Architects of Propaganda

People are willing to give up their freedom for the luxury of artificial attachment. The architects of propaganda have molded their propaganda models to fit the modern-day, but it’s the same principle that Edward Bernays had warned about in the 1920s. Facebook is well aware of these details. They model their artificial intelligent systems to cater to the absent-minded. Facebook is second to none when it comes to bullshiting the public. As a matter of fact, the average American can’t tell their asshole from a hole in the ground. Boredom is the host that Facebook feeds on. Creativity is a remedy for this flower of evil, but I digress. It is only out of a knowledge of the phenomenology of nature that man can produce magnificence.

Without that knowledge man’s endeavors are hollow. The twenty-first-century man has lost sight of nature, and they’ve lost sight of themselves. But what is the phenomenon of the self when we are constantly molded by opinions and bourgeois corporate elites who see it fit for them that we wear this or that. Or drive a Honda instead of a Toyota? The will to power is driven by desire, the corporate elites know which way the wind blows, and the last man is thrown out like chaff. We\’ve made something out of nothing, the alchemy of existence and the idle hands of boredom have created the games we play, executing the rules of life. Entertainment is a boring fantasy. Television leads to the neotomy of the mind. To create without the illusion of fame is truly a gift. Our insignificance does not warrant our atrophy, but calls us to be seekers while spectators shrug and head to the stands.

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In his article, “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about, white flight, as a “kind of natural expression of preference. . . a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America\’s public and private sectors.” Coates goes on to say that speculators knew that there was money to be made off of White panic, and resorted to \”block-busting\” — spooking Whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became Black. Speculators then sold the homes to Blacks who were desperately looking to get out of the ghettos or who had come north through the Great Migration, and would sell them these homes on contract.

“Since before World War II, African Americans had been migrating north, out of sharecropping economies into industrialized railroad meccas like St. Louis, a major boom town at the time. After the war, white downtowns emptied into the suburbs, abandoning the poor working class to slumlords and joblessness.”

Devin Thomas O’Shea wrote in a story originally appearing in Protean on Nov. 28, 2022.

Congress passed a law in which the federal government dismantled segregation in the nation\’s housing. The 1968 Fair Housing Act under the father of Mitt Romney — George Romney former governor of Michigan — pressed predominantly White communities to build more affordable housing, and put a stop to its zoning laws. He called it “open communities” but Nixon put a stop to Romney\’s plans.

The impact of segregation is still prevalent in today’s society. Black schools are still under funded, neighborhoods are still reeling from red-lining. Even in Manhattan Beach, Bruce’s Beach was taken by White Beach goers, a one time haven for Afro-Americans. Not until recently did the family of Charles and Willa Bruce (The property, which was located at 26th Street and Highland Avenue, was owned and operated by them) receive reparations for the wrongful plunder which took place in the 1920s.

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Race as a social construct means acknowledging the ways that racial difference and the meanings that arise from those differences have been socially constructed. To say that one race is better than another is the equivalent of saying that people are not created equal. In the US it is much easier to blame, blackball, and criminalize a class of people than it is to find solutions as to why. I was reading an article about anti-tobacco lobbyists who want to eradicate nicotine from cigarette products which would be the equivalent of the ban of alcohol in alcoholic beverages. There was some trepidation on my end in the whole notion when ideas on race chased down my thoughts.

I could not help to think of the affect cigarettes have on the poor, or rather, the inner-city Black and Latino communities. My thoughts began to ramble on my own biases, if any, towards different races. I cannot say that I’m a racist, but racism does disproportionatly affect people of color. So to say that racism doesn’t exist negates the fact that race exists. The trepidation came when I began to ask myself whether cigarettes should be banned. If a disproportionate amount of minorities want to smoke, so be it, and would the next step be an entire ban? This criminalization of a loose leaf cigarette led to the death of Eric Garner.

If the war on drugs has taught us anything it’s that the prison industry is thirsty for Blacks and Latinos.