by Tommy Salmons
*Republished with permission from his original Substack post
Attention is the new currency.
This isn’t an original thought. For decades there has been competition for your mind and attention on a multitude of fronts. With the popularity of social media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle the efforts have only accelerated.
The speed at which information travels today is exhausting. Information overload is a real thing, and everyone is feeling it.
The other day, a young man approached me and said, “Man, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I used to have so much energy, but ever since COVID I feel so tired all the time.”
At twenty-five years old, he should be hitting his prime, but instead he’s burdened by the weight of the ever-changing narratives, lies, and gaslighting coming at him from every direction.
Even as I sit here, I know the message I wish to convey, but my mind is a jumbled mess of information that is peripherally relevant to the burdens of the modern age.
How does one discern what to pay attention to and what to ignore?
Censorship
Over the last few years (after Trump’s surprising victory) the decision as to what information and news the masses ingest is being monitored by the elites and corporate press. The rise of alternative media, especially large podcasts, has fueled their panic, and pushed their attempts to control the narrative into overdrive.
The big tech companies took it upon themselves to determine what was allowable discourse. They ran mass censorship campaigns against anyone that said anything that challenged the power and prestige of the elites. What was once common speech among friends and colleagues is now hate speech. Comedians, politicians, and independent media personalities were depersoned and ostracized from the public square, social media platforms.
“It’s a private company, bro,” became the battle cry of the blue-check class and their useful idiots. But none dare take on the actuality that these “private companies” are funded and utilized by governments and intelligence communities around the world to track and trace dissidents.
This dystopianism didn’t stop with Julian Assange, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump. As more people have come to depend on Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter for news and information we’ve seen respected doctors and researchers deplatformed and search results throttled to curb “dangerous” voices and “disinformation” that challenges the approved directives of the elites. Even the Financial Times is publishing stories promoting psy-ops as crucial in the fight against disinformation. After Joe Biden asked publicly for tech companies to censor opposing voices DirecTV quickly announced they were dropping OAN, a right-wing populist news agency, from their list of networks.
In their attempts to control the information the elites are creating more division among the citizens. Soon there will be parallel societies in operation in these United States.
Alongside Right
In J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night an underground economy has been created by Agorists. The competing gray-market thrives while central planners destroy the nation’s economy. As the financial system crumbles the state attempts to crush the Agorists, but they’ve so effectively created a parallel marketplace that the state is helpless to stop the tidal wave. The state fails under the weight of its policies and the competing underground market.
In the late 80’s when Schulman wrote the novel revolutionary economic success was pie-in-the-sky, but today it is more attainable than ever. Crypto currencies and blockchain technology are becoming more popular; under COVID lockdowns small businesses were deemed nonessential while multinational corporations raked in more profit than ever, the Federal Reserve printed off trillions of dollars the political elites happily distributed to their cronies while throwing crumbs to the citizens they determined to be unnecessary, the supply chains were destroyed leaving shelves empty in cities across the nation; and the SEC quietly created an ESG taskforce to police the investments of Americans while the large corporations ushered in their own egalitarian standards that will surely devastate large swathes of the country.
Throughout the devastation of the COVID tyranny small business owners and workers that could not afford to sit around and wait for permission from the political class thumbed their nose at the lockdowns. There were surges of news stories about churches opening despite orders to close, the return of speakeasies, hairdressers arrested for daring to cut hair, and millions of people exchanging goods and services in an underground economy forced upon them.
All the while we were meant to believe that the virus made it too deadly for you to live your life while the rich got richer by the day, and if you questioned the motives of the COVID regime you were labeled a dangerous, science denying, right-wing conspiracy theorist that must be silenced.
This demonization of people, some very liberal, as right-wing, labeling half of the country as backwards hicks, and the unwillingness to allow people to choose their own risks created the environment for conservatives to become ever more rebellious to the regime. COVID transformed from a potentially deadly virus that people should be aware of to a political battle. One was either on the left, embracing the dictates of the political class and enrichment of their corporate masters, or they were on the right, battling the tyranny and carving out their own economic paths.
Gaslighting
From day one the messaging around COVID was an obvious sham. There was little doubt that the entire goal was to instill fear into the public, exacerbate the virus into becoming the largest crisis known to man, and usher in a corporate-centric governance of equity among the citizens while the establishment remained on high collecting more wealth, power, and influence at your expense.
Unfortunately, the gaslighting didn’t start with COVID.
It would be impossible to trace back all of the propaganda of the US government and how it has been utilized to rob people of their liberties, so I’m going to focus on the era at hand.
The modern era of gaslighting the public, and the way we see this psychological tactic used today was a response to Donald Trump’s presidency.
For years we listened to Democrats and media personalities decry Trump as a traitorous Russian puppet. When no charges were filed the pundits were in tears because the incompetent boob that couldn’t read presidential briefings had outsmarted the FBI. And though we’ve found out that the entire Russia investigation around Trump was a plot cooked up by the DNC and FBI there are those that still claim the most incompetent president ever is a brilliant criminal mastermind. (But you’re the crazy one.)
When Trump asked Ukraine to investigate the ties of Biden and Burisma due to a recording of Biden admitting to bribing Ukraine to fire the official investigating Burisma Trump was impeached for bribing Ukraine to investigate bribery… (But you’re the crazy one.)
When Time published an article admitting to the rigging of the 2020 election for Biden you were a crazy conspiracy theorist for referencing the article.
When you said they were not going to stop lockdowns after 15 days, you were crazy.
When lockdowns went on for a year and you pointed out that you had said that was going to happen, you were crazy.
When you said masks don’t work, you were crazy, and now that they admit masks don’t work, you’re still crazy.
When you asked about Moderna and the NIH sharing ownership of the MRNA vaccine patent, you’re crazy.
When you said COVID wasn’t deadly for children, you were crazy.
When you read data, you’re crazy.
When you point out the redistribution of wealth from the productive class to the parasitic class, you’re crazy.
When you say they are counting “with” COVID as “because” of COVID, you are crazy.
When BLM protested the virus couldn’t spread, but when conservatives rally or protest it is a super spreader event.
Natural immunity is no longer a thing and locking yourself in a dark room with bonbons is much healthier than going outside and exercising.
Everything you thought you knew is wrong, and the new science of totalitarianism is the truth.
ETC… I could go on all day.
The point is, the facts are not the facts until those with the monopoly on facts tell you that the facts are in fact the facts, and if you dare read, think, question, or disobey you are a dangerous biological weapon wanting to kill grandma.
You Are Not Alone
The effects of COVID, political oppression, and the corporate press’ agenda are evident in the eyes of everyone I encounter. The average person that does not regularly engage in political discourse or question authority has been completely demoralized and feels like they have nowhere to turn. They feel alone. They feel silenced. They feel insane.
If you’ve read this far, I suspect you, like me, are looking for people that are witnessing and feeling the pressure of the regime and are ready to push back against the narrative.
The fact is you are not alone. Millions of people around the world feel just as you do.
So, how can you fight back?
It would be easy to write a rant that left you seething and not offer any solutions, but I refuse to do that. Before we get to the solution, we must identify the problem.
America was founded on the idea of self-governance. As imperfect as the founding of the country was it was the founding of an idea to move forward and progress into more freedom and liberty for its citizens. God, family, and country were the hallmarks, and order of importance for which we were to live our lives and build the nation.
Over the last century the myth (by myth I mean the origin story not the derogatory perversion of the term) of God has been corrupted and dismantled, the family has been destroyed, and the idea of country has come to mean that your well-being is given its value and purpose by those elected to represent you.
The political class of parasites that feed on your labor and successes have spent the last few generations selling out the future for their own gains and comforts. Your children and grandchildren are expected to be sacrificed on the altar of their desires.
Parents are no longer expected to sacrifice themselves for the well-being of the children’s future, rather, children are to be tortured and psychologically abused by society so that the boomer generation may have everlasting life.
The destruction of trust in the political system and the corporate press has trickled down and eroded trust among Americans. Even those that should be allies are suspect of each other.
There is no more community structure in which citizens feel like they belong. The illusion of power and respectability of government is the only thread holding any of this together; the same government selling out the future to corporate interests.
If we are to retain any semblance of civility and liberty it is up to us to begin to repair the fractures that have torn families, communities, and allies apart. We must begin to interact and engage in our local communities, boycott corporations like Amazon, Walmart, Costco, and the US government. Involve yourself in local elections, buy from your local markets, seek out small, specialized companies, and reject the lazy one stop shopping with the goal of strengthening the bonds of your community.
As long as we allow ourselves to be secluded and divided for convenience the power reserved for the people will continue to be consolidated. You are not alone, but if you don’t work to build and strengthen the bonds with those that share your values, ideas, and desire for liberty you may as well be.
[Tommy Salmons is an author, truck driver, and host of the Year Zero
podcast at the Libertarian Institute. He spends his time studying
religion, history, and totalitarianism, homesteading, fishing, raising
chickens, and spending time with his family.]
