this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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Lots of people saying that Oct 7, Palestine, the genocide kicked this off.
I disagree. It kicked it into over-gear but what made it palatable for liberals was the Russiagate hoax and the concept of disinformation they've been so successfully sold from 2016 onward. That there is this cartoon villain or villains like Putin and China and so on who just have these armies of bots and trolls who conjure out of thin air as if evil sorcerers the dread disinformation which creates people (again out of thin air) who want to vote for Trump or who hate the covid vaccine, or who deny modern medicine, or who reject the imperialist narrative on Ukraine. And on and on. It broke enough brains to really get things moving. These liberals are in total denial that anything is wrong in the US, it can't be that we're in an atomized society with many left behind, with corporate lies all over, with an inconsistent, hypocritical political/economic system that breeds conspiratorial thinking or that we're founded on white supremacy and structural racism, it must be those dastardly outsiders and their false narratives and propaganda that have created all this trouble and if we get rid of them we can go back to brunch and the problems will be normal problems again like they were before.
And this is not new. I think James Baldwin was the one who said "when the south has trouble with their [black people] they blame the north, when the nation has trouble with them, they blame Russia" it's just that back then the information control was simply controlling the TV news and newspapers and there was nothing they could practically do about word of mouth campaigns, about discussions between people happening on college campuses and in various public places. But now with most discourse online and centralized behind gatekeepers the opportunity presents itself to actually institute some control.
So they were already moving this direction with the Russiagate hoax narrative and the anger and accusations towards social media for not censoring enough, it's just that Oct 7th and the loss of control of the Palestine narrative has not only panicked them but it's gotten the GOP zionists who were of course skeptical if not outright derisive of this campaign when it was just an anti-Trump thing onboard now with the need for control and a crackdown. The loss of control of the narrative on Ukraine in the global south has also significantly propelled this as we see as these arch imperialists are very frustrated with RT as Russia hasn't collapsed or been as isolated as they'd like and the war is going south in Ukraine so now it's time for blame and power-grabs.