What do The Powers That Be have to lose?

Actually … everything.

Few people realize the stakes for The Powers that Be, but if they did they would understand why The Censorship Industrial Complex is the key to their operation.

Five quick points:

• The Powers that Be want to remain the Powers that Be.

• The only genuine, potential threat to the world’s true leaders remaining in power is if they are exposed as crooks, frauds, evil and/or stunningly incompetent.

• The only people who could possibly expose their true character are real truth-seeking journalists or investigators.

• Above any other scenario, what these people and captured organizations really fear is the detonation of a thermo-nuclear truth bomb.

• If the people who could detonate such a powerful, narrative-exploding truth bomb never reach enough people, the nightmare result TPTB fear will never happen.

***

In my opinion, every important decision anyone makes involves some form of “risk-benefit” analysis.

Questions:

If The Powers that Be could somehow eliminate the risk of exposure, would they be inclined to do this? Would such a program benefit these individuals and their families?

One question I think is very important to ask and think about: What would these people actually lose if they were exposed or disgraced?

Answer: They would lose everything they value and have worked their entire adult lives to achieve.

For example …

They would lose their wealth, their lofty positions and job titles, all the perks of being in the exalted “leadership” class and all the psychological benefits that stroke their egos. They would also, perhaps very likely, lose their freedom as they, potentially, could spend the rest of their lives in a penitentiary.

They would/could lose respect and status and maybe the admiration of their spouses, children and grandchildren. They could be fired, disgraced, humiliated and ostracized from decent society.

They would become Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, O.J. Simpson, Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, Richard Nixon, Lance Armstrong - or any person who once had everything and then lost everything.

Some formerly-admired leaders - now recast as despicable villains - would be more derided than other infamous and reviled citizens as they might be considered Mengele-level perpetrators of “crimes against humanity.”

Some, once exposed, would no doubt fear for their lives as certain citizens might seek more extreme retribution or citizen justice.

As I ponder world developments of the last six years, it occurs to me that probably few citizens have a firm grasp on how much many of society’s alleged leaders could actually lose if they were fully exposed or the true scope of their crimes and frauds became widely known and universally accepted.

If one does think about this, it becomes abundantly clear such actors would be supremely motivated to do anything and everything in their power to avoid such a fate.

Furthermore, I’m confident these possibilities have, in some moments, occurred to every person who deserves the ire of their fellow citizens.

On Fear Itself …

People are motivated by numerous means, but it’s been said (and proven) that fear is probably the greatest motivator of all.

For those who have everything they want and ever dreamed of, the prospect of losing everything must produce a night terror beyond the imagination of Poe or King.

Again, if such people possess the means to avoid the ultimate Shakespearean Tragedy, would they do this? (I say yes, of course)… and how would they do this? (Please continue reading).

***

Here we come to the solution known as “censorship,” which, truthfully defined, is a coordinated program to silence or suppress the reach of any person with the potential to expose powerful people and organizations as villains.

In my opinion, The Powers that Be, who could lose everything, actually fear only a tiny percentage of the world’s population - namely, people who see our leaders’ true faces, are “onto them” and possess the talents and character traits to, at least potentially, expose them.

Fellow citizens should probably itemize the organizations where these threats to power do not exist.

They don’t exist in government, or in 99 percent of law firms or in the halls of higher education or in one newsroom of any member of the so-called Fourth Estate.

One of my oft-stated maxims is that every important truth-seeking organization has been captured. What I haven’t written enough is the reason these organization have to be captured.

The reason is if they weren’t all completely captured, the worst actors in the world would, or might, be exposed … and then disgraced … and then suffer all of the consequences outlined above.

Per my current view of society, the world is one massive network of important organizations, functioning as a classic and ruthless Protection Racket.

The entire, now-captured system is intended to protect every organization and every “leader” in these organizations from ever being exposed, purged and disgraced.

A 100-percent capture rate insulates the world’s leaders from any nightmare-scenario risks and, needless to say, benefits every person who’s aligned with the real Powers that Be, whoever they may be.

(This arrangement is actually Fascism 101: Every entity with real power coalesces around the same program; each captured entity seeks to advance or protect the objectives of the most powerful leader(s) in the syndicate.)

However, even the most meticulously-designed systems have points of vulnerability. Per Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, great general should never become so content they ignore all potential threats, even if the threat of exposure or defeat seems remote.

Those who have participated in great crimes, or great cover-ups, fully know retribution could be proportional to their sins. The more shocking the crimes, the more harrowing the potential vengeance.

Thus, what remaining group constitutes a genuine “risk” to the world’s true leaders?

If I wrote that this risk comes from the watchdog press corps at, say, The New York Times or “Sixty Minutes,” my 7,911 subscribers would instantly cancel their subscriptions. They’d do the same if I wrote that the U.S. Senate or the Department of Justice is going to make like Eliot Ness and take down the leaders of organized crime.

As things turned out, the threats to a captured and corrupt Establishment could almost be counted on one hand.

The major threat isn’t from America’s corporate-owned and controlled non-free press, it’s from a militia of citizen journalists and researchers who, out of necessity, formed a beachhead in the Alternative Media.

Which steers this essay to an independent writer’s platform called Substack.

Due to several quirks of fate, Substack - or writers who flocked to this platform beginning in March 2020 - ultimately became the only viable or significant threat to people and organizations who never seriously considered they might be exposed - not as heroes of society - but as arch villains.

Viewed through the paradigm of risk-benefit analysis, I can imagine what risks and potential benefits must have gotten Substack (and even me, a Substack author) to the place we are today.

The company’s founders simply wanted to benefit the world (and maybe make a little money for themselves) by building a better mousetrap for “independent” writers.

Through their innovation, writers could own their own content and be their own publishers. Using the tools Substack made possible, citizen journalists could “develop their own brand,” sell subscriptions to readers who enjoyed their content and write about anything that interested them.

The first risk the three entrepreneurs faced is that the venture would flop, or lose too much money to continue.

And then destiny - in the form of a black swan respiratory virus - played a hand.

While, in the opinion of most people, the great risk was that they might die, for many contrarian-minded independent writers, the real great risk was that would-be totalitarians would use the ruse of a killer pandemic to go full Orwellian.

As these writers were quickly censored, bullied and de-platformed, the only place they could go was to a new start-up company most people had never heard of.

Instead of going under in Year 3 of its venture, Substack’s business, almost over night, blew up.

It turned out the saviors of the company were a motley crew of alleged reprobates who, with their many readers, were actually the world’s only sane adults.

To its infinite credit, the company’s three founders let the only major resistance force in the world write and publish whatever they wanted.

When it comes to counter Covid narratives, almost every significant article emanated from a group dubbed “Covid Contrarians” (also known as “freedom” writers.)

The Table Top Planners hadn’t planned on Substack …

One strongly suspects that in all their many Table Top Planning Exercises, the Powers that Be completely missed the threat of hundreds of pissed-off and ultra-clever writers posting stories on something called Substack.

While it was a lay-up to get Facebook and Twitter to play ball - and pandemic producers knew the mainstream media was on their team - Substack grew and grew.

Narratives everyone was supposed to blindly accept were being challenged and, except for the official fact-checkers, were easily debunked. As it turned out, plenty of non-scientists knew Anthony Fauci was Fraud Itself.

By the time President Trump was re-elected, everyone in the Powers that Be knew Substack was probably the only threat that could detonate a thermo-nuclear truth bomb that would send every captured faux leader scurrying to their bug-out shelters in New Zealand.

But even before DJT was re-elected, things on Substack had already begun to change.

As I imagine things, Substack had two choices:

It could fully embrace the views of the warrior class of writers who actually saved the company. However, the “risk” would be the Powers that Be - who don’t fight fair and whose lives were at stake - would shut down or sabotage the growth plans of the company.

Or they could launch an affirmative action program and try to recruit every Statist content creator in the world, an outreach program that wasn’t particularly hard as the mainstream media was on life support and every good liberal journalist and public figure was looking for a bail-out platform.

Instead of being portrayed as a haven for science-denying kooks and fascists, Substack could re-brand itself as the platform where democracy was being saved by heroic voices like Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and Mayor Pete - people fighting Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy and protecting the rights of the transgendered, day-old infants at grave risk of contracting Hepatitis B … and celebrating those fighting the existential threat of Climate Change.

The benefit to Substack is that it got to join the Club that helps rule the world (and the BlackRock valuation of the company quadrupled).

***

Since it’s the future, it’s hard to predict …

… but History will probably record that, at one point - for approximately three years - Substack was a beacon of free speech and the only significant media platform that was not fully captured nor insane.

In a podcast in the future, tomorrow’s version of Micheal Beschloss might say “The Powers that Be were starting to get a little nervous,” before adding … ”and then Substack pivoted, assumed the prior role of the mainstream press and everything went back to normal.”

Once again, the world’s leaders could get a restful night’s sleep, dreaming of the many beautiful benefits that come from being them.

Writer gratuities via Ko-Fi.