12-Step Totalitarian Program: Step 1 / Step 2: Corrupt Language / Step 3: Corrupt Science and Religion / Steps 4 & 5: Corrupt History, the U.S. Founding, Natural Law, and the U.S. Constitution

Step #6: Corrupt Journalism and the Arts

The corruption here is obvious. Make everything Pravda, and suppress anything non-Pravda.

Still, it’s amazing how many conservatives still rely on the NYT or Washington Post, or even expose themselves to MSNBC, for proof of anything. They seem not to realize the power of using partial truths while suppressing evidence.

That’s the great power of Pravda. Tell the truth, but tell it slant. Again, It’s the NPR way:

• Hey, listen to this family’s story and be moved emotionally, while we claim this ONE story proves a general principle or assumption.
• Hey, look what Trump said in Charleston. Never mind that he said something we will NOT report because it contradicts our conclusion, and hey, we know you won’t bother to actually listen to the speech since we have already manufactured such a distaste for Trump that you will never bother.

Partial truths are a powerful way to manipulate people into falsehoods.

Conservatives and classical liberals who still subscribe to the NYT, Post, etc. (other than it being a part of their job) do not understand how even a person on guard against propaganda can still be programmed.

The drumbeat affects you subconsciously. If you think you know better, and can expose yourself to that drumbeat without constant exposure to the counter-drumbeat, then despite your best efforts it gets into you.

Here’s a bit I wrote on The Nocebo Effect from a larger Ricochet post on The Adaptive Unconscious. Think about this as it applied to Trump and the programming that started once he announced his campaign:

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You’ve heard of the Placebo Effect, right? That effect where doctors give a person a drug to help with an ailment, but what the doctors actually give is an inactive sugar pill?

And then the patient feels better as if the pill were the real thing.

Somehow the mind and body react 
to the suggestion of an authority.

People rarely hear about it, but there is also something called the Nocebo Effect, coined in the early 1960s. Doctors can suggest something negative and the mind and body responds.

In the 1970s, doctors diagnosed a man with end-stage liver cancer. They gave him a few months to live. He died and an autopsy revealed a tiny tumor that had not spread. The doctors’ planted the image of death, and apparently the man died of that expectation.

In a 2007 study, a suicidal man took pills believing he was taking an overdose of antidepressants. He nearly died until the researchers gave him intravenous fluids and explained that he had been given placebos. The symptoms rapidly disappeared.

In a 2009 study, researchers gave placebos to patients who were told they were being given drugs with bad side effects. Participants experienced burning sensations, sleepiness, fatigue, vomiting, weakness, taste disturbances, tinnitus, and upper-respiratory-tract infections. The nocebo complaints were not random, but were specific to the type of drug they believed they were taking.

All of these examples point to one thing:

Self-fulfilling prophecies are real.

When other people give you negative pictures, or when you give them to yourself, the mind and body respond. They deliver the negative results you expect.

Beware of toxic people, 
toxic doctors, and toxic thinking.

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Think about how self-fulfilling prophecies would work in a corrupt media without journalistic principles. Mere repetition from multiple sources works like a kind of mental and emotional programming.

You think the thoughts are your own. You feel the need to reject. But these are programmed thoughts and feelings. Or perhaps more accurately, implants.

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The Arts? Postmodernism has taken care of that. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness and the Sublime are no longer criteria. In fact, they must be driven out because the new Totalitarianism must be drab and lifeless and old. You think that North Korea, Cuba and the countries behind the Iron Curtain got there by accident?

Truth, Beauty, and Goodness and the Sublime elevate. But the goal is to crush such aspirations under the boot of ugliness.

Monet and Van Gogh and Renoir and other classics still command the big bucks and exhibit attendance.

And never mind the kind of contemporary, depressing novels that routinely appear on the New York Times bestseller list. Or that the Hugo Awards has almost completely taken over by avowed socialists.

And Hollywood? The new Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and Disney? ‘Nuff said. Well, an occasional 1883, Yellowstone, Top Gun Maverick, Reacher or The Terminal List, or The Offer get through.

But there is a reason why The Daily Wire has launched an effort to provide old-style entertainment, including that which is safe for the kids.

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CORRUPT JOURNALISM AND THE ARTS
STATUS AS OF 2022: GOAL ACHIEVED

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Step #7: Corrupt Money

Most people do not understand economics, money, wealth, credit, debt, inflation, currency, and circulation. As a result, they are targeted by con artists. Not just con artists in your neighborhood, but con artists on Wall Street and in government (at all levels).

And often these con artists don’t realize they are con artists. They think they are doing the right thing.

It’s an age-old issue: governments corrupt the definition of money and wealth so they can pick the pockets of citizens and throw magnificent parties among their fellow con artists. After the fiasco of “Not worth a Continental” post-revolutionary war, the founders understood the problem with paper “money.” Note: Some of this has been covered in the comments of Step 2: Corrupt Language.

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John W. Eppes, Nov. 6, 1813

Specie [gold and silver coin] is the most perfect medium because it will preserve its own level; because, having intrinsic and universal value, it can never die in our hands… The trifling economy of paper, as a cheaper medium, or its convenience of transmission, weighs nothing in opposition to the advantages of the precious metals; that it is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted.

John Adams, in letter to Thomas Jefferson, August 28, 1787

All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from the defects in their constitution or confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation. [emphasis added]

The founders made sure the door was closed to this kind of money manipulation of paper money from a kind of IOU for real money to a fiat currency that declares itself to be money, a transition made in the 20^th century: Can you spot the significant difference in the paper notes below?

It’s simple: The first is an IOU, a paper note that represents real money on deposit in the U.S. Treasury. The second pretends to be money. Never forget, the term “dollar” is a unit of measurement. If someone said they want to sell you a gallon, what would you say? “A gallon of what? Milk? Gas?” Same with dollar. “A dollar of what? Gold? Silver?”

If you want the full version of the gradual change of language in our paper money, see my Ricochet post Snap Out of It, Part 3. It’s a good one!

But I can sense your eyes glazing over. That’s conspiracy, tax protester talk.

It’s just a coincidence that the following things happened all in the same year, 1913:

• Woodrow Wilson sworn in as President
• The founding of the Federal Reserve.
• The 16^th Amendment establishing the income tax (which initially applied only to investment income–applying to perhaps 1% of the population–but the living Constitution eventually changed that meaning to include wages, gifts, inheritance and pretty much everything else)
• The Revenue Act of 1913, creating the first tax-exempt social welfare organizations, foundations, and trusts, allowing the wealthy to be sheltered from income taxes.

Oh yes, and it’s just a coincidence a world war started a year later that fueled the engine of creating massive debt in the U.S.

And convincing people it’s the right thing to do. Debt is slavery. But they will convince you otherwise.

The rich and powerful, and I mean the REALLY rich and powerful, are not like us. And because they are wholly material in outlook, they have no problem abusing their power, sexually enslaving children, having people blackmailed, extorted, and murdered.

If what Smetana says is true, according to Whittaker Chambers (and it is), the truly rich and powerful are totalitarians, because when you have all the wealth you want, you want control, you want the joy of abusing and crushing others.

Sorry to break it to you. You think it an accident that Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, among so many others, made all those trips to Epstein’s Island?

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CORRUPT MONEY
STATUS AS OF 2022: GOAL ACHIEVED

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Coming soon: Corrupt the Separation of Powers, Elections, and Law Enforcement