On July 15, 2017, Congressman Mike Quigley — Democrat of Illinois — made a fairly remarkable statement: “When you meet with any Russians,” he declared on CNN, “you’re meeting with Russian intelligence.
Today the civil rights genius Whoopi Goldberg proclaimed that Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard should be investigated by the DOJ for expressing suspicious opinions.
It’s insane that an idiot like her has been allowed to pontificate from the platform of her immense ignorance. We valourize popular people not knowledgeable people, the west is pure douchbagery, all the way down.
They can't process it because they are the kind of people who truly believe that reality is a product of their own collective consciousness and, therefore, when things fail to play out as they want, then, in their minds, it was due to the collective consciousness being polluted by non-believers. Anyone trying to explain to them that the universe does not play by the rules we want but by the rules it has quickly becomes a target of hate and rage by the growing mob of solipsistic overgrown children who make up the decaying corpse of what used to be Western civilization.
This mindset is being taught to our children in school: intersectionality, Microaggressions, safe zones, words as actual violence, lived experience ahead of rationality. We are at the beginning of this process and I do not think we will see it end in our lifetimes. The question is how to live with grace amongst these people: your neighbours and your children, my neighbours and my children.
While I agree, I think you have the parties wrong. I think what we're seeing is the struggles of a decaying elite (neither right nor left, really quite apolitical even if they give lip service to one side or the other) unable to cope with the fact that their handpicked puppet, HRC, failed to beat their also handpicked opponent Trump. They tried to play the population and the population played them, and it broke them.
Trump, all things being equal, looks the odds on favourite to win in 2024. It will be the world’s greatest revenge tour ever: retributive justice meted out by the bloviating orange monster. He knows how it works now and he will not pull his punches.
The two minutes hate is strong now — the fact that people are seriously banning Russian cats from shows and dance companies from performance as if that will affect Putin somehow shows how deep the brainwashing has become.
They want to "do something" to achieve a visceral emotional release, and they don't care about the second-order catastrophes that what they "do" will create.
Very interesting video here on how people tend to accept short, simple messages repeated over and over as being true, regardless of their actual truth:
I believe this is the underlying motive behind short, snappy slogans like “Build Back Better” and “Putin’s Price Hike” and “Don’t Say Gay” being repeated ad nauseum in unison by the corporate press. Like Orwell’s newspeak, it is intended to turn the shades of gray of reality into Manichaean black and white issues in which one is either good or evil -- and of course no one wants to be on the side of evil. The sickening fusion of the government with corporate media this enables them to manufacture consent using this tactic.
There is also a rule in modern politics where doing something that makes things worse or causes massive new problems is actually politically safer than doing nothing even when doing nothing turned out to be the right decision.
The Two Minute Hate must always be changing targets. The masses must always have some new "other" to direct their ire at to keep it away from the elites in power.
Within the past year, we've seen it shift, sometimes literally overnight, from Trump supporters to anti-maskers to the unvaccinated to Russians citizens.
I'm old enough to remember the seething outrage in Main Street America over the Iranian abduction of the Tehran embassy hostages. Yet we somehow had no problem buying a falafel from the local Iranian-run sandwich shop,
You can't call leaders of another country "tyrants" and "anti-democratic" while simultaneously hating the citizenry of that same country, who by one's own stated assumptions have no say in what their government does at all.
So, it's nice to hear you agree with 2nd amendment proponents. Because we believe that those who are willing to disarm themselves just because a wannabe tyrant demands they do or manipulates them into doing so are just asking for a bad outcome.
A couple months ago: "Eww... guns bad! You ammosexual Nazis are retarded. There is no way guns will be useful in fighting against a modern military." (forgetting all counterinsurgency lessons of the last five decades)
Now: "They are handing out assault rifles to civilians to fight the evil Russians. OMG this is so cool! Oh and Putin is literally worse than Hitler now! Huh, I wonder what those S shaped lightning bolts on that guy's arm mean?"
I am a Canadian and I think your founding fathers were prescient when they enshrined your right to keep and bear by way of an amendment to your Constitution
Here, as I see it is the kickass that is coming: Trump wins in 2024, the liberals triple down on narrative as control, all authority is rendered illegitimate, extreme political polarization leading to violence on the street and debt/inflation fuelled economic crisis.
Emmanuel Goldstein is an excellent literary parallel to the current anti-Putin/anti-Russian insanity. People truly are gullible, base morons unless raised not to be or astute enough to see through the agitprop.
Why? Because, apparently, many democrats are stupid, hateful psychopaths with the emotional maturity of 6 year olds. If you believe Putin to be a tyrant and anti-democratic, then you should at least be able to infer from that claim that average Russian people have no say in what Putin does.
So, anyone out to punish anybody or anything Russian is just a vile bully and a piece of garbage who found an excuse to act like a total shit with full support from the equally psychotic Western ruling class.
its not just the D's that are "hateful psychopaths with the emotional maturity of 6 year olds." In fact, I am not sure such hate and lack of maturity would predict how a person votes in US elections. The whole population appears infected as far as I am concerned.
The neoliberal Blob is doing their best to try to remain relevant after failure after failure and overseas embarrassment. Most of the public was getting tired of them and losing faith. This is their last ditch attempt to project strength, set up a geopolitical boogeyman, drum up a bit of patriotism, act like they are defending Western Civilization, and pretend like they care about things like human rights, freedom, and borders. They kicked the Realists out during the Bush era for their pessimism and complaining. You know, the same ones who warned us about Iraq and Afghanistan as well as NATO expansion back in the Clinton era. Now it looks like the Realists might just have the last laugh (along with the Chinese). As for us Americans, I do not see much to laugh about any time soon.
I hope they will lose. What I am saying is that this is their last shot. Given how vulnerable Americans are to emotional manipulation, it just might work. Most of my belief that they will lose coincides with them creating a geopolitical and economic shit storm. Honestly, I am not looking forward to that scenario.
Side note, you can edit posts by clicking on the three dots next to delete.
One thing the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles made pretty clear to anyone expressing signs of consciousness: if the Pentagon says something, it's certainly a lie.
If you listen to the talking heads here, we're already at war with Russia, and Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard should be immediate arrested for treason, according to the sows on The View. I have been wondering over the last few days how the US population would feel if the world had treated us when we invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria like they're treating the Russian population now. It's an interesting question I never hear posed.
Thank you for being that "one schmuck." I don't actually have a firm belief in a divine personage that looks out for us all, but whatever is out there, may it look out for you.
Great article Michael, totally reflective of thoughts at this moment. I was at a dinner party this past Saturday night and the discussion centered on the US chemical weapons labs located in Ukraine, and I posed this question to the esteemed salad eating panel......”Who’s lying here, Russia, Ukraine, or the USA, or all 3?”. Then I proposed a situation where maybe some enterprising Ukrainians , desperate for Western intervention, gassed some remote village, and of course what would follow would be the videos of dead children and sobbing mothers, all packaged and Twittered to the world for the extreme outrage, and bingo! Once the salad plates were pushed aside, it was decided that yes, everyone is lying, but nobody would be brazen enough to concoct a plan as evil as I had described.
On Sunday, enter Sen. Lindsey Graham, who crowed on one of the Sunday shows declared “If the Russians use chemical weapons, I will support a No Fly zone......
Everyone at the table texted me Sunday afternoon, their words lacked the confidence from the night before.
But you are our smuck, and we love you. The Russia hoax and its fallout have been very detrimental to America and the world. People should be held accountable. Important people. Obama, Biden, and Clinton for starters. Brennan. Comey Strozk. If you wander into the Capital you are an existential threat. If you participate in a coup not so much.
Watch "The Panama Deception". Search for it on youtube or elsewhere. It outlines how the US military-intelligence-media operates in a war zone. It's particularly good at showing how the photographs and videos of the conflict are controlled. These techniques have been honed for decades and they work, so they automatically do it every time. Ukraine is no different.
I find it really disturbing that we celebrate a sitting Senator for charging that someone is treasonous for expressing a non-government opinion. Which isn't even Russian propaganda, but a disagreement about actual statements made in front of Congress and their import.
We are at another point where the government truth is The One Truth. And all the "defenders" of speech from Mitt Romney, to the MSNBCs, to Mark Levin, to The View, to the proud libertarians are ALL FOR IT!
Remember - your opinion is treason to these people when it doesn't align to theirs.
And I'm a lifelong conservative and overall pretty much a hawk. But I will never be anti-free speech and will never trust the government to decide things for me.
Great work, thank you. If you want to see the propaganda from the other side of the war, the Russian Ministry of Defense is on Telegram. Today they are, quite ominously, saying that a false flag chemical attack by the Ukrainians/west is imminent. Typically, they are quite restrained and matter of fact, a rather jarring contrast with the propagandists on the other side. And no, I'm not a Russian asset, I'm a Ukrainian-Canadian expat American grandmother who has never fired a weapon in her life, but who is vehemently anti-WWIII.
We saw them collectively punish the unvaxxed with the direct help of corporations. Now we’re seeing that successful intimidation campaign move toward punishing Russia as a whole.
We truly live in the stupidest timeline.
To think that so much of this comes from the inability of the left to process the fact that HRC lost in '16 is terrifying.
It really is true. But if you make this point in pretty much any "mainstream" media venue, they'll look at you like you have two heads.
Today the civil rights genius Whoopi Goldberg proclaimed that Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard should be investigated by the DOJ for expressing suspicious opinions.
I saw that. Those women are insane.
It’s insane that an idiot like her has been allowed to pontificate from the platform of her immense ignorance. We valourize popular people not knowledgeable people, the west is pure douchbagery, all the way down.
They can't process it because they are the kind of people who truly believe that reality is a product of their own collective consciousness and, therefore, when things fail to play out as they want, then, in their minds, it was due to the collective consciousness being polluted by non-believers. Anyone trying to explain to them that the universe does not play by the rules we want but by the rules it has quickly becomes a target of hate and rage by the growing mob of solipsistic overgrown children who make up the decaying corpse of what used to be Western civilization.
This mindset is being taught to our children in school: intersectionality, Microaggressions, safe zones, words as actual violence, lived experience ahead of rationality. We are at the beginning of this process and I do not think we will see it end in our lifetimes. The question is how to live with grace amongst these people: your neighbours and your children, my neighbours and my children.
Perfect: postmodern relativism, reality as a mailable social construct. These are very dangerous people, they will start a war.
While I agree, I think you have the parties wrong. I think what we're seeing is the struggles of a decaying elite (neither right nor left, really quite apolitical even if they give lip service to one side or the other) unable to cope with the fact that their handpicked puppet, HRC, failed to beat their also handpicked opponent Trump. They tried to play the population and the population played them, and it broke them.
Yes it broke them, it being the election of an unauthorized President. Question: what happens if, as is likely, Trump wins in 2024?
My virtually apolitical wife causally pointed out recently that if Donnie runs again they will simply assassinate him. I agree.
Possible
In a word, armageddon.
Ok but maybe too biblical, sorry, more prosaic a word needed like disorder
Trump, all things being equal, looks the odds on favourite to win in 2024. It will be the world’s greatest revenge tour ever: retributive justice meted out by the bloviating orange monster. He knows how it works now and he will not pull his punches.
MT, you’re amazing. Thank you so much for going to Poland, it’s nice to have at least one trustworthy journalist over there with a nose to the ground.
@mtracey .... I have subscribed because you have decided to make the journey to Poland !
The two minutes hate is strong now — the fact that people are seriously banning Russian cats from shows and dance companies from performance as if that will affect Putin somehow shows how deep the brainwashing has become.
They want to "do something" to achieve a visceral emotional release, and they don't care about the second-order catastrophes that what they "do" will create.
Very interesting video here on how people tend to accept short, simple messages repeated over and over as being true, regardless of their actual truth:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cebFWOlx848.
I believe this is the underlying motive behind short, snappy slogans like “Build Back Better” and “Putin’s Price Hike” and “Don’t Say Gay” being repeated ad nauseum in unison by the corporate press. Like Orwell’s newspeak, it is intended to turn the shades of gray of reality into Manichaean black and white issues in which one is either good or evil -- and of course no one wants to be on the side of evil. The sickening fusion of the government with corporate media this enables them to manufacture consent using this tactic.
Or MAGA, for that matter.
Sure, except that the corporate media goes out of its way to avoid repeating the phrase except in a pejorative light.
There is also a rule in modern politics where doing something that makes things worse or causes massive new problems is actually politically safer than doing nothing even when doing nothing turned out to be the right decision.
The Two Minute Hate must always be changing targets. The masses must always have some new "other" to direct their ire at to keep it away from the elites in power.
Within the past year, we've seen it shift, sometimes literally overnight, from Trump supporters to anti-maskers to the unvaccinated to Russians citizens.
I'm old enough to remember the seething outrage in Main Street America over the Iranian abduction of the Tehran embassy hostages. Yet we somehow had no problem buying a falafel from the local Iranian-run sandwich shop,
We were so innocent then.
You can't call leaders of another country "tyrants" and "anti-democratic" while simultaneously hating the citizenry of that same country, who by one's own stated assumptions have no say in what their government does at all.
Well, the excuse is similar to "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps".
IOW, if you allow yourself to be ruled by a despot, you deserve the kickass that is coming.
How many Americans understand the kickass that is coming?
So, it's nice to hear you agree with 2nd amendment proponents. Because we believe that those who are willing to disarm themselves just because a wannabe tyrant demands they do or manipulates them into doing so are just asking for a bad outcome.
A couple months ago: "Eww... guns bad! You ammosexual Nazis are retarded. There is no way guns will be useful in fighting against a modern military." (forgetting all counterinsurgency lessons of the last five decades)
Now: "They are handing out assault rifles to civilians to fight the evil Russians. OMG this is so cool! Oh and Putin is literally worse than Hitler now! Huh, I wonder what those S shaped lightning bolts on that guy's arm mean?"
Love the consistency guys!
I am a Canadian and I think your founding fathers were prescient when they enshrined your right to keep and bear by way of an amendment to your Constitution
Here, as I see it is the kickass that is coming: Trump wins in 2024, the liberals triple down on narrative as control, all authority is rendered illegitimate, extreme political polarization leading to violence on the street and debt/inflation fuelled economic crisis.
Emmanuel Goldstein is an excellent literary parallel to the current anti-Putin/anti-Russian insanity. People truly are gullible, base morons unless raised not to be or astute enough to see through the agitprop.
Idiotic.
Why? Because, apparently, many democrats are stupid, hateful psychopaths with the emotional maturity of 6 year olds. If you believe Putin to be a tyrant and anti-democratic, then you should at least be able to infer from that claim that average Russian people have no say in what Putin does.
So, anyone out to punish anybody or anything Russian is just a vile bully and a piece of garbage who found an excuse to act like a total shit with full support from the equally psychotic Western ruling class.
its not just the D's that are "hateful psychopaths with the emotional maturity of 6 year olds." In fact, I am not sure such hate and lack of maturity would predict how a person votes in US elections. The whole population appears infected as far as I am concerned.
Because the people who profit from destabilizing societies worked very hard to make them that way.
The neoliberal Blob is doing their best to try to remain relevant after failure after failure and overseas embarrassment. Most of the public was getting tired of them and losing faith. This is their last ditch attempt to project strength, set up a geopolitical boogeyman, drum up a bit of patriotism, act like they are defending Western Civilization, and pretend like they care about things like human rights, freedom, and borders. They kicked the Realists out during the Bush era for their pessimism and complaining. You know, the same ones who warned us about Iraq and Afghanistan as well as NATO expansion back in the Clinton era. Now it looks like the Realists might just have the last laugh (along with the Chinese). As for us Americans, I do not see much to laugh about any time soon.
What you say makes sense but you suggest the neoliberals are about to loose, I hope you are right but fear in this one regard you are over optimistic.
Lose
I hope they will lose. What I am saying is that this is their last shot. Given how vulnerable Americans are to emotional manipulation, it just might work. Most of my belief that they will lose coincides with them creating a geopolitical and economic shit storm. Honestly, I am not looking forward to that scenario.
Side note, you can edit posts by clicking on the three dots next to delete.
Thanks for the edit thing
One thing the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles made pretty clear to anyone expressing signs of consciousness: if the Pentagon says something, it's certainly a lie.
If you listen to the talking heads here, we're already at war with Russia, and Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard should be immediate arrested for treason, according to the sows on The View. I have been wondering over the last few days how the US population would feel if the world had treated us when we invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria like they're treating the Russian population now. It's an interesting question I never hear posed.
Thank you for being that "one schmuck." I don't actually have a firm belief in a divine personage that looks out for us all, but whatever is out there, may it look out for you.
Great article Michael, totally reflective of thoughts at this moment. I was at a dinner party this past Saturday night and the discussion centered on the US chemical weapons labs located in Ukraine, and I posed this question to the esteemed salad eating panel......”Who’s lying here, Russia, Ukraine, or the USA, or all 3?”. Then I proposed a situation where maybe some enterprising Ukrainians , desperate for Western intervention, gassed some remote village, and of course what would follow would be the videos of dead children and sobbing mothers, all packaged and Twittered to the world for the extreme outrage, and bingo! Once the salad plates were pushed aside, it was decided that yes, everyone is lying, but nobody would be brazen enough to concoct a plan as evil as I had described.
On Sunday, enter Sen. Lindsey Graham, who crowed on one of the Sunday shows declared “If the Russians use chemical weapons, I will support a No Fly zone......
Everyone at the table texted me Sunday afternoon, their words lacked the confidence from the night before.
My wife would punch me in the ear if I brought that up at a dinner table.
But you are our smuck, and we love you. The Russia hoax and its fallout have been very detrimental to America and the world. People should be held accountable. Important people. Obama, Biden, and Clinton for starters. Brennan. Comey Strozk. If you wander into the Capital you are an existential threat. If you participate in a coup not so much.
we are all russians now.
I can't express enough thanks for your brave reporting; it is an invaluable perspective. Stay safe!
Watch "The Panama Deception". Search for it on youtube or elsewhere. It outlines how the US military-intelligence-media operates in a war zone. It's particularly good at showing how the photographs and videos of the conflict are controlled. These techniques have been honed for decades and they work, so they automatically do it every time. Ukraine is no different.
Exactly. All of this has been done before....many times over. That's the way it works in the "free world."
I find it really disturbing that we celebrate a sitting Senator for charging that someone is treasonous for expressing a non-government opinion. Which isn't even Russian propaganda, but a disagreement about actual statements made in front of Congress and their import.
We are at another point where the government truth is The One Truth. And all the "defenders" of speech from Mitt Romney, to the MSNBCs, to Mark Levin, to The View, to the proud libertarians are ALL FOR IT!
Remember - your opinion is treason to these people when it doesn't align to theirs.
And I'm a lifelong conservative and overall pretty much a hawk. But I will never be anti-free speech and will never trust the government to decide things for me.
Don't forget, Tchaikovsky is now off-limits too
Great work, thank you. If you want to see the propaganda from the other side of the war, the Russian Ministry of Defense is on Telegram. Today they are, quite ominously, saying that a false flag chemical attack by the Ukrainians/west is imminent. Typically, they are quite restrained and matter of fact, a rather jarring contrast with the propagandists on the other side. And no, I'm not a Russian asset, I'm a Ukrainian-Canadian expat American grandmother who has never fired a weapon in her life, but who is vehemently anti-WWIII.
We saw them collectively punish the unvaxxed with the direct help of corporations. Now we’re seeing that successful intimidation campaign move toward punishing Russia as a whole.