A Healthy Distrust Is Warranted

Showing my age as an “elder millennial” - one who was born into an analog world, but witnessed the stark transformation to digital throughout childhood - there was a time before smartphones where we weren’t bombarded with live content and social media 24/7, so it was very much easier for state authority (and those acting in that de facto capacity) to legitimize itself. That, and being the progeny of Boomers meant we were raised by a generation who, in spite of their brief and somewhat bohemian “hippie movement,” found themselves supporting the likes of Reagan and were generally quite right-wing. I haven’t taken any serious amount of time looking into how they ended up so counter-revolutionary, but given examples of their discourse (like the one below,) there appears to be a case to be made that anyone who had some good ideas within that movement were co-opted, or the entire thing was fake to begin with and mainly served as a release valve for the anti-war crowd without offering any sort of political or ideological solutions at all.

I open with this to try and illustrate the weird dichotomy that was present with my parents general attitude. They liked to claim they were huge pot-smoking hippies in the 60s, but as long as I’ve known them, they never found an American intervention they weren’t 100% in support of. Never doubted the propaganda pouring out of Fox News, MSNBC, CNN. Habitually read New York Times and Wall Street Journal. And on top of this, an absolute aversion to media and journalists who did not toe the establishment line or were part of the “approved” establishment media apparatus. I remember after 9/11 - when I would have been around 16 or 17 - I came across Alex Jones when he was ostensibly still independent (and not so overtly compromised by the Zionist media blob), and I remember him being one of the first guys to come out against the official narrative and, to this day, I generally agree with his original hypothesis regarding 9/11 being an inside job. Alex Jones is a divisive character among pretty much all demographics, but his take on 9/11 isn’t even really controversial among millennials - of whom it feels like the majority generally agree that what took place that day is definitely not what the government told us.

Zeitgeist came out years later, more or less echoing Alex Jones’ take but with more evidence, and that movie was hot and everyone I went to college with had seen it and recommended it. I still suggest watching it if you haven’t, but seriously, this movie was so popular when it came out that I think it became part of the millennial…zeitgeist anyway.

Point is, 9/11 occurs to me as the first major historical event that wasn’t able to be strictly controlled by legacy media and represented a fundamental point of contention between millennials and their parents’ generation. Of course, this isn’t true with everyone, but given the data showing how readily boomers drink the kool-aid, feel pretty confident in saying this as a general rule.

That being said, when I was younger, I remember being fed news articles from all the usual suspects I rattled off earlier from my father, and we would have some discourse on that stuff later. So, if WSJ had some article about WMDs in Iraq, my father would want to discuss it - but only within the confines of acceptable discourse as outlined by the mainstream media he adheres to. If I were to say, “Well, what about no WMDs in Iraq,” I’ve now entered conspiracy territory and it’s like the walls of Gaza just got erected around his brain. “You are not to talk about things that are not consensus within establishment media,” Was the vibe beaten into my head by the time I was out of high school. Gabor Maté talks a lot about how children end up in a position of having to choose between being authentic to their parents and having an attachment to them, and I had to absolutely forsake my authenticity to avoid being a pariah in the eyes of my parents, and this is still something I struggle with today. Not necessarily because I give a shit at this point what my parents think, but decades of carefully navigating what was acceptable discourse at home meant becoming an adult who really didn’t think very highly of his own opinions and didn’t solicit them. I’d say it wasn’t until around 2019 or so when I started to let go of my inhibitions and felt more comfortable expressing myself on divisive topics. By that time, My (now ex) wife and I had invested quite a lot energy into both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns spreading the good word on Bernie Sanders. Watched him endorse Hillary, clearly under coercion, and thought, “Nah there’s no way he would do something like that twice,” and then he endorsed Biden during the 2020 run and there was not a clearer moment for me since I started voting that The Fix Was In. Election rigging, I now knew for certain, was endemic to our electoral system and no amount of LARPing for democracy at the polls was going to have any sort of appreciable impact in our day-to-day lives. I haven’t voted since the 2020 primaries and have no plans on ever voting again. Evidence of my commitment to this below.

Since then, the conversation in my head has changed from thinking incrementalism at the polls is the way, to knowing we have no representation, never will have representation, and the masses desperately need to reach a higher level of consciousness to understand the futility of checking off boxes on mail-in ballots and react appropriately within that mindset. The Radical is dismissed out of hand as someone living in the clouds or unrealistic by the sheep who do what they are told every other year to witness only decay of the state and our social fabric throughout their entire lives.

“You know what, your opinions are actually valid and people actually do want to hear them,” my inner-monologue reminds me a few times a day. It’s a conscious effort to let down my guard when it comes to being afraid of saying the wrong thing, or even thinking it for that matter. Some extremely recent events in fact, have challenged my own ego to be open to the possibility that certain immutable truths - history written in stone - may have been exceptionally resistant propaganda that has withstood the test of time. When I think about all the insane propaganda we are exposed to today - all the lies, exaggerations, and fabrications - and think about how the people in power want those lies to withstand the test of time as well, it’s not crazy to me to think that maybe some (but probably most) of the stuff we are taught in school is the Americanized “version” of history that is suitable for galvanizing the new generations around good and evil tropes to make them more likely to develop values that align with Western establishment interests.

I’m at the point in my intellectual growth where I still check myself on new discoveries and insist I must be crazy. Perhaps it’s old baggage from being antagonized when I was younger for having heterodox views. Perhaps the indoctrination is so complete that even when I’m aware that I’ve been duped, I still feel bad or uncomfortable for having wrongthink. Perhaps there’s a part of my ego that still wishes I was a sheep so I didn’t constantly feel like an outsider from knowledge I can’t unlearn. In any event, I already took the redpill. Now it’s just a matter of finding peace with it.

- Chris