US is spending $28 billion to colonise your brain

Whoever owns the narrative owns the world – and things just got a lot tougher for those of us opposed to the metastasizing brain cancer known as US influence campaigns – or “perception management”.  In a staggering increase in funding for propaganda and covert action the US House has passed the Countering the PRC (People’s Republic of China) Malign Influence Fund, kicking in an extra $1.6 billion. How they spend this and other influence funds will largely be a secret but, rest assured, your neural pathways are in their crosshairs.  Politicians, generals, journalists, media outlets, influencers and all sorts of organisations will be bought and owned in an expanded effort to get you to accept the US narrative on China, Israel, Palestine, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, Syria and anything else they deem as necessary.

US disinformation/perception management campaigns are enormously important – they help convince millions of older white people in the Western world (they have pretty much lost everyone else) that the US has the right to assassinate political leaders, kill millions of non-white people, especially women and children, and generally justify the unjustifiable:  Israelis raping shackled prisoners or incinerating hospitals and tent cities is ok, the US didn’t realise what all those bombs would be used for, it’s unfortunate but unavoidable that Israelis get to steal and steal Palestinian land, etc. Kneecapping Iran, trying to knock Russia out of the ranks of the great powers, ending free trade and weaponising the global economy to stop the rise of Chinese tech – these all require acquiescence from Western voters. Welcome to the US’s desperate attempt to maintain global cultural hegemony.  

The Countering China Malign Influence Bill

After a decisive 351-36 vote the US Countering PRC Malign Influence bill will deliver an extra USD $1.6 billion to the info warriors between now and 2027.  The spend is new money, in addition to the hundreds of millions being spent on the National Endowment for Democracy, 1st Special Forces Command, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Office for Cuba Broadcasting, and all manner of think tanks, NGOs, and client universities like Stanford.  The billionaire and Western state media kick in their services largely for free. Then there are the major agencies. According to the Federation of American Scientists the combined intelligence budget of the USA exceeds $28 billion, much of it housed within the US $1 trillion defence budget and lavished on agencies like the NSA, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and National Reconnaissance Office that specialises in signals intelligence (spying).  They run Ops – largely covert activities designed to destabilise governments, promote colour revolutions, own journalists, discredit, kill or deplatform opponents and entrench US ideological hegemony. One example: the NSA has 20,000 civilian staff, 20,000 military staff and a vast network of contractors. Its budget runs into billions and it is a key cog in what Professor Henry Farrell of Johns Hopkins University calls America’s Underground Empire. 

Marcus Stanley, a Director at Responsible Statecraft, a Washington-based think tank, says the Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund will represent a significant increase in international influence operations: 

“That’s a massive spend — about twice, for example, the annual operating expenditure of CNN.”

Imagine that – more than CNN, more than the BBC World Service – a sum of money that dwarfs the already gigantic amount of money the US spends via its principal coordinating agency for propaganda, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, with an annual budget of around $100 million.  US troll farms, think tanks, intimidation campaigns, muscling major platforms to ban or silence critical voices – it’s all happening right now and will get far worse in the near future.  

The scale of what we are up against is vast – but the stakes couldn’t be higher.  Our media in large measure has excluded the majority of analysts, politicians, researchers and independent thinkers who challenge the dominant narrative on the issues that will determine our species’ future.  Thirty million people have downloaded just one of Professor John Mearsheimer’s lectures – “Why Ukraine is the West’s fault”; he is undoubtedly one of the world’s top geopolitical thinkers and public intellectuals but, like Noam Chomsky in an earlier generation, has been barred from the major channels. 

In the past month Professor Glenn Diesen, another top geopolitical thinker, an expert on the emerging Eurasian world order, and a very decent human being, was one of several commentators banned for “hate speech” on Youtube.  It was so ludicrous that, after pressure from people like Professor Jeffrey Sachs, his and a number of other channels were reinstated without explanation or apology.  

Purging voices is now standard operating procedure in the West.  Julian Assange may be free but he paid a tremendous price.  Others got the message and are suitably compliant.  As Edward Snowden said: “When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.”  Welcome to our world.

US information/disinformation also almost certainly dwarfs the combined spend on influence campaigns of all other countries combined – and yet you’re told to fear Chinese disinformation, look under your mattress every night for Russian influencers, and so on.  I want to hear more Chinese commentators, Russian commentators, Yemeni, Turkish, Malaysian, Indonesian, Georgian, Libyan, Nigerien, you name it.  Their opinions matter.  

Our media environment is so dystopian we find it perfectly normal that when Russia, Iran, Palestine or many countries are discussed, the MSM turn to Americans, Israelis, British or other Western Europeans to explain to us what these excluded Others think.  We virtually never get to hear extended interviews with any of the West’s strategic competitors or victims, and our populations are so mentally enslaved it doesn’t come across to them as distinctly weird. 

Some commie bastard, I think Karl Marx himself, said the dominant ideas in society are those of the ruling class. The Americans know only too well that whoever owns the narrative owns the world.  That’s Cultural Hegemony 101.  If they lose control of the narrative – for example, if the majority of the passive populations of the West wake up and realise they and their governments really are party to genocide, that a new world is starting to take shape that will, as I said in an earlier article, drive the demi-gods of the West back into the ranks of humanity, then ordinary people may actually start to challenge why, for example, infrastructure in the American homeland is falling apart but the military industrial complex has unlimited funds to blow other people’s infrastructure apart. 

What is at stake is epochal in its scale and implications for future generations. In the midst of a genocide, on the edge of wars that could wreck the global economy, we are also experiencing an increasingly ruthless war being waged to eliminate or silence dissent.  All of this means we have to build a better media environment that will challenge the dominant narrative; we have to find the courage within ourselves to oppose the terrible trajectory the Western elites have committed us to.  

The emerging media world outside the mainstream needs support to survive, thrive and reach more people.  Pearls & Irritations in Australia, Counterpunch in the US, Jadaliyya, Neutrality Studies, Zeteo, Palestine Chronicle, Judging Freedom, Breaking Points, Drop Site, DDN, Dialogue Works, Asia Pacific Report, the Duran, Rachel Blevins, Grayzone, Middle East Monitor, Novara Media, Deep Dive with Col. Danny Davis, Electronic Intifada, and Democracy Now – these are sources of intellectual nourishment and serious news and analysis.  My personal heroes are people like John Menadue, Pascal Lottaz, Ambassador Chas Freeman, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, Mouin Rabbani, Hanan Ashrawi, John Whitbeck, every Palestinian journalist in Gaza, Shir Hever, Norman Finkelstein, Seyed Mohammad Marandi, Owen Jones, John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris, Katie Halper, Aaron Mate, former PMs Helen Clark and Paul Keating … and more than I can mention here.  I don’t have to agree with every position they take but I know my intellectual life has been significantly enlightened by them – and I’m deeply grateful for the work they do for us all. 

If we want a better, fairer world to emerge where all people are treated as humans worthy of dignity we all need to do our part by broadening our own intellectual lives and helping more of our friends and acquaintances to look beyond the increasingly tightly curated world of the mainstream media.  That’s worth something even $28 billion can’t buy.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He writes at www.solidarity.co.nz