The Most Joe Biden Thing Ever: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article:

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A hostile military alliance expanding to Russia’s borders isn’t a provocation, sending weapons to be used by CIA-trained fighters backed by US intelligence isn’t a proxy war, those Nazis aren’t Nazis, you’re being censored for your own good, trust the media, the government is your friend.

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It’s a good thing Trump lost because otherwise Roe v Wade would be on the chopping block and immigrants would still be getting mistreated and the Iran deal would still be dead and the military budget would keep inflating. That bastard would probably have us on the brink of World War 3 by now.

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Joe Biden doing a live infomercial for Javelin missiles while everyone who voted for him worries about women’s reproductive rights is the most Joe Biden thing that has ever happened.

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Once you see that both mainstream US parties are part of a single oligarchic power structure it stops looking like a battle between opposing parties and looks more like one giant bully standing in front of voters saying “Let me hit you with my left fist or I’ll hit you with my right.”

What is the correct response when that happens? What’s the correct response when a mainstream political party keeps communicating that they’ll never do anything to help you but you need to support them anyway or they’ll let their friends in the other mainstream political party take away your rights? Is it to say “Ah well the left fist won’t hurt as much so that’s clearly the lesser evil,” or is it to take on an oppositional relationship with the tyrant who keeps punching you with both fists year after year?

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Learning about what’s wrong with the world is like watching a marathon of shitty Scooby Doo episodes from the sixties, except it’s way more repetitive and predictable, and the villain under the mask is always the US empire.

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Western media keep shrieking about Russia’s nuclear threats as though it was some kind of secret that Russia will use nukes if it feels its existence is threatened, and as though western powers wouldn’t nuke Russia for the same reason.

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This is the American way of life the US government spends so much effort starting wars and toppling governments to promote.pic.twitter.com/4RQqCUACQy

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) May 1, 2022

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The only argument against the observation that the US/NATO/Ukraine power structure could easily have prevented this war with a few low-cost diplomatic concessions is “Actually Putin would have invaded anyway because he’s a cartoon supervillain who does evil things for no reason.”

War is all the worst things that can happen to a person multiplied by the population you target. When you refuse diplomacy, you are condemning whole cities to unimaginable suffering.

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Nobody actually believes “tankies” are dangerous, some people just have a deep psychological need for the US empire’s fiercest critics to be wrong because it’s more comfortable than considering the possibility that everything you’ve been taught about the world is a lie.

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There’s a lot in the news right now but none of it is as important as the fact that we’re being shoved toward nuclear war for no good reason by a few idiots who want to rule the world.

Again, the real risk of nuclear war is not that any side will deliberately start one but that the explicit agreement in “Mutually Assured Destruction” will be set into motion by a nuke being deployed by accident, miscommunication, miscalculation or malfunction as things escalate. During the last cold war such accidental nuclear exchanges came all too close to happening multiple times. The more tense the nuclear standoff gets, the greater the likelihood of such an event occurring:

We survived the last cold war not by skill or by competence, but by sheer dumb luck. There’s no logical reason to assume we’ll get lucky again.

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So yeah, just so we’re clear, the US empire is rapidly restructuring the systems people look to for information about the world in order to ensure iron-fisted control over our dominant narratives while it scrambles to subvert its rivals in cold war maneuverings and secure unipolar planetary hegemony.

The primary purpose of expanding censorship and propaganda on subjects like Ukraine, Russia, Covid, extremism etc is not to control the narrative about those subjects specifically, but to expand and normalize censorship and propaganda. Narrative control is an end in itself, and it’s the absolute highest priority because all the empire’s power is built upon it.

Few seem to understand that the oligarchic empire seeks narrative control as an end in itself. They’re not always necessarily increasing censorship and propaganda about a given topic because of that topic; it’s often mainly because they want to normalize and expand censorship and propaganda. Certainly there are narratives right here and now that the empire would rather we believe, but that’s of secondary strategic importance to ensuring ongoing and continually expanding control over all narratives around the world into the future.

Not all powerful people support the same narratives, but all powerful people seek narrative control. Narrative control is power. Any manipulator understands this, from the most powerful oligarchs right down to the narcissistic gossip queen at the office.

Any manipulator of any level spends an extraordinary amount of energy working to dominate the stories people tell about them and about others. This is because they know humans are storytelling creatures, and if you can control the stories they tell, you control the humans. This is most especially true of the globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States; its narrative control via corporate news media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley is completely unparalleled and historically unprecedented.

Censorship, propaganda, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation are just different aspects of narrative control. Nobody does this as well as the US-centralized empire and its managers. Nobody ever has.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-most-joe-biden-thing-ever-notes?s=r