To Be A Rich And Famous Journalist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Americans: healthcare please

US government: Sorry did you say more war ships in the South China Sea?

Americans: no, healthcare

US government: Alright, you drive a hard bargain. Here are more war ships in the South China Sea.

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Hi I’m Sleazy McPundit with WMD News. To explain why more internet censorship is needed to fight disinformation, here’s a panel of millionaires who are paid to lie to you.

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Biden in 2020 is just Obama in 2008 if you aged him 30 years, made him white, and replaced all the hope and change talk with “Fuck you. No.”

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Biden’s presidency looks set to be worse than Obama’s in every way. There will be a backlash against this. It is absolutely imperative that the US left fight like never before to make sure it’s more of a leftist backlash than a rightist one, or things will get very ugly. If you don’t take the fight to the libs, the right will. If you don’t seize control of the dominant narrative, the right will. This is 100 percent guaranteed. You need to start dealing with this now unless you want something far uglier than Trump down the road in the near term.

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The longer they can keep you fixated on Trump’s impotent post-election tantrum the longer they can keep you from noticing the incoming administration full of warmongers, corporate cronies and authoritarians currently setting up shop under the next president.

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A full withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan would have been something. A partial withdrawal is just PR. If you’re not making it difficult to simply put the troops back when you’re gone, you’re not doing anything.

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The US political/media class always freaks out over a slight military drawdown but virtually never criticizes any military increase. If this were simply reversed, as it would be in a remotely sane world, the US war machine could not operate in the way it does on the global stage.

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To be a real journalist you must ask inconvenient questions, shine light in inconvenient directions, refuse to parrot establishment narratives, and be indifferent to the approval of the powerful.

To be a rich and famous journalist, you must do the exact opposite of these things.

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Trumpists fantasize about a “deep state” cabal of baby-eating elites while the actual deep state murders far more babies right out in the open than any secret society could ever get away with.

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The first woman to head the US war machine will not be a groundbreaking pioneer of feminist achievement, she’ll be a mass murderer in Spanx.

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I’m so sexist and racist that I insist the US war machine should never be run by a woman or by a member of a minority or by a white person or by a man.

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The correct position on any foreign policy conflict is the one which would result in less violence, suffering and death, less risk of conventional or nuclear war, and less control over the situation for powers which consistently advance these things. This should be obvious to everyone.

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One party wants to roll back environmental measures. The other party that wants vastly insufficient environmental measures which accomplish nothing but allowing liberals feel like they’re doing something for a few years. These two approaches are not meaningfully different.

What’s the difference between someone who refuses to pull you out of a burning house and someone who has faint plans to implement slow, incremental changes to have you partially out of the burning house by the year 2100 as long as everything goes perfectly for them?

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I definitely do not recommend getting into a relationship with an abusive manipulator, but just FYI it’s a lot easier to understand the dynamics of the US empire after you’ve escaped from one.

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Rapists, abusers and empires all operate by the same core doctrine: “I have sovereignty, you don’t.”

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Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, person whose neck we are standing on. Stop acting like a victim just because we are actively victimizing you.

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Jeff Bezos’ vision for the future includes a trillion humans living in space, which he argues would mean a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. Meanwhile there are scores of Einsteins and Mozarts working in his warehouses, too busy paying the bills to actualize their potential.

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A love of life and a hatred of war are just two camera angles of the same object.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/to-be-a-rich-and-famous-journalist