Reality consists of the stories we tell each other.

While this is not a new observation it goes a long way towards explaining the behavior of our feral elite who have bought into their own narrative to such a large degree that they literally live in a fantasyland.

And if you inhabit a fantasyland truth is the mortal enemy hence the frantic efforts at censoring any counter narratives.

The revelations on how Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” is a case in point. It’s now been proven that executives at Twitter worked in concert with the Biden campaign to suppress the scandal in the run up to the 2020 election. However, it’s pretty fucking obvious that attempts to address the contents of the laptop will never go anywhere, because the entire liberal political/media class believes any and all actions to hurt Trump’s re-election odds were justified. After 2016 a consensus was formed among liberal US media that they should have actively worked to manipulate the public into voting for Hillary Clinton, rather than reporting on her numerous scandals at the time. Killing the laptop story was the manifestation of that consensus.

Here’s how Glenn Greenwald describes what our famous Forth Estate has become. “Liberal media employees operate as a hive mind, an in-group pack, reciting the same phrases on cue. They have no novel thoughts. They’re Democratic Party activists who unite as pack animals. These people – who demand the power to censor the internet to protect you from disinformation – are the most frequent and casual liars…Twitter lied when saying they censored this story because the docs were hacked by Russia. They know there was no evidence of this! The more big stories you break, the more these frauds – who just repeat what CIA and Google tell them to say – hate you.”

Essentially, to cover-up past crimes against the country by President Biden and other public officials, Twitter, pre-Musk, was a major accomplice and enabler of all that, and suddenly it’s not–to the horror of all of the deep state denizens who make up the administration. 

Then there’s the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. In what is likely to be seen in retrospect as the most egregious strategic intelligence failure of this era US intelligence and political elites promulgated a hubristic assessment that Russia was a backward, failing state. With such an erroneous claim, they created a genuinely-held conviction that massive sanctions on Russia and unrestrained psy-ops would unleash economic turmoil, followed by political upheaval in the Kremlin followed by regime change.

The magical thinking has continued unabated. The other day Avril Haines, Joe Biden’s Director of National Intelligence made the claim that Ukraine may have brighter future as Russia struggles to resupply fighting forces.

I want to know what she is smoking.

Apparently Ms. Haines is so deluded that she is unaware that it is Ukraine, not Russia, begging for more weapons and ammunition and most NATO countries are pleading poverty, with no more to send. Haines must also be unaware that Russia is in the process of sending more than 300,000 fresh troops to the frontlines at the very time that Ukraine is suffering catastrophic losses. You would think that the head of U.S. intelligence might know about that development. The reality is that Ukraine is exhausting its weapons and ammunition stockpiles and the United States and NATO lack the industrial base to produce new supplies to fulfill Ukrainian needs and restore their own stockpiles.

There’s also the inconvenient fact that Russia continues to destroy Ukraine’s electrical power transmission system daily even as we are lectured that Russia is running out of precision missiles. That mantra is being repeated almost every week by wistful Western intelligence analysts and pundits.

Greenwald made another point that’s worth pondering. “While it was once controversial for the CIA to attempt to manipulate what Americans consume in the mainstream media, nowadays these outlets openly hire “former” US intelligence leaders and officers as news analysts. CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and the rest of them all bring on “former” members of the intelligence services to tell Americans what to think. “Big tech censorship is a critical tool of the national security state. Whenever anyone tries to do anything about it these former people from the CIA and the Pentagon and the rest jump up and say ‘we cannot allow you to restore free speech.’”

In an ironic twist that George Orwell would appreciate, the greatest purveyors of “disinformation” turned out to be these former intelligence officers who formed a chorus to label the Hunter Biden laptop disclosures–“Russian disinformation”.

What all this demonstrates is that the moneyed interests behind the politicians and deep state operatives, take great interest in the outcome of this struggle. There has always been a significant group of elites in America who believe that individual freedom must be sacrificed to create a more orderly society. This dynamic helps explain why agents of the state have infiltrated the various platforms in order to use their coercive powers to shape a narrative that garners public support for unpopular, elitist objectives, like war and tax cuts for the wealthy.

Since the election of Donald Trump and the explosion of populism, censorship and propaganda have gone into overdrive. Elites have never been more determined to quash the free exchange of ideas on the social media sites and to transform the Internet into another rancid institution that reiterates the same false narratives and propaganda one hears daily on the cables news channels.

The belief that there are magical answers to real problems in the world is not new, but it has become much more powerful in recent years, as control and influence over issues of war and peace have passed increasingly into the hands of those who know little about either. We want our leader to be noble and international crises and conflicts to finish the way that Hollywood movies do, with the good guys winning, and we will go to extremes to suspend our disbelief, so to avoid facing up to reality. We want to believe that there are powers that will make things turn out as we want, whether they are super-weapons or superheroes.