Caitlin Johnstone is Flat Out Wrong about Ordinary People and Her Wrong View UNDERMINES the Work of Revolutionaries

I'm glad she opposes and denounces the ruling class, but her wrong view of ordinary people has revolutionaries doing what is un-necessary INSTEAD of what is necessary.

Here is what Caitlin Johnstone writes about ordinary people:

The system is far too deeply entrenched, and people are far too deeply indoctrinated with propaganda to be persuaded to fight against it right now.

And I emphasize the words “right now”. My solutions might not be easy or immediate, but unlike voting for Trump or Harris in November, they will actually work if put into practice in sufficient numbers. 

An effective solution that we can all begin applying in the here and now is working to foment a revolutionary zeitgeist by spreading awareness of the depravity and deceit of the empire. The primary obstacle to real change is the fact that far too many people are far too brainwashed by propaganda to rise up against our rulers, so our first task is to begin working to wake people up out of that propaganda-induced coma so they can see how desperately real change is needed.

The tyrants won’t end their tyranny until they are forced to, and they can’t be forced to as long as enough people are propagandized into believing things are fine.

Johnstone says people don’t fight the system because they are “propagandized into believing things are fine.”

This is absolutely absurdly false!

Here’s some proof that it is false. Consider what happened in my very typical neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, a neighborhood called Brighton (zip code 02135), which is mainly white working and middle class. I stood in front of a large grocery store entrance and drug store entrance with a sign that said:

We the People want affordable housing for ALL. To get it we aim to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.

I asked people if they would like to pose for a photo displaying this sign. I said the photos would be displayed publicly so that lots of people could see that they were not alone in agreeing with the sign.

I was able EASILY to take 500 such photos, and you can see all of them online here (where you can zoom in on any photo to read the sign easier.) Here below is a sample of the 500 photos:

Not once did I have to persuade anybody to agree with the sign.

They read the sign and said they agreed with it. They were eager to be photographed holding the sign. The reasons that some people did not agree to pose for a photo were things like this:

“Oh, I don’t have my makeup on now” or “I’m afraid my boss will see it.”

If Caitlin Johnstone were right about ordinary people, then I would NEVER have been able to EASILY—no persuasion required!—take these 500 photos of my random neighbors. (You should try taking similar photos of YOUR neighbors so you can discover what they really think, in contrast to what the mass media and Caitlin Johnstone tell you they think.)

Contrary to Caitlin Johnstone, most ordinary people HATE our current system, which they know is a dictatorship of the rich. Read here lots more proof of this—proof that most people want an egalitarian revolution to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.

Contrary to Caitlin Johnstone, ruling class propaganda is NOT mainly for the purpose of making people believe “things are fine.” People know things are not fine. The actual purpose of the propaganda is to make people think that nobody else agrees with them about wanting an egalitarian revolution. It accomplishes this actual purpose by censoring any and all expressions of egalitarian revolutionary aspiration. It’s purpose is to make people thus fear that they better keep quiet about their egalitarian revolutionary aspiration because otherwise they will encounter hostility from their friends and neighbors and the general public and might even be ostracized from their social network, perceived as a “commie” or a “terrorist” or just a crazy person. ¹ I discuss this further here and I hope you will read it because if we don’t understand what the purpose of the propaganda is we will never succeed in refuting it persuasively, as Caitlin Johnstone fails to refute it at all, in fact doesn’t even know what needs to be refuted.

Contrary to Caitlin Johnstone, the problem is NOT that people are not fighting the system. The problem is that when they fight the system—such as with the large number of labor strikes that are indeed happening now—they don’t declare what they REALLY want. Please read about this here so you will understand what it is that we need to do to build the egalitarian revolutionary movement. It is NOT, as Caitlin Johnstone says, to persuade people that things are not really fine (as if they thought things were fine).

Caitlin Johnstone’s Wrong View of Ordinary People Has Revolutionaries Doing What Is UN-Necessary INSTEAD of What Is Necessary

Caitlin Johnstone’s wrong view of ordinary people is, unfortunately, widely shared by many good people who, to their credit, want to build a revolutionary movement. But this wrong view de-rails their movement-building. Here’s how.

If one wrongly believes that ordinary people think things are fine, then one draws the wrong conclusion that the way to build the revolutionary movement is somehow to persuade people that things are not fine. Revolutionaries who see things this way think that what it takes to “wake people up” is to tell them about evil deeds of the ruling class that are extremely shocking and that the public does not know about.² Such evil deeds include, for example, a) the CIA’s assassination of JFK and b) the inside job fact of 9/11 and c) the government’s assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X (all of which, as I have written about, are true), and also evil deeds that I am not persuaded are true—but might be—including d) the ruling class deliberately creating the Covid pandemic in order to kill millions of people by persuading them to take the vaccine that the rulers deliberately designed to kill people, and e) the ruling class using a Directed Energy Weapon to deliberately create the massive firestorm at Maui, Hawaii and earlier in northern California and so forth.

I call these deeds “secret” (or if one prefers, “covert”) evil deeds because, unlike the evil deed of denying us affordable housing, these evil deeds of the ruling class are unknown by the general public, they are done in secret so that people cannot know about the ruling class’s evil role in them from their own direct personal experience. The only way ordinary people can know of these secret evil ruling class deeds is by hearing a revolutionary (or some other expert) tell them about their existence and possibly persuading them that they really are happening.

The idea, for revolutionaries who agree with Caitlin Johnstone, is that when people learn of these secret hidden-from-view shockingly evil deeds of the ruing class then they will wake up and say, “Oh my God! I thought things were fine, but now I know they are not fine and that we need a revolution.”

Revolutionaries who think this way also conclude from the fact that ordinary people do not generally express an egalitarian aspiration (only, however, because they fear disapproval from others, as noted above) that therefore they are not shocked into becoming revolutionary by the many evil ruling class deeds that are done openly for all to see, such as the denial of good housing and good health care to people who deserve these things, or by the many other ways that the the rich openly and routinely treat the have-nots like dirt, many examples of which I discuss here. These revolutionaries conclude that things such as the denial of affordable housing and good health care are unimportant bread-and-butter issues and that ordinary people who focus on them are not real radicals and won’t ever become so until they are shocked by knowledge of the secret (covert) evil deeds of the ruling class.

Furthermore, revolutionaries who share Caitlin Johnstone’s wrong view of ordinary people (as believing things are fine) and who think the only way to make people learn that things are not fine is by shocking them with the knowledge of the ruling class’s secret (covert) evil deeds, have a big problem. The big problem is persuading people that these secret (covert) evil deeds are really true. These revolutionaries need to point to evil deeds that are shockingly dramatic, such as using Covid to deliberately kill many millions of people, and they need some how to persuade people that they are really true. When the evidence is not persuasive, these revolutionaries are nonetheless highly motivated to believe that it is persuasive³ because, in their wrong view of ordinary people, it is ONLY the fact of such secret (covert) evil ruling class deeds that can shock people into becoming radicals who no longer think things are fine.

Because they think that it is ONLY the secret (covert) evil deeds that matter, revolutionaries who share Caitlin Johnstone’s wrong view of ordinary people do not do the most important thing that is required to build an egalitarian revolutionary movement. Namely, they do NOT do the kind of thing I did when I took those photos of people in my neighborhood holding the sign about wanting to remove the rich from power, etc. They do NOT talk to people about the things the ruling class does that people are ALREADY furious about (such as the lack of affordable housing) in a manner designed to persuade them to tell the public how they REALLY feel about these issues. They do not do things to help the vast majority of people who want an egalitarian revolution learn that they ARE the vast majority in this aspiration so that they will begin to ACT like the vast majority instead of an impotent minority⁴. Instead they direct ALL⁵ of their time and energy to talking about secret (covert) evil ruling class deeds in the wrong belief that this is necessary in order to make people stop believing that everything is fine.

Most people know damn well that everything is NOT fine, and they would LOVE an egalitarian revolution. The problem is that they wrongly believe too few people agree with them and so they wrongly believe such a revolution is impossible and that it is therefore foolish to try to build it. Our job as revolutionaries is to help people discover the truth—that in wanting an egalitarian revolution they are the vast majority, not a tiny hopelessly weak minority. When people know this truth they will begin to act like the vast majority that they truly are and build an explicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement that can remove the rich from power. Read here how YOU can help build this egalitarian revolutionary movement.

When—and ONLY when—revolutionaries reject Caitlin Johnstone’s wrong view of ordinary people, then they will start doing zillions of different tactics to enable the vast majority who want an egalitarian revolution to KNOW that they are the vast majority and with the CONFIDENCE that comes from that knowledge to start acting like the vast majority that they are, tactics like this:

POSTSCRIPT September 7, 2024

In response to the comment of Tom Tunes that I replied to as a comment, I should add the following. Those who—to their credit!—opposed the (very non-secret) mandatory Covid vaccines (such as the truckers’ convoy in Canada) and lockdowns—did not say that the Covid virus and the Covid vaccine were deliberately secretly designed by the ruling class to kill millions of people. The wrongheaded revolutionaries who agree with Caitlin Johnstone’s view of ordinary people (i.e., that they believe everything is fine), however, think that until people ALSO agree that the ruling class secretly created the virus and vaccines for he purpose of killing millions of people then they are not yet truly radical and remain essentially in the camp of those who think everything is fine.

Most of the people in that truckers convoy (who, I have heard, were more Covid vaccinated than the general public) would probably have posed for a photo with a sign saying “We the People want a government that does not force people to get the Covid vaccination, and to get it we aim to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor.” But the wrongheaded revolutionaries would never think of asking them to pose for such photos (and thus strengthen the revolutionary movement with the anger of the truckers declaring publicly that they are for egalitarian revolution) because such revolutionaries think people who don’t believe that the Covid virus and vaccine were created deliberately to kill millions of people are not really “awake” and essentially think everything is fine and would not agree to pose for such a photo. This is another example of how Caitlin Johnstone’s wrong view of ordinary people kills the revolutionary movement.

1. It is an interesting question why so many of my neighbors were willing to be photographed with this revolutionary sign instead of being afraid to do it because of what others would think of them. Perhaps the reason is that they figured the photo not only didn’t include their name but also would only be seen by anonymous people rather than by their face-to-face co-workers or next door neighbors or extended family. The reason that workers on strike don’t tell the general public that they want not only to win their immediate reform demand but also an egalitarian revolution is because they are persuaded (wrongly) that the general public would support them much less if it knew they had such revolutionary aims. The leaders of all the unions insist on only expressing very narrow non-radical aims for this reason and rank and file workers don’t know that they would not lose support but actually gain support if the public knew of their radical aims.

2. Of course the public does know about, for example, the assassination of JFK and of MLK, Jr. and Malcolm X and the fact of the 9/11 attack and the fact of the Covid pandemic and the fact of the Maui fire, etc.; but what the public does NOT know, what is secret, is the ruling class’s role in making these terrible things happen.

3. An example of non-persuasive evidence embraced enthusiastically by revolutionaries who share Caitlin Johnstone’s wrong view of ordinary people is the following article:

An article titled, "The dead don't lie: 2 million dead from mRNA jabs!" presents data that seem to show that the CDC and FDA ignored an alarming number of deaths closely following (and hence likely caused by) administration of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, but in contrast acted quickly to halt the use of a J&J DNA Covid-19 vaccine when there were far fewer such reported deaths.​

There are two questions this article raises: #1. Do the data provide persuasive evidence that the mRNA vaccine causes death? and #2. What is the explanation for the FDA's and CDC's behavior?​

Regarding the first question (do the vaccines cause death?), there are four reasons to doubt the authors' affirmative inference (mRNA vaccines cause death):

a) The fact that most VAERS deaths occur within three days of vaccination might be due not to the vaccine being the cause of death (as the authors assume) but rather due to the fact that deaths that occur shortly after vaccination are more likely to be reported to the VAERS data base than deaths that occur long after vaccination. The jamanetwork.com study discussed here next addressed this possible source of bias by looking at all reported deaths and serious events following Covid-19 vaccination in a data set that captured all of them (unlike VAERS data) to see if these events were more likely to be soon after vaccination than otherwise, and found they were not more likely to be sooner after vaccination.​

b) The fact that there are many more deaths reported in VAERS following the Covid-19 vaccinations than following some earlier vaccinations might be in part due to there having been many more people vaccinated with the Covid-19 vaccination than with the earlier vaccinations in the comparison. The vaccinations that lots of Americans got were for childhood diseases and they received these vaccinations as young children. The next most widely received vaccine before the Covid-19 pandemic was the flu vaccine, which only 59.3% of Americans received, compared to 81% of Americans who got at least one Covid-19 vaccination.​

c) The fact that there are many more deaths reported in VAERS following Covid-19 vaccinations than following some earlier vaccinations might be in part due to the fact that there were many more deaths due to Covid-19 than prior to the pandemic and even some people vaccinated for the disease still died from it because the vaccine was not by any means perfect: "By April 2022, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show that about 6 in 10 adults dying of COVID-19 were vaccinated or boosted, and that’s remained true through at least August 2022 (the most recent month of data)."​

d) The authors' extrapolation from the 20,000 VAERS reported deaths to two million actual vaccine-caused deaths is based on the assumption that deaths are as un-reported as less serious events are. This is probably not a true assumption, because deaths elicit far more attention than less serious events.​

Regarding the second question (why the FDA and CDC behaved as they did), there are two possible explanations: #1. they had non-evil reasons for what they did (see above); #2 they had evil reasons for what they did. 

If they had evil reasons then a possible explanation for their behavior would be that the people in control of the CDC and FDA had some reason for wanting to protect Pfizer and Moderna but not J&J. What might that reason be? One possibility is having a financial stake in Pfizer and/or Moderna but not in J&J. Another possibility--which the authors, Peter and Ginger Breggin, advocate--is that the powers that be intended all along to use Pfizer and Moderna (but not J&J) to reduce the world's population with a lethal vaccination. It is one thing to assert the latter explanation; it is another thing to provide persuasive evidence for it, which the authors do not do.

An article titled, "Surveillance for Adverse Events After COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination" in jamanetwork.com reporting a study based on data through May 29, 2021 on 10,162 ,227 vaccine-eligible members of 8 participating US health plans, all of whose deaths and other adverse events were recorded, found  the incidence of selected serious outcomes was not significantly higher 1 to 21 days post-vaccination compared with 22 to 42 days post-vaccination for similar individuals after vaccine dose 1 or 2.

4. I learned how important this is in 1969 and wrote about it in “What Causes a Political Sea Change.”

5. I’m not saying we shouldn’t expose the secret (covert) evil deeds of the ruling class. As links above to my articles show, I have done this myself. What I’m saying is that this should not be done as a substitute for the more important work of building the egalitarian revolutionary movement by helping people learn that they are not alone in wanting such a revolution, so they will begin acting like the vast majority that they are instead of being paralyzed by the belief that hardly anybody else agrees with them.