The US government is far more abusive,
destructive and tyrannical than the Chinese
government and Americans are far more
indoctrinated by propaganda than Chinese
people. Americans don’t even know they’re
continually ingesting US empire propaganda
to inform their worldview, and they live
under
the most abusive regime on earth.
There’s this weird propaganda two-step
being performed where westerners are being
told over and over and over again that
Chinese people live in a freakish backwards
mind-controlled dystopia, but somehow we
westerners do not.
❖
“Chinese people live in a
freakish backwards mind-controlled dystopia
where dissenting thought is crushed and
everyone’s brainwashed by propaganda.”
“Oh yeah? How do you know?”
“Come on man, it’s all over the
news all day every day!”
❖
Point 1: It’s bad to be
racist.
Point 2: Being a
warmonger is worse than being a racist.
Neither of these points should be
controversial, and saying them both should
draw no objection whatsoever. But the
entirety of the mainstream synthetic
left — and a substantial percentage of the
authentic socialist left — quietly disagree
with Point #2.
You know this is true because if they
actually agreed with Point #2 no mainstream
western government official would ever be
able to show their face in public, because
all mainstream western government officials
are warmongers. Mainstream media reporters
and pundits would not be able to appear in
polite company, because mainstream media
reporters and pundits are warmongers. Anyone
publicly supporting the western empire and
its foreign policy in any way would be the
main villain on social media for the day,
and would be confronted by angry protesters
wherever they appeared. The New York Times
would become as socially rejected as The
Daily Stormer unless it stopped churning out
war propaganda.
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The entire empire would crumble. That’s
why Point #2, despite being self-evidently
true, is shoved outside the Overton window
of acceptable debate by mass-scale
psychological manipulation. And that’s why
there are people reading this doing all
kinds of mental gymnastics to find a way to
make what I’m saying here wrong. But it is
definitely undeniable and worth pointing out
that warmongering is far more accepted than
racism throughout the synthetic left and
much of the authentic left, when really both
should be rejected with maximum force.
❖
The authentic left opposes the ruling
power structure, opposes imperialism and
opposes economic injustice. The mainstream
synthetic left does everything it can to
build left-wing credibility without opposing
any of those things. It opposes racism,
sexism and discrimination against LGBTQ
people just like the authentic left does,
but whenever there’s an opportunity to
actually act against the interests of the
capitalist imperialists it’s nowhere to be
found.
And it’s important for the authentic left
to be aware of this, not least because it
will often fool itself about its power and
its numbers by conflating the left-wing
issues that are amplified by the mainstream
synthetic left with successes of the
authentic left. It was easy to make the
mistake, for example, of thinking that the
BLM protests of 2020 were a sign of a
surging socialist zeitgeist, or that the
opposition to Trump and January 6 was a sign
of rising anti-fascist sentiments, when
really they were both only getting the
mainstream traction they were getting
because they were supported by the
mainstream synthetic left as well. Members
of the authentic left hitched their wagons
to those impulses in a big way hoping to see
a major authentic shift to the left, but
nothing meaningful actually happened as a
result of them. The traction was coming
almost entirely from the mainstream
synthetic left, who have vastly greater
numbers and vastly louder amplification.
Contrast that with the traction gained by
movements driven solely by the authentic
left without the support of the synthetic
left, and the picture looks far more bleak.
Antiwar rallies with a hundred people.
Communist meetings with a couple dozen
people. The only traction we ever really get
is online, because the internet lets us all
find each other around the world and
network. But it doesn’t translate to
real-world movement.
That’s not our fault of course; a
tremendous amount of effort has gone into
stomping out the authentic left and
diverting all energy to the synthetic left
for generations. But it’s important to be
real about it, because we can’t begin to
address the problem if we don’t understand
it. And we definitely don’t understand it if
we’re mistaking the successes of the
mainstream synthetic left for our own
successes.
❖
Nothing will shatter your dreams of a
broad left-right antiwar coalition faster
than publicly opposing US warmongering
against both Russia and China
simultaneously.
One of the most brilliant innovations of
modern empire propaganda has been splitting
the population into two groups who argue
about WHAT KIND of warmongering should be
supported, rather than IF warmongering
should be supported.
❖
Ten Tips For Empire Critics
Getting Started In Indie Media
I don’t really know how I wound up
gathering a following and making a living
out of railing against the empire every day;
from my point of view it’s been a happy
series of miracles and coincidences combined
with decent work ethic and a burning desire
for a healthy world. So while I don’t really
know how I wound up doing this thing myself,
I have picked up a few tips that might be
useful to someone who wants to try to do
this sort of thing in their own way.
Here then are ten suggestions for empire
critics who are getting started in indie
media, for whatever they’re worth:
1. Put out daily content if
possible. The best way to build an
audience is to become a regular part of
people’s day that they look forward to
enjoying in their spare time. I’ve found it
impossible to get an article out every
single day without fail 365 days a year just
because that’s how life moves, but I do my
best and I get pretty close. This isn’t
possible for investigative journalists and
people who do deep dives or extensively
produced videos, but if you’re doing
commentary, analysis or art or whatever it’s
a real advantage.
2. Be sincere and trustworthy.
People can sense sincerity and insincerity,
and they’ll keep coming back to your
articles, videos or whatever you’re putting
out there if they get the sense that you’re
being sincere and telling the truth as best
you can. Be completely honest and
straightforward about who you are, where
you’re coming from, and what your agendas
are, and trust people to sort out for
themselves whether you’re their cup of tea
rather than trying to manipulate them into
liking you by misrepresenting yourself.
They’ll be able to tell.
3. Always be learning, and always
be getting better at learning. Make
sure you’re taking in more information than
you’re putting out, and always work to find
new sources of information. By taking in as
much high-quality information as you can and
forming an understanding of it, you can then
simplify it and explain how it all fits in
to the bigger picture for your audience in a
way that they can easily understand.
4. Be courageous and kind with
yourself about learning on the job.
Don’t expect to get everything perfect right
away. Understanding and talking about power
structures and systemic abuses is a skill
just like any other, and you’ll necessarily
be worse at it when you start out than you
will be a few years on. You will make
mistakes, but as long as you course correct
then no mistake is fatal. Looking back on
some of the stuff I said in my first year at
this gig is a bit embarrassing, but I kept
at it and got much better. I didn’t walk
very well when I was first learning that
skill either.
5. Listen to feedback, but don’t
be driven by it. Everyone’s going
to have an opinion about your content, and a
lot of them are going to be 100% certain
that you should listen to their opinion and
no one else’s and can’t understand why you
don’t view them as the sole authority in
your world. I learn more from random
people’s comments on my stuff than I do from
any authorized opinion-havers of mainstream
punditry, but I also refuse to say anything
I don’t personally see as true from my own
education and understanding. Let feedback
provide you with information and
perspective, but don’t let it shape your
work. Your work should be driven solely by
what you sincerely understand to be true and
nothing else; the job of feedback is to help
you build on your own understanding, not to
supplant it.
6. Check against your biases.
Find out if things are really true
by deeply researching opposing perspectives
on them; don’t just accept the narrative
that confirms your worldview and feels good
in your feely bits, find out if the people
whose worldview it goes against have
produced any compelling evidence or
arguments against it. There are certain
things I would love to be true just because
of my conditioning and the way I’m wired,
but sometimes it turns out that the facts
don’t support it. Our cognitive biases will
always place a filter over our understanding
of the world to some extent, but if we bring
our awareness to them and stay real honest
with ourselves about them we can minimize
the wobble they put on our perspective. Plus
being aware of the facts and arguments which
go against your biases strengthen your own
arguments, because you know which arguments
can be easily dismantled and which the
opposing perspective doesn’t have any real
answers for.
7. Don’t cloister yourself in an
information echo chamber. It’s
extremely common for indie media to get lost
in these weird self-validating information
feedback loops where things are believed to
be true solely because everyone who’s always
furiously agreeing with each other about
everything has agreed that it’s true. You
need to always be gathering information from
a bunch of diverse circles and a bunch of
different ideologies to avoid this sort of
brain poison, including circles and
ideologies you disagree with. Don’t
knee-jerk unfollow someone simply because
you disagree on their current position on
the debate du jour. You will disagree with
everyone at times. That’s normal. Keep your
information stream as diverse as possible.
8. Be very cautious about who you
collaborate with. It’s fine and
good to have co-collaborators (mine’s my
husband), but be unapologetically limited
and exclusive about it. Once you show up as
an exciting new voice you’ll get activists
and other indie media people trying to bring
you into their thing and get you on board
with their agendas and use your energy to
power their projects, and it can get really
messy. The attention can be flattering at
first, but it very quickly takes on a life
of its own, and all of a sudden your voice
isn’t your own and isn’t being used in the
ways you sincerely feel called to use it.
These days I avoid group chats like the
plague and resist getting sucked into
cliques and factions of all sorts, just
because I’ve found even that much can create
peer pressure to speak in ways that don’t
feel aligned with my inner guidance, and I
don’t like it.
9. Meditate/do inner work.
I can’t understand how anyone can do this
work without a discipline dedicated to
bringing inner stability and a practice of
discovering inner truth. Having people
scream at you all day online while examining
the darkest things happening in our world
today will burn you out and put a massive
wobble on your work unless you can create
some psychological spaciousness around it
somehow, and inner exploration turns up all
kinds of insights on the problems in our
world that you can use in your work.
10. Remember that nothing is
personal. Your critics are never
commenting on you as a person, they’re
commenting on their own inner conditioning
that shapes their understanding of what
you’re saying and their response to it.
We’re all just lost little kids interfacing
with a very complex and highly manipulated
world using brains that were designed to
avoid prehistoric predators and find grubs
to eat. Don’t take it too seriously.
_____________
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here are some options where
you can toss some money into my tip jar if
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you an email notification for everything I
publish. All works co-authored with my
husband Tim Foley.