Full-time Twitter performer and empire exposer Caitlin Johnstone is on Substack where she publishes almost a short piece a day. Sometimes she hits targets, other times she shoots blindfolded. Some of her pieces are built on facts and evidence, while others are ad hominem attacks, ideological assumptions, and all-or-nothing tribal missives. Sometimes they’re a mix of all of the above.
You won’t read much about other individuals here on this Substack unless they’re part of the global cabal terrorizing humanity, but her very recent attempt to paint Tucker Carlson as a media “propagandist” who unleashed a “psychotic rant” about China to “manufacture consent for war” is so littered with false assertions it necessitates some remarks.
Her title laughably claims Carlson is “as much a propagandist as anyone in the Mainstream Media.” One of Carlson’s recent monologues paints China as an emerging powerhouse that has been busily buying economic influence if not financial servitude of nations around the world. While using some hyperbolic language, most of what he argues is based on fact.
China’s belt and road initiative is a massive geopolitical strategic long-game of buying goodwill around the world rooted in China’s desire to expand to other hemispheres of influence, and secure natural resources for their industries and supply chains. They are not busily doing this for compassionate and ethical reasons, and Carlson’s assertion that this is “colonizing” other nations is not hyperbole. They are planting seeds of proliferation that all smart nations do that seek expansion, starting with state investment via private entities and loans, which will later be leveraged in any manner China desires, even militarily.
While the U.S. was accomplishing the same expansionist games post world war two using private sector investments, the CIA, IMF, and World Bank, soft coups, military coups, and later direct military force to maintain petrodollar dominance, the tactics of China are slightly different and the countries engaged in distinct means of power formation and dominance do not negate each other.
Johnstone opens her piece with a false equivalency littering the terrain with poisoned seeds like “right-wing” and “rightest” to signal to her ideological readers:
Fox News's fabulously popular right wing pundit Tucker Carlson has ratcheted up his show's anti-China propaganda yet again, introducing his interview with Brazil's rightist president Jair Bolsonaro with a psychotic rant against Beijing that, were it about Moscow, would have looked perfectly at home among even the most demented mainstream liberal punditry at the height of Russiagate hysteria around 2018.
The comparison between Carlson’s observations on China’s geopolitical aims in buying new spheres of global economic influence to be cashed in later militarily and Russiagate, a deep state orchestrated plot by the democrat party, FBI, and CIA-controlled media to undermine the Trump presidency is a wild swing and a miss. Tucker’s “psychotic rant” on China apparently compares to the CIA corporate-state media’s around-the-clock Russiagate hysteria that lasted four years as part of a soft coup against Trump’s presidency.
Johnstone’s fantastic assumptions are that Tucker’s call-out of China is part of a corporate-state propaganda campaign for the Empire of Lies to move their crosshairs toward greater conflict with China and eventually war. Yet on corporate media, nobody has been more anti-war over the years than Carlson, who prior to being the only media pundit to question the insanity of western policy in Ukraine from the start, lambasted Trump for lobbing missiles at an empty airfield in Syria, excoriated him for sending troops back into Syria to steal oil, exposed him for inviting psychopathic neocons like John Bolton into his policy circles and for abandoning vital allies in the Kurds who did all the heavy lifting in cleaning up the Obama CIA-funded ISIS mess in the region. It is difficult to find anyone on television who has been as consistent as Carlson in exposing the empire’s proxy war crimes (including plandemic and pharmacide crimes) and being undoubtedly against this agenda.
Most corporate-state media is controlled by narrative managers with ties to the intelligence community who have been busily engaged in driving Russia directly into the arms of China. The huffing and puffing about Russia and Putin by these intel-controlled rags has been 100-1 compared to their criticisms of China, whom on paper is listed by the Pentagon as the empire’s greatest threat. If that’s true, then why drive the largest nuclear power in Russia directly toward China and not fortify an alliance with a natural Eurasian power like Russia that is on China’s doorstep?
The point of his monologue was to ask the simple questions: What is China up to around the world including in Brazil, and why are U.S. elites silent about it? Is it because China owns so many U.S. politicians and industries? Is it because China owns the U.S.? These might as well be rhetorical questions.
Her piece is seemingly oblivious of the power China has over the U.S. economically, politically, and culturally and how they use that leverage for their own benefit. Johnstone asserts: “There is no more important goal for the oligarchic empire than securing US hegemony by halting the rise of China, and there is no figure more effective in manufacturing consent for that goal than Tucker Carlson.”
This statement is a direct contradiction to all evidence of the behavior of America’s oligarchs and thirty years of American policy. There's no industry that will even dare criticize China in the U.S., and not just sports and entertainment. Tech CEOs like Apple’s Tim Cook and Elon Musk regularly make fawning trips to China to ensure their companies maintain a vital share of the Chinese market. Google has offered to build a special search engine for the CCP that filters out wrong-think prohibited by police-state Chinese censors. American central planners would love nothing more to have these same resources and power over the population and are engaged in building the systems of technology that filter out “non-authoritative sources” (Google Search, FB Search) while romancing new bureaucracies like the Orwellian DHS ‘disinformation board’ that would realize those ends by state decree when Tech monopolies refuse to do the dirty work of censorship and blacklisting for them.
Later Johnstone muddies the waters with more comparisons and unevidenced assertions about Carlson.
China taking up more space on the world stage only looks like an egregious assault when viewed through the prism of a worldview which believes this planet is the property of the United States government.
Again, nobody has been more vocal on corporate media than Carlson in criticizing U.S. military expansion which he correctly asserts has come at the grave expense of the livelihoods of American citizens through a lack of domestic investments and concerns.
This all-or-nothing view that disingenuously labels anyone who questions America’s enemies (on paper) as propagandists “manufacturing consent” for the empire is intellectually dishonest and requires only tribal limited thinking to gain the applause of ideological adherents.
Carlson is very much a civil libertarian, and social conservative with anti-war views. Whittled down he’s an America-First pundit, which is why the NSA was previously caught tapping his phone and why the CIA-controlled media screams hysterically that he’s a racist, white supremacist, and endlessly blathers how he’s a Putin-apologist who should be taken off the air. These efforts over the years to get him kicked off the air clearly do not comport with what her title claims, “just another MSM propagandist.”
Carlson's claim that China has an agenda of "taking over the world" is also absurd on its face because it's nonsensical to claim that Beijing has been watching the US empire crush itself under its own weight, burning itself out in a few short decades with its frenzied attempts to rule the globe, and thinking "Hey that looks awesome, let's do that."
Johnstone fails to entertain the prospect that China has had an influential role in helping the U.S. empire “crush itself under its own weight”. The clear reach of China’s espionage tentacles is unknown, but they run deep into the United States government, academia, and defense industries. China’s intellectual property theft of American patents alone is in the trillions of dollars.
To understand how the Chinese view the cultural suicide presently underway in a multicultural America busily obsessed with toxic identity politics N.S. Lyons offers a long but fascinating piece on the patience and dedication of Chinese planners.
His three-part piece on China’s rising empire is equally intriguing. In the first part, he quotes Xi Jinping on the rise of China as a historical inevitability:
When mid-way through Xi said that that after “100 years of struggle” China was at last “becoming strong,” declared that “China's national rejuvenation has become a historical inevitability,” and added that anyone who dared “nurse delusions” of trying to stop China’s rise would “crack their heads and spill their blood on a great wall of steel,” a now animated 70,000-strong crowd roared their approval.1
While the U.S. has been busily “burning itself out” with frenzied and clumsy attempts to maintain unipolar world order, that doesn’t negate the geopolitical strategic aims of China on the world stage. They are not befriending Russia, India, and Brazil and investing billions in Eurasia, Africa, South, Central, and North America because they want a healthy world order in a safer multipolar world.
No nation engaged in such feverish military expansion, technological innovation, economic investment and mass looting of intellectual property is unambitious or isolationist. Every “investment” has an initial price and later cost for whatever nation accepts their “generosity”. In realist terms, there are always going to be dominant global powers that seek to expand spheres of influence. Lyons has called these rare historical moments of transformation of power ‘great upheavals’ and asserts we are witnessing one right now with the rise of China.
Acknowledging the ambitions of contending powers simultaneously need not make them exclusionary or be endorsements of one over the other. One can be against the U.S. empire as the corrupt menace it has been over decades of terrorizing all corners of the globe through covert actions, bribery, soft power, and direct military incursions, while also be interested in asking questions about what China’s aims are in expanding their influence globally so rapidly and without much criticism from American elites and at the cost of American citizens.
While the Pentagon blows smoke about Putin and Russia 99% of their waking lives and uses massive propaganda media campaigns to help their efforts, they whisper of China as an enemy only in passing, and only when prompted directly in congressional testimony, or through the release of an annual report. At present U.S. foreign and domestic policy benefits China more than anyone. Spending billions of dollars and a decade sending Russia into the arms of the dragon is such a coup for China it's as if China has been directly making U.S. foreign policy for years.
They own U.S. securities, debt, and half the industries Americans need to simply survive. There’s a reason the U.S. permanent state tip toes around criticizing China, and it’s because China owns them and their nation. They have America by the balls. They could cut off pharma exports and kill millions of Americans within months as roughly 80% of America's prescription drugs are sourced in China. There would be no way to recover the losses in other markets that do not exist. But American citizens shouldn’t fear China doing this, they should fear the managerial state and elites who have given China this insane level of power and economic control over their nation.
Globalist elites in the U.S. have spent decades destroying the foundation of American prosperity in the once-flourishing American middle class while creating manufacturing and economic policies that directly enhance China’s power and influence in the world.
American elites are fine with all of it because they're on the take. They don't want to make enemies with a country busily engaged in paying them off and enriching them. Both parties have deep ties to the CCP or CCP companies, including party leaders Mitch McConnel and Nancy Pelosi. The Biden family has taken millions from CCP-connected racketeers with “10% for the big guy”. They practically own the damn president along with dozens of members of Congress, and I think that's part of Tucker's point as to why they don't care if China takes over other parts of the world economically. When China moved on Hong Kong two years ago, the response from western elites was largely muted. Democracy “dies in darkness” but apparently not in Hong Kong. They also were silent when China refused (China-controlled) WHO access to investigate the lab leak theory as the source of the Covid virus.
All of China’s motivations for expansion need not be exclusive to the United States’ own global military and “nation-building” crimes. The latter doesn’t negate the prior. The empire's obscene behavior on the global stage doesn't negate China's own geopolitical aims and on a long enough timeline, the rise of new and emerging empires is inevitable. Having a totalitarian Chinese empire on the global stage with the power and military reach on par with the present American empire would be as catastrophic as having an abusive American empire terrorizing the world stage as it has for decades.
The fact that America resembles China more and more with domestic surveillance, police state crackdowns of political dissidents, censorship of certain views that criticize the regime in power, blacklisting, the rise of corporate-state fascist collusion in big tech monopolies and intel agencies, and coercive behavioral engineers engaged in destroying the nation from within socially and culturally is already insane enough.
Why is all this happening domestically?
Globalist elites are envious of China and they seek the kind of control over western populations that the CCP has over the Chinese people through mass surveillance to engineer obedience. Their goal of driving Russia toward China to pit two ambitious empires — one falling and the other rising — against one another in global conflict doesn’t create a new balanced multipolar world but a new kind of cold war and the further economic destruction of the American Republic which has ceased to be one for at least a century.
From the ashes of this conflict, if anything remains, global managers will be well situated to rebuild as they please. And maybe there will be no kinetic conflict with the U.S. so actively engaged in self-destructive policies pushing toward another civil war.
China is patient and cunning and will stick to its present agenda of aiding in the destruction of the American empire by waiting and watching or buying further economic influence and control over the nation and other nations.
In the end, China will dominate the world as Carlson asserts is their aim. In doing so he’s not “manufacturing consent for war” as a “propagandist”, he’s letting the American people know it’s their own leaders who are responsible for the rise of China’s Empire, that will be well-positioned to further dominate the United States economically and even militarily. With the present self-immolating course of American foreign and domestic policy it’s not a matter of if, but when.
Tucker’s “psychotic rant” on China’s aims.
The Good Citizen is powered by Good Citizens like you. Consider joining the flock.
Fixed Income Pensioner Discount (honor system)
Student Discount (valid .edu email)
Thanks for sharing.
Visit shop.thegoodcitizen.live
Get 10% off for a limited time with code: FLOCK
Donate
BTC: bc1qchkg507t0qtg27fuccgmrfnau9s3nk4kvgkwk0
LTC: LgQVM7su3dXPCpHLMsARzvVXmky1PMeDwY
XLM: GDC347O6EWCMP7N5ISSXYEL54Z7PNQZYNBQ7RVMJMFMAVT6HUNSVIP64
DASH: XtxYWFuUKPbz6eQbpQNP8As6Uxm968R9nu
XMR: 42ESfh5mdZ5f5vryjRjRzkEYWVnY7uGaaD
The fact that she spreads constant "disinformation" about the war in Ukraine, and has yet to be kicked off PayPal, makes me highly suspicious of her now.
Maybe she's one of the many on the Chinese payroll, if not, she soon will be with such Chinese apologist commentary.