How The Television News Works

The six o’clock television news is the single most powerful force in existence for manipulating public opinion. At no other time during the day are so many people tuned into one single source of information. This unique dominance means that whatever is spoken about on The News is spoken about at work the next day. The News sets the agenda.

The sad, bitter truth is that The News is not, in any sense, a genuine effort to inform honestly about the issues of the day. The News is, and always has been, propaganda, i.e. an effort to regiment the minds of the public and to persuade them to consent to certain actions.

This propaganda is put together by the television programmers – exceptionally skilled psychologists who order the segments of the television shows to achieve the best effect. Here, “best effect” is defined as whatever is desired by the beneficiaries of the programming – the corporate interests who buy the advertising.

The television news is a simple work, but it’s possibly the most effective and powerful one on Earth, if one measures how many people are affected by it. The work occurs in two phases: the first is when the viewer is made to feel tension by watching a news bulletin, and the second is when the viewer is given relief from the tension by watching an advertisement.

The news bulletins themselves are of two kinds.

The first sells fear. In this category are stories about rising Chinese military power, global climate change, Islamic terrorism and financial collapse. The News usually leads with one of these stories, to set the tone. Once the viewer is made afraid, the television programmer can then double down on the fear.

The second sells anger. In this category are stories about lesser humans getting away with it, such as dark-skinned people getting light sentences for violence or sex crimes, or welfare increases, or a lower-class person questioning whatever their society’s noble lie is (in our case, the noble lie is equalitarianism).

The advertisements can be anything, but their common characteristic is that they relieve the fear and anger generated in the previous phase. To this end, it doesn’t matter if the advertisements are selling power, leisure, excitement, style, class, friendship or any other emotion. They only have to release the tension built up in the first phase.

So long as the advertisement causes the body to release tension, natural physiology will lead to that person forming a positive association with whatever product is displayed at the same time. Even if only at a subconscious level, the person watching The News comes to associate the product advertised with a decrease in anxiety and stress. Having formed such an association, the viewer is effectively programmed to behave in a way that benefits the advertiser (usually by buying their product).

It’s all but impossible to avoid being programmed in this manner if one watches television. The only way to escape is to not react emotionally to anything displayed on the screen.

The usual result of such programming is that, when a person is at the supermarket and sees a product that was advertised during The News, they recall the pleasant, relaxed feeling that they felt during the advertisement and associates that with the product in front of them. This often leads to a sale.

Even if the programming doesn’t cause people to buy a particular product, it achieves a more sinister objective: to regiment the minds of the public.

Most people are far too busy with their everyday lives to conduct a philosophical investigation into what’s right or wrong, so they just go along with the crowd. But they’re also too busy to conduct an accurate and objective survey of what the crowd thinks, so they trust The News to tell them.

The News tells its audience what the issues of the day are, what most people think about those issues and what they should be outraged over. They do this by normalising certain attitudes and by abnormalising others.

For instance, by making a big deal out of race issues, and by prominently featuring people to speak about race issues, The News promotes race consciousness, and normalises viewing the world through a racial lens. At the same time, they minimalise or trivialise class issues, denying class consciousness, and abnormalise viewing the world through a class lens.

The result has been the intensification of race neurosis to race hysteria level. This myopic focus on racism has made it impossible for people to develop the necessary class consciousness to resist the ruling class and its depredations. The television news, by dividing the people up among racial and gender lines, plays a crucial role in destroying that class consciousness.

The television news, then, works by modifying the behaviour of its audience to the benefit of its sponsors. The corporate, banking and financial interests that buy television advertising get to decide how the viewers will be programmed, and then the television programmers schedule their programs to make this possible.

If you enjoyed reading this essay/article, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Free Speech Under Attack VI

This reading carries on from here.

The 16th chapter in Free Speech Under Attack is ‘Free Speech and the Fate of Socrates’ by Tim Wikiriwhi.

This chapter recounts the trial and death of Socrates, who angered the elites of ancient Athens by telling the truth. Those who represented the status quo, and who therefore benefit the most from the commonly-accepted lies, were happy to tell lies about Socrates or to use political force against him.

This is not much different to how Human Rights Commissioner Paul Hunt got the mainstream media to tell the nation that VJM Publishing was similar in mentality to Brenton Tarrant, just because we sold ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ t-shirts. There is nothing that a corrupt ruling class hates more than an honest person explaining the lies and falsehoods used by the ruling class to maintain their dominance.

Wikiriwhi puts it best when he says that “Free speech has always been despised by those seeking to perpetuate falsehoods and control the minds of the ‘sheeple’.” This point cannot be laboured enough – those against free speech always take their position because they wish to perpetuate lies.

Unfortunately, Wikiriwhi credits Protestant Christianity with free speech in the West, when Protestants were still burning people at the stake for heresy as little as 400 years ago. Calvinists in Switzerland were even happy to burn to death as great a man as Michael Servetus. The truth is that all the rights we possess have been prised from the claws of an Abrahamic theocracy that has darkened the West for over 1,600 years.

However, Wikiriwhi is dead right when he says that free speech has to be defended to the utmost, for, without it, all the other freedoms are lost in turn. He’s also right when he points out that the modern left hate no-one more than a member of a slave demographic who has escaped the plantation (Wikiriwhi is Maori). He concludes by pointing out that trying to silence people is the real hate.

The 17th chapter is ‘Hey, Give Us Back Our Rights’ by Robert Stanmore.

Stanmore opens this chapter by recounting the ways that free speech rights have been stripped away in favour of supposed other rights. The New Zealand Human Rights Act makes abusive and insulting language illegal – Stanmore contends that this should be changed. Laws must punish actions, not thoughts.

He points out that most of the political elite support restrictions on free speech, as shown by their widespread support for the Harmful Digital Communications Act in 2015. As such, the people are going to have to fight them in order to assert their rights to free speech.

This chapter mentions, at several points, David Seymour’s Freedom to Speak Bill. It also points out that it is often foreign interests that are against our rights to speak freely. Fundamentally, however, our enemies are not foreigners but the enemies of Western Civilisation themselves, whether external or internal. Free speech is an essential human right, and anyone who would take it from us is our enemy.

In summary, Free Speech Under Attack is an excellent and brave book by some intelligent and original thinkers. It’s a very timely volume, given the relentless and broad-fronted assault on free speech currently being carried out by authoritarians, particularly leftist ones. With any luck, many of the suggestions in it will be adopted by a wider movement of free people.

Anyone who believes in cognitive liberty and who doesn’t trust the mainstream media (i.e. the typical VJM Publishing reader) would enjoy reading this book.

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Why I Won’t Be Taking A Coronavirus Vaccine

The whole world seems to be at a standstill, awaiting a coronavirus vaccine. Only when a vaccine is available, we are told, can we risk opening up the borders again and resuming normal life. But there are many good reasons to be skeptical about these impeding vaccines. I won’t be taking one – and in this essay I explain why not.

The mainstream media has presented a misleading picture of how easy it is to produce a coronavirus vaccine. The story we’ve been sold is that we just have to wait a few months longer, then it will be ready and all will be good. Apparently, “COVID-19 vaccine development has been expedited via unprecedented collaboration in the multinational pharmaceutical industry and between governments.”

By September last year, a variety of different potential vaccines were supposedly in advanced stages of development. At some point – soon – doctors everywhere will be telling people that they have an effective and safe coronavirus vaccine, and they’ll be expecting people to believe them and take one, as they expect people to believe everything else they say.

And I won’t be believing them and I won’t be taking a coronavirus vaccine.

Why?

Because they still don’t know that cannabis is medicinal. If they still don’t know that cannabis is medicinal, when there are mountains of evidence suggesting this and has been for decades, then how can I trust them to have an accurate picture about a coronavirus vaccine?

In 1996, doctors in California, being aware already then that cannabis was medicinal, organised to have it made legal. They arranged to have a referendum on the subject and made sure that the voters were correctly educated. Since then, recognising the science, 16 countries and 39 other American jurisdictions have legalised medicinal cannabis.

Despite these advances, doctors here in New Zealand have resolutely stayed ignorant. They know nothing about medicinal cannabis, not even the difference between CBD and THC. All cannabis use causes mental illness, they bleat, as if it were still 1970. The most recent quarter-century of scientific advancement can just fuck off.

So when doctors start telling me about a coronavirus vaccine, and how they’re sure it’s safe and effective, I’m just going to laugh. Their approach to medicinal cannabis has shown me that they’re more interested in political realities than scientific ones. Twelve years of trying to communicate with New Zealand doctors about medicinal cannabis has been utterly fruitless.

If these doctors want people to trust them about a vaccine that has been known for a few months, they have to start telling the truth about a medicine that has been known for thousands of years. If they’re not capable of doing that, I’m going to stay well away from any vaccines they might offer me.

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Clown World Chronicles: Elections In Clown World

That Clown World is at the point where democracy tips over into tyranny is evident from the state of elections today. If there’s anything in today’s world that could be compared to a grotesque circus, it’s our general elections. The political world has always been like a circus, but in Clown World the circus is 24/7.

Problems with starting a democracy in places like Africa, it is said, don’t generally arise during the first election. It’s in one of the subsequent elections, when the winner of the initial election loses, that the problems start happening. It’s all well and good for one party to assume control after winning the first democratic election. What matters more, though, is what happens when they lose control and are asked to hand over power.

Characteristic of democratic elections in African scumholes is that they are contested. Almost inevitably, the loser accuses the winner of cheating, either by stuffing ballot boxes or by intimidating opposition voters into staying home. This is especially likely to be true if the loser won the previous election. It’s common for these disputes to end up in massacres or even civil wars.

Characteristic of democratic elections in the West is that the loser accepts the result. This is why it was so shocking for the 2000 American Presidential Election to drag on for as long as it did. But in Clown World, elections in the West have started to go down the African route.

The first real sign of it was the Russian interference conspiracy theory that was pushed by Democrat Party operatives in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. This conspiracy theory suggested that the election result might not have been legitimate because it was influenced by the actions of the Russian Government, who supposedly purchased enough FaceBook ads to switch the result from Clinton to Donald Trump.

At time of writing this chapter, the result of the 2020 American Presidential Election still isn’t clear. Seven weeks after the election, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump has conceded (although the mainstream media has anointed Biden the winner). Trump has mounted a number of legal challenges relating to the vote, and rumours persist that he might try to enlist the military in a coup.

The tendency of Clown World politicians to dispute election results is made worse by the fact that the elections themselves have become detached from reality. The election process presents an image of a politician that 99.9% of voters will never meet. So it’s almost impossible to know if the results of a general election reflect the will of the country. This makes disputes much more plausible.

In Clown World, elections come down to a battle between competing narratives. Whichever narrative can assert itself the strongest wins, regardless of what any vote tally might say. Elections aren’t so much won as consent for one side’s victory is manufactured. This has made elections into permanent public relations exercises more than temporary leadership contests.

Buying media space is how positive public relations are maintained, and thereby how most elections are won. 90% of the time, the better-resourced candidate wins. This is because most voters in a democracy simply vote for the candidate with the most name recognition. If they saw Candidate A on the television and not Candidate B, that must mean that Candidate A is superior.

It’s even possible to calculate how much money you need to buy enough positive attention to win. A seat in the United States House of Representatives, for example, will cost around $1.6 million. However, it’s not always as simple as money – Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million to win the Democratic nomination for the 2020 Presidential election, and failed. Generally speaking, the lower the office the easier it can be bought.

No matter how hard it is to buy an office, though, people will always try. Because of all the mainstream media propaganda and disinformation this leads to, we still don’t know who has won the 2020 Presidential election. Faith in institutions is so low that there’s no-one we trust to tell us the definitive truth about who the President will be. FaceBook will censor anyone questioning Biden’s supposed victory, but as of right now it’s not clear that Trump intends to concede.

The great risk when elections become disputed is that it can lead to tyranny. The logic is that if the other side isn’t going to play fair, then why should we? Mistrust can escalate to the point where both sides reason that they had better get their retaliation in first. At that point, the country is essentially in a state of civil war.

Unfortunately, if the last two decades of American presidential elections are anything to go by, civil war is almost inevitable. It seems like the election results are becoming more and more heavily disputed by the loser. Trump is digging in his heels right now, and ill will is so widespread that if he called for a million Republican supporters to hit the streets with firearms he might get it.

For democratic elections to work, there has to be widespread confidence that the electoral process is legitimate. This means widespread confidence that there is no voter suppression, no foreign interference, no collusion with outside third parties and no influential disinformation campaigns. If one or more of these factors are present, the results are liable to get disputed.

It might well be that democratic elections themselves are inherently signs of Clown World. But the decay doesn’t stop at democratic elections. The predictable future is increased Weimarisation, up to the point where the system collapses or is overthrown. One possible pre-emptive solution is withdrawing the franchise from certain anti-social groups.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

If you would like to support our work in other ways, please consider subscribing to our SubscribeStar fund. Even better, buy any one of our books!