The Misinformation Trap

How Independent Media Becomes Propaganda

Inflammatory statements—that’s what they want. Every time I write something disparaging about Trudeau the readership skyrockets.

I get it. I hate him too. Well, not necessarily him because there’s nothing to hate. He’s an empty vessel; a piñata packed with ideology and foreign interests.

I hate what he represents. Hate might even be too soft a word for it. I find the agenda that controls him and his government repugnant to the essence of my humanity; it repulses me right down to the cellular level.

He’s an easy target: a trust fund kid with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Everything he touches turns to shit. Canadians have been trained to instantly reject any policy his government puts forward based on the correct assumption that it will be egregiously mismanaged. No matter what the cause of the day is, and how fixing whatever issue the Trudeau Liberals are attempting to tackle may benefit us, some series of events will occur that will lead to millions or even billions of tax dollars vanishing into thin air.

The housing crisis is the latest topic of concern, and unlike gender affirming care for kids or Covid vaccine mandates, this one is actually pertinent. Trudeau has pledged to build 3.9 million homes by 2031—a number so astronomical anyone still loosely tethered to reality knows it’s a mathematical impossibility. Canada doesn’t have the labor force or resources necessary to deliver half a million homes per year. Even the most liberal estimates set the number at 200,000 for 2024 and trend downward in the proceeding years.

But that’s what we’ve come to expect from Trudeau’s traveling circus: grand declarations of death defying feats followed by graphic displays of economic carnage. Trudeau himself is an intellectually impaired ringmaster assuring a panicked audience that everything is going according to plan while the dancing bears maul spectators in the front row.

We now know China is deeply embedded in our government and media institutions. Twenty years ago this would have triggered an immediate dissolution of parliament and a complete overhaul of our agencies, however, in the aftermath of the great reset a foreign dictatorship’s influence over a western democracy is a non-starter. The mainstream public doesn’t blink at the revelation because they don’t know what it means. They’ve been conditioned through a series of violations disguised as civil duty to accept a future of technological imprisonment and voluntary suffering. China may as well be the Hamburglar or Ronald McDonald in this scenario—it doesn’t matter because it never occurred to them that what they’re about to lose could ever be taken. It’s why so many complied with the vaccine mandates and passports despite the risks involved. They were unaware they’d never return from the system they were swept into—and those that did know didn’t mind at all.

The outsiders were thrust into a permanent state of emergency. We’ve been vibrating with anxiety since lockdowns were introduced four short years ago. It took time for many of us to come to terms with exactly what we were descending into, but all of us instinctually sensed something ominous on our doorstep; our awakenings occurring at different times depending on when the alerts wailing within our cranial walls were too loud to ignore.

Independent media became the only reliable source for information. Overnight, podcasts and previously unknown publications took the lead as authorities on the objective universe since legacy networks were mere extensions of the power brokers who sought to obscure the truth. It was a sudden shift that transported many of us to the surface of a foreign planet, sifting through dust searching for a compass or any indication of which direction to travel; what distant landmarks may provide cover or clues to the nature of this new world we’ve arrived in.

There were academics, scientists and philosophers who offered themselves as guides—many of whom were foreigners also, but had a better understanding of the terrain than we did. We followed because the north star we traditionally relied on had proven to be deceptive and failed us at a critical juncture.

In a short time these guides became important countercultural figures, and as their profile grew, many discovered their role as public personalities to be far more desirable than the positions they held previously. Others caught on and joined them—regular people without academic experience but with a sharp sense for unraveling the official narratives and pinpointing the falsehoods.

The initial reveal of that hidden dimension captivated the outsiders. We weren’t fed red pills by slow intravenous drip, we were baptized in them. Alex Jones transformed from apostate to apostle, and previously measured critics abandoned their skepticism for what had become empirically evident to anyone with the courage to acknowledge the tidal wave rolling toward us. Those of us familiar with what were arrogantly tagged as conspiracy theories in the past were stunned to hear credible voices lend credence to these purportedly fringe ideas.

Podcasts crushed cable news networks. Anonymous X accounts dwarfed the long-standing papers of record. Citizens suddenly supplanted journalists, and Elon Musk introduced an ad share program on X that incentivized those citizens to keep the cycle spinning at warp speed.

An unregulated competitive market for news distribution was established. lt was here that an industry developed, and in the race to generate highly valuable ad revenue, independent publishers and broadcasters began to favor hyperbole over rational messaging. It wasn’t enough to simply present the facts and the astonishing bureaucratic corruption those facts exposed, they needed to take it a step further into escalating the language as a method of holding the viewer’s attention long enough for those ad dollars to appear. Humans respond passionately to content that prompts an emotion, and whether content creators knew it or not, that became their primary motivation since rage, anger and hate translated mightily to monetary gain.

This led to a heavy dose of sensationalism injected directly into the information feed. Ironically, the advertising model that steered the mainstream into propaganda was now the headwind pushing the independents—but in the opposite way. Extreme rhetoric became the preferred mode of communication with every instance of political turmoil signaling an incoming apocalypse. While the assessments made were often generally correct, we entered dangerous territory where the constant alarmism served to discredit the warnings of a very real totalitarian threat.

In response, western governments have tabled a number of censorship bills, which are difficult to argue against when the internet is awash in examples of actual misinformation that has traveled and manipulated millions of people. We’re providing the radicals with all the ammunition they need to silence us, while at the same time becoming radicals ourselves. Whether it’s Israel, Trump or just plain anti-woke sentiment, there’s an evangelism materializing that mirrors the cult behavior typical of neoliberalism. In the quest to win a culture war, the outsiders have created their own theocracy; holy laws that must not be questioned despite the glaring hypocrisies that show themselves at first glance.

The hazards here are apparent: if we cannot confront the duplicity within our own political movements then what we have is less a forum for free thought and more a cathedral erected around a religious faith. If we don’t demand integrity and purge the spurious elements then ultimately we will subjugate ourselves as a result of our own zealotry—and transition into what we’re fighting against.

We have to vacate the woke right before it’s too late.