The Matrix and State Terror
How America's Media Propaganda System is Failing and How the Government Will Respond
A state has only two options for exerting control over its population. The first is through persuasion and indoctrination, which is accomplished through private and public propaganda channels. The other option is through brute force, coercion, and state-sanctioned terror.
The United States government has historically used propaganda, persuasion, and indoctrination to control Americans. It has used its allies and agents in the "free press" and corporate sector to disseminate its messages, ideals, ethos, creeds, demands, etc. It has also used the states' own infrastructure to do the same.
The United States government and its partners in the mainstream media excel at what propagandists, public relations staff, marketers, and journalists everywhere know as "the manufacture of consent."
What is the manufacture of consent? Oxford University offers the following definitions:
1. A phrase originally coined in 1922 by the American journalist Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) to refer to the management of public opinion, which he felt was necessary for democracy to flourish, since he felt that public opinion was an irrational force.
2. For [Edward] Herman and {Noam} Chomsky, the acceptance of government policies by people in the USA on the basis of the partial picture of issues offered by the mass media, denying them access to alternative views which would lead them to oppose such policies. They present this as a propaganda model in which the mass media select material in relation to the values of those in power.
Both definitions are correct and offer a remarkable view of how Americans are controlled by their government and socioeconomic elites through the manipulation of their mass media.
It's important to understand that responsible leaders must "manage" American public opinion because, as Lippmann believed, the public could not be trusted to manage their own opinions. Lippmann believed their opinions may directly contradict the interests of the wealthy and powerful, which must not be allowed to happen.
Thus, in the United States, we live (and have lived for over a century) inside a giant propaganda bubble that I will henceforth refer to as the Matrix (in reference to the famous movie).
The Matrix is a tightly controlled and managed reality overseen by governmental and mainstream media propagandists. It is an artificial construct designed to “manage” public opinion, primarily through the manufacture of consent, and confine American citizens to an invisible psychological prison. As the character Morpheus famously says to Keanu Reeves's character in the movie, "You've been living in a dream world, Neo."
This dream world, the Matrix, is indispensable for understanding how the United States government conducts its foreign policy abroad.
In the lead-up to the Iraq War of 2003, American mainstream media overwhelmingly parroted the Bush administration's assertion that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and had ties to Al Qaeda. When both justifications proved to be embarrassingly untrue, the media immediately pivoted to parroting the government's new line: that the American military invaded and occupied Iraq to "bring democracy" to the Middle East.
Decades later, war continues to rage in that region. Witness the current Israel-Gaza war. In the highly controlled reality of the Matrix, bombing masses of women and children from the air for over a year is "self-defense" against terrorism (current casualty figures: 65,000 Gazans dead; over 130,000 wounded). When Netanyahu and his messianic-extremist ministers openly talk about genocidal aims, using genocidal language, while taking genocidal actions on the ground, many mainstream American news outlets portray it as self-defense against an evil terrorist organization. When these same Israeli representatives and the American president openly discuss the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the mainstream media is either silent or portrays it as an "innovative" idea.
This is the manufacture of consent in action.
American mass media reinforces, 24 hours a day, the notion that we Americans, Israel, and our other Western allies are always "the good guys," acting in self-defense. Everyone else is suspect.
However, the situation is now changing. What has upended the Matrix in the United States is the Internet. For many years now, the Internet—ironically, the creation of the United States government under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—has slowly been seeping through and weakening the propaganda bubble.
It has allowed the average American and Westerner an unfiltered view of the larger global reality. Anyone can now access platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, Tik Tok, Instagram, etc., and view images and video, almost in real-time, from any event in the world. This is unprecedented in history and essentially revolutionary.
It is also hazardous to the Matrix, the United States government, and American elites. An unfiltered and un-propagandized view of reality significantly threatens established power.
This is where the states' other option comes in. If the state can no longer rely on persuasion, indoctrination, and propaganda, its only recourse is to resort to option two: brute force and state-sanctioned terror.
This explains, in part, the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and figures like Donald Trump. The propaganda is becoming less effective every day. The Matrix is weakening. Trump offers nostalgia for the good old days of "American greatness" and strength. Moreover, he promises an iron fist to enforce this nostalgic return to a time that, if one looks carefully at history, never really existed in the first place.
This is a direct consequence of the larger reality of the world leaking through the Matrix and psychologically affecting American citizens. The United States government can no longer rely on the Matrix and the propaganda bubble. Now, it must resort to repression and terror.
This is why we are now seeing state security forces invading college campuses to abduct and disappear pro-Palestinian activist students into a state-controlled detention system and/or trying to deport them for writing op-eds for their college newspapers.
This is why the Trump administration is trying to coerce major universities like Harvard into allowing direct executive control of their departments and teaching content.
This is why we see government coercion against news organizations and law firms viewed as "unfriendly" to the state.
This is why we see the militarization of local and state police departments and the deployment of the actual military onto American streets.
This is a natural result of the Matrix weakening—of the red, white, and blue mask falling off the ugly face of American foreign policy. The manufacturing of consent is no longer working as it should. People are increasingly forming opinions based on unfiltered reality and realities not sanctioned and controlled by the state and power elites
Americans should prepare for more state coercion and state terror as a result.