Normally, I let my pen rest during the summer months, but for some things, you set aside your habits. What has been happening in the context of the US presidential elections over the past few weeks is, to say the least, remarkable. We are witnessing a social system that – to use a term from complex dynamic systems theory – is heading toward a catastrophe. And the essence of the tipping point we are approaching is this: the propaganda model is beginning to fail.
It started a few weeks ago like this: Trump, the presidential candidate who must not win, is up against Biden, the presidential candidate who must win. After the first debate, it was immediately clear: Trump will win against Biden. The big problem: Biden and Jill are about the only ones who don’t realize this.
The media then turned against Biden. That, in itself, is a revolution. They had praised President Biden to the skies for four years, turning a blind eye to the fact that the man either seemed hardly aware of what he was saying or was giving speeches that could only be described as having the characteristics of a fascist’s discourse.
I’m thinking, among other things, of the 2022 midterm speech in which he, against a bombastic-dramatic backdrop and flanked by two soldiers with machine guns, more or less directly called for violence against the Maga followers. Not to mention the shameless prosecution and imprisonment of political opponents and the intimidation and excommunication of hundreds of journalists (carefully kept out of the media by journalists who sided with the regime).
Huxley would not be surprised that Biden claims in almost every speech that he had to save democracy, including his most recent speech. I’ve shared the quote of Huxley below before, but it doesn’t hurt to read it a second time:
By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.
Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
In any case, the media’s love for Biden was suddenly over when it became clear that he could not possibly win the election, even not with a little help from the media. If you want to know how that ‘little help’ worked in 2020, look at one of the most important interviews of the past year, where Mike Benz – former director of the cyber portfolio of the US government – explains to Tucker Carlson in detail how information flows on the internet were manipulated during the 2020 elections (and the Covid crisis). The guy eventually got disgusted with what he was doing and now runs a project striving for online freedom of speech. I would recommend everyone to spend an hour watching that interview. Such an explanation is what we need: calm, expert, nuanced, and extraordinarily revealing.
Hellbound and Down 