I recently had an exchange with an old work friend of mine on facebook and the divide between us is so great that it is nearly impossible for me to discuss political issues with him in a rational manner. This is because our opinions of what is true and right are so different.
The evolution of the Dimensions
Having come from an extremely conservative family with membership in the John Birch Society at the age of 9, I can give you a pretty aware perspective from Dimension A of what has happened.
In the late 50's, prayer and saying the "Pledge of Allegiance" in school was a regular thing and was uniform throughout the country and of course we were only teaching in the English Language at that time.
As I grew up within the public education system things slowly moved away from the American centric view of life and history as the Education system, the mass media and Hollywood steadily emitted data to push people to a more world-oriented multi-cultural viewpoint. In the 60s this was gentle. In the 80s it was getting pretty blatant. By 2000 it was crazy.
I give you some cases in point from a few experiences I've had over my lifetime.
Experience 1 - truth lost from the textbooks
Having been an avid member of the John Birch Society I was very up on all things published by them and had met most of the leaders in the society personally. I knew what a "Bircher" was inside and out. Our Social Studies teacher was going over our textbook's description of the JBS which flatly labeled the society as "racist", "fascist", "anti-semetic", "extreme" and "right-wing". These are labels were invented by the media and were used to trigger readers into an emotional response. They do not have accurate definitions and indeed, in class, these labels were never clearly defined except by association. This is known as "Neural Linguistic Programming" (NLP). Just ask yourself, right now, what EXACTLY do these terms mean? Ask a few people for a definition, you will find vague and differing responses - mostly emotional based.
I explained to my teacher that we had "black" speakers on the JBS speakers bureau - trying to thwart the "racist" label. I explained to my teacher that "facism" is a form of socialism where the government works with business to control the means of production and distribution of wealth and that the JBS was completely against all central control of the means of production and distribution of wealth. This was to thwart the "facist" label. I explained to my teacher that the JBS was not anti-Jewish or anti-Israel in any way to thwart the "anti-semetic" label. I explained to him as well that "extreme" is a term that is very much relative and doesn't really have any kind of accurate meaning in and of itself. At best this term could mean that something is "very different" from "normal" which has no true connotation of good or bad - it's just different. And finally the term "right-wing" is poorly defined by the school system on a scale of left (wants change) to right (doesn't want change) which is equally an arbitrary relative term that in and of itself means nothing.
In response my teacher said his favorite line: "I don't want to get into semantics" and then posited that "It's in the textbook so it must be true'. My many years of JBS membership and intimate familiarity with its teachings and leadership was of no effect to him, and so my class gets a biased input from the textbook.
NLP is used in the media all the time and was developed by advertisers to get people to buy things without thinking. I believe Dimension B people are all victims of this NLP from their youth. Critical linguistic analysis has been obliterated from their brains. This is the "new speak" of George Orwell's 1984 and causes a person to accept "Cognitive Dissonance" within their thinking without realizing it.
Experience 2 - secret curriculum
I had a social studies teacher in my junior year of High School that began showing us an Alan Toffler video called "future shock". I remember it positing how terrible it was that we had so many choices to make in our free society. This was simply overwhelming the minds of people as they walked down the deterrent isle of their local drugstore. I knew most parents had no idea their kids were being subjected to this crap (this was in the early 70s) so I decided to write an Op-Ed article in the paper informing parents of this curriculum and simply asking them to visit the school and check it out. Everything in the article was true. I was simply reporting what I had seen and experienced.
The next day the principle told me to retract the article. I asked him what was not true about what I said. He couldn't give me any examples of inaccuracies in my article but insisted I retract it. I suggested he write a rebuttal. There was nothing he could do and the teacher's experimental curriculum was quickly canceled as parents were asking what was going on. All I did was blow the whistle so ignorant parents could be alerted to check into what their kids were being subjected to.
Experience 3 - blatant media bias and election tampering
When I was attending junior college at Diablo Valley College in Walnut Creek California, in the 80s, I witnessed something quite striking. Ronald Reagan was running for president and the local TV media was looking for a way to smear him. Election tampering I would call it. They approached our local "American Opinion Bookstore" which is a JBS reading room and book sales outlet. I knew the owner personally. They asked the owner if he would let them interview a local conservative and politically active pastor at the bookstore. They also asked him if he knew of any active Birchers of college age. This brought me into the picture. They called me up and asked me if we had any "activities" they could film. I explained that all we did was meet once a month on campus (there were only 3 of us) to write our congressmen. They wanted something more "active" so I offered to put our books on sale on campus a few weekends from that time so they could film us selling books.
On that same weekend they scheduled the interview with the pastor at the American Opinion bookstore.
I showed up at the early appointment at the bookstore and met the cameraman and interviewer from the local TV station. They asked the bookstore owner if he has a meeting room with a conference table. There was one located on the second floor so we all went up there for the interview. The room had a long conference table with a bookshelf at one end and the interviewer expressed that this was "perfect".
I sat behind the cameraman who set up his camera at the end of the table opposite the bookcase and the pastor sat at the bookcase end of the table. I then saw how the cameraman set up the shot to go low along the table towards the pastor. It made the pastor look quite important with the long reflective table in front of him and the books behind him.
All of a sudden, the interviewer pulled out a large American Flag and placed it vertically behind the pastor in front of the bookshelf.
This was a complete set-up. The pastor now looked like Patton (the movie had just come out) and no matter what he said he would look like a super-patriot. I saw the shot through the camera - it was amazing! That pastor could say anything and would still look like a wacko. Who talks in front of a giant American flag except some right-wing nut?
After that fiasco I went to college to set up our book table with our 2 other birch students. We were pretty excited that we might be on TV!
After awhile some youngish guy who definitely was not a student at our small college showed up about 200' from us and began to shout out what I would describe as "sound bytes" of provocation. He was yelling about the Vietnam War, economic issues, whatever. It didn't really make sense to me but it was beginning to attract a crowd. All of a sudden the TV camera crew showed up and started filming this guy and now the crowd became huge.
I saw what was going on and told my fellow members not to argue with him but just smile and stay at the book table.
As time went on the guy yelling sound-bytes began to work his way slowly towards our book table. He was clearly a professional agitator and we refused to fall for it. We just smiled and listened to his nonsense, giving him no ammo to argue with us.
Finally he gave up and went away and the interviewer appeared with the camera crew to interview us.
We were each interviewed one at a time and the interviewer had a specific question for each of us. I don't recall what he asked of the others but for me he asked me this question. "Do you believe a Communist can be President of the United States?"
I tried to explain that such an idea makes no sense because communism is antithetical to a republican form of government such as ours. The interviewer kept asking me to "shorten the answer". As hard as I tried to explain that the question was simply preposterous, he kept asking me for a shorter "sound byte". Eventually I simply had to answer the question as "no".
That evening, on the TV news, was a short story on "Reagan Supporters" and our interviews followed, all cut to just what they wanted us to say. The pastor as well was shown with just a short few words but the imagery of the table and flag said it all.
This was a clearly premeditated attempt to influence the election by interviewing the most right-wing type people they could find and boxing them into questions and imagery that gave the idea they wanted the audience to get. There was absolutely no real interest in our views at all. It was a complete show.
Experience 4 - a setup media event at UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley is well known as a hotbed of leftist activities and protests. Drugs, sex and rock & roll all the way. I was attending UC Berekley in the early 80s pursuing an engineering degree.
One evening as I was walking home from class I passed through a quad area and noticed that there were carpenters building small shacks all over the area. I also noticed they were building several open stages that allowed someone to stand about four feet higher than anyone else.
I decided to bop by this quad the next day and saw several buses arrive with hippies. They appeared to be from Santa Cruz, smoking pot, long hair, and clearly not UC Berkeley students at all.
By that evening the media was set up with TV cameras on the open stages all facing a building on the west side of the quad. The hippies had taken residence in the shacks and the quad was full - but I didn't see a single person that looked like a real student to me.
That evening on the news was a big story of a protest at UC Berkeley over some announcement the Dean of the collage was making. I don't recall the gist of what he said but the whole event was apparently an attempt to pass some kind of legislation at the state level.
The next days the hippies were all gone and the quad was a mess of shacks and trash. Janitors and construction crews were dismantling the shacks and stages and cleaning up the quad. Within a few hours, you'd never know anything had happened there.
These two media events are the most blatant first-hand examples I have witnessed of media bias. They were planned and executed by the media, for the media (or their sponsors or owners) to alter our elections and effect legislation. These were political actions designed to accomplish specific tasks with no regard for truth or honesty.
The textbook event was a blatant example of lies in the textbooks using NLP techniques to program student's minds to accept preconceived notions that had nothing to do with truth or honest history.
I find it hard to explain these things without a conspiratorial context.
Since that time the bias has become worse and worse. The lies on lies on lies have piled so high that unless a person takes extra effort to learn the truth of things on his own via alternate sources of information, it is impossible to know the truth.
So this has now created two different world-views.
Dimension A are those that have done a bit of homework and have found that the majority and the media and the movies and even the schools are lying to us. They are naturally seeing conspiracies everywhere because the media as a whole makes no sense. They see the cognitive dissonance as simply scams and lies.
Dimension B are those that have accepted the NLP programming and have accepted enough lies to believe the carefully orchestrated history painted for them over decades of mis-education and mis-information fed to them. Because it appears that the vast majority of people agree with them, they rest in a state of sleepy fuzziness not even realizing that that "majority" of supporters are merely an image projected by the mass media, movies, and their education. They are emotionally committed to their views and cannot step-back enough to question their base information because it threatens their entire world view. It is simply not possible to accept the idea that "everything you know is wrong".
Enters Trump
Now enters a winner of an election that none of Dimension B thought could ever have won. All of a sudden, it appears there are a LOT of people out there that don't agree with all the NLP media bias Dimension B has been fed. The media is doing everything it can to trash this man and the DBers are swallowing it. Because they rely on their NLP induced emotional responses, they are becoming violent in protests and abusing anyone that might oppose their views with an alternative view. All the NLP inputs over their lives are kicking in and they are going mad with cognitive dissonance. To them the world is collapsing and all the socialistic "good" built up in the past 70 years is appearing to dissolve before their eyes. Trump is insane. He is racist. He is sexist. He is every label they can come up with.
Trump grabbed a ladies crotch (a fact I am not sure is really true) and is despicable in every respect. Meanwhile his predecessor, Obama (real name Barry Satoro) has been living a secret homosexual life with a transvestite, takes drugs, and has broken most of his campaign promises and lied (proven) publicly on many occasions. The two men are not held to the same standard. This blatant bias is simply not even perceived by the DBers.
Thus I get a facebook post like this: (NLP labels marked in red)
Your definition of racism is too narrow. Racism is judging and treating others differently based on their race, in particular when those with privilege continue this pattern against a historically oppressed group. Racism can be unconscious, and is systemic in our society (why do blacks get longer prison sentences for the same crimes? Especially when the judge is republican?) Referring to alleged racism of (some) blacks is sheer whataboutism. Two wrongs don't make a right, and doesn't justify trumped up white grievance. Trump is hated because he is a horrible person, a pussy grabber, a bully, an egomaniac, a swindler, a crook and a liar. He is hated for his obscene racist lies against Obama. He is hated for his destructive roll back of aid to Africa which is killing hundreds of thousands, he is hated for his petty vindictiveness. People hate him for appointing people like Zinke and Pruitt who are destroying the agencies they head and undoing all their progress over recent decades. They hate him for his cruel policies that separate children from their parents. I personally strongly object to his position on climate change. What he has done against the environment is inexcusable. He has set back our progress in tackling climate change horribly, and many people will suffer as a result. He is objectively the worst president we have had in recent history.
Most of these words are emotional in nature. They are not objective. The writer does make some objective points which to correct here for a DBer is impossible because I must undo layers of lies injected over decades of propaganda. I don't say Trump is perfect or even "good" necessarily, but he is a typical politician like the last 6 presidents we have had - but this one is getting blasted by the media constantly while the others were held up as "respectable" even though their sins are certainly no less than Trump's. Trump appears to me to be at least attempting to keep the promises he made during his campaign, something that to me is refreshingly unusual.
Just trying to undo the bias and emotionalism around the word "racism" would take an entire post or more to just explain how this term has become so emotionally overloaded as to trigger violent outbreaks from DBers and to bypass all rational thinking.
So with that, I suggest my readers start listening to the NoAgenda Podcast for some good media bias analysis that MAY, in time, help to reunite us as a nation with a set of facts we can agree on or at least a healthy skepticism of the media that prods us into looking a little deeper before going off the deep end. No agenda isn't right or left. They are two guys that look at things differently but both trying to find what is true behind the stories we are peddled every day by the M5M (mass media).
Enjoy your education - it will take some time.
