Rise of a Collective Consciousness

Inside the coordinated media warfare against anti-war voices

I think the propagandists are running into a classic diminishing-returns problem that shows up in any complex system: the more the public recognizes the tactics being used to manipulate our emotions and our thinking, the less effective those tactics become. Once you can see the machinery behind the messaging, it’s forced to come up with new strategies, and in the process it loses credibility and trust.

There’s a kind of information war happening in the media space right now, and here’s how I see it. Within the U.S. government—especially inside the national-security establishment—there has long been a strong neoconservative push toward foreign interventions, whether in Venezuela or, more importantly, Iran. This isn’t new; the wars in the Middle East have been well documented since the 90s. The idea was to reshape the region by destabilizing the countries surrounding Israel, taking control of oil supplies, and establishing regional dominance. That plan didn’t go as intended. Iraq was a failure, and Iran is still standing. For reference, look at the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the “A Clean Break” strategy paper by David Wurmser and Richard Perle. These neocons were high-ranking officials in the Bush Jr. administration who played central roles in making the Iraq war happen, all sold to the public on lies.

In short, the military-industrial complex is alive and well, it’s enormously powerful, and it shapes the information environment we rely on to make sense of the world. This isn’t abstract—there are dedicated military and intelligence units whose entire job is to influence narratives on platforms like TikTok, X, YouTube, and the broader social-media ecosystem. Some focus on counter-propaganda, some on psychological operations, and some on steering public sentiment in ways that align with strategic objectives. The people who run the major social-media companies also work closely with the military.

Put simply, the U.S. government and its allied institutions don’t just fight wars overseas; they compete for perception, attention, and narrative control at home. And that constant background pressure filters into the media we consume, the controversies that suddenly dominate headlines, and which voices get amplified or smeared.

Fast-forward to today, and you can see these massive coordinated attacks against people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. They’re being treated like the modern equivalent of books powerful institutions want to burn—not because they are lying, but because they’re challenging narratives that cut against the interests of those in power.

It’s hard for me to explain my politics because the thing I care about most is being anti-imperialist. I think our country must do everything in its power, if it wants to survive, to decouple itself from meddling overseas. These wars—Ukraine, Somalia, Gaza, Syria (sorta), Venezuela (sorta), Iran (maybe?), Lebanon, and I’m sure others I’m forgetting—are bankrupting us economically and morally. We’re like a UFC fighter who has taken 20 fights in a row without a break.

There does seem to be a cultural shift happening lately, like the dam might be cracking. People seem tired of being browbeaten into conformity. There’s a growing awareness that something with a lot of power over our government, politicians, and media has its own agenda. People at least intuit that what they’re being told isn’t right, and they’re more open to discussion—which is exactly what’s needed if we’re going to pull ourselves out of what many see as a civilizational death spiral.