When you think about propaganda, authoritarian governments like the Soviets, Nazis, and China come to mind. Most people realize that American media is biased, but fully believe it is independent and protected by the first amendment. Technically speaking that remains true. However, propaganda and mass persuasion have come a long way, especially since the rise of the internet and social media.
Just like evil regimes of the past, modern-day governments have enormous incentives to control the narrative. Perversely, these incentives are greater in democratic nations than in authoritarians ones. Dictators use brute force to control the public, while democracies use the power of persuasion to elect desired candidates and enact legislation1. This force is so great that it affects all forms of mass media including movies, television, radio, search engines, social media and podcasts.
What about the 1st Amendment?
One reason it is so hard to see propaganda is that it is subtle. And it isn’t coercive, at least not directly. The government allows you to say anything you like with some notable exceptions2. Americans are so thoroughly protected by the first amendment that it give us a false sense of security. However, anybody that lived through the covid panic knows the 1st amendment does *not* apply to private companies.
Since most media is privately owned, the first amendment is virtually powerless as a shield against propaganda. And this is just as true for traditional media as it is social media. Sure, American courts have ruled that the first amendment applies to advertising on these platforms, but otherwise it simply has no jurisdiction3.
CNN is free to promote whatever policies it feels like. The same is true with Fox or any other so-called “news” outlet. So long as they don’t block paid ads or incite violence, these corporations are free to pursue their own interests. Looking at the top 10 news shows, only one pretends to be objective4. The other nine are explicitly opinion shows.
What Does Self Interest Have to do With the State?
On the surface, there is nothing wrong with opinion based news. My blog is a perfect example of this. I try my hardest to base my posts on research and facts, but it is impossible to be objective. The difference between what I do and mass media is scale. I don’t have the power the move the masses, while the corporate media does. In fact, their power to manipulate is the source of their profits5.
Without advertising revenue, these companies would have gone out of business long ago. Since they are so closely tied to ad revenue, it creates a gigantic conflict of interest. You will never see critical news articles against companies that buy large blocks of advertising. For this reason alone, you should greatly mistrust anything published by mass media.
How many news stations were critical of lockdowns or forced vaccination policies? Zero. Why? Because big pharma is one of the biggest purchasers of ad time6. Even worse, how many had human interest stories on people harmed or killed from taking the vaccine? Again, the answer is virtually zero. As alternative media (like mine) has shown, there is strong grassroots demand for this content.
Lies of Omission
In fact, lies of omission is one of the State’s most effective propaganda tools. If critical pieces are difficult or impossible to find, then the government can build a consensus for otherwise controversial actions. And don’t be confused, it is government power that controls the narrative. The patently false story of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) is a perfect example of this.
Prior to the second war in Iraq, the Bush regime performed a media blitz to build the case for invasion7. Just like the covid narrative, the entire media happily accepted money from private businesses to construct an ironclad case against the Hussein regime. The fact that non of it was true didn’t matter. Nobody in media or government lost their jobs. There was never an investigation. As a result, the war machine and cable media outlets profited handsomely from the war8.
The most important point to consider that is there wasn’t true public opposition to the war. Plenty of Americans were opposed the war, but they had no platform to organize against it. According to the mainstream media, you were either in favor of the war or you supported terrorism. While the corporate media circulated lies, the truth was mired in irrelevance.
I wish this phenomenon only applied to legacy media, but it doesn’t. The internet was unusable without search engines. I’m old enough to remember the internet before Google, and it sucked, plain and simple. Google is worth over 1.5 trillion dollars because of its near monopoly for finding things on the internet. The power they have over the dissemination of information is impossible to understate. Google is hands down the absolute, uncontested king of information.
Just think about, even if you wanted to dispute a mainstream source, where would you go to find dissenting voices? The internet, of course. And Google has spent decades and billions perfecting search algorithms. There is no question that the search engine helps consumers. Trust me, it blows away the results given from alternative search engines. But is Google objective, fair or politically neutral?
The answer is overwhelmingly NO. They are guilty on all counts of bias. Their most outrageous bias is teaming up with the Chinese government to offer an explicitly pro-CCP version of its search engine9. And if you believe they aren’t also working with the US, then you are hopelessly naïve.
Search Results
Censoring and manipulating search results is trivial. It is a well known fact that most searches (70%) end with clicks on links from the first page of results10. Google could easily hide dissenting opinion in plain sight by simply putting them on the second page. In fact, they have favored every Democratic presidential candidate since Obama11.
And it doesn’t end there. Google is the king of information (and manipulation) for every nation in the world, even China. It is so bad in European elections that the EU fined them over $8 billion12. Sadly, their funding is so deep and their influence is so great that the fines don’t come close to stopping them.
Manipulating the first page is only the tip of the iceberg. Google also maintains an extensive set of blacklists, allegedly for “security” reasons13. They also decide which results are relevant, and carefully keep people away from sensitive results. Here is a simple challenge: compare the search results from Brave vs Google. Try the search “wiki leak dump” and see the vast difference in regards to Hillary Clinton. Although you didn’t explicitly search for her, plenty of results appear in Brave and only a couple of mainstream hits appear with Google.
Social Media
As bad as Google is, social media is even worse. Here the State and their crony corporations are more obvious. There is a mysterious and unpublished list of no-no topics for all social media platforms. Some topics are obvious, like child porn or inciting violence, but others aren’t so cut and dry. For instance, social media platforms heavily censored information about the covid vaccine or alternative treatments, like Ivermectin. The most egregious example was when Twitter permanently blocked Dr. Malone, the inventor of the mRNA14.
Of course, Twitter itself doesn’t care one way or the other about covid. Their censorship was done on behalf of the State. This was in full display in the runup to the 2020 presidential election. The government openly admits to censoring “misinformation” and “foreign meddling”15. Sadly, those censored accounts supported the Trump campaign, revealing the bias of social media platforms.
The most famous incident of censorship was also in the runup to the 2020 election. Alex Jones, the man behind InfoWars, was simultaneously banned from Apple, Spotify, Google/YouTube, Facebook, and payment processors16. This coordinated attack against Jones was purely political. And the only way for all of these ‘independent’ / ‘private’ companies to coordinate such an attack was with help from America’s intelligence agencies. Clearly Jones and his massive following of Trump supporters were victims of the censorship machine.
If You Can’t Beat Them, Buy Them
Alternative media, like podcasts and blogs, have exploded in popularity over the past ten years. And as the censorship regime gets worse, I fully expect that trend to accelerate. Shows like the Joe Rogan Experience already perform better than most cable shows17. The State’s old tricks of cancelation via political correctness simply don’t work anymore. Since his following is way too big and mainstream to flat out censor, what is the State to do?
Coopt and subvert is the answer. If you can’t beat them, why not pay them off? Currently, there are only a handful of alternative voices and organizations influential enough to bother with buying off. But the pool of talented dissident voices is growing rapidly. To silence their dissent, the State will simply buy them out. I expect to see mainstream news and media outlets hire their next up-and-coming superstars from alternative media.
There is already evidence of this trend. Jordan Peterson, a canceled professor from Canada turned superstar of the internet, has clearly sold out. His recent support for gay marriage18 and his “Message to Muslims”19 goes against the huge audience he built over the years. There simply is no way he had a sudden change of heart without tremendous financial incentives.
Politics
Political speech is only part of the equation. As dissident voices gain popularity online, it will eventually translate into political organizations. Here the government is a master of manipulation. Anybody that tries to organize a national movement will get displaced by pro-regime agents. Ron Paul and Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) is a perfect example of this.
Ron Paul was the original alternative-media celebrity candidate. His 2008 campaign masterfully used alternative media20. Not because he want to, but because there was a near total blackout from mainstream sources21. Shortly thereafter, his campaign founded YAL to promote libertarian and antiwar candidates in the Republican party.
The State is in the process of consuming the organization. In the controversial removal of their prior CEO, YAL’s current CEO has solidly mainstream view, like being pro-war and pro-woke22. What happens next is anyone’s guess, but I expect more and more mainstream leadership and money to neuter an otherwise great organization.
Conclusion
We live in a censored world. Yes, China and Russia are bad, but so is the US and all Western nations. The openness and forcefulness are different, but the results are the same. The power brokers that run the US also control the media. They influence internet search results. And they censor your social media feed. If you dig hard enough, you can find alternative points of views. But let’s face it, the masses will never do that on their own.
Public opinion is fully controlled by mass media. Alternative media is growing in popularity, but even it will eventually succumb to the machine. There is too much money and power for it to work any other way. So what should you do? Read alterative and independent media sources, like Antiwar or Zerohedge. But be on the lookout for sell-out or compromised content. Of course, keep reading my blog and others like it. There are tons of great writers on Substack, just have to know where to find them.
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