Below is an excerpt from my latest Federalist piece: “America’s Post-Charlottesville Nervous Breakdown was Deliberately Induced.” I hope you’ll have a chance to read it in full.
"Wars are won or lost based mostly on perceptions of events, not on what actually happens. This is true for any given battlefield, whether it’s the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam or the ideological battlefield over the future of the First Amendment as played out in Charlottesville in 2017. The reality of what takes place in the public arena is always secondary to any projected illusion.So let’s never forget this: Whoever has the power to dictate public perceptions of reality is in a position to dictate public opinion and behavior. Abusing language and images to stir up emotions is an ancient trick of power-mongers. And once journalism turns into unchecked propaganda , we become trapped in its dangerous illusions."
The social turmoil we are witnessing today has largely been manufactured through the combination of three elements: 1. the manipulation of our language; 2. the deliberate use of such loaded language to cultivate extreme emotions in people, particularly anger and resentment; and 3. the role of mass media as a nuclear device to impose those perceptions on a mass scale.
Here's another interesting sidelight to consider. Public Relations firms such as Crowds on Demand provide actors for protests and rallies and run ads on Craigslist to recruit and pay for that purpose. So it's very easy to create illusions of riots if you can rent a mob for it. The blog Gates of Vienna ran an interview recently with an eyewitness who was in Charlottesville on the day of the riots and reports that protesters from both sides -- attired both in "counter-protester" clothing such as Antifa or BLM shirts AND neo-Nazi/KKK shirts -- were dropped off from the same bus. And this happened with a line of chartered buses, both sides apparently sharing the same vehicles. The story is here: "All the World's a Stage." Whether or not you believe this, the fact that politicized officials ordered police to stand down lends credence to the scenario of a staged riot.
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