Just Following Orders: How Media Creates Conformity

Polarization leads people to side with authority

Jan 28, 2024

∙ Paid

Media pushing polarisation is a feature not a bug of unified governance
Television bias and slant sows the outrage that creates opposition
When pushed to extremes, people cling to the power vertical or horizontal norms
Could polarisation’s bedfellow, populism, be manipulated too?
Social unity of the Cold War crumbled as the wealth gap widened
Aim is to distract people from income inequality, shared class and culture
Filter bubble creates ‘extreme' cohorts and provides the ‘enemy’
Manipulates behaviour, ‘othering’ half the population
Paradoxically polarisation opens door to globalist communitarians

(2,900 words or 14 minutes of your company)

Orchestrated opposition in London, UK, Nov 2023. Credit: Jeff Gilbert

Jan 28, 2024

Television viewers are triggered by candidates who are not to their taste. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow told viewers that the channel would not air “lies” and censored Donald Trump’s speech after his landslide win in the Iowa caucuses on Jan 16.

CNN host Michael Smerconish said it was the wrong decision, then ran into his own cancel crisis when he lined up Arizona’s former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr..

A tantalizing discussion? Viewers thought different.

“I turned the show off at 9:32 a.m. EST today right after [Kennedy] and before [Lake], two liars who should not be given a platform to spread more lies. I get that you want to be fair and balanced, but you’ve gone too far.” [1]

We hear words like bias — when a writer or interviewer tries to sway a discussion; or excludes a perspective — but this is different. Audiences take offence and political technologists capitalise by providing safe spaces, offering up guests with identical views to their own.

At the World Economic Forum talking shop this month, polarization and trust were the buzzwords. This spectre, real or faux, derives from the same who condemn it.

See Germany May Ban Opposition Party - Globalists desperate as their narrative Babel breaks down (Jan 21, 2024)

The self-described “elites” admit they are not listening to the people, leading to the rise of “populism.” They concede that representation as we knew it, from local government, up through school boards and parish councils, to metropolitan executives, to the state and federal legislatures, is on life support.

Like dead-eyed doctors touting needles and tubes of Midazolam and Remdesivir, the hired thugs of plutocracy are intent on finishing off the patient, with a smirk of phony concern.

This is no partisan point scoring because this syndicate is above party politics. The rules of disorder are shared among insiders.

The “cascading crises of our era,” to quote Joe Biden’s inauguration speech, are choreographed so that the sheepdogs of the surveillance state can corral the people into a pen — different pens, and that is the point of polarisation.

Narrative replaces ideology

Are people genuinely triggered, in general, by a different opinion on the political spectrum? Is it a question of ideology — are the descendants of a Christian Socialist confronting an aristocratic liberal or Whig or a Tory (if there is such a thing nowadays) — or is this a clash of narratives or identities?

Political commentators and technologists speak of polarisation. Statista compiles a ranking of countries by degree of division. [2]

By this they mean the rise of populism, which in turn is poorly defined; sometimes taken to be the perception that the rich are getting richer and do not care about ordinary people.

Why should technologists draw attention to this divide unless they seek to exploit it? By polarisation they keep people in silos: disconnected belief systems in which people can never unite.

Once upon a time the bulk of people enjoyed a fairly common standard of living. The economic gradations were smoother, and most of our experience was shared. Paradoxically, those fine gradations allowed politicians to slice and dice us into economic classes: a little bit richer; a little bit poorer: manual workers, skilled machine operators, trades unionists, the professions, urban dwellers or country folk. A plethora of parties appealed to social distinctions that could be geographical, socially conservative, religious, professional etc.

Populism manipulated, too?

The gap between rich and poor has widened, however, and the powers that be (TPTB) do not want us focusing on wealth disparities or to recognise class conflict.

They do not want another Huey Long, a genuine Democratic Leftist who, according to the Dems’ own political pretensions, puts today's war party to shame.

Long has been smeared as a demagogue, even a national socialist. His “Share The Wealth” movement went after the very richest and proposed there should be no income tax until someone earned one million dollars a year (equivalent to $12 million today). He understood in 1935 the consequences of the huge concentration of wealth.

He forecast his death from the floor of the Senate; he talked about the Roosevelt administration and powerful forces plotting to kill him. He was shot a month later. His injuries were not fatal but he died from medical mistakes by a team that included a doctor who declared he despised Long.

As with Martin Luther King, the movement fell apart after his death because it was so closely associated with one charismatic individual.

Today we are presented with a populism that is not as raw as Long’s nor as nuanced as King’s, and we are subject to greater mediation and manipulation. Comedian and political commentator Roseanne Barr perceives Trump as an old school socialist whose mission, she says, was to destroy the Republican and Democratic parties and open the door to globalist socialism disguised as populism. Recall that for most of his life Trump identified as a Democrat.

No one on the podcast, which included James Corbett, responded to what was the illuminating insight of the discussion (at 53 minutes). [3]

While the media shrieks about populism, it has so far been tamed and channeled in a direction that suits the powers that be, the syndicate and their uniparty.

Regarding Covid and the response, if it was a military operation in line with NSSM-200, aka the Kissinger Report on depopulation — for which researchers Sasha Latypova, Katherine Watt and David Martin make a persuasive case — then we can see that Trump faced Hobson’s choice.

Although he was commander in chief and able to overrule the military, this assumes he was fully informed — which is unlikely since much of the bureaucracy was uncooperative and undermined his administration at every step. The alternative was to trust the assurances of the intergovernmental institutions that the pandemic was genuine and the shot, safe and effective. In both cases, he ended up doing the globalists’ bidding.

TV bias creates opposition

This takes us to the wars: Ukraine, Israel, and perhaps more broadly in West and East Asia.

It seems we have a military government, does it not? In fact, all wars are bankers' wars, and they have to disguise that.

So they need to allow some opposition to carry the “other side’s flag” even as they condemn them in faux indignation.

We saw this in Britain at the beginning of the attacks in Gaza as then interior minister Suella Braverman incited British nationalists to stage a counter demonstration against those in solidarity with Palestine.

One of these nationalists, Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) dutifully presided over the commencement of the counter protest before hailing a taxi and sailing away, possibly to a late breakfast and debrief at Claridge's.

The more biased the media the better. The BBC’s own staff have protested at its one-sided reporting in favour of Israel. [4]

Combined with social media, which does nothing to hide images of dismembered babies in Gaza, politicians know this inflammatory one-sidedness will provoke a reaction and increase the scale of opposition. It borrows from old time religion: the routine of call and response between speaker and audience.

Another example: BBC and Sky News brazenly failed to carry live coverage of South Africa’s lawyers accusing Israel of genocide on Jan 11, yet televised in full the next day’s Israeli response. Having worked as a television newsroom journalist for both, I can assure you this was no accident; it was more provocation.

This strategy of exciting the populace to “pick a side” is another level of polarisation and the silo technique.

The king-financing business

Why the need to create bogeymen and opposition? At root the target is not the people but governments, more specifically the national treasury, manipulated by the military corporate financial complex.

In order to create the need for wars, lend money, and then ensure that governments repay and do not default, bankers lend money to both sides in a conflict, as they did in the last two world wars.

“If the ruler gets out of line, the banker can finance his enemy or his rival. Therefore if you want to stay in the lucrative financing business of kings and governments it is wise to have an enemy or rival waiting in the wings to unseat every king or every president to which you lend money. If the king does not have an enemy, you've got to be able to create one.”

Few have explained this more accurately or eloquently than Louis Farrakhan in what he calls “the king-financing business.” [5]

Filter bubble

You may encounter online a rather narrow range of opinions, when even a direct search yields limited results. This hampers the use of Twitter or social media as a research tool (though they are still better than the censored search engines like Google).

The same happens on the other side of the fence: the writer or commentator finds it harder to reach an audience or to receive feedback (Please sign up so that you don’t miss the next instalment of this newsletter).

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