeness in him,” said Jean-Christophe Boucher, an associate professor of political science at the University of Calgary.
“He is a kind of unapologetic conservative … and somehow party members have found comfort in this kind of person because he’s not somebody that’s different. They know what he stands for. They actually respect that.”
If today Poilievre is a known quantity in the party and the new favourite of its base, it may be because he spent much of his life swinging a sword for the conservative cause.
At the University of Calgary, he led the campus Conservative club before working as an intern for Jason Kenney in the summer of 1999 and then performing policy work as a staffer for Canadian Alliance MP Stockwell Day from 2002 to 2004.
After winning a seat in the Ottawa-area riding of Nepean-Carleton in 2004 — knocking Liberal defence minister David Pratt out of his seat — Poilievre went on to re-election in 2006.
In the 39th Parliament, then-prime minister Stephen Harper appointed Poilievre parliamentary secretary to John Baird, president of the Treasury Board. The following year he was made parliamentary secretary to the prime minister.
Even as he rose through caucus ranks, that abrasive and combative behaviour Boucher mentioned did not always avoid the ire of Harper and the party he led.
In 2008, Poilievre was made to apologize after musing in a radio interview about whether Canada was “getting value for all of this money” spent on compensating Indigenous residential school survivors — an interview that aired the same day Harper was scheduled to apologize publicly for residential schools.
Such missteps did not derail Poilievre’s career. Harper elevated him to cabinet in 2013, making him minister of state for democratic reform. In that role, Poilievre introduced the controversial Fair Elections Act, which had to be amended when critics claimed it would compromise Canadian democracy.
Poilievre was then made minister of Employment and Social Development in early 2015, gaining further executive experience.
Jean Charest’s moderate message failed to resonate
“Poilievre is more credible than [leadership rivals] Roman Baber, Leslyn Lewis … because he’s a high-profile former cabinet member and he seems more conservative than Jean Charest, who literally campaigned on being a moderate,” said Randy Besco, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
“Generally, the candidate that is the more conservative and also credible wins.”
Political observers note that Erin O’Toole lost his grip on the Conservative leadership after he ran for it seeking votes from social conservatives, moved to the centre during the federal election and ended up with nothing to show for it.
Boucher said O’Toole’s ouster, and the reasons behind it, framed the race to replace him as a search for an anti-O’Toole candidate — a race that left former Quebec premier Charest out of the picture.
Experts say that — aside from offering a moderate message right after O’Toole tried doing the same thing and failed — Charest also suffered from voter fatigue. While he’s experienced — he led the federal Progressive Conservatives, served in Brian Mulroney’s cabinet, and was premier of Quebec — people may have gotten tired of him.
“He is not yesterday’s man. He’s the day before yesterday’s man,” said Barry Cooper, a professor of political science at the University of Calgary.
“He’s a very nice, charming man,” Cooper said, adding a Charest-led Conservative Party would have experienced “a great diminishing of support … certainly in Alberta and Saskatchewan and maybe in B.C., although that’s a little hard to predict.”
Boucher said that Charest’s moderate Progressive Conservative message did not resonate in the West and the prevailing view west of Manitoba was that Conservatives lost the last election because O’Toole was not Conservative enough — a problem Charest could not solve.
“I was a bit surprised that Charest ran at all,” said Cochrane. “It seems like a lost cause for a Progressive Conservative candidate to run in this election.
“In some respects it’s admirable that he ran, to give that part of the party a strong voice in the leadership election. But I would be very surprised if he truly believed he had a chance [of] winning this from the get-go.”
Poilievre won while promoting a very different populist message. He fanned public anger toward institutions like the Bank of Canada — accusing it of not acting quickly enough to curb inflation — toward the Liberal government’s response to that inflation and toward Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s use of vaccine mandates to help manage the COVID-19 pandemic.
He also threw his weight behind cryptocurrency and stated several times that no ministers from a Poilievre government would be allowed to attend World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, Switzerland.
Poilievre’s anti-elite message
The WEF hosts a conference in Davos every January where business leaders and politicians from around the world gather to exchange ideas.
Some Conservative MPs have been accused of spreading anti-WEF conspiracy theories claiming the WEF is really a cabal of global elites planning to remake society, eliminate private property and impose an authoritarian global government.
Now that he’s won the leadership with that anti-elite, populist message, some of his critics say he’ll have to moderate his tone if he wants to make inroads in the next federal election outside the party’s western base. Others are not so sure that’s what he’ll do.
“Poilieve’s message on economic grievances actually runs a lot further than people think,” Boucher said. “I don’t think he’s just going to be interesting for the Conservatives. I think some people on the left will actually buy this message of anti-elitism.”
Poilievre may be able to attract disaffected voters from the left, Boucher said, by focusing a general election campaign “on the idea that the reason why inflation is there, the reason why you can’t pay for your groceries and inflation rates are moving up, the reason why you are less well off is because of the elites.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Senior writer
Peter Zimonjic has worked as a reporter and columnist in London, England, for the Daily Mail, Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph and in Canada for Sun Media and the Ottawa Citizen. He is the Author of Into The Darkness: An Account of 7/7, published by Random House.
That’s why the more you learn about the world, the more fake and stupid our civilization looks. It’s because it is fake and stupid. Our news, our entertainment, our jobs, our legal systems, our political systems, our education systems, our financial, monetary, economic and commercial systems; the way our entire civilization is structured and organized has nothing to do with what’s true and good and everything to do with keeping human organisms compliantly turning the gears of capitalism and empire.
From the very beginning, human civilization has been built around serving the interests of the powerful, from religion to philosophy to the arts to law.
So mainstream culture presents a fraudulent image of reality. It’s written into the code of everything that’s mass-produced — not just in Prager University lectures on the evils of socialism or propagandistic news stories about weapons of mass destruction, but in sitcoms, in advertisements, in clothing brands, in pop music, in textbooks, in trends.
But mainly learn to take comfort in the fact that, just underneath the logos and screens and suburbs and Hollywood actors pretending to be people, reality is roaring.
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/our-entire-civilization-is-fake-and
Listen to a reading of this article:
You’re not jaded; everything really is just as phony and vapid as it looks.
I say this because if you are reading this it’s likely the result of a personal quest for truth which has led to a gradual peeling away of the lies our society is made of. Your eyes probably found this text because you’re the sort of person who’s been trying to make sense of the world in a sea of propaganda and deception, which often results in a growing disgust not just with the power structures which oppress and tyrannize humanity, but with our entire civilization.
This experience is very common for people like yourself, and it’s very common because it arises from a clear perception of reality. From the very beginning, human civilization has been built around serving the interests of the powerful, from religion to philosophy to the arts to law. As the world has gotten smaller and it’s become possible to artificially manufacture culture with mass-distributed media, this has only become more the case.
That’s why the more you learn about the world, the more fake and stupid our civilization looks. It’s because it is fake and stupid. Our news, our entertainment, our jobs, our legal systems, our political systems, our education systems, our financial, monetary, economic, and commercial systems; the way our entire civilization is structured and organized has nothing to do with what’s true and good and everything to do with keeping human organisms compliantly turning the gears of capitalism and empire.
Mainstream culture is one giant psyop geared toward keeping people fueling the oppression machine. Not because of some grand conspiracy (though there’s plenty of that too), but because the manufacturers of culture have a vested interest in preserving our unwholesome status quo. The media are owned by plutocrats who have an interest in making sure everything they’re putting out sustains the imperial status quo upon which their kingdoms are built. The Pentagon has more influence over Hollywood than people like you or I ever will.
Things get elevated to mainstream levels of attention and influence by the people with the wealth and power to elevate them, and they’re always going to elevate things which serve their interests by manufacturing consent for the status quo their wealth and power are premised upon, not things which harm their interests like material that expands class consciousness or highlights the depravity of the US-centralized empire.
So mainstream culture presents a fraudulent image of reality. It’s written into the code of everything that’s mass-produced — not just in Prager University lectures on the evils of socialism or propagandistic news stories about weapons of mass destruction, but in sitcoms, in advertisements, in clothing brands, in pop music, in textbooks, in trends. When it’s not constant messaging that capitalism is totally working and the world is ordered in a more or less sane and truth-based way, it’s manipulations designed to shape our values and measures of self-worth to make us into better gear-turners.
If you’re noticing this ubiquitous fraudulence, it’s not because you’re becoming distant from the rest of society, it’s because you’re becoming more intimate with it. You’re getting in real close, so close you can see the nuts and bolts of it, see how the sausage is made.
So if this is happening to you, don’t worry. You’re not turning into some kind of jaded hipster who’s too cool for what everyone else is into, you’re just seeing the bullshit for what it is. Sure a rejection of mainstream culture can just be pure ego-driven “look at me I’m so special” crap, but it’s also what happens when you sincerely move in for a closer look at the mass-scale psychological fabric of human civilization.
This is what Terence McKenna was talking about when he said “The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.” And it’s what Jiddu Krishnamurti was pointing at when he said “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” A lucid perception of reality today will necessarily be accompanied by the ever-present smell of bullshit.
And that’s not your fault. It’s not your fault that you were born into this world where so much of everything is fake and stupid. So be gentle with yourself in your sense of alienation. And take comfort in knowing that others see what you’re seeing too.
But mainly learn to take comfort in the fact that, just underneath the logos and screens and suburbs and Hollywood actors pretending to be people, reality is roaring. There’s a whole world of wonder and authenticity shining ferociously from just beneath the surface. It’s just got nothing to do with the artificial culture that’s been mass-produced by the powerful and funneled into our minds.
Underneath all the social engineering and power-serving control mechanisms, there’s a whole life of raw terrestriality that is much, much older and much, much stronger than the lies of the machine. You can see it crackling everywhere, even in the densest parts of the matrix.
You can see it in the sky. You can see it in the bushes and the pigeons. But you can also see it in the bus billboards and skyscrapers, in the flashing signs and blaring screens. And you can see it in the giant-brained bipedal primates you’re surrounded by each day, hiding just behind the dance of imperial fraudulence in their heads. You can see it even in those who are most asleep at the wheel, the most enslaved to the mind viruses of the machine, if you look. Once you learn to see it, you can observe nature winking at you even from inside the most rage-faced pundits and most self-absorbed social natterers. It’s there.
In reality, this sense of alienation is just an awkward transition phase between buying into the imperial dreamworld and a deep, deep intimacy with humanity as it really is beneath all the obnoxious programming. Beyond the revulsion at the phony face puppets, something ancient, authentic, and exuberant is dancing. And it is more real and more true than our disgust with this civilization.
Look closer and you see the fraudulence. Look even closer and you see what’s real. Your sense of alienation is entirely valid and based in truth, but we’re not meant to stay there. Truth beckons us forward. Truth is beckoning us all forward. And these mind cages they have built for us aren’t real enough to hold us in for much longer.
I don’t mean to be mean but why do they all look unhealthy? Not good for public perception. Don’t forget these people have access to the best mind programming on the planet, so why is this?
Every part of this controversy is hilarious, from Republicans thinking they are not extremists, to anyone thinking that MAGA Republicans are meaningfully different from generic brand Republicans, to Democrats thinking they are any less extremist than MAGA Republicans, to Jean-Pierre claiming that you are extremist if you don’t agree with mainstream political consensus in the United States.
The Biden administration is the Trump administration with a different soundtrack. The Trump administration was the Obama administration with a different soundtrack. They are all violent extremists. None are superior to the other. They all serve the interests of the most murderous and depraved institution on earth, as does anyone who supports any of them.
Listen to a reading of this article:
Republicans are up in arms over remarks from the White House depicting the Trump-aligned faction of their party as “extremist”, which Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended Thursday by saying that MAGA Republicans are extremist because they disagree with the majority of Americans.
“When you are not with what majority of Americans are, then you know, that is extreme; that is an extreme way of thinking,” Jean-Pierre said.
Every part of this controversy is hilarious, from Republicans thinking they are not extremists, to anyone thinking that MAGA Republicans are meaningfully different from generic brand Republicans, to Democrats thinking they are any less extremist than MAGA Republicans, to Jean-Pierre claiming that you are extremist if you don’t agree with mainstream political consensus in the United States.
If you look at who is inflicting the most violence, terrorism and tyranny upon the largest number of people in our world, it’s clear from the numbers that the worst offender by far is not fringe neo-Nazi groups, nor violent jihadists, nor communists nor anarchists nor environmentalists nor incels, but the bipartisan political consensus of the US-centralized empire.
No other power has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression. No other power is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working continuously to destroy any government which disobeys it. No other power is starving entire populations with economic sanctions, military blockades and brazen theft. No other power has been interfering in foreign elections anywhere near as often. No other power is terrorizing populations around the world with wars, covert ops, drone strikes, proxy conflicts, and staged coups and uprisings. No other power is using its military, economic, diplomatic and media dominance to bully the world into serving its interests.
The only reason the mainstream views espoused by Democrats and Republicans are mainstream is because massive amounts of narrative management have gone into creating that consensus. The fact that the social engineers of the oligarchic empire have poured vast fortunes into making sure Americans consent to capitalism, corruption, militarism and murder is the only reason those perspectives are so mainstream that they can be labeled “moderate” or “centrist”.
When people hear the word “extremist” they tend to think of groups like ISIS or the Ku Klux Klan, but per definition an extremist is just someone whose political or religious beliefs can lead them to do violent or illegal things. The US empire would crumble if it didn’t do violent and illegal things continuously, which is why its body count dwarfs those of any of the extremist ideologies the news media tell us to worry about. And it is fully supported by both Republicans and Democrats.
To pick a recent illustration of essentially limitless possible examples, imagine what the response would have been if a prominent MAGA pundit had given an award to neo-Nazis at an event hosted by the US military during the Trump administration. Imagine how Democrats and their aligned media would have responded to such an event.
Can you picture it? Can you hear the shrieking in your mind’s ear? Good. Because that’s exactly what happened at the Pentagon’s annual Warrior Games at Disney World a few days ago, only it was a liberal pundit and Ukrainian Nazis during the Biden administration.
In a new report titled “Jon Stewart and the Pentagon honor Ukrainian Nazi at Disney World,” The Grayzone’s Alex Rubinstein shows the former Daily Show star presenting an award to a member of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who is wearing a t-shirt and a suspicious-looking red sleeve on one of his arms, with another photo showing the same Azov member a tattoo of a Nazi symbol on that same arm. Rubinstein presents evidence that this wasn’t the only Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian at the event, which was also attended by musician Darius Rucker.
I keep thinking I’ve seen the most liberal thing that could possibly happen, but 2022 keeps proving me wrong. I have a hard time imagining how you beat a liberal comedian honoring a Ukrainian Nazi with an award at a Pentagon event in Disney World, but I’m sure they’ll find a way before long.
Biden is advancing the interests of the murderous US empire by waging a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine whose combatants can’t seem to get photographed without Nazi insignia on their person. Trump advanced the interests of the US empire by inflicting death and starvation in nations like Yemen, Venezuela, Iran and Syria, as well as ramping up the brinkmanship with Russia which led to the current proxy war in Ukraine. The Biden administration is the Trump administration with a different soundtrack. The Trump administration was the Obama administration with a different soundtrack. They are all violent extremists. None are superior to the other. They all serve the interests of the most murderous and depraved institution on earth, as does anyone who supports any of them.
Democrats calling Republicans extremists is like ISIS calling Al Qaeda extremists, only Democrats and Republicans have a much higher body count.
Elliot Mcdavid
Come on NZ, get rid of the fascists! Reclaim your country!
Sky News host Rita Panahi says New Zealanders are finally waking up to the “gross ineptitude” of their “lockdown happy Prime Minister”. “After enjoying one of the longest political honeymoons in modern politics, thanks largely to adoring media coverage,” she said. “Jacinda Ardern and her Labour party are facing some ugly poll numbers and protests.”
Russia says the measure is ‘routine,’ and the troops will be in Nicaragua for purposes of training, law enforcement or emergency response.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/10/nicaragua-authorises-deployment-of-russian-military-forces
Published On 10 Jun 2022
The government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has authorised Russian troops, planes and ships to deploy to Nicaragua for purposes of training, law enforcement or emergency response.
In a decree published this week, and confirmed by Russia on Thursday, Ortega will allow Russian troops to carry out law enforcement duties, “humanitarian aid, rescue and search missions in emergencies or natural disasters”.
The Nicaraguan government also authorised the presence of small contingents of Russian troops for “exchange of experiences and training”.
Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, told the Russian news outlet Sputnik that the measure was “routine”.
“We are talking about a routine – twice a year – procedure for the adoption of a Nicaraguan law on the temporary admission of foreign military personnel to its territory in order to develop cooperation in various areas, including humanitarian and emergency responses, combatting organised crime and drug trafficking,” Zakharova said.
Nicaragua also said it will allow the presence of “forces naval and air vessels” of Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, El Salvador and the United States. The permission is valid for the second half of 2022, according to a report by the Russian state news agency Tass.
Ortega has been a staunch ally of Russia since his days in the leadership of the 1979 revolution that deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza. Ortega served as president from 1985 to 1990, before being re-elected to power in 2007.
Dozens of political opposition leaders have been arrested, including most of the potential presidential candidates, in the months before Ortega’s re-election to a fourth consecutive term last year. His government has shut down dozens of non-governmental groups that he accuses of working on behalf of foreign interests to destabilise his government. Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans have been chased into exile.
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/celebrities-are-such-scumbags-because?s=w
May 15, 2022
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Have you ever wondered why a famous person whose work you’ve enjoyed has such a myopic perspective on world events? How someone can stir you at your most intimate depths with their words or their music and yet have a blinkered mainstream political worldview that is manufactured by think tanks and spinmeisters?
Celebrities have been particularly odious empire sycophants these last few days, and it’s probably worth taking a moment to reflect on what’s going on when that happens.
Bette Midler has been drawing headlines for her recent let-them-eat-cake remark about baby formula shortages, taking to Twitter to tell Americans, “TRY BREASTFEEDING! It’s free and available on demand.”
There are of course many reasons why parents might be unable to consistently provide breast milk to their baby, including but not limited to the very health problems and long working hours that the US status quo often creates. More than this, telling individuals what to do in response to a systemic problem created by the wealthy and the powerful serves to divert attention away from criticisms of those people and those systems.
Midler often uses her Twitter account to broadcast her indifference to the struggles of the less fortunate, like in March when she tweeted “I’d happily pay more for gas for her” with a picture of a child holding a Ukrainian flag. Midler has an estimated net worth of a quarter billion dollars.
While we’re on the subject of Ukraine, U2’s Bono and the Edge recently played a concert in Kyiv in support of the world-threatening US proxy war against Russia, because of course they fucking did. Bono, who says he has “grown very fond” of war criminal George W Bush and praised capitalism at the World Economic Forum and teamed up with warmonger Lindsey Graham to promote US empire narratives about Syria in 2016, would of course be seen singing “Stand by Ukraine” in support of US empire narratives in a Kyiv subway in 2022.
The immensely popular Indian spiritual leader known as Sadhguru Jagadish Vasudev recently tweeted “May Israel inspire the world” in praise of the apartheid ethnostate’s farming practices even as its tyranny and bloodshed draws international headlines. Few of the enlightenment merchants on the spiritual marketplace have anything worthwhile to say about individual awakening, and virtually all of them are fast asleep when it comes to consciousness about the external world.
Horror author Stephen King made the bizarre decision to tweet “I stand with Nina Jankowicz” the other day in support of the freaky shitlib who will be leading the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth. Nothing really to say about that beyond what it is.
This kind of thing happens so often because within an empire that is held together by propaganda, capitalism and mass military violence, those who are elevated to prominence within that empire have a symbiotic relationship with those things.
Someone who is worth a quarter billion dollars is unlikely to support the end of capitalism and the elimination of vast wealth inequality. Someone whose wealth and status come from Hollywood is unlikely to oppose the imperial propaganda machine of which Hollywood is a crucial part. Someone who benefits from status quo politics is unlikely to promote meaningful opposition to them.
And it goes both ways. The imperial machine is not going to elevate people who seek its death. Anti-imperialist journalist Aaron Maté will never win a Pulitzer. Antiwar comic Dave Smith will never star in a mainstream Hollywood movie. Chart-topping songs will tend to glorify money and affluence and will never amplify any opposition to the mechanisms which make them possible.
You don’t generally become rich and famous without the cooperation of people who have the power to facilitate your doing so. Those people will always be invested in the continuation of status quo systems, because they are intimately intertwined with those systems. If you seek the end of capitalism or empire or Israeli apartheid or US sanctions or cold war brinkmanship, you are unlikely to be helped toward the top by any of those people.
And then once you are granted your golden ticket to fame and fortune, you immediately find yourself surrounded by people who are deeply invested in the status quo systems which just elevated you. You go to their parties. You make friends with them because it’s difficult to form normal friendships with ordinary people when you’re very famous. Before you know it you’re in a tighty cloistered echo chamber of the status quo worldview.
So fame is a self-reinforcing feedback loop of support for establishment power in numerous ways, and it’s a major problem. It’s a major problem because it means that the people with the most influential voices in our society will always necessarily be people who have benefited tremendously from status quo systems. Their voices eclipse those countless millions who are suffering under those same systems, not because they are more valid or more truthful but solely because they are more amplified.
When you’ve got all the loudest voices talking about the world and their nation in a way that suggests that the system is working fine while all the far more numerous voices saying the opposite are going virtually unheard, what happens? It creates the illusion that the system is working fine. That status quo politics is getting the job done, and no massive, sweeping changes are needed.
In this way the contentment of celebrities with the current establishment order becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, because it keeps enough of the population thinking that the status quo must be working. That any difficulties they are having making ends meet and keeping their head above water is a failure not of the system, but of themselves. That the answer is not revolution and change but self-defeating self-blame and learned helplessness.
To be a celebrity within the oligarchic empire is, with very few notable exceptions, to be an agent of that empire. The weird plastic-faced freaks who fill our screens and shape our worldviews are as much a part of the oppression machine as the Pentagon and the police force.
Just a useful thing to be aware of while navigating this mess.
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Tales from the Conspiratum 