Manchurian Voters, or, The brainwashing of a nation [View all]

[GliderGuider]

Last edited Fri Feb 17, 2017, 04:30 PM - Edit history (1)

There is a schism in American society that, at least for now, appears to be unbridgeable. I call the two sides of the chasm "Realists" and "Trumpists".

The genesis of this split goes back to the Powell Memo in 1972. It was what convinced corporations to get into the social engineering business. The FCC changes that happened under Ronald Reagan were one of its outcomes. Those changes enabled RW hate radio to take hold and spread.

The spread of RW talk radio in turn permitted the mass brainwashing of a large number of citizens. It did this through a form of the process called "psychic driving". Driving is a technique originally developed by Dr. D. Ewan Cameron under the auspices of the CIA's MK Ultra project in the 1950s and 60s. Driving involves subjecting people to continuously repeated audio messages to alter their behaviour. The goal is to alter the subjects' interpretation of reality.

So that's what RW talk radio did, over a span of 40 years. It succeeded, and the Trumpists are the result.
Then the Citizens United ruling came along in 2010. It allowed corporate money to flood into politics. The money was used to entrench the corporate version of reality that had been perfected by RW think tanks, radio and Fox television in the political arena. That change has resulted in the modern GOP and ultimately Trump himself.

The end result is a segment of society that has been socially engineered over a long span of time. They have been given a political platform through which to expand their beliefs into the rest of society. The result is the current sociopolitical polarization of the USA.

As far as I can see, the chasm can only be bridged by deprogramming the brainwashed sector of the populace - people I have called the "Manchurian Voters". Unfortunately, the deprogramming would require unwinding the changes brought about by the Powell Memo, the FCC changes and Citizens United.

Then the economy needs to be made more equitable to assuage their bitter sense of "left-behind" grievance.
And finally, once all that is done, the actual deprogramming (if it can be accomplished at all) would probably require another generation and a half - 45 - years to take effect. This time frame is equivalent to the time it took to brainwash them in the first place.

The Trumpists' problem isn't really stupidity or ignorance, despite what it may look like to us. It's brainwashing. They have been reengineered, reshaped and reeducated into a new worldview that is fundamentally incompatible with ours. They see every situation, event and idea through those engineered filters.

Psychic driving

Psychic driving was a psychiatric procedure of the 1950s and 1960s in which patients were subjected to a continuously repeated audio message on a looped tape to alter their behaviour. In psychic driving, patients were often exposed to hundreds of thousands of repetitions of a single statement over the course of their treatment. They were also concurrently administered muscular paralytic drugs such as curare to subdue them for the purposes of exposure to the looped message(s). The procedure was pioneered by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, and used and funded by the CIA's Project MKUltra program in Canada.