This great article in American Greatness can help average Americans start taking their freedom back

March 19, 2021 | Bureaucracy, Community, Culture, Education, Freedom of Association, Identity Politics, Isolation, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Society, Uncategorized

“Until Lambs Become Lions” is a fantastic article in the online magazine American Greatness. It is one of many excellent reads out there, but for most people such reads are not so easy to find. Because of growing media and tech censorship — and extreme bias — we face more roadblocks to finding real information. We are inundated with propaganda that’s growing more vicious by the minute.

Nevertheless, if you look carefully, you can find many insightful essays online that expose readers to the truth and cut through the confusion of identity politics and cancel culture during these insane times. This is just one of them.

I am sharing this particular essay by a retired marine officer, Max Morton, because he gives everyone the big picture. With clarity. His essay is a 30,000-foot view of where we are as a nation as well as where we need to be headed if America is ever going to win back its hard-won freedoms. It provides average Americans a good start for understanding what’s at stake and what we can do about it. And it goes beyond both hope and despair. Morton describes our current landscape in about 2000 words and five salient subtitles: What we are facing; How did we get here? Developing an Agenda; What lies ahead; and Building the Barricades. The piece is sobering and hopeful at the same time.

How do we recover from so many toxic trends in all of our institutions? Especially when those who are poisoning us have isolated us and are circling the wagons? How can we hope for Americans to regain the ability to relate to one another as human beings, rather than as enemies? It’s going to take a lot of courage by a lot of people to overcome the descending darkness. It’s going to take a lot of one-on-one building of strong relationships of trust and building of strong communities against forces that are committed to breaking up such relationships. The work towards renewal has to happen fast. It’s too late for anything else. We have the means. But do we have the will? Here’s an excerpt from the beginning:

In order to defeat this rebellion, we need to understand the terrain we are operating on and the strategy and tactics of our enemy. Even more important, we need a strategy of our own to guide our struggle and return to a functional representative government, bounded by the Constitution with the power fully vested in the people. Only a few decades ago, American politics was driven by shared interests of prosperity and well-being aligned with a free constitutional republic. We need to drive from the American consciousness the current docile acceptance of the fact that America has a ruling class—or a ruling elite—and we must banish these terms to the trash heap of racial epithets and aristocratic garbage.

And here’s the conclusion:

At this moment we are the weaker side in this asymmetric struggle. Right now, we are 80 million couch potatoes and keyboard warriors with rifles in our bedroom closets. This is not a force to be reckoned with. And the ruling elite know it because they control the information flow and own the power institutions. Traditional Americans will have to organize and band together to help each other and fight in this struggle. When we become 80 million strong, organized citizens with a tangible agenda, when we know where we want to go and what we want this country to look like, and when we can see the path to achieve this, only then will we become the lions we need to be to achieve victory. 

Please read Morton’s entire article in American Greatness by clicking here: Until Lambs Become Lions.

Everyone Should Take a “Propaganda 101” Class to Understand How they are Manipulated

April 28, 2014 | Culture, Politics, Propaganda, Society, Uncategorized
Lots of folks have been scratching their heads wondering how genderless marriage — which seemed just a fantasy on the fringes just  a decade or so ago — so quickly became a reality of American public policy today.  There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle. A few of them include activist judges, the monied LGBT lobby, and  President Obama’s disingenuous “evolution” on the subject after being elected.

But the bigger picture shows something very different, very calculated, and decades in the making.  It’s possibly been the biggest propaganda campaign in human history.

Do you believe the biggest manipulators who push same sex marriage really and truly care about the canard they label “marriage equality?”  I don’t.  In fact, it seems more likely the power elites among them have simply been engaged in a social experiment, testing the limits of propaganda and how easily people can be controlled and manipulated, even to the point of accepting an implausible idea. Of course, “marriage equality” is a great test case for them, because it could pave the way to ending family autonomy, giving them greater control over the relationships of others.

Are you familiar with the term “availability cascade?”  It’s related to Richard Dawkins theory (The Selfish Gene, 1976) about “memes:” that any idea injected into public discourse can potentially spread like a virus and change the culture in much the same way that genes replicate and evolve.  Of course, to make it work you need an unwitting citizenry.

I think the only way around this is a proliferation of education and information on the subtle techniques of coercive persuasion. If our society produced lots of non-partisan webinars and classes taught by citizen-activists on “Propaganda 101” people could be exposed to the  uses and abuses of social psychology so that they’re not such easy targets.  More on that in a later post.

In 1999 the Stanford Law Review published “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,” an article co-authored by Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran.  Sunstein served as Obama’s regulatory czar during 2009-2012.  Kuran is an economist and author of Private Truths, Public Lies:  The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (1995) a fascinating look at how our individual willingness — or reticence — to express our real beliefs is what drives all of public opinion.

In fact, our willingness to say what we believe is what drives all public opinion.  All of it.  Yes, what you say or don’t say to your co-worker, classmate, or neighbor makes a difference in how they perceive the world.  At the epicenter of the ripple effect is our daily conversations in our daily lives.

The coddling of an idea like “marriage equality” through repetition — and the suppression of dissent — projects the illusion that “everybody’s believing it.” People shift their “beliefs” to conform to what they perceive everyone else believes.  Soon enough you’ve got a chain reaction.  It’s a bandwagon effect that’s helped along by political correctness  which, through the threat of smearing and isolating anyone who speaks “out of line,”enforces that illusion by creating a spiral of silence. In essence, this teases out a reverse bandwagon effect in dissenters.