Noam Chomsky on the Power of Propaganda

Noam Chomsky:

We should not underestimate the capacity of well-run propaganda systems to drive people to irrational, murderous, and suicidal behavior. Take an example … World War I … on both sides, the soldiers marched off to mutual slaughter with enormous exuberance, fortified by the cheers of the intellectual classes and those who they helped mobilize across the political spectrum, from left to right including the most powerful left political force in the world, in Germany. Exceptions are so few that we can practically list them, and some of the most prominent among them ended up in jail for questioning the nobility of the enterprise: among them Rosa Luxemburg, Bertrand Russell, and Eugene Debs. With the help of Wilson’s propaganda agencies and the enthusiastic support of liberal intellectuals, a pacifist country was turned in a few months into raving anti-German hysterics, ready to take revenge on those who had perpetrated savage crimes, many of them invented by the British Ministry of Information. But that’s by no means inevitable, and we should not underestimate the civilizing effects of the popular struggles of recent years. We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe merely because those are the marching orders.

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Why Racism is Complicated

This is an excerpt from a spirited and insightful conversation involving Jordan Peterson and John McWhorter. Why embrace Woke racism? Why claim that it is virtually impossible for modern day "black" people to achieve parity with "whites" while ignoring the many modern day successes of "blacks"? This tactic is essentially a convoluted cop-out. Doing the real work to, for example, raise test scores in distressed schools would require a lot of work. Merely declaring "systemic racism" (without doing anything to help people who are struggling) is easy and gets one robust rounds of applause from the like-minded.

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New Mashup by Matt Orfalea: The Lies of Nicolle Wallace Presented as Journalism

NBC's Nicolle Wallace keeps proudly getting the facts wrong, over and over. She still has a job at NBC.

Glenn Greenwald comments at his new article: "The Typhoid Mary of Disinformation": Nicolle Wallace. Nobody Spreads it More Relentlessly.From her days as Bush/Cheney propagandist, to her stint on The View, to her role as beloved-by-Democrats MSNBC host, Wallace has perfected the art of sociopathic lying.":

She has an unsurpassed ability to broadcast to audiences outright lies whispered to her by Deep State operatives — one after the next — without flinching or betraying the slightest sense of a conscience or moral compass. She lies like only a sociopath can: exuding charm and warmth yet utterly vacant on the inside, except for a soul festering in rot. Over the last twenty years — from her perches at the White House, on The View, and now at MSNBC — nobody has made liberals eat up Pentagon and neocon war propaganda more eagerly and uncritically than Nicolle Wallace. There is literally not a single liberal/CIA disinformation campaign over the last six years that she did not fully and uncritically embrace.

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