April 23, 2024

Mythmaking: On the Edge of Reality

How we just keep fighting the battles of the 1960s over and over again.

The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Earlier today, I was driving back with my 13-year old son from his regional karate tournament1 when he deemed it was important to share with me that in 2023 Taylor Swift flew over 170,000 miles2, which, according to the Insta post he was reading, is many times the carbon footprint of an average American. I am sure that the entirety of the statement is correct and factual. I am sure that as part of her Eras tour, Taylor flew a ton of bloody miles last year and that once you’ve added it all, of course it’s multitudes above the footprint of an average person.

Therein is the rub, so to speak: take a kernel or two of truth and frame it to serve your specific narrative. That’s not even Mythmaking 202, this is Introduction to Propaganda 101, and if life was a learning institution, we, as a society, are dreadfully failing.

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The utter and complete meltdown among the MAGA at the mere mention of Taylor reached the apogee around the Super Bowl, leading to a campaign of politization and smear tactics against the artist. The “she does not care about environment” was just another turd thrown against the proverbial wall, with the hope that something will eventually stick. Never mind that for thousands of people enslaved to the corporate overlords, flying a couple hundred thousand miles a year is par for the course.

I am not trying to defend or justify the culture of commercialization and idolatry that creates the necessity for both kinds of servitude, for make no mistake, while she is famous and rich, Taylor is as much a cog in the machine, a brick in the wall, as practically every person reading this.

My son was surprised at my perspective on a fairly innocent post pointing out that even well-intended people, quite often say or do things that they should be criticized for. Except that we live in a world of mythmaking and 24/7/365 propaganda that almost literally sips through every crevice of our collective consciousness. There’s no way for me to know whether the kid who posted that tidbit about Taylor Swift is knowingly taking a part in the comprehensive smear campaign against the singer and generally contributing to destabilizing the very notion of information and fact or whether he is simply another unwitting tool in the spread of falsehoods and undermining of what we think and know of history and reality.

When I say “idolatry,” I am not speaking in strictly religious terms, rather the now ingrained societal need to exploit celebrities as role models, regardless of their qualifications or consent. We see and experience this idolatry so often that we have grown almost oblivious to every permutation of it insidiously metastasis deeply interwoven within the public discourse. From branding to politicization to outright celebrity worship via the artificial and pretentious reality shows to.. well, we practically lived through 4 years of Idiocracy with a celebrity President who also happens to be a fascist.

"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow." Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Just last week, Aaron Rodgers, the New York Jets starting quarterback, went on a show hosted by a bigoted tinfoil cook, Jason Whitlock3, and basically claimed that Dr. Fauci is not only responsible for the COVID pandemic, but he is also responsible for the covert CIA operation that developed and intentionally released HIV. To say that Rodgers, with all due respect to his professional achievements as a quarterback, is no stranger to controversy, would likely be an understatement of the year.

You could write this off as just another absurd conspiracy theory by a dude famous for picking truly bizarre hills to die on4, if that was all. However, this particular conspiracy theory just happen to be an apt lesson in mythmaking and propaganda development on generational scale to the point that Bene Gesserit’s Missionaria Protectiva simply pales by comparison.

Allow me to digress with a story from a long time ago, when the KGB was still in the prime of their power, unlike their current descendants.

Operation Denver

In July 1983, an editor of pro-Soviet Indian newspaper Patriot5 received an anonymous letter from a "well-known American scientist and anthropologist" who claimed that AIDS was manufactured at Fort Detrick, Maryland, by genetic engineers working for the United States government, specifically the CIA. This "scientist" claimed that "that deadly mysterious disease was believed to be the results of the Pentagon's experiments to develop new and dangerous biological weapons.” The anonymous letter alleged that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientists sent to Africa and Latin America to find dangerous viruses alien to Asia and Europe, with the results of this research analyzed in Atlanta and Fort Detrick and thus the "most likely course of events" leading to the development of AIDS. The letter, also claimed that the Pentagon was continuing such experiments in Pakistan and as a result, the AIDS virus was threatening to spread to India. You can assume that the original intent was to to exacerbate tensions between the U.S., India, and Pakistan.

Not satisfied with the intermediate success of the active measure, in 1985 the KGB decided to leverage the already planted seed to further attempt to discredit the US. On September 7th, 1985, KGB sent a telegram to Bulgarian Committee for State Security (KDS)6:

We are conducting a series of [active] measures in connection with the appearance in recent years in the USA of a new and dangerous disease, "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome – AIDS"…, and its subsequent, large-scale spread to other countries, including those in Western Europe. The goal of these measures is to create a favorable opinion for us abroad that this disease is the result of secret experiments with a new type of biological weapon by the secret services of the USA and the Pentagon that spun out of control.

The telegram, which referred indirectly back to the Patriot article, provided guidance to KDS on how how to couch their AIDS disinformation7:

Facts have already been cited in the press of the developing countries, in particular India, that testify to the involvement of the special services of the United States and the Pentagon in the appearance and rapid spread of the AIDS disease in the United States, as well as other countries. Judging by these reports, along with the interest shown by the U.S. military in the symptoms of AIDS and the rate and geography of its spread, the most likely assumption is that this most dangerous disease is the result of yet another Pentagon experiment with a new type of biological weapon. This is confirmed by the fact that the disease affected initially only certain groups of people: homosexuals, drug addicts, immigrants from Latin America.

In October, Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta8 published an article from Valentin Zapevalov entitled, "Panic in the West, or what is hiding behind the sensation surrounding AIDS". The article cited the disinformation contained in the Patriot article9, but also provided further details on the alleged development of the virus. According to Zapevalov, employees of the CDC had allegedly collaborated with the Pentagon, traveling to Zaire, Nigeria and Latin America to discover samples of the "most pathogenic viruses" that are alien to Europe and Asia.

These samples were then synthesized to develop the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. The disinformation campaign claimed the Pentagon then carried out isolated experiments in Haiti and within the U.S. itself, specifically on the marginalized groups in U.S. society: drug addicts, homosexuals, and the homeless. Zapevalov's article was subsequently reprinted in Kuwait, Bahrain, Finland, Sweden, Peru, reaching 80 countries in over 30 languages in just about 18 months. The article very closely followed the guidelines that the KGB had already sent to KDS.

We know that KGB and KDS were also assisted by the Stasi, unfortunately, the extent of the Stasi involvement will likely remain forever unknown as most of the records of Main Directorate for Reconnaissance (HVA) were lost in 1989-90. KDS, for example, in September 1986, received the following from HVA10:

Operation "DENVER". With the goal of exposing the dangers to mankind arising from the research, production, and use of biological weapons, and also in order to strengthen anti-American sentiments in the world and to spark domestic political controversies in the USA, the GDR side will deliver a scientific study and other materials that prove that AIDS originated in the USA, not in Africa, and that AIDS is a product of the USA’s bioweapons research.

The KGB ultimately confirmed Stasi involvement and even threw a shade at the Czechoslovakian secret services in a telegram to the KDS in 198711:

A complex of [active] measures regarding this issue has been carried out since 1985 in cooperation with the [East] German and to some extent the Czech colleagues. In the initial stage, the task was resolved of spreading in the mass media the version regarding the artificial origin of the AIDS virus and the Pentagon’s involvement in by means of the military-biological laboratory at Fort Detrick. As a result of our joint efforts, it was possible to widely disseminate this version.

The “scientific study” that HVA promised in the communique to the KDS was “AIDS: Its Nature and Origin" by East German biologist Jakob Segal and his wife, Dr. Lilli Segal. The study was first distributed in August and September of 1986 in a brochure entitled, "AIDS: USA home-made evil, NOT out of AFRICA.” To build more credibility, when citesd the Segals were often said to be French. It was true that both fled to France in 1933, but both also attained Soviet citizenship in 1940 on the basis of Jakob's birth in (then Soviet-occupied) Lithuania.

In his report, Segal postulated that the AIDS virus was synthesized by combining parts of two distantly related retroviruses: VISNA and HTLV-112:

It is very easy using genetic technologies to unite two parts of completely independent viruses… but who would be interested in doing this? The military, of course… In 1977 a special top security lab… was set up…at the Pentagon's central biological laboratory. One year after that… the first cases of AIDS occurred in the US, in New York City. How it occurred precisely at this moment and how the virus managed to get out of the secret, hush-hush laboratory is quite easy to understand. Everyone knows that prisoners are used for military experiments in the U.S. They are promised their freedom if they come out of the experiment alive.

Regardless of whether the Segals were pawns in this play, the dissemination of the narrative was along a recognized pattern: propaganda and disinformation would appear in a country publication outside of the USSR, gradually be picked up by Soviet news attributing the story to unbiased investigative journalism from independent sources. To help spread the narrative, Soviet “news” aka propaganda was provided free of charge, at times actually offering with cash benefits. This was particularly true in case of India where the Soviet Union maintained a large propaganda and disinformation apparatus for covert and sometimes active measures.

To explain how AIDS outbreaks in Africa occurred simultaneously, the KGB organized the announcement of a discovery by Soviet correspondent Aleksandr Zhukov, who claimed that in the early 1970s, a Pentagon-controlled West German lab in Zaire "succeeded in modifying the non-lethal Green Monkey virus into the deadly AIDS virus". Radio Moscow also claimed that instead of testing a cholera vaccine, American scientists were actually infecting unwitting Zairians and spreading the virus across the continent.

Claims that the CIA had sent "AIDS-oiled condoms" to other countries sprang up independently in the African press, well after the disinformation operation started. By 1992 roughly 15% of Americans believed that “AIDS virus was created deliberately in a government laboratory13.” In 2005, a study by the RAND Corporation and Oregon State University revealed that “nearly 50% of African Americans thought AIDS was man-made, over 25% believed AIDS was a product of a government laboratory, 12% believed it was created and spread by the CIA, and 15% believed that AIDS was a form of genocide against black people.”

In 1992, Director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Yevgeny Primakov admitted that the KGB was behind the newspaper articles claiming that AIDS was created by the U.S. government. Segal's role was exposed by KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin in the Mitrokhin Archive. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend this series from the New York Times.

It is of course quite sad and very unfortunate that 40 years later a KGB active measures campaign is still bearing fruit amidst the onslaught of dis- and misinformation flooding every possible source of news, education, entertainment, etc. What makes the Insta post that my son recited to me so much worse is that it seems that the only people who have learned any lessons from the history of KGB active measures and the bad actors who are actively decimating propaganda that serves their own terrible purposes but also happen to perfectly align with the goals of the Russian one.

Meet Christopher Rufo, a modern age Goebbels-wannabe who clearly took diligent notes from his KGB comrades and then openly told America his supervillain plan to manipulate and distort the meaning of CRT and DEI to launder his agenda of global christofascism.

What I find so abhorrent is not the fact that the established institutions continue to fall for the same old trick over and over, but rather the repugnant glee with which so many of my friends jumped on the bullshit bandwagon of castigating Ivy League presidents as antisemitic in the service of fascism while calling me out for being a self-hating Jew! “Claudine Gay, Harvard, antisemitism, plagiarism” was a four-week story while "U.S. President ‘losing’ a binder full of top secret intelligence on how Russia helped him win the election” was a 12-hour story!

Rufo said that "[w]e will eventually turn [critical race theory] toxic, as we put all of the 'various cultural insanities' under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something 'crazy' in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory'."

That is the key point about Claudine Gay. Whatever her faults, she was not targeted by well-meaning people. She was part of a larger christofascist assault on prestigious higher education institutions and on years of progress that has been made.

If you knew nothing else, except that Rufo’s plan of attack was perfectly aligned with Elise Stefanik’s, you should have already known that the real antisemites here are the people leveling the accusations, not the people being accused. Stefanik has openly promoted the Great Replacement Theory and attended white nationalist events. By the way, here’s Elise hiding from the Jan6 “hostages” that she calls heroes:

Of course, Rufo very quickly turned Gay's minor academic transgression into proof that she 'climbed the ladder of diversity politics and built a DEI empire.' I see people marveling at the dude's alleged evil genius, but I am sorry if I don’t see anything genius, only evil. Rufo did not invent or create anything, he is simply following the old KGB template of mythmaking.

Now Rufo is taking on NPR:

Rufo’s crusade is not against antisemitism, it is not against plagiarism, his holy war is against diversity, equity, and human rights. It’s the same playbook being played over and over, first it was the “wokeness,” then the Critical Race Theory (CRT), now it’s DEI.

DEI is not the reason why one would presume Black people aren’t qualified. Racism is the reason. And a need to believe a Black person could not possibly do better than you. I know it and you know it, and they know it too.

I need to say this because it doesn’t seem like we as a society really understand this: There’s something deeply wrong with a multiracial society that is proudly and loudly opposing and shuttering offices working towards equity and diversity. There is an explicit attempt to normalize anti-blackness (along with antisemitism, islamophobia, xenophobia, etc.). I have a tortured personal history with DEI, having personally seen the dire need for the programs and especially the education provided but also being completely deflated by the cavalier and too often window dressing approach to DEI across the corporate America.

The fact that so much of the reporting on this is that people like Rufo show how successful the right has been in normalizing a radically regressive agenda that is upsetting what we pretended were societal norms. Granted, there has been little in terms of policy to alleviate racial inequality, rather we’ve seen drastic steps backwards in gutting the VRA, Dobbs, etc. but we at least pretended this was an important goal for us as a society. Four years after George Floyd murder, we are rapidly devolving, “we’ve gone from woke to asleep” even though the statistics tell us otherwise.

The backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion frequently frames DEI initiatives as tantamount to anti-white indoctrination. Donald Trump, for example, said he banned racial sensitivity training from federal agencies back in 2020 because “it’s racist.” DeSantis described diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as “discrimination, indoctrination, and exclusion” back in May 2023 when signing a Florida bill into law banning DEI initiatives from public colleges in the state. And Elon Musk recently wrote, “DEI must DIE. The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination.”

Let’s digress for a minute. The first time we can be sure of the term wokeness or woke being used to signify awareness of the institutionalized racism was in 1860 during Lincoln’s presidential campaign when a youth organization in Hartford Connecticut named itself Wide Awakes. One of the earliest uses of the idea of wokeness as a concept for black political consciousness came from social activist Marcus Garvey, who wrote in 1923, "Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!"

Nearly a century and a half later certain white people began associating it with “oppressive” agendas involving non-white mermaids and transgender athletes. Critical race theory existed for decades until it was redefined as something that made white men uncomfortable. Yet, the same fascists who oppose education reform and social program funding also claim college admission policies that address these inequities are “woke.” The current whitelash against DEI policies in the airline industry is a perfect example. Faced with a shortage of pilots airlines wondered how they could increase their staffing. A 2022 report notes that 94% of American pilots are white, so the industry smartly decided to look in traditionally overlooked places to address this deficiency. United Airlines even opened a flight school and promised that half of its recruits would be women or people of color.  To be clear, the industry didn’t lower its standards or exclude white men; it just diversified its workforce. Yet, somehow, people interpreted these efforts as an attack on qualified, unemployed white pilots who don’t exist. Candace Owens claims she’d be “terrified” if she got on the plane and saw a woman pilot, while Charlie Kirk said: “I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” 

While neither Charlie Kirk nor Candace Owens have earned a college degree or professional training in any area of expertise, they exemplify the white backlash against diversity. Their baseless assumptions have nothing to do with merit, DEI or leftist policies. The reason why they believe Black or female pilots are less qualified is that they are bigots. Ultimately, the backlash against DEI is no different than any other whitelash that has ever existed. The abolition movement was divisive. Anti-lynching activists were “subversive.” Civil rights activists were Communists. The Black Power Movement was “radical.” Talking about Black history is “Marxist.” 

With Elon Musk’s Twitter opening the floodgates to the literal nazis and rapid monetization of engagements, we are flooded with a tsunami of bullshit ranging from subtle dog whistles to misinformation to disinformation to outright propaganda where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to filter out the truth. It is a bitter irony that in today’s contempt hearing in NYC, Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche repeatedly used “truth” as a verb to describe Trump’s posts on his own social media platform. Elon, recently, gleefully celebrated the death of the legacy media:

Yet one must sleep in the bed one made. Twitter has seen such proliferation of nazis, that Alex Jones (!!!) was roasted, burned and ratioed for daring to say bad things about Hitler.

Elon fully lost control of the monster he has unleashed and now people like Jones are starting to panic. False flag school shootings and globalist cabals are one thing, but even they know this open embrace of Nazism is toxic to them. But the rank and file is all in. How crazy does it get? I’ve spent a few days digging into vapid and abominable, repugnant and loathsome so that you would not have to. I’ll try to keep the highlights short.

Well, MTG is no stranger to absolutely absurd and bizarre statements. Last week she spent proposing outrageous openly pro-Russia amendments to the military aid bills, going as far as proposing setting aside money, in billions, for the development of space laser technology for the Southern border from the experience of IDF. Yup, literal Jewish Space Lasers!

Some of it, like Hitler-wannabe Miller’s bullshit on Fox is just well, bullshit, there’s absolutely no truth or “truth” to anything Miller said about Trump’s style, quite the opposite in fact. However, that’s precisely the point. Along with the framing facts to push the necessary narrative, you also need to flood the space with so much mis- and dis- information, that people will 1. question everything they see in the news and 2. believe in the most outrageous conspiracy theories.

Here, Sacks, a well known loudmouth for fascist pro-Russian propaganda goes on to outright lie about chemical weapon use by Assad regime and his tweet received 1.4 million views! This freedom to get away with such outright lies enables Sacks to twist independent reporting to continuously push Russian narrative (which is also anti-Biden narrative) about corruption in Ukraine and Zelensky specifically.

Bill Ackman, in all of his deranged glory coming of the plagiarism debacle, joins the chorus by gaslighting a nation suffering from ethnic cleansing.

I mean, following Bill’s logic Germany, Russia and many other countries should never have the right to self-govern. Ironically, Israel would make the list, but Bill is too busy pushing Zionist tropes that lately come to resemble one thing that it should abhor the most, more and more…

Some of it, is weaponized propaganda by the bad actors that Elon happily welcomed back on Twitter. Here is an example of attempted doxing of potential jurors in the Manhattan’s Election Interference criminal trial:

There’s, of course, plenty of incredibly cliche tropes, such as George Soros being a mastermind and the wallet behind, well everything these people are against, which often is somehow communist.

Here’s a good account of how far Elon enables and promotes these campaigns of disinformation:

Then, there’s the Anti-Defamation League, that recently published a report indicating a significant increase in antisemitic incidents last year. Except, most of the increase is directly correlated to the fact that for the first time ever, ADL decide to count “from the river to the sea” as an antisemitic incident. We’ll have to talk about this hypocrisy another time.

If you thought that Aaron Rogers is the only “crazy” anti-vaxxer, meet your future Secretary of Defense (or is it Director of the CIA this week), Kash Patel offering to reverse COVID vaccines!

Then, there is Sam Parker, who “couragesly” ran to be US Senator from the great state of Utah. Part of Sam’s platform was to repeal 16th, 17th, and 19th Amendments. Such a nice guy, right?

Well, here’s how truly nice Sam is:

This phenomenon is not unique to the US. We can look across the Pond, where Nigel Biggar, begs to differ because he is a historian of empire? I am not sure what that is, because that’s not what a historian is or should be.

I am sure you are aware of Mr. Tate. Here’s one of the more tame statements of his:

Then, there is this belief that Europeans are not homo sapiens, rather descents of Neanderthals. It is a fact that on average a white European would have somewhere around 2.5% of the Neanderthal DNA, but….

apparently Darwinism is not a settled scientific theory.

If these people struggle with the history from ions ago, perhaps they have a better grasp of more recent events?

Perhaps not. I mean there’s an actual website that sells stylish loafers that are named after Nazi leaders???

And then there is an entire industry of anonymous Twitter accounts which nominally are promoting “classical art and culture” and “classical education” but in fact are white supremacy propaganda. Yes, I, too, was shocked.

The point here is that so-called "classical" art and architecture has become for the extreme right and white supremacists a kind of coded language for expressing extremist ideas about race and culture. The subtext in this is that things were best back when societies and cultures were dominated by art and architecture coded by the extreme right as white and European. This places the idea of loss in a much more sinister light, if you hear echoes of the Great Replacement theory, you are not alone.

How have we "lost" these styles?

Well, someone (and their ideologies) have taken them away from us. One doesn't need much imagination to fill in those blanks. Here, the “Culture Critic” summarizes the Nazi state like this:

While I have a degree in history, I did not focus on 20th century or the Holocaust, but even I know that there are some things being left out here...

When these people are challenged, they respond with outright lies. Read that last sentence one more time.

There’s an intense focus on architecture, among these accounts:

This is where the white supremacy comes in because, you see, there is no aesthetic style that is best. The beauty is in the eye of the behold. The problem is when you say "This style is best because...White European."

Of course it is a direct reaction, if you’ve read this far, you know this already.

And while any definition of “classicism” would extend beyond the Western Christian thought, as pointed out correctly in the first screenshot, not everyone is on the same page among these folks.

For example, outside of Twitter, Liberty Christian School in Durham, North Carolina received almost a $1 million in voucher funding. Liberty's primary educational objective is "to bring each student to a saving knowledge and relationship with Jesus Christ." They should not be getting taxpayer funding. This is the classical education they want.

Though of course it absolutely must be in parallel to the “proper education on surving beyond the rule of law:”

With so many sources of information, this is literally a death by a trillion papercuts. However, Russia, would not be what it is, if it did not always have backup plans, contingencies, and failsafes. Clearly that the grassroots campaign around the world is moving full steam ahead, but:

Almost reminds you of the Patriot newspaper in the 80s..

Last week marked five years since the release of the Mueller report. I want to remind everyone of one sentence from the report:

I was reminded of a psychological syndrome that explains what we see today's on the political right. It's the same thing that happened to Nazis. It is common among the ruling class in most authoritarian regimes. Once your acts have gone beyond a certain point of inhumanity, it becomes necessary to keep going lest the realization takes hold that one has become a monster. Each act of depravity demands another that is worse in order to justify the previous one.

That's why there's no bottom.

Once locked into this cycle of self-reinforcing cruelty, the descent cannot be stopped. It ends only in self-immolation or in violent suppression by an outside force. This is true for a single person or for a group. An isolated person, left to him or her self, will spiral into increasingly depraved acts, rationalizing each further perversion as a consequence of the last. Members of a mob or a cult will essentially dare each other to go past any previous limits.

The right has become one of these cults. They're caught in the spiral. The only way for them to deny their guilt is to insist they did nothing wrong, and then to prove it to themselves by doing something worse still.

If left unchecked, there will be extermination camps and rape centers. There will be roving gangs of brownshirts authorized to wreak intentional terror. There will be no courts, but rather summary executions.

All done, of course, in the Name of God.

We've seen this story play out countless times in the history of totalitarianism.

Almost as if that's what we are conditioned to do by the myths we live through and history that keeps repeating itself.
Almost.
As if…