There’s no better example of how little faith Americans have that government officials will tell the truth than the public’s blasé reaction to UFO announcements. In the last ten years, The New York Times has run stories about secret Pentagon programs tasked with retrieving alien craft. Members of Congress have held hearings on “mysterious orbs” and invited government witnesses to testify about black budget projects supposedly reverse-engineering alien technology. Secretary of State Rubio and director of National Intelligence Gabbard have both suggested that the UFO issue is serious. Yet eight billion people around the world collectively shrug.
Can you imagine what the public reaction would have been like had national newspapers and prominent officials released similar details in the 1950s? With the 1947 Roswell Incident still fresh in Americans’ minds, government confirmation of UFOs would have been the most important story in the world. Every article written and television report broadcast would have been framed around the alien/UFO phenomenon.
For eighty years, UFO-hunters have been fighting for government declassifications and official disclosure of alien contact. Now that videos of strange sightings have been released and congressional hearings have been convened to investigate the matter, Americans don’t seem to care. Representatives Tim Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna have said explicitly that extraterrestrial visitors are real, and their statements disappear in a blizzard of news stories discussing the “Aryan micro-aggressions” of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans.
Nobody believes what government officials say. Nobody believes what journalists say. In our world today, fantastic stories come and go, and nobody knows if they’re real.
CIA director William Casey reportedly told other principals gathered in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in early 1981, “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” Whether Casey was being frighteningly blunt or darkly humorous, I don’t know. Yet we certainly know that the CIA and FBI have been running mass propaganda programs on the American people for as long as either agency has existed.
What military schools now teach as examples of “hybrid” or “information warfare” has long been part of the U.S. government’s arsenal of psychological weapons used against American citizens. I wish this fact were more shocking to people. Information warfare is just as effective and deadly as conventional warfare.
As bad as Allied losses were at Normandy, they would have been much worse had Eisenhower and Patton not tricked Hitler into concentrating his forces away from the locus of the invasion. All of the so-called “color revolutions” of the last fifteen years in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East relied heavily upon anonymous (and likely espionage agency–created) social media accounts to inflame tensions, sow chaos, and encourage rioting. The Russia Collusion Hoax and the unbridled COVID hysteria (during which governments rushed to close schools and businesses and censor online speech before basic facts could even be established) are textbook examples of information warfare that upended entire societies without ever firing a shot.
When we acknowledge that government institutions have knowingly and willfully targeted the American people with disinformation campaigns meant to achieve strategic objectives, we are acknowledging that these institutions have made war against us exactly as military planners would wage war against foreign enemies. That is a sobering, terrifying, and unforgivable betrayal of the U.S. Constitution.
Surely the federal government’s information war against the American people is just as newsworthy as the possibility of extraterrestrial or intra-dimensional visitors. Noticeably, however, there are even fewer stories written about the government’s mass psychological operations against citizens than there are stories written about UFOs. That’s pretty revealing. The New York Times would rather hype speculation about little green men than document how federal agencies regularly lie to and manipulate the American people.
Why do you think that is? It is because The Times and other prominent news publications are well aware that they have been willing weapons in this decades-long information war against citizens. The government can’t psychologically manipulate the masses without controlling mass communication. Likewise, instruments of mass communication can’t effectively disseminate disinformation if the people who are meant to be manipulated recognize those instruments as weapons for spreading colossal lies.
When President Trump first began excoriating reporters for publishing “fake news,” the Dan Rathers and Jim Acostas of the propaganda press huffed and puffed, claiming that Trump’s exercise of his First Amendment right to free speech somehow jeopardized Americans’ First Amendment right to a free press. Coming from the mouths of known liars, the journalistic Establishment’s choreographed umbrage was hilarious. The prodigious manufacturers of fake news had long advertised their offal-laden sausages as fine cuts of meat. And Trump had no problem telling the American people that the most famous names in news sold eyeball- and intestine-filled slop.
But it was not Trump’s insults that the corporate news media really feared. After all, lame-duck President Obama had used the “fake news” pejorative repeatedly before leaving office in an effort to blame Hillary’s election loss on random social media accounts supposedly spreading “Russian disinformation.” (Appallingly, Obama was pushing Russia Collusion Hoax disinformation while blaming disinformation for Trump’s victory.) Even the propaganda press picked up Obama’s baton and published numerous stories in late 2016 claiming that an epidemic of “fake news” got Trump elected.
So the purveyors of fake news had no problem disparaging other news publications as “fake.” They only started worrying when they belatedly realized that Trump’s belittling of their profession had shattered their decades-long spell over the minds of the American people. Frauds such as Dan Rather and Jim Acosta called Trump a liar. Trump called them liars. And the American people believed Trump more than the pudgy blood sausages of fake news.
Trust in government institutions and newsrooms has been falling for decades. The Russia Collusion Hoax, the COVID Reign of Terror, and the outrageous lawfare campaigns against conservative politicians and voters have now destroyed public trust in Establishment institutions for the foreseeable future.
Where do we go from here? When authorities no longer have the trust of the people, they survive only by making amends for past transgressions or adopting even more overt forms of coercion. In the former case, government transparency, the impartial application of the law, and respect for public dissent help to renew the social contract between citizens and their government. In the latter case, appeals to expertise, discriminatory criminal enforcement, and rank censorship become hammers beating citizens into submission.
The United Kingdom has chosen coercion. Law enforcement agencies in the U.K. spend more resources policing public debate on social media platforms than they do curbing illegal immigration or protecting children from rape gangs. Citizens who express unapproved thoughts that contradict official government policies put themselves in legal jeopardy. U.K. health authorities continue to defend their COVID totalitarianism as a reasonable emergency response backed by “scientific” expertise. In the U.K., protections for free speech, dissent, and freedom of conscience are dead.
The Brits will surely reap what they now sow. They will discover how many citizens are willing to “trust the experts” when “net zero” energy rationing puts lives and livelihoods in danger. They will learn how many capable warriors are willing to fight and die in future wars for a country that treats illegal aliens better than patriotic citizens. They will rediscover that the criminalization of public debate leaves silenced citizens no alternative to rebellion.
In the United States, we have a small window to avoid Britain’s fate. While President Trump is keeping the corporate news media’s propagandists and Silicon Valley’s censors at bay, Americans have one final chance to defend free speech from the contemptible Deep State. If we fail, everything will soon resemble a UFO. Nobody will know what’s fake or real...or even care.
Image via Needpix.