One of the things that is becoming clear to everyone as the USAID scandal unfolds is that much of what has been presented to us over the last several decades, as far as politics, has been an illusion created by the blob. The media was part of the blob, underwritten by the government and cultivated with government access, so they presented a version of political reality that favored the blob. Even the debates over policy were staged by the blob.

That is what is clear in the release of the CBS tapes of the 60 Minutes interview of then candidate Kamala Harris. Calling it an interview is an assault on the language because it was nothing like an interview. It was one part screen test, one part coaching and one part editing to produce what was presented as an interview. Everyone involved knew it was fraud and said nothing. In other words, what we have been seeing is not media bias, but an orchestrated fraud on the public.

As an aside, the corruption was so deep and so normalized that it appears that most people in these media companies were unaware of much of it. The staff at Politico only became aware of who was actually paying their salaries when the USAID money was halted, and Politico could not make payroll. How many people at the BBC knew that USAID was the second largest source of funding to the BBC? Did anyone at the Financial Times know that management were on the pad?

Putting that aside, everyone in Washington certainly knew what USAID was doing, and they remained silent. There is not a single “reporter” in Washington unaware of the fact that the main source for Ukraine news has been an operation run by the Kagan family with funding from the government through various proxies. They all knew it and they played along because their paycheck demanded it. In effect, all of Washington was enlisted as participants in the manufactured drama of politics.

That is probably the biggest part of the scandal. Most political scandals involve a small number of people breaking the rules. Their undoing is the old Benjamin Franklin line about how three can keep a secret if two are dead. What we are seeing is that Ben was wrong about that as tens of thousands were keeping a secret until now. It speaks to the poisonous culture inside Washington that no one dared mention publicly what all of them knew was happening.

This raises another question. What else have they been faking? Think about something mundane like television ratings. They used to be a big topic, but the proliferation of subscription services and cable fees changed the revenue models. Even so, they are still used to gauge the popularity of shows. The more popular a show is, the more likely new people are to give it a go. In the modern sense, it means more people are going to sign up for a Netflix or Disney subscription.

An iron law of life is that if something has value then there will be people trying to steal it or to fake it, so faking ratings has always been a thing. This video from the Critical Drinker where he and his friends discuss the ratings of various bits of bugman content just screams organized fraud. When you are talking about “minutes viewed” rather than actual people watching, it is safe to say you are trying hard to prove the old maxim, “Figures do not lie, but liars figure.”

You can probably look around and find dozens of things that are used as measures or standards that we take for granted but are probably fake. Will the upcoming Super Bowl really break viewing records for the fiftieth straight year? Is the pop star cast to perform at the halftime show as popular as they claim? Is the game itself on the level or is it also a manufactured drama? Speaking of which, how come there are no gambling scandals in sports? Did everyone suddenly get honest?

You can get carried away with this, of course, and begin to question your own grasp of reality, but we are on the cusp of a great questioning. Once the enormity of the fraud begins to sink in, people will naturally start to wonder if what is being presented to them is not part of an ongoing fraud. We already see this with medicine because of the many frauds perpetrated during Covid. Now we are about to see the same process rumble through the rest of society.

In a way, the events of the last three weeks are like what happened in the transition from communism to chaos in the old Soviet Union. On the one hand, there was the mass realization that much of what had been told to the public was an organized lie, but on the other hand an understanding that it was a necessary step to exit the world of lies and enter the period of reform. The American empire is now getting its form of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (transparency).

This should not suggest that success is assured. The blob will fight back, and it has many tentacles, so the fight has just begun. The vast amounts of fraud in the economy support millions of mortgage payments and college tuition bills, so the people benefiting from the organized fraud will not go quietly. With every window that is opened, more sunlight rushes in to expose the corruption. If the blob is to be defeated, it will be through the sorts of transparency we have seen this week.

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