https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/you-can-only-support-trump-or-harris
Caitlin Johnstone
Oct 28, 2024
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

People who think of either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris as decent or acceptable simply have not realized how immensely evil you have to be to become a US president.

In order to support either Harris or Trump you need to have an extreme ignorance of the murderousness and depravity of the US empire, which they both serve. Only a complete failure to see and understand the vast scale of the abusiveness of the US power structure could cause you to view these two candidates as meaningfully different from each other — let alone see one of them as decent enough to be worthy of your support.

Both Trump and Harris are auditioning for a role that will necessarily entail the creation of mountains of human corpses by US-sponsored violence, as has every viable US presidential candidate throughout our lives.

This is because the US empire is deeply evil. Not the country called the United States in and of itself, but the globe-spanning power structure which functions as an empire that’s structured around it. This vast power structure is held together by rivers of human blood, and if you’re the Democratic or Republican nominee to lead it as president then you are necessarily a deeply evil person, because you have sufficiently assured all the necessary powers that be that you will continue that bloodshed in order to become the nominee.

Most Americans (and most westerners generally) fail to truly see and understand how profoundly evil the US-centralized empire is, which is the only thing that allows all this political energy to go into pretending there are these hugely significant differences between the Democrat and the Republican presidential candidate every four years. If they could really ingest the scale of the empire’s brutality and tyranny with a deep sense of empathy for their fellow human beings upon whom it is inflicted, they would never support anyone who is pledged to help operate the slaughter machine, and they would not see any would-be operators of that machine as meaningfully different from any other. All they would see is the need for the slaughter machine to be dismantled.

The most sophisticated propaganda engine ever created exists to prevent this understanding from taking root, in the west generally and in the United States in particular. Americans are the most propagandized population on this planet, and their propaganda indoctrination is at its most intensive during the quadrennial performance ritual known as the US presidential race. The whole thing is geared toward falsely exaggerating the differences between the two candidates while drawing emphasis away from the 99 percent of the issues on which they are indistinguishable from each other. And those 99 percent similarities happen to be on all the most murderous and tyrannical behaviors of the US government.

If Americans weren’t so aggressively propagandized and indoctrinated, this would all be obvious to them, and this election race performance wouldn’t get them clapping along like children at a puppet show. The abusive status quo necessary for maintaining the US-centralized empire would not be consented to at all, and would be forced to collapse. There’s too much power riding on preventing this from happening for Americans to be allowed to have a real say in their elections, so they are propagandized to the gills into clapping along instead.

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Liberals are freaking out because The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post chose not to endorse a presidential candidate this election cycle, which is silly. Newspapers shouldn’t endorse political candidates. How is this not obvious to everyone?

It’s absolutely ridiculous that news outlets endorsing political candidates is a thing at all. The first job of a real journalist is to have an adversarial relationship with those in power, regardless of who wins. The only correct political position from the perspective of journalistic ethics is “If you are in power I will do everything I can to expose all your lies and misdeeds, no matter what your party or platform happens to be.” This position is vastly more important in the US, the nation with the world’s most powerful government, and becomes more important the more influence your news outlet has.

If you are campaigning for one side or the other, you’ve obviously hurt your ability to take this position. You’re communicating a line of favoritism not only to the public, but to your outlet’s staff, and to the politicians you’re meant to be holding to account. You’re making decisions which can help or hinder your outlet’s ability to gain access to an administration once in office by doing or not doing what amounts to a political favor for them. The press should not be doing political favors for any political candidate, and the expectation that they should inhibits their ability to do critical journalism.

Obviously news outlets have biases like anyone else, and they should do everything they can to bring transparency to those biases. But that should look like saying “Yes we have an ideological bias, so here’s what we’re doing to prevent that from skewing our coverage of the powerful,” not “Everybody please vote for Candidate X because we like them more than Candidate Y.”

The whole controversy is stupid. The LA Times and Washington Post shouldn’t be endorsing a presidential candidate. No news outlet should, at least if they purport to be engaged in journalism rather than political activism.

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Back when people used to watch TV they’d complain that there’s “a hundred channels and nothing on,” and they were right: there WAS nothing on that was worth watching. Mainstream culture was just that vapid and worthless — and it still is. There’s nothing in it that fulfills us, that nourishes us in the ways we long to be nourished, that tells us real things in a real way about the world as it actually is. People would flip through TV channels disgusted at the emptiness of it all because that’s all they were being presented with: empty drivel with no edifying or transformative value.

People experience the same thing today when scrolling through their online media feeds and streaming services. They’re searching for something true and meaningful, but unless you’ve been lucky enough to stumble into a rare corner of the internet where real things are being discussed, all the algorithm feeds you is propaganda and distraction. Mindless entertainment. Celebrities. Gossip. Mainstream electoral politics. Donald Trump.

For generations we’ve been corralled toward streams of information which are designed to turn us into idiots and sociopaths. Designed to keep us from getting good information about what the powerful people who rule us are really up to. To dull our curiosity and keep us from asking useful and penetrating questions about our society. To direct any political impulses we might be able to muster in this confusing fog toward mainstream political factions which all support the status quo. To stop us from looking too closely at the death and misery our government inflicts upon people in far away countries. To keep us from noticing that we live in a mind-controlled dystopia that is fueled by endless exploitation, abuse, mass military violence, and ecocide. To keep us mindlessly turning the gears of the empire and trusting our rulers to sort things out on our behalf. To keep us sedated and compliant instead of brilliant and inconvenient.

It takes work to get outside of that matrix of manipulation. It takes time to find good sources of information and ingest what they’ve got to teach us. It takes effort to find our way into depth and meaning inside this fraudulent empire. But that’s what we all ache for. That’s what kept people flipping through channels in frustration in the glory days of television. They were looking for the depth. They were searching for something authentic. Something real.

Forming a truth-based relationship with reality can be difficult, but it’s a necessary step if you want to be an authentic person and come out of that itching sense of dissatisfaction which all controlled minds must inevitably experience. This is the only path to real and lasting happiness. Until then all you get is the fake decoy happiness they try to sell you in advertisements and Hollywood movies that comes from always getting your way and owning the right products and achieving all your goals and having a compelling personal story to tell people. This isn’t real happiness. It cannot last. It cannot satisfy.

Only truth can lead to satisfaction. And everything in this fake plastic dystopia is structured around preventing us from ever finding it.