Propagandists have the capacity to make us feel like they are saying something we always wanted to hear. It’s as if they peered into our souls and found the words to express exactly what we felt deep inside.
But not all people who say things that resonate with us are propagandists. How do we distinguish between a manipulative liar who hits us in our Shadow to dupe us and a person who has insight that enriches us?
There are several steps we have to make to root out a propagandist, and here I want to talk about the first one. It’s a very obvious one but people forget to make it way too often.
The step I’m talking about is to ask, “is there evidence that this person is sincere? Or is he avoiding the need to live what he preaches?” For example, is this passionate anti-vaxxer fully vaxxed? Is this passionate vaxxer avoiding the vaccine? Did the public school advocate put her kids in private schools? Does the anti-racist activist have black friends? Does the “trad wife” run a successful business? Does the homeschooling advocate employ 3 nannies and barely ever see her kids?
This seems so obvious but people often fail to take this step. Russian propagandists rant about the evil West while their wives and children all have American citizenship and live in Miami. The propagandists earn the money to keep their wives and children in Palm Beach by getting a million duped losers to listen about stories about how terrible life in Palm Beach is.
Tucker Carlson’s children are all in Ivies and nepotized into the establishment, the money for which comes from hypnotizing the same million of duped losers (most of Tucker’s viewers are now in Russia) with stories about the terrible US establishment.
Insight or an exploitative lie? It’s up to us to find out.
This is only the first step, though. There’s a lot more we need to do as part of our intellectual hygiene.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is why I laugh at climate crisis mongers who fly around in private jets, anti-gun politicians who never go anywhere without armed bodyguards, open-borders advocates whose own mansions are surrounded by walls and security cameras, and people who tell me to eat bugs while they dine on filet mignon and caviar.
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These are excellent examples. And it should be so easy to notice these discrepancies, yet many people don’t manage to do it. Or, rather, choose not to because believing propaganda is pleasant.
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Don’t forget the anti-zoning-laws activists who don’t want low-income housing or industrial activity in their neighborhoods.
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Yes, and the sanctimonious snobs living in “sanctuary cities” who flip out when some actual undocumented immigrants arrive in their neighborhood, so they call out the National Guard to get them the hell out of there…
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“For example, is this passionate anti-vaxxer fully vaxxed?”
Both Steve Kirsch and Robert Malone got Covid-19 mRNA vaccines in early 2021; they only began objecting to the vaccines after they had done that. Yet my strong impression is that both of them are serious and sincere critics of the vaccines.
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If a person changed their mind because of new evidence that came in, I’m the last person to criticize. I’d be a total hypocrite myself given how often I’ve changed my mind. But if they keep getting boosted while gaining a following among those who oppose the vaccine, that’s pure manipulation.
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“most of Tucker’s viewers are now in Russia”: really?
If Carlson’s only good ratings were in Russia rather than the United States, don’t you think Fox would demote him rather quickly? He can’t be making Fox’s corporate management happy right now; in the last year he has taken on several taboo topics in American politics, such as the possible CIA involvement in John F. Kennedy’s assassination. If he weren’t bringing in a serious U.S. audience, it’s hard to imagine how he’d keep his job.
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He’s definitely got a large audience in the US. But here we have many channels, many sources of info and entertainment people can access. Now imagine a country of 140 million where there’s only state-owned TV that transmits Tucker on a loop. The viewership becomes enormous just because there’s literally nothing else.
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“The step I’m talking about is to ask …”
If it were only that simple.
One of the things that people in the so-called “intelligence community” are taught is that the instrumentality of lies and deceptions is necessary in order to defend some notional “noble purpose”.
Rather than this “noble purpose” being something actually noble, such as saving all of the books, this becomes a “defence of the realm” argument by other means in which the country comes first and all other positions remain at best a distant second.
The “noble purpose” gives these people carte blanche to distort truth at the least, with a more familiar application being where entire teams of people “defend the indefensible”.
When you approach any of these supposedly sensitive topics, that’s when the personal attacks start, because the “ring fencing” serves as a trip mechanism for a munition made out of people.
You don’t even have to have that much of a controversial position to be attacked by any of these groups, whether they’re pro-American, pro-Russian, pro-Western, pro-Asian, pro-anything at all.
Happy Hasbara Fun Ball will not be taunted or mocked, and if you do, its defenders will be coming for you.
And so I discount the idea that people are sincere with their lies and bullshit almost entirely.
Talk to us again about this when you’re in a position where most people are lying to you all of the time instead of that merely being some of the people some of the time.
Instead, I have a different question: is it going to hurt this person to be wrong?
The Happy Hasbara Fun Ball defenders can’t tolerate the truth, but they can’t tolerate being wrong even more.
But in the end, you also have to ask a second question: does it really matter to this person whether anyone else gets won over in this particular exchange?
What happened over the forced “vaccinations” for The Rona in certain countries was just one example: the people asking you to consider not taking it and not making it a forced medicine didn’t necessarily have a “noble purpose” or want to “defend the indefensible”.
They wanted for themselves not to be bothered and to be left alone, and this extended to wanting this for anyone else.
That they could be wrong and that they might win everyone over didn’t enter into the discourse, because this wasn’t about compelling action and forcing outcomes.
Compare this to the people who couldn’t be wrong, for which There Is No Alternative, who had a “noble purpose” made up of a bunch of lies they tell so that they can feel good about themselves while serving as pawns for an infowarfare campaign.
Otherwise, calling someone a “propagandist”, that’s really old terminology, and these days it’s used to provoke some kind of immediate emotional response because of that idea that people like to imagine themselves as “good people”, “honest people”, and so forth when in fact on certain occasions, they aren’t anything remotely like that.
I don’t know if you’d really like a basic tutorial on infowarfare, but given the reality of how language has been weaponised, you’ll probably need one anyway as a matter of surviving the “mass formation” that’s one form of language being weaponised.
But consider the so-called “triad of disruption” method: memetic agents masquerading as truth or news, but are actually fake and engineered, combined with distribution through immediate means, with the end being the emergence of a manufactured pretext that’s meant to divert discussion or to replace the consensus experience of reality.
It’s like the difference between more affluent people and those in the mainstream when it comes to reacting to fake invoices sent to you via E-mail. Somehow because of a leak, they have your mail address, but nothing else, so they send you bland looking fake invoices to try to get you to call their “support number” so that you’ll provide them with enough details so that they may “correct any problems” with the invoice. This of course gives them enough information to conduct identity theft.
The more affluent people got in the habit of not paying certain types of invoices on receipt anyway, and that these expenses have to have a backing purchase. They’ll pay certain vetted types of invoices on time or early, such as utility bills, but as for everything else, they’ll push back against the immediacy.
In other words, “Net 30” isn’t an offer of credit, it’s an insurance policy against fake invoices that can’t be verified mutually.
So here’s your defence: any time someone wants to play the Speed It Up game, play the Slow It Down game against them.
And here’s mine: submit those fake invoices for being a propagandist all you’d like, because I don’t have to be right all of the time and I usually don’t care about people thinking I’m some kind of “bad person” anyway.
But people telling me they’re openly corrupt and evil, I buy that 100% of the time, because the Vile and the Evil love telling you that they are like this before they do one of their planned actions.
It’s why the bad guy in the movies explaining the impending evil is such a trope. 🙂
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By FAR the most vital urgent and DEEP understanding everyone needs to gain is that a mafia network of manipulating PSYCHOPATHS are governing big businesses (eg official medicine, big tech), nations and the world — the evidence is OVERWHELMING and TOTALLY IRREFUTABLE (see “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room”… https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html ).
“… normal and healthy discontent .. is being termed extremist.” — Martin Luther King, Jr, 1929-1968, Civil Rights Activist
But global rulership by psychopaths is only ONE part of the equation making up the destructive human condition as the cited article notes because there are TWO pink elephants in the room… and they’re MARRIED.
Without a proper understanding, and full acknowledgment, of the true WHOLE problem and reality, no real constructive LASTING change is possible for humanity.
And if anyone does NOT acknowledge, recognize, and face (either wittingly or unwittingly) the WHOLE truth THEY are helping to prevent this from happening. And so they are “part of the problem” and not part of the solution.
If you’re in the US and your employer mandates the toxic/lethal COVID jabs, register to receive a free “Medical Exemption Certificate” at https://drgastonmedicalexemption.com
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