By Caitlin Johnstone
August 09, 2021"Information
Clearing House" -
You hardly ever hear about Russiagate anymore.
The last time it made a blip in the radar was when
disgraced Collusion author Luke Harding
published a
very thinly-sourced story in The Guardian
claiming to have proof that Donald Trump was a
Kremlin asset, but other mass media outlets
barely touched it and it vanished as quickly as
it came.
Looking at mainstream news outlets in 2021, you’d
hardly know they’d recently spent years hammering
the story into public consciousness that Vladimir
Putin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US
government, day after day after day after day after
day.
But they did. Vast fortunes were raked in off the
public interest generated by click-friendly stories
about the latest BOMBSHELL revelation involving some
peripheral member of Trump’s associates perhaps
maybe having some kind of contact with a Russian
national at some point. Entire careers were built on
this.
Then the Mueller investigation invalidated the
entire claim by
failing to indict a single American for
conspiring with the Russian government, and the mass
media who’d spent the previous few years bashing
everyone in the face with that story just kind of
slowly sidled away from it.
And now they act like it never happened.
Now I’m going to ask you to put yourself in the
shoes of someone you might not normally be inclined
to.
Imagine you’re someone on the political right
watching this whole thing unfold. Imagine that from
late 2016 to mid-2019 you were watching the mass
media aggressively shove this story down everyone’s
throat that a US president, whom you support, is
secretly working for a hostile foreign government
with the goal of subverting the United States of
America. The media you consume have been
highlighting all the
massive, glaring plot holes in this narrative
the entire time, so you know it’s not true, yet
you’ve still got friends, coworkers and family
members who believe it is.
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Can you imagine how disgusted you’d get with the
media watching this happen day after day? How
outraged? How resentful? If you’re really putting
yourself there, I think you probably can.
Now imagine a year later these exact same media
institutions start telling you there’s a novel
coronavirus which we’re all going to have to
sacrifice some personal liberties in order to stop.
We might have to stay in our homes, wear a mask, get
injected with new drugs we’re not sure about,
possibly while watching our bank account drain and
our business go under, and all these media
institutions you just watched lie to everyone’s face
for years on end are aggressively saying
you need to do this and support this or you’re a
dangerous monster whose voice should be
banned from social media.
How well do you imagine that would go over with
you
And yet now we’re seeing
article after
article after
article and
news segment after
news segment after
news segment from these very same institutions
freaking out about “the unvaccinated”, a new label
for a new category of human we’re all meant to have
very strong opinions about. The very media
institutions which actively cultivated the distrust
of these populations are now whipping up public
outrage at the people they alienated.
And of course it’s not just right-wingers; people
of color across the political spectrum have
relatively low vaccination rates as well. What
do those groups have in common? Distrust for
institutions which in their experience have an
extensive history of being untrustworthy. People
on the left who saw through the Russiagate madness
would be skeptical as well.
The sane way to counteract the public distrust
that’s been caused by generations of lies, wars and
depravity would be a tremendous increase in
transparency, accountability and contrition on the
part of those institutions, showing the public that
they have changed and are working to become more
trustworthy. So naturally what we are seeing is
vaccine mandates in New York City, pundits
calling for forced injections, and
soldiers policing the streets of Sydney.
The way people are acting like trust in
media-sanctioned narratives should be a given after
those institutions literally just
discredited themselves in front of everyone is
insane. You don’t have to believe anything odd about
the virus or the vaccine to understand the distrust.
It was entirely predictable that this trust crisis
would occur, and surely there were people in
positions of influence who did predict it.
And now this entirely predictable thing is being
used to ban people from social media, justify
vaccine passports, etc. I find that immoral.
I don’t know what’s going on with this virus; my
brain just
doesn’t work in a way that lends itself to
science. One of the most annoying things about the
indie media scene in the age of Covid has been
gaining an audience because I’m good at logic and
writing and then being told by lots of people “Oh
you’re good at writing? Cool. Now you have to be
good at science or I hate you.” People expect me to
either understand things I don’t understand or
pretend that I do, and maybe that’s good enough for
them but
it isn’t for me.
What I do know is that things are getting
increasingly ugly and authoritarian as global
capitalism looks more and more like the end of a
Monopoly game, and that media institutions have no
business complaining that people don’t trust them
after spending years actively alienating their
trust. The sooner humanity
wakes up from its unwholesome relationship with
mental narrative, the better.
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com
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