Astroturfing

One of the most common tactics the propaganda apparatus uses to gaslight the population is to flood them with messaging that implies anyone who questions the narrative is insane and completely alone, as this is a fairly reliable way to bully the population into compliance (alongside making public examples of anyone who speaks out). In turn, again and again, we’ll see any widely used media platform gradually get monopolized so it can only present the orthodoxy’s narrative (and simultaneously have it be put on a pedestal by all the other monopolized news sources). Hence, it becomes harder and harder to find the kernels of truth we need anywhere (e.g., most recently we’ve seen this with Google and Facebook’s relentless censorship).

More importantly, this principle doesn’t just apply to the standard media. For example, the academic publishing industry is essentially monopolized and will not publish anything that threatens the pharmaceutical industry’s interests—but simultaneously, any journal that does is immediately attacked as being an “uncreditable source” (and often effectively buried since Pubmed, the source almost everyone uses to find journal articles, won’t index any articles from the journal). As a result, it’s often immensely difficult to find research that actually answers what I want to know about a topic, and I have to make use of a lot of creative approaches to find it.

Note: one of my simple rules for evaluating academic publications (which I detailed further here) is to take findings they report which agree with the prevailing narratives with a grain of salt, whereas if they report something I would not expect a journal to want to publish, I place a heavier weight on them (as in almost all cases, those claims are held to a very high standard of proof and an immense of work went on behind the scenes to get the journal to be willing to publish them).

On the internet, a different tactic is taken to flood the audience with a specific message—ban or censor any account that posts information that challenges the prevailing narrative, while simultaneously mobilizing large numbers of accounts to (which are often bots or a group working together in coordination) all work together to push a very specific message.

This tactic is known as “astroturfing” (in reference to making large amounts of fake grass), and if you have a basic sense of pattern recognition, it’s very easy spot (e.g., I could immediately tell that vaccine injuries were being censored and astroturfed away even though it took months for proof this was occurring to emerge). In turn, when you are on a media platform (e.g., Wikipedia) that is astroturfed, you essentially can only use it for the information you don’t expect would be worth anyone’s time to astroturf (e.g., concise explanations of well-accepted scientific principles), whereas for everything else, the only value it has is to inform you of what the orthodox position on an issue is—not what is actually true.

Note: search engines like Google do a related form of astroturfing by primarily showing websites they know consistently support their biases.

In turn recently, two of the best proofs I’ve seen that astroturfing is a widespread phenomenon emerged:

•First, a group was created by the Harris campaign, which would flood large numbers of Reddit pages every day (and Twitter community notes) with messaging that supported Kamala’s campaign, after which someone who joined that group leaked everything in their private server, clearly and and unambiguously proving that the Harris campaign astroturfed a lot of the content being seen by the users of Reddit. This is important because while many users on Reddit suspect much of the platform is astroturfed (due to the widespread biases that occur there), this is the first time I’ve seen it so concretely laid out.

•Second, a large part of Harris’s campaign materialized out of thin air from the entire media apparatus collectively, suddenly saying she was a fantastic candidate. Over the last few days, influencers (e.g., this one, this one, and this one) have come forward with proof showing that the Harris campaign offered them a lot of money (they rejected) to post favorable content about Harris. Likewise, a key part of the Harris campaign strategy has been to have celebrity musicians perform concerts at campaign rallies (so people want to attend) that are juxtaposed with the celebrity endorsing the Harris.

On Friday, something remarkable happened—Rapper Cardi B (who a year ago had stated she would not endorse a president because she could not support America funding two overseas wars) headlined for Kamala Harris. However, at the start of her speech, the teleprompter broke, leading to her stumbling for 90 seconds (utterly unsure of what to say), after which a cell phone was rushed to her, and she read her entire speech (which was written to sound like it was her authentic voice) off of the cell’s screen.

In my eyes, this is noteworthy because it’s essentially the most straightforward proof I’ve ever seen that many of the things experts and celebrities say are astroturfed and completely fake.

Note: similarly, a massive issue with journal publications is that pharmaceutical companies will often write ghost-write scientific articles and then pay “expert” academics to put their name on the papers as its “authors” and thereby lend significant credibility to what would otherwise be rightly dismissed as biased marketing.

Monopolies vs. Value

As you take a step back and consider each of the above examples, you will see that each one keeps raising a similar question. How can we be generating wealth if so much of our resources are devoted to creating garbage that only exists to manipulate people and maintain an inferior product’s monopoly rather than actually creating things of value that people would want?

Note: to illustrate, America now spends almost 1 trillion dollars each year on research and development, yet much of that goes into “non-threatening” topics that have minimal actual value to the country.

Bill Gates for example, epitomizes this principle, as once he created the Windows operating system, he rapidly moved to prevent competing software companies (with better software) from using Windows. Since this monopolistic behavior was illegal, Microsoft was sued for antitrust violations. Throughout the court process, Bill Gates was revealed to be a nasty individual who was doing everything he could to bury his competitors. To address the negative public perception of him (at the time, he was one of the most disliked individuals in America), Gates founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to recast himself as a philanthropist, and through this PR stunt was able to successfully remediate his public image.

Since that time, he continually repeated these same tactics. He gradually monopolized the field of public health (e.g., he changed public health from helping people’s legitimate needs to selling as many vaccines to them as possible and replacing their sustainable farming with corporate agriculture that requires continually buying expensive agricultural products).

Likewise, during COVID-19, his network bought out major media stations around the world, Gates was able to dictate the global COVID-19 response, and simultaneously, he made “remarkable” investments as a result of how the COVID-19 response played out (e.g., Pfizer’s vaccine was developed by BioNTech, a company Gates invested 55 million into two months before COVID-19 emerged in China and then made at least 500 million off of).

In short, Gates was able to leverage his monopoly to make a vast amount of money off of a technology which was incredibly unsafe and ineffective (and would not have ever been approved had there not been immense political pressure behind it). More importantly, it not only didn’t work, but also has been immensely costly to the world (e.g., in America alone, it’s killed hundreds of thousands of people, disabled more than a million, and likely cost America well over 100 billion dollars).

In short, as he has done throughout his career, Gates leveraged his monopoly to extract wealth from everyone else rather than create something of value.