1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA4e0NqyYMw  PSYWAR: Ghosts In The Machine
> You stupidly keep paying for their PsyOps against you


10 Examples When 'Empire Managers' Exposed Their Desire To Control Our Thoughts

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/05/29/ten-times-empire-managers-showed-us-that-they-want-to-control-our-thoughts/

The single most-overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society
is the fact that immensely powerful people are continuously working to
manipulate the thoughts we think about the world. Whether you call it
propaganda, psyops, perception management or public relations, it’s a
real thing that happens constantly, and it happens to all of us.

And its consequences shape our entire world.

This should be at the forefront of our attention when examining news,
trends and ideas, but it hardly ever gets mentioned. This is because
the mass-scale psychological manipulation is succeeding. Propaganda
only works if you don’t know it’s happening.

To be clear, I am not talking about some kind of wacky unsubstantiated
conspiracy theory here. I am talking about a conspiracy fact. That we
are propagandized by people with authority over us is not seriously in
dispute by any well-informed good faith actor and has been extensively
described and documented for many years.

More than this, the managers of the US-centralized empire which
dominates the west and so much of the rest of the world have
straightforwardly shown us that they propagandize us and want to
propagandize us more. They have shown us with their actions, and they
have at times come right out and told us with their words.

Here are just a few of those times.
1. Operation Mockingbird

Let’s start with maybe the best-known example. In 1977 Carl Bernstein
published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the
CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets
and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known
as Operation Mockingbird.

It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media are meant to
report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate
public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.

But it only got worse from there.
2. Intelligence operatives now just openly working in the media

    The CIA Used To Infiltrate The Media. Now The CIA Is The Media.

    "This isn't Operation Mockingbird. It's so much worse. Operation
Mockingbird was the CIA doing something *to* the media. What we are
seeing now is the CIA openly acting *as* the
media."https://t.co/mFwHob0MFC
    — Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) April 16, 2021

Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and
people are too propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous.
Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically
pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits.
The Washington Post has consistently refused to disclose the fact that
its sole owner has been a CIA contractor when reporting on US
intelligence agencies as per standard journalistic protocol. Mass
media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John
Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank
Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew
McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano,
Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price, Rick Francona, Michael
Morell, John McLaughlin, John Sipher, Thomas Bossert, Clint Watts,
James Baker, Mike Baker, Daniel Hoffman, David Preiss, Evelyn Farkas,
Mike Rogers and Malcolm Nance, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken
Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants
like Tucker Carlson.

Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What
we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any
meaningful separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even
any pretence of separation, has been dropped.
3. Richard Stengel’s CFR remarks on propaganda

    At a Council on Foreign Relations forum about "fake news," former
Editor at Time Magazine Richard Stengel directly states that he
supports the use of propaganda on American citizens - then shuts the
session down when challenged about how propaganda is used against the
third world pic.twitter.com/ClAT5POv7G
    — William Craddick (@williamcraddick) May 11, 2018

Former US State Department official and Time Magazine editor Richard
Stengel expressed full-throated support for the use of propaganda on
both foreign and domestic audiences during a 2018 event organized by
the supremely influential think tank Council on Foreign Relations.

“Basically every country creates their own narrative story,” Stengel
said. “My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke
as the chief propagandist. I’m not against propaganda. Every country
does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t
necessarily think it’s that awful.”

Interestingly, years earlier during his time at the US State
Department under the Obama administration Stengel actually provided
his own definition of what precisely he means by the word
“propaganda”, and it’s not nearly as innocuous as he made it sound for
his CFR audience.

“Propaganda is the deliberate dissemination of information that you
know to be false or misleading in order to influence an audience,”
Stengel wrote in 2014.

Those are two mighty interesting positions for an empire manager to
hold at the same time, especially one who just served on the
presidential transition team of the current president.
4. US officials telling the press they’re circulating disinfo about
Russia to win an information war against Putin

    US Officials Admit They're Literally Just Lying To The Public About Russia

    "And the only plausible reason I can think of that they would want
the public to know about it is that they are confident the public will
consent to being lied to."https://t.co/mYBJ4kQhk8
    — Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) April 7, 2022

Last month NBC News released a report citing multiple anonymous US
officials who said the Biden administration has been rapidly pushing
out “intelligence” about Russia’s plans in Ukraine that is
“low-confidence” or “based more on analysis than hard evidence”, or
even just plain false, in order to fight an information war against
Putin.

The report says that toward this end the US government has
deliberately circulated false or poorly evidenced claims about
impending chemical weapons attacks, about Russian plans to orchestrate
a false flag attack in the Donbass to justify an invasion, about
Putin’s advisors misinforming him, and about Russia seeking arms
supplies from China.

So they lied. They may hold that they lied for a noble reason, but
they lied. They knowingly circulated information they had no reason to
believe was true, and that lie was amplified by all the most
influential media outlets in the western world.

That this happened while the mass media is continually churning out
reports warning the public about the dangers of “disinformation” is an
irony that was lost on almost everybody.
5. Senators telling Silicon Valley representatives it’s their job to
manipulate public thought to prevent dissent

    Friendly reminder that last year representatives of
Google/Youtube, Facebook and Twitter were instructed on the floor of
the US Senate that it is their responsibility to "quell information
rebellions" so as to "prevent the fomenting of
discord.”https://t.co/X4Hc56fH0k
    — Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) August 6, 2018

In 2017 representatives from Google, Facebook and Twitter were called
before the Senate Judiciary Committee and told they must “quell
information rebellions” and were instructed to come up with a mission
statement expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of
discord” on their platforms.

“We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell
information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations
and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the tech
giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who
added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on
social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus
stories are silenced — silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

When monopolistic billionaire corporations are faced with demands from
a legislative body that could easily make their lives a lot harder and
a lot less profitable by taking action, up to and including major
antitrust cases, they are being made an offer they can’t refuse. This
was made abundantly clear by Senator Dianne Feinstein during the 2017
hearings in her threat to intervene if those corporations failed to
curtail the spread of unauthorized information online.

“You have to be the ones who do something about it — or we will,”
Feinstein told the online platforms.
6. The Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board”

    Patriot Act co-author, former DHS secretary, surveillance porn
addict, & Russiagate hoax spreader Michael Chertoff will be overseeing
the review of the Ministry of Truth
    You can't make this shit uphttps://t.co/IeAelhFy3m
    — Slow News Day (@SlowNewsDayShow) May 24, 2022

The Department of Homeland Security’s hotly controversial
Disinformation Governance Board, which critics have not-unfairly
labeled a government-run Ministry of Truth, has “paused” its
operations pending a review in light of public outcry. That review
will be headed by corrupt imperial swamp monsters Michael Chertoff and
Jamie Gorelick, of all people.

No government entity has any business appointing itself the authority
to sort information from disinformation on behalf of the public,
because government entities are not impartial and omniscient deities
who can be entrusted to serve the public as objective arbiters of
absolute reality. They would with absolute certainty wind up drawing
distinctions between information, misinformation and disinformation in
whatever way serves their interests, regardless of what’s true,
exactly as any authoritarian regime would do.

Whatever happens with that review we may be sure that the board’s
mission will continue, either under its current name or under some
other more carefully disguised iteration. The empire is expressing far
too much enthusiasm for greater and greater control over public
thought to just let this one slip past.
7. The Smith–Mundt Modernization Act of 2012

    Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban http://t.co/NClezBI0 via @BuzzFeed
    — Michael Hastings (@mmhastings) May 18, 2012

In December of 2012 the US congress passed a revision of the
Smith-Mundt Act as part of the 2013 NDAA which critics said ended
restrictions that were put in place to prevent the government from
propagandizing US citizens.

The legislation was first highlighted in a BuzzFeed News article by
journalist Michael Hastings, who the following year would die in a
rather suspicious car wreck while reportedly working on a major story.

“It removes the protection for Americans,” an unnamed Pentagon
official told Hastings. “It removes oversight from the people who want
to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one
knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely
false.”

Hastings’ report sparked online controversy, with many agreeing with
his analysis of what would become known as the Smith-Mundt
Modernization Act of 2012 and others saying concerns were unfounded.
Either way, with all that’s happened over the last ten years, it’s
clear now that Americans were right to be worried about a dramatic
escalation in domestic propaganda.
8. Reagan’s Psychological Operations

    Robert Parry shows how three decades ago the US began an operation
to flood the world with psyops, https://t.co/xXRRRufsBS
    — Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) March 25, 2017

The late Robert Parry wrote numerous articles for Consortium News
about the Reagan administration’s operations of mass-scale
psychological manipulation, which related directly to Parry’s
extensive work on the Iran-Contra affair during that time.

Parry described how Reagan and his neocon goons were obsessed with
countering the public war-weariness and distrust of US interventionism
which followed the Vietnam War in order to gain more consent for the
depraved agendas the administration was working to roll out in Latin
America. Central to this goal of consent-manufacturing, which the
White House called “public diplomacy” in public and “perception
management” in private, was a particularly odious-sounding spook named
Walter Raymond Jr.

In an article titled “The Victory of ‘Perception Management’,” Parry
wrote the following:

    During his Iran-Contra deposition, Raymond explained the need for
this propaganda structure, saying: “We were not configured effectively
to deal with the war of ideas.”

    One reason for this shortcoming was that federal law forbade
taxpayers’ money from being spent on domestic propaganda or grassroots
lobbying to pressure congressional representatives. Of course, every
president and his team had vast resources to make their case in
public, but by tradition and law, they were restricted to speeches,
testimony and one-on-one persuasion of lawmakers.

    But things were about to change. In a Jan. 13, 1983, memo, NSC
Advisor Clark foresaw the need for non-governmental money to advance
this cause. “We will develop a scenario for obtaining private
funding,” Clark wrote. (Just five days later, President Reagan
personally welcomed media magnate Rupert Murdoch into the Oval Office
for a private meeting, according to records on file at the Reagan
library.)

    As administration officials reached out to wealthy supporters,
lines against domestic propaganda soon were crossed as the operation
took aim not only at foreign audiences but at U.S. public opinion, the
press and congressional Democrats who opposed funding the Nicaraguan
Contras.

9. Canadian military leaders using Covid regulations as an opportunity
to test out psyop techniques on civilians

    Sad that a tragedy like COVID was used to test Canadians’ reaction
to fear propaganda. I hope we didn’t lay down our freedoms at the
alter of gov created fear, segregation, & hatred. Was that the purpose
of the secret military op, testing our malleability?
https://t.co/IPtx8eVa7u
    — Dr. Leslyn Lewis (@LeslynLewis) September 29, 2021

Last year Ottawa Citizen reported that the Canadian military used the
Covid outbreak as an excuse to test actual military psyop techniques
on its own civilian population under the pretense of assuring
compliance with pandemic restrictions.

Some excerpts:

    “Canadian military leaders saw the pandemic as a unique
opportunity to test out propaganda techniques on an unsuspecting
public, a newly released Canadian Forces report concludes.”

    “The plan devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, also
known as CJOC, relied on propaganda techniques similar to those
employed during the Afghanistan war. The campaign called for ‘shaping’
and ‘exploiting’ information. CJOC claimed the information operations
scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during
the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the
pandemic.”

    “A separate initiative, not linked to the CJOC plan, but overseen
by Canadian Forces intelligence officers, culled information from
public social media accounts in Ontario. Data was also compiled on
peaceful Black Lives Matter gatherings and BLM leaders.”

    “’This is really a learning opportunity for all of us and a chance
to start getting information operations into our (CAF-DND) routine,’
the rear admiral stated.”

    “Yet another review centred on the Canadian Forces public affairs
branch and its activities. Last year, the branch launched a
controversial plan that would have allowed military public affairs
officers to use propaganda to change attitudes and behaviours of
Canadians as well as to collect and analyze information from public
social media accounts.”

    “The plan would have seen staff move from traditional government
methods of communicating with the public to a more aggressive strategy
of using information warfare and influence tactics on Canadians.”

So empire managers are not just employing mass-scale psychological
operations on the public, they’re testing them and learning from them.
10. The US government funding “independent” media in Ukraine

    White House fact-sheet says part of the mammoth $33 billion
spending package it's requesting for Ukraine will be to "support
independent media." Because nothing screams "independent" like being
directly funded by the US Government as part of its "information
warfare" initiative pic.twitter.com/O3JshV1Mg9
    — Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 28, 2022

Lastly, there’s the fact that the infamous $40 billion proxy war
package sent to Ukraine includes funds allocated to “Counter Russian
disinformation and propaganda narratives, promote accountability for
Russian human rights violation, and support activists, journalists,
and independent media to defend freedom of expression.”

So information warfare. The US government is funding information
warfare to manipulate public perception of this war and running cover
for those manipulations by calling them activism, journalism, and
independent media.

Given that the mainstream western press have been uncritically
reporting even the most outlandish stories coming out of Ukraine
without a shred of evidence, we can expect this government-funded
propaganda to spread throughout the western world.