Caitlin Johnstone's message to her fellow Americans on July 4 last year

It's important to understand that the imperial propagandists don't just tell us what to think; they also train us how to think. Feeding us bad information is only half their job; the other half is shaping the cognitive frameworks by which we form opinions about that information.

This is why the mass media have "opinion" segments as well as "news" segments. They're not there in case you were curious what Johnny McThinktank's opinions are on the issue of the day (they know you weren't), they're to model the acceptable parameters of thinking on that issue. And the acceptable parameters of thinking will always take it as a given that the mechanisms of oligarchy and empire mustn't be interrupted or inconvenienced in any way. Differing opinions will be modeled on how those mechanisms should be advanced, but never if they should.

That's how come the renowned expert PhD pundit will often have a less truth-based worldview than your stoner flatmate with an eighth-grade education. Because they've been trained on both what to think and how to think, they'll pour all their intellect into defending lie-based worldviews.

The most dangerous extremists of our age are not radical jihadists, nor fundamentalist Christians, nor white supremacists, nor communists, nor anarchists, but mainstream adherents to the status quo politics that are murdering people around the world and driving us to armageddon.

Caitlin Johnstone is on the left. As my friend Tim says, it is completely impossible to tell left from right anymore.