"The more they can keep us factionalized, fragmented and insulated in tight echo chambers, the more politically impotent they make everyone in the world who opposes US imperialism, surveillance, CIA sociopathy and establishment cronyism. I speak from experience when I say that the walls of peer pressure, manipulation and manufactured taboos that they have erected around us to keep us from talking to each other are extremely high and very complex, but it's the only way sufficient force will ever be generated to shove any of the pillars of empire hard enough to make it fall."
"You can interact with people from other political ideologies and work with them to advance a mutual agenda. Everyone who has ever been employed in a normal job knows this for a fact. You can trust yourself to know on what issues and to what extent this can happen. You are wiser than the groupthink. Rise above it."
Caitlin Johnstone
caitlinjohnstone.com
One year ago today I wrote an article titled “Lefties Need To Stop Being Shy About Working With The Anti-Establishment Right”, and Left Twitter exploded. To this day there are still some social media echo chambers in which this article is the primary thing I am known for.
I still think it was a decent article, and I stand by it. It was about how anti-establishment leftists can collaborate across ideological lines on specific points of mutual interest without compromising their principles, which to me is just an obvious no-brainer, and that people can trust themselves to know how and to what extent that collaboration can take place. Over the following few weeks, the actual contents of my article were falsely spun by Progressive Army, Counterpunch and a few other lefty thought leaders as “Caitlin Johnstone wants us to align with Nazis.”
None of the journalists or activists fanning the flames of this conspiracy theory ever reached out to me for comment, or even to try to convince me of the error of my ways. Not one private message, email or Twitter DM was ever sent to me (apart from one particularly virulent hater after I pointed this out publicly). This is because these people weren’t interested in my actual ideas or what I was actually saying, they were interested in advancing and controlling a narrative: Caitlin Johnstone wants leftists to become Nazis/facilitate Nazis, and anyone who ever suggests venturing outside their impotently small political faction to get things done is pulling a Caitlin Johnstone. My reputation in those circles now serves as a head on a spike warning off anyone from ever suggesting that leftists ever collaborate on any agenda with anyone besides (A) other leftists and (B) the centrists who are intrinsically opposed to ideas which run counter to the interests of America’s unelected power establishment.
The false narrative that a Hillary-hating leftist wants to collaborate with Nazis was shoved into mainstream attention by this faction of Left Twitter day after day after day, until eventually it caught the attention of left-punching centrists who, of course, took this false narrative and ran with it as an excuse to attack the left. The people responsible for aggressively and relentlessly promulgating this false narrative then went on to blame me for it.
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