The Soviet Strategy Fueling America's Decline

anyone else feeling really bad right now like the type of bad where you're not sure what's just media spectacle and what is full-on fascist decline well today I'm going to try to explain why this is happening what I'd like to see Canada become our 51st state within two weeks of taking office Trump has renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America the Gulf of America what a beautiful name you blame the most tragic plane crash in recent American history on diversity the FAA is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities while Dr Phil

is out in the streets of Chicago doing ice raids Dr Phil Dr Phil yeah how do you know me how do you know me and Elon Musk and a gang of twins are apparently just taking over the government and and they know your Social Security number so that's cool now we might feel like there's little that we can do right now other than just Doom scroll the pain away but what's happening is connected to a political strategy with its roots in the Soviet Union I'm trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion

right now that diversity had something to do with this crash because I have common sense okay now one way that we can understand what's going on and why it's making us feel so bad is the phenomenon of hyper normalization now this concept was coined by Anthropologist Alexi yur to explain the Twilight of Russian communism it describes how the Soviet government's self- mythologizing propaganda was so successful that it made it impossible for people to consider alternatives to the system the Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real because

they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart but everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real one Soviet writer called it hyper normalization the fakeness was hypernormal one writer describes it as an entropic acceptance and false belief in a clearly broken polity and the myths that underg it the term is popularized in the work of British documentarian Adam Curtis the picture he gave was of a political class reduced to trying to steer Society into a dark and frightening future constantly peering forward and trying to see the risks

coming towards them their only aim to avoid those risks and keep Society stable for him hyper normalization means this politicians financiers and technological utopians they can Ed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power allowed dark and destructive forces to fester and grow outside forces that are now returning to pierce the fragile surface of our carefully constructed fake World Curtis elaborates on his use of the term in an interview saying we live in a world where the powerful deceive us we know they lie they know we know they lie they

don't care we say we care but we do nothing and nothing ever changes it's normal welcome to the posttruth world welcome indeed while this might feel overly cynical Curtis contends that Americans and Europeans have long known that our systems aren't working and when journalists point this out we all get to say oh no that's horrible before we just get on with our day no one has any vision of a different or a better kind of future so nothing ever changes and we might feel this recently when one day we're reading horrifying news about the climate

and the next moment we're being told the Golden Age of America begins right now and this gap between what we're seeing in the world and what we're told the world is actually like can create a sense of Detachment from reality or a passive acceptance of the reality we being sold or both I felt some of this this week uh cuz right before we filmed this video I learned that Elon Musk has recently Unleashed a bunch of kids to run around Washington DC disrupting departments that administer potentially life-saving services so that's cool and the two responses

to all of this seem to be either losing one's mind or just trying to stay distracted let me know how you're staying distracted these days I've been watching the television show shrinking and watching YouTube videos about maps and if I look giddy it's because I am I love old original Maps one of the features of the hyper normalized political reality of the late Soviet Union as described by Ure was their policing of language in which a Mastery over words and their meaning facilitated political control now we're currently seeing this at play in American politics where

a series of executive orders have focused on redefining some terms and eradicating others all for the sake of new levels of control for example in the official language of the state Dei or diversity equity and inclusion actually means forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs now this shift in official language turns workplace seminars on diversity and and preferred pronouns in your emails into firable offenses okay before we get into it I want to talk about this video sponsor magic spoon I've been getting older I've been trying to cut down on sugar because it leaves me feeling

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a specific State sanction definition with previously existing gender ideology being identified as a as a violent threat to women and children one interex writer and activist has pointed out that these definitions are not only just straight up scientifically untrue they make her biological identity seemingly nonexistent in the eyes of the state while the executive order establishes gender at the moment of conception professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology Eve Feinberg points out everybody has some combination of X and Y chromosomes but it's not until between 9 to 13 weeks of gestation that formation of the internal reproductive

organs begins and this is not a binary male or female pathway in case the science words got you confused there what the the doctor of stuff that happens down there is saying is that literally the government definition doesn't even make sense it doesn't make biological sense when when it's trying to Define what gender is but but the government said it's true so that makes it true I think something like that I don't know I wish I could daydrink I could daydrink but I can't you know it's worth noting that the executive order on gender calls

for the resending of previous government documents on the issue including things like supporting transgender youth in school this creates moments of in congruity as we're all very aware that trans and intersex people exist but official government definitions of gender are now telling us that well they don't it's not to similar to the feeling we get when we're told that the economy is booming while everyone around us is struggling or that it's good to ramp up oil production when we're witnessing the effects of a collapsing climate but it's about much more than just controlling language the

very platforms and mediums by which we receive information are also reinforcing this hyper normalization while in the Soviet Union the government's propaganda constructed reality today privately owned platforms determine how we understand and experience our world and this works in a couple of different ways now first reality is mediated by the forms of media that we have access to so only that which can be tweeted Tik toked or instagrammed becomes information worth knowing and that which we must know is elevated by algorithms that we can't understand much less control a recent example is that in the

days after Elon Musk did a Roman salute the trending news bar on his platform was filled with stories about the controversy over Alexandria aazia Cortez doing a Nazi salute you see what happened there is he is he made up a thing to distract you from the real thing that he did and he just got to do it CU he owns the platform turn politics into a strange theater where nobody knew what was true or what was fake any longer also he's inside government offices right now getting access to all types of information about us this

is really nuts guys I'm not trying to freak you out but you should be freaked out like you should be that's a normal response to what's happening these platforms also create a distance between us and reality as whatever happens out in the world it's always been mediated via these platforms so what's real isn't what happened in the world but what these platforms say happened in the world for example X elevating a totally true story about a kazio Cortez running around New York doing Nazi salutes and when everything is content it's increasingly hard to distinguish between

prank videos influencer post clips from a war zone sponsored content or images of fires burning down our cities because everything becomes part of the narrative and the contents of this virtual reality is often at odds with actual reality the version of reality that politics presented was no longer believable that the stories politicians told their people about the world had stopped making sense and in the face of that you could play with reality constantly shifting and changing now your check and Curtis argue that these narratives eventually become self-fulfilling prophecies which shape our actual reality which brings

us to an even more Bleak aspect of hypernormalisation feeling that there is no alternative to the system you know this is what writers like Mark fiser have referred to as capitalist realism the idea that capitalism is the only viable political and economic system and it's impossible to imagine any alternatives when language and images and media platforms all communicate one specific political worldview it can be increasingly hard to imagine anything valid existing outside the system instead of the explicit propaganda seen in Soviet Russia we're seeing a similar strategy in the use of Politics as content and

content as politics whether that's Dr Phil doing right alongs on Ice raids to me it seems that these politicians are creating what they fear the most and that is forcing ice agents into the community where they pick up the Target and wind up picking up collaterals that may be around them as opposed to going to the jail where they just get the Target and leave or homand security secretary Christy Nome doing immigration raids in New York early this morning president Trump's new Secretary of Homeland Security Christy gome on the front lines of the administration's Crackdown

on undocumented immigration and promise of mass deportations which had to be way less exciting uh than her previous hobby of shooting dogs in the head politicians and dog experts are criticizing South Dakota governor Christy gome after she wrote about killing a puppy in her new book both examples blur the line between reality TV and politics you know turning the horrors of mass arrest into sensationalized fuel for clicks and attention increasingly creating and controlling content is precisely how politics is done and even seemingly non-political events like historic wildfires in Los Angeles are quickly reframed as political

events once they enter the content machine I think that is largely incompetent and I think the mayor is largely incompetent and probably both of them are just Stone Cold incompetent and at an even deeper level this Taps into the feeling of watching the world burning down the street well we're just expected to keep keep doing our jobs and consuming as usual and while things seem like they're maybe collapsing outside the system just lurches forward without interruption ultimately just like the Soviet form described by y modern hyper normalization is a mechanism of political control now writing

about scientific and educational materials in the Soviet Union Ure argues that these texts contributed to hypernormal the linguistic form and to the growing understanding that as long as one reproduced the precise forms of language the correctness of the meanings conveyed was guaranteed we see this in Trump's executive order to defend women from gender ideology and extremism and restore biological truth to the federal government this guy is in order to defend women and he's been like accused of sexual assault by multiple women so that's sick now how does it attempt to restore truth well via the

reproduction of a precise form of language aimed at conveying the correct meaning at the government level and when this controlled form of language is then reduplicated on the very platforms we use to communicate it helps solidify this hyper reality I was very upfront in my briefing on day one um that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room we are going to hold those lies accountable and it is a fact fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America and I can't

help but note right now that two figures very responsible for perpetuating this mode of political hyper reality Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg own the platforms upon which all of this is happening okay so is there any way out of this hyper normalized world or are we just in too deep well the best we can do here is point to what Curtis sees as the root cause of the hypernormal culture of the West individualism what she was describing was the rise of a new powerful individualism that could not fit with the idea of collective political action

now according to Curtis the emphasis on the individual that began with the radicalism of the 60s not only weakened our ability to analyze what's wrong with Society it limits our ability to construct Solutions now Curtis has said that the real problem is that we've grown up in a period of high individualism and in a period of high individualism the one thing you don't notice is power you're supposed to be an empowered individual yourself what's disappeared out of the language as [Music] power now Curtis has elaborated that the failure of leftist politics comes down to this

precise hyper fixation on the individual rather than the mechanisms of power and if we want to find a way to break out of this hypernormal reality then we need to break free from the spell of individualism in which we only view single individuals as agents of change so while we as individuals might feel stuck inside a fake system with no way out well maybe we as a collective can do the work of identifying where power comes from so we can maybe you know feel feel a little more normal and I actually asked our community on

a live stream this week what they think we can do to respond to this increasingly weird and bad moment and folks suggested a lot of stuff you know people brought up Mutual Aid networks local organizing and politics and even just continuing to educate ourselves and others on what's going on in the world you know it's not a One-Stop solution but I think all those things are really great suggestions and I would love to hear more from what you all think about this and how you're responding to our current moment thank you so much for watching

hanging out liking subscribing it means a ton big shout out to our patrons your support means so much uh there's a link in the description if you want to get involved over there and in the meantime take it easy I'll see you next week [Music] [Applause] [Music] no [Music]