Addressing the "Information War"

Where does the truth lie amongst the biased, cognitive dissonant, liars, apologists, and the willfully ignorant who obfuscate it, and how will we ever find it again?

We’ve heard time and time again that we are in the midst of wars. We are now in other types of wars beyond the tangible physical battlefield where soldiers go to use the latest weaponry of guns, bombs, tanks, lasers, and missiles. Whether it is a cyber war, cultural war, war on information, war on “disinformation,” a war against “fake news,” or a war on ideas, it seems our vernacular has transformed every contemporary human struggle we face as a “fight” or a “war.”

We have to fight against injustice, fight against global warming, and fight against whatever we think is the next danger, threat, or boogeyman. Before the war on misinformation, it was a war against terrorism or Islamic extremists, and the war against communism. A lot of the newer generations may not be familiar with what happened during the McCarthy period after World War II, where there was mass hysteria against communism called the “red scare”, when people were losing their jobs in the government, labor unions, academia, and Hollywood simply due to hearsay. The culture became exceedingly untrusting of anyone, and people were acting as informants, to blacklist anyone who they feared might be a socialist or communist. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Supreme Court found Congress to have enacted unconstitutional laws in relation to anti-Russian espionage paranoia that cost so many people their livelihoods.

Considering this never-ending diatribe designed to stimulate fear, I call on you to really begin to pay attention to the language being used, to what you hear on the mainstream news by correspondents and analysts. Start listening to the conversations for the words fight, fight, fight, and war, war, war, and you will begin to realize how ubiquitous these terms have become. We’ve had the war against drugs, the war against obesity, the war against the pandemic, the war against climate change. You get the idea. It’s been a constant barrage of language about wars and rumors of wars.

President Biden stated on December 16th, 2021, “For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death.” That prediction proved to be irresponsible doom-and-gloom hyperbole at best. At worst, that message was a radical form of extreme fear-mongering that not only did not come to fruition but emphasized the division between the perceived good people who will be safe and the perceived bad people who can get a lump of dark coal in the form of severe illness and death over Christmas. Did that kind of communication encourage people to do the right thing and buy into the agenda that everyone must line up for emergency-authorized medical procedures with ever-changing goalposts? No, that sort of language had the opposite effect. It further discredited the legitimacy of the narrative that you will die if you don’t seek pharmaceutical products as your method of intervention. The Omicron variant proved to be a much less deadly variant, which produced mostly mild symptoms and full recovery without hospitalization. Looking at our world in data, the winter was mild compared to the previous wave in the winter of 2020 that peaked at 10 deaths per million, with less than 8 deaths per million people in 2021, yet there was limited post-mortem analysis to critique that form of messaging being so irresponsible and diabolical...

What is more diabolical than generally accepting such irresponsible hyperbole from elected officials is buying into the lies that keep us divided. Once you succumb to the you’ve got to stand with one side against the other, and you decide to stand together against a common enemy, you are allowing things to become excessively polarized. You see the polarization all the time. It’s Black Lives Matter against Blue Lives Matter. It’s the Liberal Left fighting against the Alt-Right, or the pro-lifers against the “my body my choice” pro-choice, or pro-abortion camp; it’s the people who are all about mandates who claim to be “pro-science” against the anti-vaxxers, who are mislabeled “anti-science” for simply asking questions.

Who Gets a Monopoly on Accurate Information?

Additionally, we are now faced with “fact checkers” who have positioned themselves as the bastions of truth, helping us in our war against misinformation. However, the fact-checkers themselves have been shown to either have bias or have had their fact-checking debunked. How ironic that we have to check the fact-checkers because their fact-checking is itself not factual?

What this boils down to is that some people in one organization have the ultimate say in their own opinions, whether or not their opinions are the actual truth or facts. Instead, facts are being suppressed for the wrong reasons, and healthy discourse or debates are stifled due to censorship that cannot be publicly appealed or contested.

No matter what side you perceive to be where you are ideologically most aligned, you still fall squarely into the either you are with us, or against us meme, which makes you both alike in the same respects. Both of your positions are blinded by the rhetoric without seeing the bigger picture, or the nuance and grey areas that exist simultaneously within the chasm and ever-expanding divide of your socialized separation - namely, the instruments that perpetuate your perception of “other” is bad, and I’m the good guy. All the while, devolving into a quagmire of arguing online, wasting precious time and energy to effect real and lasting positive change. If you were to consider the spirit of cooperation over competition, you might find a lot of commonality between perceived “others”, where you share similar goals or values outside of the one that you differ on. Again, there’s more of a grey area between all the black and white. All this talk of “either/or” reminds one of the famous quote in the 2005 film, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, where Obi-Wan stated to Anakin when he turned to the dark side, “only Siths deal in absolutes.”

This “Us vs. Them” mentality has infected our mind field like a noxious weed that we have to root out. It can be likened to a malignant tumor of the mind, eating away at the prefrontal cortex, which hampers the ability to make good moral judgments and to properly reason. The reptilian brain, when stimulated, puts people in the fight or flight response, which is reactive, overly emotional, and cannot be tempered with reason nor logic. If we live primarily with the reptilian brain in survival mode and continual fear, that basically short-circuits the brain’s higher-order cognitive functions of the rational mind.

Modern governments and corporations that have been engaging in “psyops” understand this well and have been employing it on a regular basis and with increased frequency. According to the Corbett Report, “Psyops, or psychological operations, is a term used to describe the techniques of psychological manipulation used in warfare.” Just as soon as one crisis begins to decline in importance over time, another one takes its place with uncanny timing. Is it any wonder we are incessantly bombarded with a new crisis in the news cycle? When people are operating from their reptilian and mammalian parts of their brains, people are then more easily controlled by the ever-increasing major news organization propaganda, through repeated suggestions, commands, decrees, directives, or diktat by the “trusted” authority of the day all to serve agendas that aren’t necessarily for the greater common good and often-times, manipulate public opinion to such a degree that they unwittingly serve to fatten peoples wallets and change public policies that sacrifice our bill of rights for short term security...

Our only Defense

It’s time that we begin to make the conscious decision to break our addiction to “fear porn” and engage the rational part of the brain. The one that understands that there is no clear delineation between the illusory choice of only two realities or socially accepted choices of which “side” you are on. If you feel yourself getting either angry, fearful, or persuaded to demonize the “other” by what you watch or read from mainstream news organizations, bring that to your conscious awareness. Begin to question why the us vs. them mentality is being brought before you, and what purpose that serves. Let us begin to question if there truly are only two options of black and white thinking, or if we live in a world with many more dimensions and nuance to contend with, where things are not only black and white, but there’s a grey area in between. What are you being asked to do when you are in a state of fear, anger, or when you need to fight against “them”, your perceived enemy? Once you begin to see the man behind the curtain pulling on the puppet strings, you will be able to understand the Modus Operandi behind the latest controversy designed to pit us one against the other and remove yourself from being manipulated to think or act a certain way as a result of it. You can become an independent “free-thinker” in a sea of soundbites, regurgitated talking points, and taglines, and begin asking the hard questions about how we got here, how harmful it has ultimately become, and become more proactive in taking the necessary steps to understand and address how we can get ourselves out.

It’s also important to understand that the increasing imposition of people who are advocating a tyranny of thought is dangerous. Any who’d like to discuss the topic with more critical thinking skills are either labeled, marginalized, or outright ostracized, censored, or banned for questioning the narratives. In the 21st century, the primary “go-to” terms used to silence healthy discourse, or discussion, or to discredit a person are labeled a “conspiracy theorist” for pointing out the corruption and collusion in government, someone who is guilty of “antisemitism” for questioning human rights abuses by the nation-state of Israel, or “anti-vaxxer” if people simply want to know if the pharmaceutical products being coercively pushed onto people or else they’re out of a job are actually safe. Let’s not get lost in the weeds of whether or not the people fit the bill for those labels, but let’s consider the methodology on its own. Why have we turned into a culture that goes immediately to discrediting people who disagree with mainstream narratives, rather than considering the merits of their arguments? To what or to whom does it serve to stifle conversations by discrediting people with labels, rather than considering the arguments themselves? One has a sneaking suspicion that the elites stand to gain by doing power grabs behind the scenes, while the proletariat argues amongst themselves with all the manufactured distractions. Does that make one a “Conspiracy Theorist”? Or, is it something a majority of working-class citizens have intuitively thought might have some basis in reality but cannot say out loud for fear of being labeled one? Thus, the labels not only stifle dissent but also demoralize people from even feeling safe to ask tough questions or have any conversations about it for fear of being labeled or judged. In fact, people have to qualify their statements by saying, I’m not this label, because I support x, y, or z, but I still think people should have freedoms, or that this social behavior is questionable.

At this point, the articles in the news automatically label people as one or the other in their titles, whether or not the label is warranted, relevant, or truthful. It’s as if the standards and ethics of journalism have been completely lost, where objective reporting of the news that includes opposing viewpoints has been replaced entirely by biased reporting. Where some news organizations rely on advertising dollars and funding or are influenced by their owners and their biases, people are being fed news that isn’t necessarily truly informing their readers about the truth. Journalists are hired simply to write “puff pieces” to make people look favorable, or “hit pieces” to engage primarily in character assassinations to make people unfavorable, for any number of reasons. Any credible expert can be a victim of libel or slander these days, and if enough of it gets out and the damage is done, it calls into question that person’s integrity, and the masses immediately engage in logical fallacies called, ad hominem attacks to ignore the principle arguments the experts have raised in public for the public consideration. Even for talk show hosts who simply have conversations with people discussing controversial subject matter without telling people what to think. If people don’t like what a guest says, the host is under attack and threatened to be “de-platformed” for being guilty of being a misinformation spreader, or worse, for outspoken critics, like Steve Kisrch, an entrepreneur turned investigative reporter, into a “misinformation super spreader.”

Do you think anyone who wants to ask questions that go beyond the this or that illusion of choice are all conspiracy theorists? Do you think people who are injured by pharmaceutical products and want to share their stories deserve to be shamed or ridiculed with labels like “anti-vaxxer”? If not, then why are we allowing labels like these to be used so loosely against anyone and everyone who thinks “outside the box” of the either you are with us or against us mindset? Instead, it has led to a dangerous groupthink, not unlike the McCarthy period, where the social culture is quick to judge without consideration or mercy and destroy people’s lives and careers over a perceived threat to the status quo, or mainstream narrative that everyone is lead to believe and anything deviating from it should be cancelled, deplatformed, unpublished, be suspended and so on.

Ultimately, we should be looking more toward what unites us rather than divides us. We all desire to live and be free to share our opinions and talk with our friends and family. We don’t need a big brother that is so distrustful of our ability to think for ourselves that they decide for us what we can think, read, or talk about. We don’t have to use, nor buy into, any social media platform that becomes the thought police. We certainly shouldn’t acquiesce to any person, organization, or agency that doesn’t trust our ability to make decisions for ourselves and our families, depending on our values, to the point of violating our rights to privacy or free speech. Otherwise, how can we say we live in a democracy or a free country? If we can no longer say that, perhaps it’s time we ask the tough questions and get real about where we are headed if we don’t all stand together against the true common enemy, which is tyranny itself.

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Note: this article was 100% human with zero AI assistance or LLM support.