A duped electorate is easily played

Ain’t nobody can pull the wool over your political savvy eyes; you watch all the news, read all the papers, you know what’s going on. This is the Age of Information, and no populace has ever been more informed than Americans are today.

Wrong.

Americans might be the most spectacularly propaganda duped electorate in the history of civilization. Whether ratcheted right, left, or operating confidently from the center, we are certain we have a grip on how things work, certain what we see and read is not censored or manipulated to distort our perception of reality.

Nixon might very well have been the last actual president of the United States. He was an independent contractor, who went too far with Watergate, and threatened the very process the rich and powerful had spent a century and a half perfecting, a process that gave them de facto dictatorial power over all three branches of government.

The two presidents that followed, Ford and Carter, solidified a fundamental change in how the presidency would operate. Ford served out the remainder of Nixon’s second term, a caretaker president basically holding down the fort, making no waves, exercising no mandate. The 1976 election, was probably the last time Americans were given an actual choice for president. They chose Carter, a Democrat governor from the Deep South, who has since been touted as a man of deep compassion and decency given his involvement with Habitat for Humanity.

As president, he took a principled stand against Soviet aggression, boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics, citing human rights violations he could not ignore. At the same time, East Timor was being ravaged by Indonesian strongman Suarto, hundreds of thousands died, but we said nothing in order to protect US mining interests in Indonesia. Intrepid Australian journalists gave their lives to get this story out. The US media did its best to cover it up. You sat back at home watching your TV, reading your papers, thinking you knew what was going on in the world. You didn’t know squat.

The situation has only gotten worse since. Carter was beaten, ironically by an actor, Reagan, who spent eight years acting like the president. The rich and powerful who run our country said, hey, this works great—from now on let’s have fake presidents, the public won’t know the difference because we will control both sides of the narrative. At this time, the executive branch was operationally killed, leaving only the legislative and judicial branches. Reagan’s fake president priority was to transfer as much wealth as possible from the working class to the obscenely rich.

The first president Bush actually wanted to be president, and would have been president, had he been elected in 1980. But after eight years as Reagan’s VP, he knew there was no longer such a thing as president, so he ratcheted right politically, and became the second fake president. The Democrats had now been replaced by two fake presidents, so they decided to try and manufacture their own fake president.

Starting during the Reagan years, they scoured the political landscape, and decided upon the governor of Arkansas, a former Rhodes scholar, and eager to become the first progressive puppet. Clinton was tapped as keynote speaker at the 1988 Convention, but he droned on, the audience booed, little did they know, despite their dissatisfaction with this blatant self promoter, he had already been predetermined the winner of the 1992 nomination, the process was no longer in their hands. They were just letting the public see his face. From now on, every political convention was there only to ratify the candidate already selected.

The GOP should have stayed with the fake president strategy after Clinton beat Bush, which was the first actual election where both candidates were totally controlled by the same special interest, so they could not lose no matter how you voted. But they owed Bob Dole for past contributions, so they paid that debt by serving him up to Clinton. Clinton’s job was to pretend to be a progressive, while dismantling all the economic safeguards against monopolies. Under Clinton, the media was scarfed up by just a half dozen major media conglomerates. This was fundamental to the propaganda deluge that was to come. Independent mainstream media had to be eliminated.

With Obama, the Dems had groomed the perfect preselected president, and this fake progressive, fooled millions on both sides of the political spectrum into believing he was actually the president (he was just a front man) and his job was to militarize the police, dial back civil liberties, and escalate the surveillance state. He did a masterful job at all three.

And now Obama is being trotted back out into the public eye, a carefully prepared propaganda scheme to get you to still believe voting gives you choice, so he tells the press: “If you thought elections don’t matter, I hope these last two years have corrected that impression.”

The Trump presidency is a train wreck, but it is not an accident. By giving us this horrifyingly bad president, they make any candidate to come look like a better “choice.” But there is no choice. The executive branch is no longer run by the president, but by his handlers, and they work for his masters. Congress has been taken over by their lobbyists, and the Supreme Court will soon be fully staffed by their appointees. Soon, the entire shebang will be converted to cutting edge authoritarianism, you will keep mistaking for democracy and freedom, until nothing remains of either.

(James Giago Davies is an

enrolled member of the Oglala

Lakota tribe. He can be reached

at skindiesel@msn.com)