Murdoch’s empire is the tip of the iceberg, my fine feathered friend. The US government has been producing propaganda for its entire existence. It continues the propaganda that was produced by the English, Dutch, French and Spanish before it. The US military is a propaganda machine. US military intelligence is a propaganda machine. The US State department is a propaganda machine. Nearly everything said by electeds and appointeds are part of the narrative, knowingly or not. Our education system is fundamentally built on propaganda. Our advertising landscape. Our video games. Our literature. Not just the rags, but the real thoughtful stuff too.

It’s in the universities at every level, it’s in all the curriculum, it’s in the court system, in common law, in the jurisprudence. It’s in SCOTUS opinions. It’s in children’s rhymes and songs and school yard games. It’s in parenting. It’s in the churches and synagogues.

It’s quite literally the narrative equivalent to the air we breathe. No. Getting rid of Murdoch’s empire would do nothing. MSNBC is propaganda. WaPo, NYT, NPR, CNN… It’s all completely integrated into a long running white supremacist narrative.

Don’t believe me? Do you know about AIM? The American Indian Movement? When they were brought to court to face the state accusers the ultimate authority for the court’s decisions was none other than the fucking Doctrine of Discovery - literally a bulletin sent out by the Pope 600 years ago saying “Christianity must be spread. Save the heathens of the world. If they won’t be saved, enslave them, take their way of life from them and educate them, and if they fight back, kill them all”. Yeah. That’s what the court’s decided.

But that was like 50 years. Surely it’s not the same? A, that’s not how law works and B, nope. In the 2000s the SCOTUS heard a case involving Indian territory and RBG, liberal bastion, wrote the majority opinion and the decision rested on the Doctrine of Discovery, with RBG stating that the US would not have a legal basis for its territorial claims without it.

We are all living on land stolen under the decree of a fucking religious leader who said that genocide is OK because they weren’t going to be saved anyway. The Spanish were disgusting in a totally different way, choosing to interpret the decree as a license to rape as much as possible, steal children, and mix white blood with savage blood in an effort to bring the offspring of the savages closer to God.

But you’ll never learn that in grade K - 12. You’ll never learn that a Thanksgiving was a victory prayer that the white settlers held after successfully destroying a village of natives, killing everyone there or running them off. They were giving thanks to God for their victory. Again, not something we’re gonna teach kids.

Everything from the holidays we celebrate and don’t celebrate to the speeches given on those dates to the statues, paintings, poems, museum displays, historical markers on the highway.

It’s all a fucking narrative to cover for the absolutely brutal country we live in and have always lived in. The fascism didn’t start with the Nazis and we’re not just emulating them for some abberation in time.

This is who we are as settlers. This is our inheritance. This is what was done in our names, when our forefathers said “we need to make a better life for our grandchildren and their grandchildren and their grandchildren”. This is America. This is Canada. This what Europe unleashed on the world.

And this is what we have to clean up, arrest, and heal.