Beware those who flatter your sensibilities

Beware those that flatter your sensibilities. They’re usually selling you something: literally or figuratively.Sit with that for a moment.We love being flattered. We eat it up. We love being the good guy, the hero, the cowboy in the white hat. And we can be manipulated into making poor choices by those who would take advantage of us via the age-old technique of flattery.Propaganda can influence us by presenting criminals that we can judge and bemoan. Downward comparison makes us feel better about ourselves as we sit in righteous indignation about how the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. We need to be suspicious when a narrative comes along that makes us also feel heroic. It’s usually a call-to-action. Certain dark corners of our media seem to constantly elicit righteous indignation about crime, drug use, non-traditional lifestyles and immigrants. They’ve got to convince you of the problem before they sell you the solution. More on that later.“Diplomatic immunity.” The line spoken in a South African accent always comes into my mind when I think of the movie Lethal Weapon 2. The story was about an Apartheid South African Diplomat and the illegal drug trade. It was one of those movies that was entertaining and well acted. But in looking back, I surmise that it was successful at least in part because it flattered our sensibilities. Especially as conscientious citizens of a nation with its own ugly racial history, it’s easy to see why we collectively want to feel absolved. The bad guys were so cartoonishly evil, so easy to hate. And we, by extension, were so good because we were against racism. We got to live vicariously through the good characters in the movie. And as Americans, we had a faraway boogeyman to love to hate.Movies like these seem to be a self-congratulatory effort to make oneself (or a whole nation) feel better about our complex history and our sense of collective guilt over slavery. Dances With Wolves is similarly manipulative: a convenient revision of our history concerning Native Americans. Another very self-congratulatory endeavor, much like the Lost Cause Narrative that has overtaken the actual history of our nation’s bloody Civil War.We can be the hero, against slavery, noble, the good guy. Flattery deludes and pacifies.Similarly, it goes without saying that we are all against the mistreatment of children. Every sane human wants to end sex trafficking, child labor, and child abuse of any kind. And yet conspiracies about rampant child sex trafficking and abuse have become mainstream in the last 5 years or so. These dramatic stories would lead many to believe that a burgeoning child slave trade and rampant child sex rings etc abound. Q Anon, Pizzagate and other fantastical and unfounded conspiracy theories have captured the attention of large swathes of our population. People believed that child slaves were being sent in furniture boxes from Wayfair, an online furniture company. These theories took place at the crossroads of a conspiracy-peddling fascist presidency and the Covid 19 outbreak and subsequent shutdown.Millions of us were working from home, or out of work. We were home and bored amid an onslaught of messages about the shutdown, the vaccines, politicians and other public servants. Documentaries like ‘Plandemic’ had many believing that the covid virus and vaccines were all part of a Deep State plan to control the masses and curtail rights. It wouldn’t be long before many were told by the outgoing President himself that the 2020 election was stolen by the incoming President, Joe Biden. And there was a ‘documentary’ called ‘2000 Mules' that sold many people on this clearly falsifiable claim.So it’s easy to see why some would believe what they saw, since there purveyors of such stories presented them as truth. But why did so many fall for this nonsense? Because the viewers were being flattered. They were the good guys. And only they could stop the villains. And the villains were everywhere! Politicians, big pharma and other big targets were easy to vilify as faceless entities bent on destruction and profit.But it turns out that each of these conspiracies was debunked. Liberals weren’t drinking virgin blood. There was no secret DNC child slave trade or sex ring. The government didn’t intentionally release covid only to help the big pharma companies make billions. It was all disinformation in service of dividing our nation.Why did they want us divided? To sow confusion and distrust of the government. To help usher in a Fascist would-be dictator in Donald Trump. And it’s working. And the conspiracies, collectively were like a trojan horse, willingly accepted and with similarly devastating results.For more details about how so many were duped into conflating prostitution with the child sex trade, please read the following article. I found it very enlightening, especially since it agrees with the suspicions I held about these events.THEINTERCEPT.COMQAnon Was Born Out of the Sex Ad Moral Panic That Took Down Backpage.comFor years, the political establishment opportunistically railed against sex trafficking and ads on Backpage.com. Then came another conspiracy theory. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit greenmang.substack.com/subscribe