The Power of Propaganda

~ Clarissa

Propaganda switches off people’s knowledge about the world.

“ICE detains people without warrants! This is illegal and unprecedented!”

We’ve all seen about a trillion police shows where representatives of every possible enforcement agency constantly arrest people without warrants. The police observe somebody committing a crime. Do they stop and send for a warrant while the suspect escapes? Of course, not.

“ICE agents mask their appearance! This is illegal and unprecedented!”

Plainclothes police mask their appearance. Undercover officers change their look. It’s completely legal for police to lie to suspects. We know all this. But it says on TV that this is unprecedented and illegal, and that erases everything we’ve known until now.

“Nobody is obligated to step out of their vehicle if stopped by law enforcement!”

Dude, do you drive? Have you ever been stopped? Or observed anybody being stopped? Have you troubled yourself to find out what you are supposed to be doing in this situation? If you managed to be a driver for a few years, I assume you figured it out.

Repeating these propagandistic inventions is dangerous because people end up believing them and put themselves in danger unnecessarily. Don’t attack officers. Don’t try to flee if you are getting detained. Even if you are completely innocent, becoming belligerent and trying to escape is not the way to go about it.

The people on TV who are peddling these lies aren’t putting themselves at risk. They put you at risk because that generates stories and they make money from the stories. They are selling your risk for profit. Have you heard of risk society? Externalizing risk and privatizing the profit is one of its top strategies. Some people play this game very intelligently at the expense of those who don’t know there is a game.

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Published by Clarissa

41 thoughts on “The Power of Propaganda”

  1. “Repeating these propagandistic inventions is dangerous because people end up believing them and put themselves in danger unnecessarily. Don’t attack officers. Don’t try to flee if you are getting detained. Even if you are completely innocent, becoming belligerent and trying to escape is not the way to go about it.”

    I completely agree that people shouldn’t flee from police, interfere with officers, or put themselves, or others, in harm’s way. Those actions can escalate a situation in ways that benefit no one. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that these behaviors, even when wrong, don’t justify the use of deadly force. We can hold both truths at once: individuals should act responsibly, and those with authority must be held to a higher standard in how they exercise power.

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    1. –in FL, the journalists would have been legally OK to just run them over. But of course this would never happen in FL. They only pull this crap in places where they know the judiciary will cover for them.

      -ethyl

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            1. In everyday and legal terms, law enforcement officers (including ICE) are civilians because they are not part of the armed forces; they are civilian government employees with police powers.

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              2. ed

                Most (likely all) of us understand that all law enforcement officers including ICE are not military. But rather sworn law enforcement personnel with legal powers and responsibilities not held by the general population, while remaining subject to civilian rather than military law. Now what the hell is your point?

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              3. It really troubles me how militarized ICE and other agencies have become. From the way they dress to how they act, they are almost undistinguishable to a military force.
                Ultimately I don’t care about their mission be it a left or right wing mission, what I care about is not having military wanna be law enforcement people out harassing both Americans and non Americans, instigating shootings and violence.

                It also seems to completely go over many right wingers that these militarized thugs can be used against them the next time a Biden-like president inevitably takes over. Enjoy your DEI militarized police next election cycle, make sure to wear your rainbow flag pins.

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              4. Wait, wait, you seriously don’t care about their mission, but you DO care about how they dress?

                -ethyl

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              5. ethyl, you reduced ‘militarized law enforcement is dangerous regardless of politics’ to ‘he doesn’t like their clothes.’ That’s not a summary, that’s a strawman.

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              6. Ed, ten years ago, I would’ve been entirely on your side. I was as concerned as anybody about the military selling off their surplus armored vehicles and other equipment to local police forces, who then got puffed up ideas about their own importance. Plus, I’m old enough to remember Waco.

                Right after 9/11 I had to fly. We went through an airport car check tent full of Nat. Guard dudes with huge guns. My mom recognized one of her former students and went “I can’t believe they gave that kid a gun! I didn’t even trust him with scissors!”

                A couple of things have happened since.

                Our local police force ditched most of that junk because it was expensive to maintain and they so rarely needed it. ROI was negative. They have accountants. Better results per dollar by just… not letting repeat offenders roam the streets, mostly. Effective local police, working with effective local prosecutors and judges, don’t need that crap because they are doing their jobs. It *is* possible to vote for competence. The equipment doesn’t make the PD into an arm of the military all by itself. Not magic. It’s the admin that does it.

                The total opposite thing was going on in the big blue urbs. Local LEOs, prosecutors, and judges went *hard* the other direction, opting instead to either not enforce the law in a normal routine way, or to enforce it selectively on certain demographics, while giving other demographics a free pass. They seem to have developed large and intractable crime problems, and now have organized well-funded activist groups involved.

                This forces federal enforcement into the picture, in areas where local enforcement not only isn’t helping now, but hasn’t been doing its job for a very long time. I would like for this to be a routine enforcement procedure, carried out by normal cops with normal uniforms and normal equipment. That’s how it’s playing out in my state: we do have some problems with illegals, ICE is involved in that (because it’s their job), and… they don’t seem particularly militarized in the vids I’ve seen. They look like cops.

                Why do they look like military in Minneapolis, when they look like cops in FL?

                Is it perhaps because they are being forced to work *against* local law enforcement and the activist contingent local LEOs are tolerating in MN, and for ops reasons need to look different, and have more firepower available? I mean, nobody’s trying to run them down with SUVs here, as far as I can tell.

                So… yeah, I’m cool with what they’re doing currently wrt “militarization” because it doesn’t seem to be universal. It seems to be only in places where they’re forced to operate in a dense, hostile environment full of potential combatants, where they are flying solo because local enforcement is colluding against them. Are they really supposed to go into that situation limited to just the uniform and equipment of normal patrol cops? They aren’t doing a normal patrol cop job, thanks to the dereliction of local govt.

                I think it’d be nice if we could solve this problem by simply declaring a lot more state sovereignty: if Minnesota doesn’t want to cooperate, great. Let Minnesota do what it wants. But also, let every other state vote on whether to keep sending federal dollars to MN, whether to allow Minnesotans to travel to other states, and whether goods in Minnesota may cross state lines to be sold in other states. This would be 100% worth it, if we could impose limits on people from CA, NY, and NJ moving to FL, and do roadblocks with ID checks and car searches at the state line.

                Since that’s not in the offing, and the massive fraud that Minnesota (and other states) have been engaging in is having a negative effect on the entire country, intervention is warranted, and I’m against sending agents to intervene with inadequate equipment. I am enthusiastically in favor of local governments getting their shite together, dealing with crime in their own communities, and working with feds when necessary, so that it never comes to that.

                But if they refuse to do so… what other options would you suggest?

                -ethyl

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              7. I confirm that they look VERY different here downstate as opposed to upstate in the blue part of Illinois. And this is within one state. So what Ethyl proposes wouldn’t even work here because it’s not even state but county based.

                This isn’t new. I first noticed during COVID that there are two completely different ways of experiencing COVID in Illinois. It’s like we inhabited completely different countries compared to people from Chicago. We didn’t believe each other’s stories because they were so different.

                The problem is that the national story gets told as if it were 100% the story of the Blue America. But it’s not.

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    2. These are people who have been wailing for days about how they just don’t like bullies. I can bring dozens of tweets about them not liking bullies but zero tweets about them condemning these bullies.

      Another talking point collapses.

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      1. If only.

        It’s a pretty sweet magic trick, though, where if you self-identify *as* or even *with* victims, then you are incapable of bullying and you can do whatever the hell you want and still not be a bully.

        -ethyl

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      2. Note: I would love to see footage of how the metal burn barrels are getting to the “protest” locations. That and frozen water bottles seem to be this year’s version of pallets of bricks. Somebody is supplying them: those don’t just grow out of the pavement.

        -ethyl

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  4. Speaking of all this nonsense. I saw a podcast video last night of an independent journalist, (it might have been that nick sorter fellow) that was done last Friday night I think in Minneapolis Minnesota.

    What was worth mentioning about this wasn’t the stalkers or those demanding to know where his car was, nor even those calling him a fascist and shouting for him to leave.

    No what’s worth mentioning is the 911 calls he made. He had security with him which is likely the only reason he left walking rather than feet first. He was in downtown and called 911 to have an officer dispatched to help his party escape the mob.

    There was two or three calls made. The first asked if he was a local, then started asking where his car was, and flat out refused to send any officers. When he asked why, she hung the phone up on him.

    The second call went roughly the same way with it being hung up again. Non of them were willing to dispatch the police, to the middle of downtown one of the largest cities in the State of Minnesota. Heck they were downright hostile to him just before hanging up.

    Leftist hellholes are called that for a reason. Inside the law does not necessarily get enforced in both directions.

    • – W

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    2. I think he was reporting from the protest, gathering, whatever of that woman who got shot for trying to run the ICE agent over. I should also mention that some of the filth coming from the speaker at the event’s mouth was quite wild.

      If I remember correctly some of the highlights were. We need to start bringing guns to shoot the ICE agents with. and my personal favorite when he stated that with her death she earned the highest badge of honor a white woman could. A Race Traitor. His words by the way. The guy was a loon. She was an idiot and certainly a traitor to America, but she was not a race traitor by the definition of it.

      Anyway like I said there was a bunch of really wild stuff spewed out in that whatever it was. Up to and including chanting protests in Spanish, which the pod-caster did mention was odd seeing as this was MN and its overrun with Somalis, not Mexicans.

      • – W

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      1. Not in my state. But there’s that background anxiety: are we one governor election away from this? This could’ve been us, if they had frauded the DeSantis/Gillum election *just* a little bit more. Patronis might be able to keep us on track, but IMO he probably has even less “screen appeal” than Ron.

        -ethyl

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        1. We are all very close to being surrounded by this chaos. Watching this absolute disgrace unfold is disturbing. People coming out to beat their fellow citizens with the noble goal of keeping Tren de Aragua gangsters in the country. You can’t make it up.

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            1. Mostly OT, but speaking of police, my 80yo dad showed up for his court date for the dumbest of dumb traffic- stop arrests, no lawyer, plead not guilty, and… the judge dismissed the case. Because it was dumb, and none of the three cops involved bothered to show up for the hearing.

              And that’s the sane way to deal with dumb police interactions when you think the police are wrong: not resisting arrest or fleeing the scene.

              -ethyl

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  6. OT: this one’s eye-rollingly funny:

    https://x.com/axios/status/2009653817487270188

    “China’s crackdown”

    Why? Why did China crack down?

    (crickets)

    Can’t possibly attribute good news to the actual cause of the good news (WH policy changes). Too hard to say it. It’s gotta be China, all by itself, out of the goodness of its mercenary heart.

    Waiting for the “but Venezuela isn’t even where most of the drugs are coming from anyway” folks to chime in…

    (ok, but VEN isn’t the only place action is happening)

    Nice that ODs are going down. That seems like a win.

    -ethyl

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    1. Waiting for the “but Venezuela isn’t even where most of the drugs are coming from anyway” folks to chime in…

      This makes no sense. Why would those folks need to chime in on this completely unrelated piece of news?

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  7. Speaking of ICE, has the administration tried focusing on meat processing plants, farms, and construction sites first starting in friendly red states, not going door to door in hostile blue states? No? Oh well.

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    1. Yes.

      They have been regularly raiding construction sites and landscaping businesses in my state all along. It doesn’t get any press because there are no protests.

      Within the last couple months, in my town, they raided a lanscaper and arrested 35 people, and a popular taco joint shut down for a while, so the owner could deal with his mom’s visa problems. I’ve seen several reports and videos from elsewhere in the state where ICE conducted roundups at construction sites and Lowes locations, and also whiny contractors b****ing on social media about how ICE was taking all their employees (that they were paying cash under the table below minimum wage) and “no Americans want these jobs” (for 6 bucks an hour).

      Plus, my mother reports that at least three rental houses in her neighborhood that used to have six trucks parked on the front yard, are now vacant. I’ve seen a couple of such houses from my old neighborhood here come up on the MLS listings for sale recently (the interiors are trashed, and they are cash-only sales).

      The big difference is, in my state ICE has the full cooperation of local law enforcement, and we don’t tolerate idjits blocking traffic, doing property damage, or interfering with law enforcement in the execution of their lawful duties (HALO law).

      You not hearing about it, is not the same as “it’s not happening”.

      -ethyl

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