I’ve been discussing the US’s decline in conventional military power and resort to terrorism or “dirty war” as a result, but there is another factor to take into account. The America empire possess overwhelming dominance over the global media, allowing them to shape the meta narrative, or reality of much of the world’s population, including the political, economic and cultural elite. In the process, America has turned war into a performative spectacle, with our president sounding more and more like an unhinged ringmaster.

This same narrative management is deployed inwardly at our own citizenry and ruling elites. Even after all of the lies spewed by the corporate media pushing war, and other policies that are deeply inimical to the interests of most Americans, there is a surprisingly cohesive and committed support for US foreign and domestic policies. What’s apparent is is that incessant propaganda works on an unintelligent, uneducated and ill-informed public, but also, surprisingly, on the educated elite decision makers. The upshot is that the corporate media has convinced the ruling elite that anything less than a permanent war against China/Russia/Iran is Neville Chamberlain level appeasement, while anything other than Wall Street/hedge-fund looting is communism.

It’s a site to behold.

My job in the winter offers conversations with a wealthy, educated elite, and I can tell you that they strongly believe the conventional wisdom and recoil at my apostasy when the conversation turns to Russia’s Special-Military-Operation. To them it was an “unprovoked. invasion” launched by Hitler-want-to-be, Vladimir Putin, and my detailed explanations to the contrary produces bewilderment.

Unfortunately, anyone on 9/11 who can watch three skyscrapers suffer sudden full-structure failures and fall smoothly into their foundations, any media that can promulgate the idea that Russia was responsible for the destruction of its own Nord Stream gas pipelines–these are willing and able to consider any narrative and to believe anything.

We can witness the effectiveness of the elite propaganda by the way in which US officials like CENTCOM commander general Erik Kurilla, explain military reality. “Iran is in a weaker strategic position now than at any point in the last forty years,” Kurilla told the House Armed Services Committee on June 10, the same day, coincidentally, that the US transferred hundreds of missiles to Israel for its upcoming attack on Iran.

Then, during the 12 day slug-fest Iran seriously fucked-up Israel with it’s own inventory of ballistic missiles, which penetrated Israeli/US air-defenses with ease, destroying a wide-range of vital military/intelligence bases, refineries, airports, military/industrial complexes and research centers. Somehow that doesn’t sound “strategically weaker” to me but I’m not a ranking general, like Kurilla, with access to highly classified intelligence. The CENTCOM commander is known for his close relationship with PM Bibi Netanyahu and his enthusiasm for the Greater Israel Project, but if he believes the cover story that Israel triumphed in it’s war with Iran, he’s as loony as his commander-in-chief.

Welcome to post-modern America, where proof just ain’t what it used to be. And making sense of reality without AI to assist? That’s like saying that two plus two is either four or twenty-two. No, we’re dealing with peoples and elites who don’t take reality too seriously. Or like Karl Rove explained–how they create their own reality.

However, narrative only goes so far and reality has a annoying habit of intruding no matter what “Turd Blossom” says. The accelerating authoritarianism/corporate propaganda we’re seeing in the US is characterized by the plutocrats’ war uni-party and burgeoning police state, and is a direct result of the ever widening economic inequality among other symptoms. While it gets a whole lot of attention when Trump is in office, it’s been a long time coming.

Obama led a nationwide paramilitary crackdown on Occupy after bailing out finance and turfing millions of Americans out of their homes. Biden oversaw repression of student protests against US-backed genocide. And let’s not forget all the ongoing global abuses of the War on Terror: illegal wars and drone death raining from the skies abroad while homelessness, surveillance, and deaths of despair surge. Both the Republicans and Democrats, or the uni-party, serve the plutocrats and moves evermore rightward to stifle dissent and expand the rapaciousness at home and abroad.  Trump is an accelerant in this regard, torching American diplomacy and what little remains of the social safety net, speech and due process protections, as well as collective bargaining law.

Trump’s secret power is that he makes all of the machinations obvious, while exposing the differences in narrative management between the two political parties. Democrat’s have a different way of selling empire than Republicans. The neoliberal Democratic Party emphasizes “human-rights” and “democracy’, while the Republicans favor strong neoconservative, muscular foreign-policies involving MOAB bunker-buster bombs as a way to compensate for their small penises.

Presidents come and go but Washington’s political class manifests less and less regard for the long-term strategic interests of its own citizens security and prosperity.

I don’t know what it will take to wake up somnolent Americans but I try to carry out my own little acts of rebellion to help undermine public perception of the official empire narrative and so should you. Because, after all: “To live without Hope is to Cease to live.”

Update: Caitlin Johnstone offers some words of encouragement.

“It’s hard to imagine how western governments could make support for Palestine look more attractive to western youths, really. Here’s this unimaginably horrific mass atrocity that they can all watch unfolding on their phone screens in real time every single day of the year, and they’re being told “You’re not allowed to oppose this. We, the stuffed shirts in Washington and London, command you to obey. If you think unauthorized thoughts and chant unauthorized chants, we are going to get very huffy and upset.”

I mean, can you think of anything more fun?

This is after all the generation who’s been told that they need to accept being poorer and sicker than their parents and grandparents and that they’ll never own a home no matter what they do, knowing full well that the crusty old bastards finger-wagging at them for opposing an active genocide are the same freaks who’ve refused to do anything to steer their planet’s ecosystem away from looming disaster. They have every reason to want to express defiance, and nothing to lose by doing so.

A real, politically meaningful counterculture has been born in the western world, and our rulers are already showing us that they’re afraid of it. This is a fascinating time to be alive.”