"Don't Believe the Hype"

Affordability is real. It’s not a hoax. Trump is so narcissistic that when he claims truthful things against him are hoaxes, he wants the world to bow down. But polls show him losing the vast majority of American people.

As Lincoln is credited with saying, “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.” Exactly, although Lincoln didn’t say this. One statement by him that comes close: “In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed.”

What people in a collective sense believe is important. Even if this includes awful ideas or outright lies. That’s why manipulating public sentiment is big business. Commercial ads and mass media are about twisting and dominating the “ideas” of civic society. The CIA once called this owning “hearts and minds.” It’s also called “controlling the narrative.” Political parties and major corporations spend billions to win people over to their narrative lines. Capitalism, being a continuously destructive and failing system, nonetheless depends mightily on keeping people blind about this. “Manufacturing consent” is to make people think capitalism is who they are, that capitalism works for them, and is as natural as air and water.

I know this intimately. I’ve worked in journalism for many years starting in 1980: Weekly newspapers in East Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area; a daily newspaper in San Bernardino, CA; monthly publications as well as a news radio writer for CNN, NBC, and Westinghouse in Chicago; and as a freelancer. I’ve covered crime/murders, car fatalities, police abuse, the homeless, mass incarceration, major labor battles, as well as Indigenous and campesino uprisings in Mexico, the Contra War in Nicaragua and Honduras, and gang violence throughout the U.S. as well as in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

In this work I’ve been in the line of fire–seeing more dead bodies than any person should ever see in a lifetime and getting shot at during SWAT raids. I was also shot at by .50 caliber bullets and bombed twice in 1982 when the CIA allowed Colombian cocaine to enter through Central America and Mexico (helping create the Crack epidemic) to fund the counterrevolutionary war against the Sandinistas.

Despite working with courageous editors and journalists, I learned how corporate media can turn facts into fiction. How advertisers have undue influence on what gets printed, spoken, or seen. And how many good reporters are pushed out, and in too many cases killed.

A Republican editor even blacklisted me from working in Southern California daily newspapers in the early 1980s when I tried to expose the police murder of a homeless man by chokehood, by then an outlawed practice in various police jurisdictions.

So believe me when I say: The media also distorts the truth about large phenomena like capitalism, an historically evolved system arising from definable social conditions. While this system has long become parasitic, exploitative, and oppressive, aged and unwelcomed, it’s mostly sustained by elaborate devices and intrigues.

Today everything is in crisis: financial institutions, religious institutions, educational institutions, political institutions. Even the “freedom” ideals of capitalism’s birth are hollow (free from other social systems like slavery or feudalism; free to exploit in a complex but more lucrative mode and manner).

Few research and reports delve deep into the nature of this crisis arising from the economic and political web we’re caught in.

Meanwhile, apologists for the system, including politicians, use what’s called the art of deception.

Trump, Bannon, Miller, and other architects of the MAGA movement in the United States know there are gaps in the public’s knowledge. But they’ve added another layer. They simply don’t care. There’s hardly any “art’” in what they do. Just bold-face dissimulation.

With the government in their hands, and undue sway in major media and social media outlets, they’ve fooled enough Americans about their BS. The right-wing don’t need to have keys to a brighter, better future. They look to a make-believe past–when capitalism was supposed to be the best social engine for wealth and innovation. But MAGA’s existence proves how fragile all this is. Instead of unity and forward motion, they act like wrenches in the works, using chaos as a weapon of mass destruction. They push a hierarchical by-gone, mostly fantasized, concept of what the world should be, one run by powerful wealthy, mostly white, men who have a “God” in their image–mean, detached, narrow-minded. Trump and cronies are willing to do anything, legal or not, for their greed and powerlust, even if this means winning ugly.

The Trump Administration’s hijacking of Venezuelan oil tankers and the bombing of around 100 so-called “narco-terrorists” on boats in the Caribbean is a case in point. The tankers or boats are not directly endangering U.S. military personnel or civilians nor are the “boat people” behind the scourge of fentanyl in our country. What keeps this going are lies, lies, and more lies. The government has always lied. Now such fabrications are normalized, hardly challenged, and given a wide berth–even for piracy and murder.

We simply can’t “believe the hype.” But how do we navigate all this? For one, use your God-given brains and other senses. You don’t need the Internet or AI (unless you use them wisely). Master critical thinking skills. Read and study (there are still powerful sources to draw from). Learn the discernment required to know what’s real, what’s not; what’s distorted, what’s the full-blown truth.

My journalism experience and personal study has helped me tremendously. I’m not super-smart. I’m average. Like most people. But being so-called average is quite a magnificent thing. You can do so much with having a healthy average capacity. Books, intuition, and experience make for great teachers. These are your tools.

Let’s not fall into the system’s traps. Polls show increasing numbers of Americans are somewhat waking up. We can still nurture a higher-level BS meter. If you can’t rely on the legacy media, schools, or the cacophony of social media, you can still get to the bottom of things. Think, study, experience, learn, and think again. Society wants us to believe we’re all “dumb.” Again, our greatest weapon is what’s already within us: our brains, a mature range of feelings, and other wondrous senses.