How this divide and conquer / demoralization strategy is being achieved:
Ten Ways the 1% - Who Own Almost All Media and Which Have Radicalized Us Against One Another - Are Manipulating Us Right Now to Walk in Lockstep Into the Technocratic Incinerator, by Unknown
1) The first manipulation is the illusion of choice. You think you have two parties representing different visions for America but both parties are funded by the same billionaires, vote for the same surveillance bills, approve the same defense budgets, and serve the same corporate interests. The choice you are given is which color tie the puppet wears, not who controls the strings.
2) The second manipulation is emotional hijacking. The news does not inform you, it activates you. Every story is framed to trigger fear or anger or disgust because those emotions bypass your rational thinking and make you easier to control. You are not watching journalism. You are being subjected to psychological operations designed to keep you in a constant state of agitation.
3) The third manipulation is tribal sorting. The algorithm learns what makes you angry and feeds you more of it until your entire worldview is shaped by outrage at the other side. You are sorted into a tribe not because you chose it but because keeping you tribal keeps you predictable and profitable.
4) The fourth manipulation is false scarcity. You are told resources are limited and the other tribe is taking what belongs to you. Immigrants are stealing your jobs. Welfare recipients are draining your taxes. The other party is destroying your healthcare. Meanwhile the billionaire class has more wealth than any humans in history and could solve most of these problems tomorrow if they wanted to.
5) The fifth manipulation is memory holing. Stories that threaten powerful interests get buried or forgotten within days. Exposed crimes result in no consequences. Historical context that would help you understand the present is never taught. You are kept in a perpetual present with no past to learn from and no future to plan for.
6) The sixth manipulation is controlled opposition. The voices you think are fighting for you are often funded by the same interests they pretend to oppose. The outrage merchant on your side of the aisle is playing a character designed to keep you engaged and angry and tuned in while nothing ever actually changes.
7) The seventh manipulation is the Overton window. The range of acceptable opinion is artificially narrowed so that anything outside it seems extreme. Ideas that were mainstream fifty years ago are now treated as radical. Ideas that serve elite interests are treated as moderate common sense. You are not choosing your beliefs from the full range of human thought. You are choosing from a menu they wrote.
8) The eighth manipulation is learned helplessness. You are shown so many problems with no solutions that you eventually give up and accept that nothing can change. This is intentional. A population that believes resistance is futile does not resist. They scroll and complain and feel superior for understanding how bad things are while doing absolutely nothing about it.
9) The ninth manipulation is identity capture. Your political affiliation becomes your identity, and any attack on your party feels like an attack on you personally. This makes you defend politicians and policies that harm you because admitting they are wrong would mean admitting you were wrong, and your ego will not allow that.
10) The tenth manipulation is the most insidious of all: you are manipulated into believing you are too smart to be manipulated. Every person reading this thinks the manipulations I described apply to other people, the stupid people, the brainwashed people on the other side. That certainty is itself a manipulation. The moment you believe you are immune is the moment you become most vulnerable.
Here are well over a dozen Fox, CBS, ABC, & NBC local news stations all reading an identical script sent down from their singular overlord to crash & burn alternative media in order to enhance the Oligarchy’s Overwhelming threat to our democracy:
Ultimately we are not consuming news. We are consuming a product manufactured by the richest men in human history, and that product is designed to do one thing: keep us so busy fighting our neighbors that you never notice the chains being fastened around our wrists.
Tossing Schumer (and Jeffries) would signal a great deal; AND (at the risk of sounding too kitchen-tabley) I think we also need a full-throated defense OF GOVERNMENT. We are still laboring under the Reaganesque framing of government as the problem. Mamdani gets it. Government--in the hands of the right people--can be positive, responsive, supportive...accountable. The whole damn country needs a remedial civics lesson. If only we had the world's biggest media/entertainment factory on our shores....
Thanks for writing this. It sums up my views and feelings quite accurately. I'm in Michigan supporting Abdul El-Sayed. I do have qualms from time to time, that I should be supporting Haley Stevens, the "safer" choice but I'm not budging.
In Michigan, the echoes of the Democratic Endorsement Convention on April 19, 2026 continue to linger. Haley Stevens was booed during her speech. I wasn't surprised. I might have booed too if I had been there.
The message from the Michigan Democratic Party elite and in particular, Haley Stevens, has been clear. Progressive voices don't matter. Progressives are supposed to show up and canvass and donate money but never have a candidate of their own.
When this started, I would have been happy with a progressive position or two like Medicare for All or Abolish ICE. But no compromises were offered. I wanted to hear that the progressive voices were heard and acknowledged.
According to the polls, El-Sayed has a decent chance of defeating Mike Rogers. My own view is that Rogers is a weak candidate and El-Sayed a stronger one. And that El-Sayed is a better choice than Haley Stevens for the nominee in 2026.
The Democrats somehow managed to be heavily complicit in or come to outright own in the public mind every Republican failure of the last 25 years, whether it be the financial crisis/bailouts, Iraq/Afghanistan War, War on Terror, Covid, Mass Incarceration, Income inquality, Gaza, you name it. Seems unsurprising the base has turned on its leadership.
Excellent analysis Brian. For me what caused the collapse of trust wasn't necessarily the 2024 election results but the party's response to it. After saying they would conduct a thorough assessment of what went wrong they couldn't produce an autopsy, leadership did not change, and strategy did not change. Party leaders advocating for doing nothing in 2025 was an astounding failure.
It was also demoralizing having consultants tell us that Kamala was doomed from the start and many people thought Biden would lose in mid 2024 while asking for our money and time. It feels like we were grifted. Or being told that "we lost less in places we campaigned." Imagine a football coach losing the superbowl and saying "we did good on first down".
Most infantilizing is the leadership doubling down on terrible candidates like Haley Stevens, doubling down on AIPAC spending and corporate spending, demolishing any sense of a policy or governing agenda, and then telling us to vote our way out of facism. We did it before and these people did nothing.
I remember all this because 2000 was the first presidential election I voted in, as a lefty radical college student (although I voted for Gore). So I spent a lot of my adult life frustrated with Dems for not being lefty enough, and I think a lot of what happened in the aughts was a holdover from Bill Clinton's centrist triumph in the 90s, and a lot of the politicians who came up through the ranks then (Schumer, Pelosi) still espouse this centrist prioritization of bipartisanship, as though New Gingrich and a recalcitrant wing of the Republican party didn't exist. (Which is to say, there were more reasonable Republicans in Congress prior to the Tea Party, but let's not pretend it was all hunky dory.)
Anyway, one thing I think a lot of commentators miss is that the filibuster benefits Republicans. McConnell-style Republicans care about two things: judges and tax cuts, and they can do both with 51 votes. That's why GOP senators insist on keeping it; it'll be far worse (to them) if the filibuster is abolished and Dems can pass voting rights bills and whatever other liberal priorities keep John Thune awake at night. (Before the McConnell era, the filibuster was most often deployed to stop progress, especially on civil rights.)
I think also sometime in the last ten years, elected Dems starting fearing being called radical to an irrational degree. They trust mainstream media too much and think the truth is on their side but don't make an affirmative case and let all of Trump's nonsense fill the void. I think that's also part of the current party infighting. Take New York. Tom Suozzi is so terrified of someone on Fox News calling him a Marxist that, rather than making a case for his own politics, he's lashing out at the DSA candidates in NYC, mad their very existence will give Republicans fuel to call the whole party communist (which Trump is doing now and doesn't seem to be getting much traction with). But the dynamic is such that Biden could have built the dang wall and Trump and Republicans would still be yelling about open borders. If the centrists think they're right, let them make that argument instead of punching left. Maybe they are right! The DSA movement seems to be one largely of affluent white liberals, but they'll have to win over voters of color to win bigger races.
But Dem establishment politics of the Trump era have been a lot of telling the base what we can't have, or just tinkering around the edges while problems get bigger and worse, and they should maybe be less surprised that voters are like, "we bided our time and did things your way for decades, and we got two Trump terms for it, so we're trying something else now."
Hi Brian, starting with a welcome back. I am going to read this article in full later today so I can really let it soak in. From the start of this article I see you are on the mark describing problems the Dems are facing especially as they refuse to make way for new ideas and recognize they have enabled trump, particularly in his first months, though it is still happening now. . Best regards
Are you and Matthew tellling stories that look at first glance to be diametrically opposed, but maybe are not?
I read you as saying, mainly, "this is how the Dem establishment lost the voters"
I read Matt as saying, "The left is marketing itself as the anti-Trump coalition but that is a scam, their are more focused on intraparty factional battles."
Right or wrong, these are not exactly opposite points of view. Him being right doesn't make you wrong or vice versa.
We have somewhat similar analyses (we depart on the particulars of what precipitated the collapse of trust. But we very different prescriptions. Mine is that if elected Dems want to put down the insurgency, they should recapture anti-Trump energy by fighting him harder, in real procedural terms. Matt’s (I think) is that we should expose and stigmatize the insurgents, to starve them of resources.
Regarding Matt’s assessment, don’t we kinda of need those insurgents to have them reveal that the establishment were always frauds like we all knew they were? No internal opposition by the establishment reflects business as usual, no?
How this divide and conquer / demoralization strategy is being achieved:
Ten Ways the 1% - Who Own Almost All Media and Which Have Radicalized Us Against One Another - Are Manipulating Us Right Now to Walk in Lockstep Into the Technocratic Incinerator, by Unknown
1) The first manipulation is the illusion of choice. You think you have two parties representing different visions for America but both parties are funded by the same billionaires, vote for the same surveillance bills, approve the same defense budgets, and serve the same corporate interests. The choice you are given is which color tie the puppet wears, not who controls the strings.
2) The second manipulation is emotional hijacking. The news does not inform you, it activates you. Every story is framed to trigger fear or anger or disgust because those emotions bypass your rational thinking and make you easier to control. You are not watching journalism. You are being subjected to psychological operations designed to keep you in a constant state of agitation.
3) The third manipulation is tribal sorting. The algorithm learns what makes you angry and feeds you more of it until your entire worldview is shaped by outrage at the other side. You are sorted into a tribe not because you chose it but because keeping you tribal keeps you predictable and profitable.
4) The fourth manipulation is false scarcity. You are told resources are limited and the other tribe is taking what belongs to you. Immigrants are stealing your jobs. Welfare recipients are draining your taxes. The other party is destroying your healthcare. Meanwhile the billionaire class has more wealth than any humans in history and could solve most of these problems tomorrow if they wanted to.
5) The fifth manipulation is memory holing. Stories that threaten powerful interests get buried or forgotten within days. Exposed crimes result in no consequences. Historical context that would help you understand the present is never taught. You are kept in a perpetual present with no past to learn from and no future to plan for.
6) The sixth manipulation is controlled opposition. The voices you think are fighting for you are often funded by the same interests they pretend to oppose. The outrage merchant on your side of the aisle is playing a character designed to keep you engaged and angry and tuned in while nothing ever actually changes.
7) The seventh manipulation is the Overton window. The range of acceptable opinion is artificially narrowed so that anything outside it seems extreme. Ideas that were mainstream fifty years ago are now treated as radical. Ideas that serve elite interests are treated as moderate common sense. You are not choosing your beliefs from the full range of human thought. You are choosing from a menu they wrote.
8) The eighth manipulation is learned helplessness. You are shown so many problems with no solutions that you eventually give up and accept that nothing can change. This is intentional. A population that believes resistance is futile does not resist. They scroll and complain and feel superior for understanding how bad things are while doing absolutely nothing about it.
9) The ninth manipulation is identity capture. Your political affiliation becomes your identity, and any attack on your party feels like an attack on you personally. This makes you defend politicians and policies that harm you because admitting they are wrong would mean admitting you were wrong, and your ego will not allow that.
10) The tenth manipulation is the most insidious of all: you are manipulated into believing you are too smart to be manipulated. Every person reading this thinks the manipulations I described apply to other people, the stupid people, the brainwashed people on the other side. That certainty is itself a manipulation. The moment you believe you are immune is the moment you become most vulnerable.
Here are well over a dozen Fox, CBS, ABC, & NBC local news stations all reading an identical script sent down from their singular overlord to crash & burn alternative media in order to enhance the Oligarchy’s Overwhelming threat to our democracy:
https://substack.com/@tritorch/note/c-208406729
Ultimately we are not consuming news. We are consuming a product manufactured by the richest men in human history, and that product is designed to do one thing: keep us so busy fighting our neighbors that you never notice the chains being fastened around our wrists.
Tossing Schumer (and Jeffries) would signal a great deal; AND (at the risk of sounding too kitchen-tabley) I think we also need a full-throated defense OF GOVERNMENT. We are still laboring under the Reaganesque framing of government as the problem. Mamdani gets it. Government--in the hands of the right people--can be positive, responsive, supportive...accountable. The whole damn country needs a remedial civics lesson. If only we had the world's biggest media/entertainment factory on our shores....
Thanks for writing this. It sums up my views and feelings quite accurately. I'm in Michigan supporting Abdul El-Sayed. I do have qualms from time to time, that I should be supporting Haley Stevens, the "safer" choice but I'm not budging.
In Michigan, the echoes of the Democratic Endorsement Convention on April 19, 2026 continue to linger. Haley Stevens was booed during her speech. I wasn't surprised. I might have booed too if I had been there.
The message from the Michigan Democratic Party elite and in particular, Haley Stevens, has been clear. Progressive voices don't matter. Progressives are supposed to show up and canvass and donate money but never have a candidate of their own.
When this started, I would have been happy with a progressive position or two like Medicare for All or Abolish ICE. But no compromises were offered. I wanted to hear that the progressive voices were heard and acknowledged.
According to the polls, El-Sayed has a decent chance of defeating Mike Rogers. My own view is that Rogers is a weak candidate and El-Sayed a stronger one. And that El-Sayed is a better choice than Haley Stevens for the nominee in 2026.
But nothing is certain.
The Democrats somehow managed to be heavily complicit in or come to outright own in the public mind every Republican failure of the last 25 years, whether it be the financial crisis/bailouts, Iraq/Afghanistan War, War on Terror, Covid, Mass Incarceration, Income inquality, Gaza, you name it. Seems unsurprising the base has turned on its leadership.
An indictment of the Democratic establishment’s insouciance and the whole political class as a whole.
Excellent analysis Brian. For me what caused the collapse of trust wasn't necessarily the 2024 election results but the party's response to it. After saying they would conduct a thorough assessment of what went wrong they couldn't produce an autopsy, leadership did not change, and strategy did not change. Party leaders advocating for doing nothing in 2025 was an astounding failure.
It was also demoralizing having consultants tell us that Kamala was doomed from the start and many people thought Biden would lose in mid 2024 while asking for our money and time. It feels like we were grifted. Or being told that "we lost less in places we campaigned." Imagine a football coach losing the superbowl and saying "we did good on first down".
Most infantilizing is the leadership doubling down on terrible candidates like Haley Stevens, doubling down on AIPAC spending and corporate spending, demolishing any sense of a policy or governing agenda, and then telling us to vote our way out of facism. We did it before and these people did nothing.
I remember all this because 2000 was the first presidential election I voted in, as a lefty radical college student (although I voted for Gore). So I spent a lot of my adult life frustrated with Dems for not being lefty enough, and I think a lot of what happened in the aughts was a holdover from Bill Clinton's centrist triumph in the 90s, and a lot of the politicians who came up through the ranks then (Schumer, Pelosi) still espouse this centrist prioritization of bipartisanship, as though New Gingrich and a recalcitrant wing of the Republican party didn't exist. (Which is to say, there were more reasonable Republicans in Congress prior to the Tea Party, but let's not pretend it was all hunky dory.)
Anyway, one thing I think a lot of commentators miss is that the filibuster benefits Republicans. McConnell-style Republicans care about two things: judges and tax cuts, and they can do both with 51 votes. That's why GOP senators insist on keeping it; it'll be far worse (to them) if the filibuster is abolished and Dems can pass voting rights bills and whatever other liberal priorities keep John Thune awake at night. (Before the McConnell era, the filibuster was most often deployed to stop progress, especially on civil rights.)
I think also sometime in the last ten years, elected Dems starting fearing being called radical to an irrational degree. They trust mainstream media too much and think the truth is on their side but don't make an affirmative case and let all of Trump's nonsense fill the void. I think that's also part of the current party infighting. Take New York. Tom Suozzi is so terrified of someone on Fox News calling him a Marxist that, rather than making a case for his own politics, he's lashing out at the DSA candidates in NYC, mad their very existence will give Republicans fuel to call the whole party communist (which Trump is doing now and doesn't seem to be getting much traction with). But the dynamic is such that Biden could have built the dang wall and Trump and Republicans would still be yelling about open borders. If the centrists think they're right, let them make that argument instead of punching left. Maybe they are right! The DSA movement seems to be one largely of affluent white liberals, but they'll have to win over voters of color to win bigger races.
But Dem establishment politics of the Trump era have been a lot of telling the base what we can't have, or just tinkering around the edges while problems get bigger and worse, and they should maybe be less surprised that voters are like, "we bided our time and did things your way for decades, and we got two Trump terms for it, so we're trying something else now."
Hi Brian, starting with a welcome back. I am going to read this article in full later today so I can really let it soak in. From the start of this article I see you are on the mark describing problems the Dems are facing especially as they refuse to make way for new ideas and recognize they have enabled trump, particularly in his first months, though it is still happening now. . Best regards
Are you and Matthew tellling stories that look at first glance to be diametrically opposed, but maybe are not?
I read you as saying, mainly, "this is how the Dem establishment lost the voters"
I read Matt as saying, "The left is marketing itself as the anti-Trump coalition but that is a scam, their are more focused on intraparty factional battles."
Right or wrong, these are not exactly opposite points of view. Him being right doesn't make you wrong or vice versa.
We have somewhat similar analyses (we depart on the particulars of what precipitated the collapse of trust. But we very different prescriptions. Mine is that if elected Dems want to put down the insurgency, they should recapture anti-Trump energy by fighting him harder, in real procedural terms. Matt’s (I think) is that we should expose and stigmatize the insurgents, to starve them of resources.
Regarding Matt’s assessment, don’t we kinda of need those insurgents to have them reveal that the establishment were always frauds like we all knew they were? No internal opposition by the establishment reflects business as usual, no?
Asking for a friend.