Unf*cking Flashback: The American Propaganda Machine.

Unf*cking The Republic

UNFTR Media

Government, News, Politics

4.9 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2024

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

While Max puts the finishing touches on the forthcoming Worker Cooperative episode, we’re replaying an oldie but a goodie called The American Propaganda Machine. We chose this as a complement to our recent discussions surrounding news literacy. We think it holds up pretty well, actually.

On this episode of Unf*cking the Republic we do a deep dive into the American system of propaganda and pull back the curtain on the tangled web of think tanks, lobbying groups, media organizations and corporations that live to fuck over the American people. We’ll demonstrate how dark money works its way through a labyrinth of special interest groups and emerges as public policy that looks and sounds patriotic and helpful but is actually designed to strip away your rights and generate profits for a handful of assholes. And we’ll show how groups like the Heritage Foundation help craft and sell these messages to turn people against their own best interests and make you believe the horse shit they’re peddling.

Resources

The Center for Public Integrity: You elected them to write new laws. They’re letting corporations do it instead.

Book Love

Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical

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Unf*cking the Republic is produced by 99 and engineered by Manny Faces Media (mannyfacesmedia.com). Original music is by Tom McGovern (tommcgovern.com). The show is hosted by Max and distributed by 99.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Chastising people for voting against their own self-interest is a little insulting, if not a reductive,
0:06.0	topic for any show. After all, who am I to assume, who's anyone to assume, what is in someone's
0:13.0	best interest? Further complicating things is that we've moved past monolithic voting blocks, while
0:19.0	still operating under the illusion of a two-party system.
0:22.2	We are aliens, but what are you going to do about it?
0:26.5	It's a two-party system. You have to vote for one of us.
0:31.7	Two parties that are so closely aligned in reality, but sold to us as distinct propositions.
0:38.0	We can hardly tell who's telling the truth and who stands for what.
0:41.3	You're tearing me apart!
0:44.3	And within that system, we fall into dozens of smaller tribal identities, sprinkled along
0:49.7	the political spectrum.
0:51.3	Progressive, moderate, libertarian, conservative, liberal, socialist, capitalist,
0:56.9	Democrat, Republican, Bernie Bro, Trumper, Globalist, isolationist, pro-life, pro-choice, furry.
1:02.8	Wait, what? Antifascist, proud boy, feminist, fundamentalist, so many identities, so few elections.
1:11.4	Let the unfucking begin.
1:14.2	Oh, my friends, we are fucked.
1:17.3	Deliciously, unreservedly, catastrophically fucked, and not the good kind.
1:23.3	We'll traverse this audio journey together to upend conventional wisdom,
1:27.4	blow up narratives on the left, right, and middle, and use magical devices like facts, logic, and reason to explain how exactly we arrived in Bizarro America, the fun house mirror version of what was originally intended.
1:42.3	I have found myself more and more fully committed to being ungovernable.
1:48.7	We'll examine exactly how and why we're fucked.
1:52.7	You want to claim this land is a land of a free?
	...

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