From election interference to military psyops, we’re discovering the depths to which we’ve been deceived
For the past decade or so, many of us have felt that the world makes less sense because what we see happening around us doesn’t sync with how things are “supposed” to work:
If our leaders are acting in our best interests, then why is America turning into a country of haves and have-nots?
If the facts we get from our government and media are trustworthy, then how can dangerous “misinformation” become tomorrow’s headlines a few months later?
Why is the vaccine that was supposed to end the pandemic not preventing infection of those it was supposed to protect?
Many Americans dismiss this cognitive dissonance with the standard explanations: our leaders are well-intentioned, but incompetent; corruption and self-dealing are inevitable, but not widespread; the System isn’t perfect; hindsight is 20/20. Etc, etc. These explanations don’t instill confidence in our government, but we accept them because they’re more comforting than the alternative, which is far more unsettling.
The last thing we want to consider is the possibility that our leaders aren’t just incompetent or slightly unethical, but that they haven’t been honest with us about the rules and assumptions we’ve based our lives on.
That we’ve been deceived on a massive scale.
I’m not talking about a harmless Santa Claus-type deception, where you suddenly learn those shiny toys came from your parents and not a fat man in a supersonic sleigh. I’m talking about a much deeper deception, the kind that shatters your worldview and makes you question everything you thought you knew about the people you trust and the country you live in.
An existential deception.
When you hear the word “apocalypse,” what’s the first thought that comes to your mind? Nuclear holocaust? Grid failure from an EMP attack? Catastrophic earthquake? Viral plague or zombie outbreak? Maybe you imagine fire, brimstone and the pale horses John described in the Book of Revelation? Whatever you’re thinking of probably involves massive destruction, wide-scale suffering and death, and general shit-hitting-the fan conditions. Right?
As it turns out, the word “apocalypse” means something entirely different.
a·poc·a·lypse /əˈpäkəˌlips/Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis; the removal of a veil so that something can be seen.
The ancient Greek translation of the word is “the lifting of a veil”, which scholars have interpreted to mean a “revelation of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception.” (FYI this definition was offered on Wikipedia until recently and has since been removed).
The apocalypse heralds a time when the truth that has been hidden from humanity is finally revealed.
Revealing deception on this scale might bring relief or joy to those who long suspected they were being lied to (“I knew it wasn’t my imagination!”) But for many others, this revelation might be too painful. As humans, we crave safety and protection and our instinct is to trust those who provide these assurances. Like children who look to parents to safeguard their best interests, we expect our leaders and other authority figures to have our back. In fact, we need to believe this.
But what if we discover that our parents have been lying to us all of our lives? What if we find out that they’ve manipulated the way we think and what we believe? What if our parents really aren’t acting in our best interests, after all? A revelation this profound might leave us feeling helpless and insecure because we wouldn’t know who to trust or what to believe. It would rock our world to its core. Understandably, most of us will do everything in our power to avoid feeling this way.
I think this is where we find ourselves now: staring into the face of existential deception that’s being revealed, one ugly thread drop at a time on Twitter. We’re in the throes of an apocalypse — but it’s arrived with a whimper, not a bang. Millions of Americans either don’t realize it or are doing their best to pretend it’s not happening.
Two weeks ago, former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi set off a firestorm with a series of Tweets detailing email exchanges between Twitter executives about how to deal with the Hunter Biden laptop story. Recall that the laptop, which mainstream media outlets insisted was Russian disinformation in the run up to the 2020 election, has now been authenticated, and the information on it appears to be “genuine”.
Ultimately, Twitter's "content moderators" decided to remove posts about the scandal and even suspended the account of the New York Post, the newspaper that broke the story. (Reasonable people might ask the obvious question: if Twitter's content curators were wrong about a story they vehemently insisted was disinformation, what else might they be wrong about?).
Mainstream media outlets immediately downplayed the Twitter Files and dismissed them as a “regurgitation” of “right-wing conspiracy” theories (despite the fact that until recently Taibbi was considered a “major voice of the political left,” and the revelations are the textbook definition of a conspiracy).
MSNBC even claimed the Files were a “big flop” because they provided no evidence that Twitter had done anything wrong; decision makers were simply wary of dispensing potential disinformation that could sow the kind of division we saw in the 2016 election. Plus, private companies can do whatever they want, right? There was no proof that the U.S. government had any role in censoring users, so anyone complaining about a First Amendment violation was crazy.
And then came the 3rd batch of Files.
That’s when we learned that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Director of National Intelligence were holding weekly meetings with Twitter execs to discuss posts that government officials wanted removed from the platform. But that’s not all. The FBI also held weekly meetings with Facebook and other social media platforms to censor “disfavored speakers, viewpoints and content." They even targeted jokes reflecting these perspectives in a Kremlin-style attack on political satire.
By the 6th batch of Files, we learn that Twitter had essentially become an “FBI subsidiary.”
Please understand what this means. Contrary to what we’ve been told for the last few years, the U.S. government has not only violated the First Amendment — depriving us of one of our most important constitutional rights — but it’s done so repeatedly and shamelessly.
This isn’t just gaslighting; this is gaslighting on steroids.
Keep in mind that Americans have been constitutionally “softened” over the past decade and conditioned to expect more government intrusion in our lives. We knew that intelligence agencies were monitoring our communications, so we had little expectation of privacy. We knew they were in communication with social media platforms about the need to “moderate” dangerous content and weed out “misinformation.”
While these developments were concerning, most Americans assumed everything was still kosher. There was never any evidence that the government was intensely coordinating with private companies and actively suppressing our rights — until now. As Reason journalist Robby Soave put it, “[t]he extent to which Big Tech and Big Government are working in tandem to crack down on dissent, contrarianism, and even humor is frankly disturbing.”
Perhaps more disturbing is that when Twitter execs pushed back on the government’s content moderation “requests” they were met with resistance. The company apparently wasn’t hell-bent on tilting the election in Joe Biden’s favor; it was just reeling from accusations that it had enabled Russian interference in 2016 and felt immense pressure from government agencies not to let it happen again.
The remaining Twitter Files have been been released in batches by Taibbi, former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, and other investigative journalists, spanning a wide range of issues ranging from the decision to ban President Trump, censoring discussion of election security or flaws in the voting process, and helping the military spread pro-U.S. propaganda in Russia and China (the kind of “meddling” that drives us crazy when other countries do it).
As each batch has dropped, mainstream media have scrambled to defend Big Tech’s unholy alliance with Big Government. The Washington Post claimed the Twitter Files rely “more on insinuation than evidence.” NPR pooh-poohed the disclosures, claiming Elon Musk is using the information to “discredit foes.” The outlets that were so terrified of foreign interference on social media have gone out of their way to excuse clandestine and illegal meddling by our own government on the same platforms.
I won’t bother to list all the juicy details; I highly recommend diving into the Twitter Files (linked below) to get the full experience. But here are some highlights:
The FBI paid Twitter more than $3.4 million to cover the costs of retrieving voluminous user data in the agency’s “content moderation” efforts (taxpayers foot the bill to help the government suppress our rights — a sick irony)
Despite its repeated claims to the contrary, Twitter disproportionately targeted accounts of conservative users for “shadow banning” in the run-up to the 2020 election
Twitter changed its content violation guidelines — deviating from a longstanding policy for public officials — to justify banning President Trump
Twitter used fake, Pentagon-run accounts to “amplify certain messages” and influence public opinion on foreign policy
(Oh, and we haven’t even gotten to the COVID files, which Musk claims are “coming bigtime” and has hinted could lead to the prosecution of America’s favorite doctor, Anthony Fauci).
Did you ever see The Wizard of Oz?
Remember how great and powerful everyone thought the mysterious green ruler was? As it turns out, he wasn’t great or powerful, but the residents of Oz didn’t realize this until he was exposed. When Dorothy literally pulled away the curtain — the veil — that he’d been hiding behind, the people of Oz discovered the wizard was just a frumpy, insecure, middle-aged man who had managed to stay in power because he’d been lying to everyone.
This was the apocalyptic moment in the land of Oz.
The apocalypse worked out well for the people there, and everyone lived happily ever after. So if apocalypse is such a good thing, why do we associate the word with such fear and ugliness? Why would unveiling the truth lead to the nasty things that come to mind?
I think it’s because the stakes in our world are a lot higher than they were in Oz. We’re not talking about a veil that hides a mild-mannered little man who fancies himself the ruler of Emerald City, a place where the biggest threats are flying monkeys and witches who can be taken out with a bucket of water.
We’re talking about a veil that hides something much bigger: a System controlled by a few who have the ability to determine what we think, what we believe, and how we behave. People who can steer nearly every aspect of our lives based on the information we do (or don’t) have, and have largely done so by keeping us in the dark.
If they’ve managed to maintain control through deception for this long, they’re probably invested in keeping things that way. They would probably try really, really hard to keep the veil in place and do everything in their power to thwart the apocalypse. And the people who have consciously or even unwittingly enabled the deception (especially the media) would try really, really hard to resist the apocalypse, too. Because sometimes it’s easier to ignore what’s staring you in the face than to admit you’ve been fooled.
I think this is where the doom and gloom in the Book of Revelation comes from. Just to be clear, I subscribe to no organized religion. But beneath the Bible’s mysticism lie clues to what might be happening in our world now.
Imagine you’ve lived your entire life behind a veil of ignorance that hides fundamental truths from you. Now, imagine two sets of hands: one that’s trying to raise the veil to expose the light, and the other holding tight to keep the veil in place. The harder one set of hands tries to raise the veil, the harder the other resists. A vicious tug-of-war ensues, pulling the veil tighter and tighter until it finally rips apart.
I think this is what we're seeing now: the beginning of a fierce battle between the forces that are pushing for truth to be revealed and those fighting to keep humanity cloaked in ignorance.
This is the apocalypse.
It’s not a one-time event; it’s a process, and once it’s started, it won’t stop. It could take many years to play out, and it will likely get very ugly along the way. But regardless of how ugly it gets, always remember that the apocalypse isn’t about fear, vengeance or judgment.
It’s about awakening.
It’s the beginning of a collective enlightenment that will vault humanity to the next level of our evolution. Because we can’t fix what’s gone wrong in our world and make it a better place until we understand why it’s broken, and who is responsible.
So, don’t fear the apocalypse. As you see it approaching, open your arms, embrace it, and give it a big, sloppy kiss. Because as ugly and painful as it might look, it’s one of the best things to happen on this planet in a very, very long time.
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