Runaway Rant: Accepting Dystopia and Not Daring to Hope

Imagine what America would look like if it were ruled by corporations and institutions that paid off politicians and got away with doing whatever they wanted in their own self-interest. Somehow it would look exactly like it does now.

Things have gotten worse and worse over time. We’ve adjusted to it and will keep adjusting to it. We accept it as just the way things are going and as reflecting the broad era that we live in. If there’s a projected recession, we see it as something like bad weather. It just appears that things will be tighter, but with more grit and sacrifice, we’ll weather the storm, and we’ll need to because there are more on the way.

The lifespan of the average American is declining for the first time. Fertility rates are down. All chronic diseases are up. Homelessness is up. Owning a home is not something young adults have in their future. Inflation is up, and up, and up. IQs are going down. Suicide rates are going up. Extreme weather events are going up. In a surprise turn of events, the world population is poised to crash. Nuclear war is back on the table. If you feel this way, you are a common person, and your feelings don’t matter. For another group of people, the international multi-millionaire and billionaire classes, life has never been better, and it just keeps getting better and better and better. These two phenomena are intimately related, and the latter is the cause of the former. The reason life is getting worse for 99% of people is that it is getting astronomically better for the proverbial 1% of people because, for generations, they’ve been unethically and perversely ripping everyone else off.

We’ve been disappointed so many times because the rich and power-laden always win—the big polluters, the war machine, the banks, the insurance companies, and big pharma—that we eventually give up on hope. We’ve been conditioned. We are now no longer served news so that we can be informed and come to our own conclusions; journalism is dead or persecuted to the fringes, and instead what we get is social engineering. What you see on the news is what the ruling elite wants you to believe in their own selfish self-interest. You don’t get to have your own opinion; you are told what to believe; otherwise, you are a bad person, and you might even be cancelled. Even if you passionately agree with what you are being told to believe, if you step back and observe mainstream TV or internet news, you will notice that you don’t get two sides of an argument unless one side is parodied, and you don’t have a choice in what to believe.

And then we discover that everything we were told to believe, which only brain-dead, immoral cretins would oppose, was a lie. If you don’t know that they were lies, you haven’t been paying close attention, reading between the lines, and teasing out the truth. Let me give you one stellar example. It has recently come out that Russiagate was entirely fabricated from the get-go; it was crafted by the Hillary Clinton campaign to undermine her political rival, and everyone in the CIA knew there was nothing to it. And I’m no friend of Trump. I’m a lifelong liberal humanist. Please notice that the terms “liberal,” “left,” and “progressive” have been hijacked by the corporate elite to mean something completely different, so that today’s liberal is pro-war, for censorship and surveillance, against independent journalism, and for punishing truth-tellers and whistleblowers, etc. I’m also a huge environmentalist who believes in the real science of climate change [which is not the same thing as believing in or supporting how politicians try to use the science for ulterior purposes] and “Drill Baby” Trump is an enemy of the biosphere! But let it sink in that the CIA, in cahoots with Hillary Clinton, deliberately framed Trump and lied to the public in order to swing the election and undermine his ability to govern. Also keep in mind that the Hunter Biden laptop, which we were told was a Russian hoax, is now absolutely real. Consider that we were sold a conspiracy theory that Russia had swung the 2016 election and were told in 2020 that Hunter’s laptop was a conspiracy theory. What we were told was the truth was a conspiracy theory, and what we were told was a conspiracy theory was the truth.

Now consider how the NYTimes frames the startling revelation that the entire Russiagate investigation was a conspiracy:

When there is an actual, treasonous conspiracy at the highest levels of government, the New York Times tells us that it is a conspiracy theory to believe in the proven conspiracy. That is not reporting; it is social engineering. Whatever side of the convenient divide you are on, and whichever wing of the oligarchy you are persuaded is the absolute right and good fighting the absolute wrong and evil on the other side, you can’t honestly miss how flagrantly disingenuous and deceptive that headline is.

If you watch or read the news regularly and you don’t know about the Durham report or that Russiagate was a hoax all along, your news source is dedicated to promoting the interests of the Democratic Party and is trying to brush this bombshell under the rug. People who only watch MSNBC, CBS, or ABC will have a completely different view of the world than people who only watch Fox, which is the propaganda outlet of the Republican Party. The reason people can’t agree on anything and see people on the other side as enemies is because the news they are getting is not intended to inform them and let them make their own decisions, but is either there to persuade them to support Democrats or Republicans, which are enemy camps.

Most Americans are neither “liberals” nor “conservatives”. They are Democrats or Republicans. Their political views are those of their respective parties, both of which are corrupt and beholden to their corporate donors. Once you catch on to this, watching news from either side is a forehead-slapping event because they will both endlessly shill for their respective candidates and demonize the rival candidates and their supporters.

How is news coverage of a company affected by taking money from that company? Pfizer, for example, funds CBS, ABC, CNN, etc. You don’t have to be an economist to figure out that if the news programs are critical of any of Pfizer’s products they’ll lose their sponsorship money. Someone posted a montage of Pfizer sponsorships on Twitter.

Well, this is totally normal and not at all a conflict of interest pic.twitter.com/4MKm0VozBC

— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) October 19, 2021

Big businesses, the media, and politicians are all working together to support each other, scratching each other’s backs and doing favors for each other. In a true democracy, the government would be regulating the businesses, not getting their palms greased, and the news would be holding both big business and the government to account. Instead of being a kind of checks and balances against each other, big business, the government, and the media work together to dupe the hapless and presumed stupid public.

For us common people, it’s very difficult to accept that our authoritative institutions are bankrupt and immoral. It makes us feel more vulnerable and isolated. And even when presented with damning facts, it is not enough for us to mentally acquiesce to them, we need to have a leap of the imagination and undergo a painful paradigm shift before we can accept the greater truth. I, for one, have some temporary difficultly in admitting to myself when I’ve been chumped. Even though I’ve wizened up, I feel like I was stupid enough in the past to be fooled, and that it could be some reflection on my character or intelligence. It’s OK to have been wrong or chumped. The people doing the fooling are the best in the business. Even the goddamned NYTimes, which used to be a trusted liberal source of news has been coopted by power and serves the interests of the corporate elite. Many millions of Americans have not noticed that news organizations and politicians that used to represent morality and decency, more or less, have been corrupted and are now feeding us lies. On a simplistic level, it looks like the statement that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is accurate, and what happened is that the formerly “liberal” and “democratic” forces we trusted gradually gained power, became corrupted, and now are as bad as the opposition, if not worse. Hint, politicians and government should be there to SERVE the people, not RULE them.

Our response on “the left” to the Russiagate hoax perpetrated by Hillary Clinton is that, well, those dirty tactics were necessary and even moral because we were fighting a greater evil: a racist, misogynist, bigoted, white supremacist! The kid gloves had to come off. Well, there’s something a little comical in all that when you put it in context. The ruling elite doesn’t care about us in the slightest, except as laborers and tax payers, and they have no interest whatsoever in our feelings. Whatever the human-cattle believe about each other and however they treat each other is absolutely irrelevant.

In fact, our ruling elite deliberately stokes hatred and tribalism among us in order to divide us and keep us distracted and fighting each other rather than taking them to task and holding them accountable for the deplorable state of the nation. Not only could they care less if we hate each other, they deliberately and calculatingly pour gasoline on racial discord for personal gain and then make a show of lamenting that all of us troglodytes are fighting among ourselves. Our only hope, they instruct us, is to elect them to seats of power and privilege, in which case they will vanquish from on high our existential enemies on the ground. In reality, we would be getting along just fine if we were even close to being as prosperous as we should be, and if we weren’t told constantly that we were hateful and hating, and that our neighbors and colleagues are our mortal enemies. When Biden surrounds himself with POC and working people in his campaign ads, that is just a marketing device so those same voters think he represents them. In reality, he should be surrounded by corporate logos, and those people matter no more to him than cows in a factory farm being milked for their lives, in other words, as means to an end, which is the personal enrichment of himself and his cronies. Attempts to make Trump appear to be the devil himself only highlight how bad a candidate Biden needs to run against to be considered preferable. Biden campaign ads are the equivalent of a restaurant pitching that you should eat at their establishment because if you eat at the competitor’s restaurant, you will get food poisoning and vomit in your lap while doing a live-stream on social media.

The graph below illustrates the dramatic increase of the words “racist” and “racism” in popular media since 2010. Does this reportage reflect a mysterious burgeoning of racism among the common lot of people, or is the rhetoric about racism in the news creating racism on the ground?

I saw a recent Biden speech where he stated once against that the greatest threat to America is not inflation, recession, war, nuclear winter, environmental destruction, another pandemic, AI, obesity, drug addiction, homelessness, or corruption, but “white supremacy”. Even Ronald Reagan understood that a nuclear war can’t be won, and means the end of life as we know it. And as the unthinkable becomes an ever increasing reality, what we really need to worry about according to our sitting president is the bogie man and monsters under the bed. If I were black and I believed the words of the president, I would certainly be wary of whites, and being told they hated me would very likely reciprocally hate them back. All the inflammatory rhetoric around racism very predictably is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and specifically and diabolically designed for that express end. Our good politicians are engaged in the equivalent of spreading malicious gossip in the workplace in order to turn colleagues against each other to affect who gets a raise or promotion. Some of the same people who say that racism is our biggest priority are the same people incessantly rekindling the fire and liberally sprinkling it with lighter fluid.

I used to live in NY, and I rode the subway to and from work for 8 years. I never observed any overt expression of racial hatred, or violence, and never felt I was in danger. Today, people are frequently apprehensive about taking the subway. That shift is due to media propaganda. Biden and crew will say that hate is the enemy and we must end it once and for all, while they are cultivating hate out of thin air in order to undermine any kind of class solidarity. Hint: if a politician, especially a presidential politician, does not address the issue of class, and the increasingly massive and insurmountable chasm between the rich versus the middle and lower classes, they are not a candidate for the people, but servants of the aristocracy. Now that election season is upon us, expect a flowering of stories in the media about racial hate, which are so useful for political ends and demonizing the white working class.

Our ruling oligarchs cynically use ideas like “social justice” in order to present themselves as a “progressive” moral force evolving humanity forward on the most delicate and humanitarian issues, such as protecting trans identities, when in reality they couldn’t care less about any of that cosmetic stuff that has little to nothing to do with international battles for strategic military power, capturing resources, dominating markets, and accruing finances. Everything is a power grab. While our corrupt leaders present themselves as the moral authority with real compassion who will instruct us on ethics and finally bring an end to our unconscious microaggressions at the water cooler, they are just duping us into giving them more real power and control over us while performing the most outrageous injustices on whole populations (war, recessions, disease, health crisis, and economic devastation..).

In the graph below, you can observe that since 1980, the top 1% of income earners have made massive gains relative to everyone else, and the middle, working, and poor classes are almost neck and neck in comparison. To not address this stark reality is to deliberately hide it.  

You will instead hear about the differences in wealth relative to race, when all of those differences occur in the same lower quadrant of wealth, period. The real issue is swept under the carpet.

If you haven’t picked up on it yet, a certain contagious organism really did escape from a lab. This truth is slowly and reluctantly being unveiled. Even Dr. Fauci said that maybe someone got infected in the field naturally with the pathogen, then went into the lab, and then it escaped from the lab. This cleverly maintains that the microorganism was not created in the lab but gets us used to the idea that it escaped from it. And then slowly we will learn that, yes, it not only escaped from the lab, it was created there, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Take note that the people who denied the pathogen came from a lab, and who funded bogus studies proving it didn’t, knew all along that it did and were involved in the technology, including funding the lab in question. The disease and the cure ultimately issue from the same source. This is already finally coming to light. And after years of banishing, censoring, and de-platforming anyone who dared wonder about the origins of the disease, we are now permitted to talk about it as part of the slow roll-out of truth (without accountability). If this is all new to you, pay attention to who sponsors your news outlets. It might explain a thing or two.

Apparently, the plan for our future is complete surveillance, censorship, and control, which technology and AI make possible. Enter Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum. 

This short clip exposing the plan of the head of the world’s economic elite is a page out of George Orwell’s 1984.

In this new world, we must accept transparency, and I’ll even say total transparency. Banking secrecy. Everything is going to be transparent, and you have to get used to it. You have to behave accordingly. It becomes, how should I put it, integrated in your personality. But if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be afraid.

~ Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum

This statement, when applied to banking institutions and the government, would be a godsend, but the way Jimmy Dore and crew interpreted it, it applies to private citizens and certainly not to Schwab himself. What is the measure of reality now? Are corporations transparent? Or is it us whose locations are being tracked on our mobile phones? Is the government creating secret dossiers on us? Are our phone calls being recorded as Edward Snowden revealed? Does Microsoft Windows automatically record all your web browsing and every keystroke you make and deliver it to the company?

Above, I just took a screen shot of this section of my Windows 10 operating system. Yes, the “typing diagnostic data” means everything you type in an email, every password, every tweet, comment on a video, etc. You can check your own system right now to see if you’ve been allowing yourself to be spied on. Go to Settings, Windows Permissions, and then Diagnostics and Feedback, or Inking and typing personalization. The default settings are that Microsoft collects all of your internet activity and every keystroke you make. Unless you think Marc Zuckerberg should have access to everything you do on your computer, you might want to disable those factory preset options. And those are just a couple of the multiple default options for spying on you from your computer. The defaults also include allowing an array of apps to have access to your location, camera, and microphone. In other words, anything you do at and on your computer is automatically or potentially recorded and catalogued without your knowledge or consent.

People have discovered that their Smart TVs are secretly recording them using the built-in camera and mic. Facial recognition cameras are being put in airports and on the streets so that the government can keep tabs on everyone’s whereabouts and create profiles. This is based on the Chinese system, as they have no compunctions about spying on their citizens. What we can expect next is a version of the Chinese Social Credit System, where every citizen is given a ranking based on their financial credit, education, health status, and social and political views. Those who score low on the credit system can have their access to airlines, public transportation, how much they can spend and where, and even what restaurants they can go to curtailed. You can imagine that anyone who is critical of the Communist Party or the social credit system itself will have an abysmal credit score. Instead of being horrified by this kind of system, the West is eagerly putting it into place as fast and as much as they can get away with themselves.

We all used to joke about getting computer chips put in our bodies, or heads. We all knew some complete wingnut who said we’d all get them one day. Well, some people already have them. How long until such things become mandatory?

When Klaus talks about “transparency,” he’s talking about surveillance, and “total transparency” means total surveillance. Your banking will be completely known: every purchase, every late payment, every defaulted loan, where and how you attain any revenue, how much you have, etc. Most chillingly, YOU will “have to behave accordingly” and YOU will have to “integrate” having no privacy and being spied on by your elite rulers “into your personality”. This condition of being monitored 24/7 by authority was formerly only used on prisoners [think Foucault’s discussion of the panopticon] and people subjected to diabolical psychological experiments before they were outlawed as crimes against humanity.

The “transparency” agenda Klaus Schwab is licking his chops over, and which is presented as the inevitable trajectory of our civilization, is the dictionary definition of totalitarianism:

Sound familiar?

We can now conjecture about which dystopian sci-fi future is most likely and which has already come about to some degree. The contenders include 1984, The Terminator, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Brave New World, Mad Max, Ex Machina, any episode of Black Mirror, Death and Robots, and Elysium… It’s a breakneck race to make each of those a “how-to” book and a reality. 

The Terminator? A fighting humanoid robot is already a reality.

The idea of Skynet—AI taking over the global internet and integrated computers—is a serious risk that the makers of AI fear the most but can’t resist making billions off of creating. The two things The Terminator got wrong were time travel and the AI operating on its own behalf. The much more likely scenario is that the richest and most power-laden people use AI and robotics to subordinate, spy on, control and exploit the general population. That’s already happening.

I find the Elysium scenario very persuasive. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the trailer:

And we are gradually accepting all of this, adjusting our behavior, and integrating it into our personalities. We are becoming docile sheep. In complete conformity and obsequious subordination, we have nothing to hide and nothing to cherish. The goal is that we harbor zero opposition to control and exploitation.

Klaus talks about this dystopian future as if it were an inevitability. It is not, any more than it is just part of evolution that Windows collects your every keystroke by default. War is not inevitable. Environmental destruction is not inevitable. AI and robotics replacing us are not inevitable. Absolute surveillance and censorship are not inevitable. Getting poorer is not inevitable. Losing fertility, dying younger, and suffering ever-increasing numbers of chronic and mental illnesses are not inevitable. Being put on a menagerie of medications is not inevitable. Those are all choices that are being made for us.

I recall that back in the days when George W. Bush was president, I thought that a chimp could do a better job because there was the possibility that the chimp would incidentally choose to do something that helped the people rather than the ruling oligarchs. I feel the same way today about the people I am supposed to believe in, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they are on, with the outstanding exception of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom the corrupt corporate propagandist media is hell-bent on smearing. The goal is for Americans never to get enough exposure to him to see who he really is and who he is really fighting for and against, namely for us and against corrupt rule. The fact that your most likely reaction to hearing his name is thinking he’s a wackadoodle conspiracy nutjob is evidence that your news media is not giving you the remotest chance of forming your own opinion. They will only let you see him through the lens of malicious gossip, slander, and character assassination. They will compare him to Trump, but they will never tell you that, as an environmental lawyer, he successfully sued Trump, preventing him from constructing polluting golf courses along the Hudson River. They won’t tell you he successfully sued Monsanto for $2 billion for harming the public’s health. They won’t tell you that he sued multiple polluting corporations along the Hudson River, and is the guy responsible for cleaning the river of pollution.

They will give you the impression he is a lone crusader for the call of the cuckoo, but not tell you that he’s written exhaustive books on the subjects he addresses, and with a team of hundreds of PhD scientists who corroborate with and fact check him. They won’t dare mention even once that his obvious goal is to protect the public health, and that is the record of his lifelong career. It took me weeks to overcome my own disinclination to take him entirely seriously, so successful has the smear campaign been, as well as the cover-ups and clandestine operations he exposes and fights on our behalf.

If you think RFK Jr. is a “conspiracy theorist” and not a serious or competent candidate, you don’t have the first clue. You could read my article about him, but I would recommend two published articles, one from a liberal source, and one from a conservative one, so you get two angles which are both quality encapsulations of his character and his career. If you read them both, then you can at least honestly say that you have a semblance of your own opinion, and are not just regurgitating propaganda forced down your gullet by news outlets with corporate sponsors they answer to, and strong political allegiances.

The Real Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Should the Left Give RFK, Jr. a Chance?

For now, take it from me that he’s got a rock-solid intellect, otherwise he wouldn’t have won hundreds of court cases. He is an intellectual, and carries the original honesty and integrity of JFK and RFK, both crusaders for justice who were assassinated because of it. The forces in the media and elsewhere today who smear him and try to shut him down are in league with those responsible for wiping out his father and uncle. You might want to be careful about which side of history you come down on in this instance. It is an utter disgrace that the son of a slain presidential candidate, and the nephew of a murdered president is being relentlessly smeared and slandered by corporate media instead of being welcomed to the table. The entrenched DNC won’t even allow him to debate Biden because they don’t want you to have any chance to be won over by him. That is not democracy or freedom in the slightest. The DNC wants to shoehorn in their chosen candidate, who reliably does their bidding and does as he is told. This atrocious affront to democracy will very likely ensure the return of Donald Trump as president.

When everything is designed to accrue wealth and power to those who already possess them in spades, life gets worse for everyone and everything else. And this has been going on for generations, including my entire life beyond a toddler. I do not know what it feels like to live in a real democracy with free market capitalism that honors the constitution and is by and for the people. My early childhood was marked by the assassinations of the Kennedys, MLK, Malcom X, and a corporate and military takeover that continues to this day. I’m used to my prospects slowly being suffocated out.

Accepting a dystopian future, we dare not hope because it’s a waste of the limited energy and mental resources we need just to scrape by. Truth is presented to us essentially as whatever everyone else believes, and we are lied to about what everyone else believes. Few of us have the time, energy, wisdom, intelligence, and education to see through the deliberate BS. There are many more lies that we are not allowed to question, and I can’t mention them because I am not allowed to. Virtually everything is a lie and a distortion because it is all designed to profit the already astronomically wealthy and privileged.

We dare not imagine living in beautiful environments, having our own homes, having disposable income for traveling, being able to freely speak our minds, not having to worry about an accident or illness destroying our lives, having a safety net, being stewards of nature instead of exploiting it, and our species having a long future ahead. To do so is to be a ditz, an airhead, mush-minded, a Pollyanna, or a pinhead. But those pie-in-the sky dreams are the natural things we deserve. They are what should have become inevitable with our current level of technology and resources, but which we have been robbed of by corrupt and sinister forces in the form of fully immoral corporations and bought politicians.

If you think I’m exaggerating, imagine what America would look like if it were ruled by corporations and institutions that paid off politicians and got away with doing whatever they wanted in their own self-interest. Somehow it would look exactly like it does now.

And we’ve given up, even given up hope. Dystopia is a choice, and it’s been chosen for us by and for the select few who can live in a paradise above the law and are now even investing heavily in immortality drugs and robot sentries. Their mansions will become climate-controlled fortresses circled by drones. They will use AI, robotics, economic power, and control of health outcomes to reign as demigods over this Earth. Welcome to the machine.

You have to behave accordingly. It becomes, how should I put it, integrated in your personality. But if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be afraid.

This we will be required in order to have permission to exist.

If you aren’t afraid of that kind of system, it’s because you are planning on running it and not being subjected to it yourself, in which case you definitely have something to hide, which is an evil plot to subordinate the mass of humanity to your own ends. Radical inequality is the shared characteristic of every authoritarian, totalitarian, and fascist state. This one-sided proposition where some people have absolute power over all others is a recipe for an extreme form of totalitarianism, and people should be laughing that anyone would propose such a grotesque attack on individual sovereignty. Klaus Schwab sounds like a comic supervillain out of the Austin Powers movies. Uh, I may have used AI to make the following:

The least we can do is not fall for it and not become so cynical that we don’t dare hope for or dream of anything better for ourselves. Those dreams should have been a baseline reality generations ago. Our past and present have been stolen from us by powerful and corrupt elites for their own outrageous and unimaginable privilege, and the plans for stealing our future are getting more and more ambitious, sinister, and ugly.

~ Ends

Addendum:

Incidentally I just started watching this new interview with RFK Jr.. The first 15 minutes are outstanding. Why not give the guy a chance? We can have a better future, and he is willing to fight for us as president, and that’s not just words. One of his really smart tactics, by the way, to overcome being completely sidelined by the corporate DNC is to hit the internet hard, and do lots of interviews with independent YouTube influencers. It’s the modern equivalent of the strategy of his father and uncle of touring the country campaigning in person at an array of venues. He’s just doing it digitally.

Watch this guy talk for one hour, and by the time you’re done, at very least you will be shocked to see a presidential candidate speak so expertly, on an intellectual level, about politics. If you think the label “liberal” applies to you, and you don’t like Kennedy, it’s only for one reason, and that is that you haven’t given him a chance.