I wasn’t always a conspiracy theorist…

Not so long ago I believed I had the world pretty well figured out. Through both education and personal interest I had acquired what I believed to be a pretty good picture about how the world worked. I understood business, and economics. I avidly followed politics and I kept track of world events. I considered myself lucky to live in a country where both Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press were guaranteed and protected by our founding document, and because of that I had great faith in the reliability of the information I was receiving from the various news, opinion, political and economic sources that I consumed on a daily basis.

My faith our system of information and governance did not crash overnight. It was a death of a thousand cuts.

I never quite believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy. Nor did I think the Vietnam war was fought to stop communism, or that that Clinton NAFTA agreement was going to create more American jobs. But you live through enough of life and you get inured to a certain amount political spin and and even outright lies.

Then came 9/11.

I had no thought that this was anything other than the terrorist attack that it appeared to be. I even grudgingly supported then President Bush when he stood on the rubble pile and promised to bring justice to whomever was responsible. But then Bush started talking about invading Iraq. Oh, sure, he was putting troops in Afghanistan – where Osama bin Laden was – but it was clear, though incomprehensible, from the outset that invading Iraq was a priority. First Bush tried to sell the idea that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had links to Al Qaeda – but that turned out to be a lie. So they shifted to a mishmash of other Iraqi sins; human rights violations, support of global terrorism, before finally settling on the ultimate lie: WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.

Today, we know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But nowhere do we hear anyone in the press demanding to know the true reason our government must have had for sending U.S. troops to invade a sovereign country, costing thousands of American lives and murdering millions of Iraqis. Nor have we seen the media petition Congress or the Justice Department asking for Bush, Powell, Rice or Rumsfeld to be “brought to justice” for lying to the American people.

So what happened…? Why did our stalwart Free Press fail to call for justice for the perpetrators of this war of aggression? Did they just drop the ball on this one? Did they think these questions were unimportant, or not of interest to us…? Obviously, neither of these excuses make any sense in explaining what was a media-wide failure to uphold their duty to inform and advocate for the American people.

The fact is, there is only one thing that explains this systemic failure… censorship. 

For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn’t matter if the media was censored by the government or by it’s corporate owners. The only essential point is that, for whatever reason, the media stood-down and we were willfully kept in the dark and not told the true reasons behind our military’s invasion and occupation of another sovereign state.

And the sad truth for we Americans is that we do not have a Free Press and we are not nearly as well-informed as we think we are.

Truth is, we are misinformed and fed lies so that we don’t get our panties in a bunch and start interfering with nefarious actions of our government – actions which we would certainly oppose, if we knew the true goals and motivations behind them.

So what should we have learned from this experience…? At the very least we should recognize that that our Government thinks nothing about deceiving us. We don’t know: was Bush getting even with Saddam Hussein for trying to kill his father? Was he really trying to plant the seed of Democracy in the middle east…? (That went well.) Was it really just an excuse to build permanent military bases in the region, or maybe just a takedown of an oil-rich dictator who had the audacity to challenge our world-dominating petrodollar system…? We will likely never know.

So while you sit there believing – as I once did – that you know what’s going on… I’ve got a question for you:

If the government is not telling the truth, and the media is not telling the truth… then what can you really know about anything?

Back in the days of the cold war, the official newspaper of the Soviet Union was called Pravda. Whenever Pravda put out a news story everyone knew that this was pure propaganda and meant to enhance the image and promote the agenda of the Communist Party. So when Pravda published stellar reviews about the Soviet economy or raved about military successes – even the Soviet people knew this was utter bullshit. 

But here’s the shocking truth… the Soviet people, living under strict censorship, were in a better position than Americans are today.

You see, the Soviets at least knew they were being fed lies and propaganda. They were under no illusions about having a Free Press, and therefore took everything their media told them with at least a grain of salt – and probably a shot of vodka.

Americans today are not so fortunate. Unlike the Soviets, have been programmed to believe that if the media or the government says something… then it must be the truth. We naively persist in believing in the integrity of the information we receive, despite the preponderance of evidence that it’s full of lies and disinformation.

And this predisposition to believe has made us especially susceptible to their propaganda, manipulation and mind control. Propagandists understand the power of this his reflexive tendency to believe first and ask questions later – and they use against us. They know that once someone comes to believe something, that belief is often very hard to unseat… or, as Mark Twain said, “It’s much easier to bamboozle someone, than to convince them they’ve been bamboozled”.

 So whenever they seek to manipulate or deceive us they come out first with the big lies… the bigger the better:

– Kennedy was shot by a lone gunman.

– Three steel-framed World Trade Center buildings collapsed due to fire.

– Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

– Assad used chemical weapons on his own people.

– Putin invaded the Ukraine / Russians shot down a commercial jet plane.

– Free Trade Agreements are good for Americans

They don’t worry about being having their lies being exposed or the truth coming out at a later date, because know that lies go on the front pages of newspapers and corrections appear in the back… if they appear at all. And anyway, they know that ultimately… we won’t care! That we’ve been so hyper-stimulated by their fear mongering, endlessly distracted by their 24 hour news cycles, dumbed down and stupefied by electronic media and pharmaceuticals that we’ve lost the ability to focus and remain engaged with any issue… they know that once their associates in the media have moved on to the next story and the next crisis… so will we.

For the past several years, I have had to come to grips with the notion that I have been bamboozled. This is not a fun process. It has meant that I had to accept that I have been played for a fool, naively trusting a system that has been intentionally deceiving me. I’ve had to face the uncomfortable truth that the American ideals which I once believed were the unshakeable foundation of this great free and open society, are in reality little more than opiates used by our ruling class to sedate us and blind us to their true tyrannical and fascistic agendas.

Universal surveillance; endless wars; drone strikes; torture; invasion; the police state; globalization; privatization; international trade agreements; off-shoring of jobs; off-shoring of tax revenues; quantitative easing; too-big-to-fail banking; corporate bail-outs & subsidies; rigged & unregulated financial markets; forced vaccinations; common core education; student-debt enslavement… are these the actions of a government dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Or are these instead the actions of a pernicious ruling class – a closed community of corporate bigwigs, financial titans, military & security chiefs and political henchmen – all bonded together in an exclusive club dedicated to getting more privilege and power for themselves… and taking everything they can from us.

And now, this same system – this same collaboration of corporations, media and billionaires – is once again giving us the opportunity to select who will be their front-desk manager for the next four years… I believe the fix is in for Hillary. I’m convinced she made that deal when she bowed-out of the 2008 campaign and that  now, the collection of mutant candidates on the Republican side has been specifically designed to hand the 2016 Presidential election to her. 

Far fetched you say?

Maybe… but then again, as a conspiracy theorist I’m always looking to protect myself against the the tricks they use to control the way I think and manipulate my behavior…

You’re just probably not quite there yet.