Cthulhu Gazes Right
The Regime Dons a Skin Suit
ISAAC SIMPSON
APR 05, 2024
We haven’t had a guest author here before, but the opportunity arose to debut this new piece by a writer I not only subscribe to, but is among the few I admire from the prose and stylistic—rather than merely subject matter—standpoint. And the subject happens to be his bailiwick, as Isaac Simpsonruns his own dissident marketing agency, WILL.
Bernays, the ‘father of public relations’, is therefore for him a natural crowbar with which to pry open the unseen world of modern cultural engineering via the fig leaf of ‘publicity’, and the secret behind-the-scenes stagecraft which steers our dialectics. You’ll find the topic he covers runs current with several of my own most recent pieces, serving as fascinating corollary to the ongoing threads I’ve tried to weave together.
You can find Isaac’s work here on Substack at The Carousel:
The Carousel
Exploring the world through modern propaganda.
By Isaac Simpson
bcole
cinci.rr.com
Or on Twitter here, where he revels in the art of Disgraceful Propaganda.
“But, given our present political conditions under which every office seeker must cater to the vote of the masses, the only means by which the born leader can lead is the expert use of propaganda….Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses.” - Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)
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Super Bowl 58. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I put a lot of stake in the images that uncontrollably flash into my mind, and when I woke up the next morning I kept seeing the same thing: Post Malone’s bolo tie.
The Ozempicked pop star eschewed his wiggerish priors for a clean cut cowboy rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Why was I thinking about this? Where had I seen it before? At the Grammys, Beyonce had appeared in cowboy gear wearing a bolo tie with a similar turquoise clasp to promote her “country album” with songs “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages.” Country star Luke Combs performed a healing mashup with Tracy Chapman. Back at the Super Bowl, Reba McEntire sang the national anthem.
For decades mainstream culture has ignored white music, at least those singers who don’t crossdress on command. But now right-coded whites are center stage. There’s Bud Light’s apology tour, $100 million plus to right-wing impresario Dana White and Kid Rock to beg our forgiveness for the trans can. Then the new Bud Light Super Bowl commercial combining Dana White with Peyton Manning. “Canceled” “racist” comedian Shane Gillis, who has been posting Bud Light factory tours on his Instagram, sat in a special Bud Light section at the Super Bowl. A Bud Light square appeared at the top of the replay—“this angle brought to you by Bud Light.”
Also in the Bud Light section? Post Malone. He also stars in the commercial with Dana White and Peyton Manning. And he also sang “America the Beautiful” at the Super Bowl, dressed as a cowboy. Then the “He Gets Us” Jesus ads depicting conservative Christian archetypes washing the feet of liberal archetypes—homeless person, abortion girl, illegal immigrant. Then flyover-state hero Travis Kelce advertising Pfizer shots in a commercial that ran back-to-back with the Bud Light, just after halftime, the most expensive peak media of the Super Bowl broadcast.
Without prompting, the mainstream media began predicting that MAGA may soon interpret these cues as a “country conspiracy for Biden.” How ridiculous to think that they could possibly be connected!
Sometimes the bigger the propaganda, the more complex and shadowy we make it, when the reality is very simple: the Party of Davos, the regime, the cathedral…whatever you want to call it, is buying back white people—white men in particular—so they don’t vote for Trump, don’t stop buying Bud Light, and don’t forget to sign up for the draft.
By getting out in front of claims that this rightward turn is manufactured, the regime cleverly runs interference on the truth: it actually is a conspiracy. But not the kind they mean, and not the kind the “Intellectual Right” means either. While intelligence agencies do have a history of musical warfare—The CIA conducted a “cultural Cold War” against the Soviets, influencing the writing of the Scorpions’ “Winds of Change”—I’m not so sure intelligence agencies are directly responsible for this recent white shift.
Two things are happening. First, a natural cultural correction, similar to the ones that occurred in the 1950s and 1980s, is genuinely creeping from the far edge of culture (e.g. Dimes Square in literature, e/acc in tech) to the mainstream. Beyonce isn’t being forced to write a country album, she genuinely thinks it's a cool idea. The CIA isn’t pointing a gun to Post Malone’s head and saying put on this Bolo tie or else. Nobody is forcing Travis Kelce to shill for Pfizer, or Shane Gillis for Bud Light. Nor is anyone forcing Taylor Swift to date Travis Kelce.
But they are receiving suggestions, strong suggestions, from the people around them: their managers, publicists, agents, trainers, dealmakers, wirepullers. And they are receiving payment, in some form or another, whether they fully realize it or not. As you will see below, this is not a special case or conspiracy, it’s how publicity and propaganda always work. Celebrities exist first and foremost to embody the status quo and their network of managers represents the powers that be. “The regime.” “Them.”
Everyone involved receives more money and more power for participating in the project of propaganda. It feels like there’s a conspiracy to make white right wingers believe the regime doesn’t hate them because there is such a conspiracy. But conspiracy is the wrong word. The right word is publicity. The least-understood, most-insidious form of propaganda invented by a man named Edward Bernays.
Propaganda the Book
“When the interval between the intellectual classes and the practical classes is too great, the former will possess no influence, the latter will reap no benefits.” said Henry Thomas Buckle. Edward Bernays uses the quote as the cornerstone of his argument in Propaganda (1928).
Bernays is the father of modern propaganda and public relations. Much is made of Saul Alinksy and his Rules for Radicals, but Alinsky is a mere stalagmite in Bernays’ cave. Today’s practice of shaping public perception derives from Bernays’ work, most of which wasn’t written down. First and foremost he was a practitioner; he ran propaganda efforts for the US military, the US intelligence services, presidential campaigns, and the largest corporations in the world.
He did write an erratic litany of short books, however, like Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928), and Public Relations (1945), which I find to be transparent and genuine, if somewhat poorly composed. Propaganda is short, simple, and crudely-written. It makes the same single argument over and over again—like he’s trying, breathlessly, to help us understand something he knows is over our heads. I’ve tried to boil this point down to one sentence:
Propaganda is not a poster, it’s an economy.
What does this mean? Bernays doesn’t state it this way, but here is how I would synthesize it:
In both capitalism and democracy, the only way to get things done is via implementation of propaganda campaigns by non-public individuals. In order to be successful, these campaigns must:
Unite demographic subgroups around a single initiative using entities that those subgroups trust.
Benefit the shared interests of the entities in question.
Use or create a “moment in culture.”
A brief explanation of these phrases. First, all societal projects are propaganda initiatives. There is simply no other way to realistically get things done in bottom-up structures like democracy and consumer capitalism. You have to move the masses, and the only way to move the masses is through propaganda. Second, every propaganda initiative must seek to unite different subgroups around a single cause; and the best way to do that is to appeal to “leaders” (more often celebrities, brands, universities, media companies, scientists, etc.) of those subgroups. Third, in order to fully participate, these “leaders” must have skin in the game—you can’t merely appeal to these entities rationally or emotionally (e.g. “a poster”), they must have a shared economic interest in the propaganda initiative (“an economy”). One of these interested parties must be the media itself. And finally, fourth, the only way to successfully deliver the message of the propaganda initiative is by either hijacking an existing “cultural moment” (e.g. the Super Bowl) or by creating one yourself. This is how you further ensure media complicity.
It’s no wonder, then, that after 100 years of Bernays-style propaganda we live in the Age of Conspiracy, where everyone feels paranoid and nearly everything is labeled a “conspiracy theory” at some point or another. What Bernays invokes is indeed tactical conspiracy-making, but it’s a mistake to interpret Bernays as a clandestine manipulator, or some kind of Wizard of Oz, just as it’s a mistake to call Travis Kelce’s manufactured rise to fame “a conspiracy.” Again, as you will see, it’s merely publicity.
As Bernays acknowledges, the conspiracy of mutual interest, coalition making, and creative execution by invisible forces is the way true leaders lead given the populist criteria of both democracy and capitalism. It is simply the nature of the system, which is why its practitioners so often don’t realize themselves that they’re part of a conspiracy, and why they find such allegations ridiculous. The masses must be guided by a small number of leaders, just like every other human organization in the history of the world. Propaganda/public relations (AKA publicity) is how that’s achieved. It’s only the communist who believes, without evidence, that it can be any other way.
Let’s take each step one-by-one, with a quote from Propaganda to back it up.
Invisible Governors
First, propaganda is essential, and must be executed by “invisible wirepullers.” This methodology develops naturally from the broadcast revolution, when human societies began to be influenced by mass-distributed messages in print, radio, and television.
“A presidential candidate may be ‘drafted’ in response to ‘overwhelming popular demand,’ but it is well known that his name may be decided upon by half a dozen men sitting around a table in a hotel room. In some instances the power of invisible wirepullers is flagrant. The power of the invisible cabinet which deliberated at the poker table in a certain little green house in Washington has become a national legend. There was a period in which the major policies of the national government were dictated by a single man, Mark Hanna…Such persons typify in the public mind the type of ruler associated with the phrase invisible government.”
But why is invisibility necessary? Why don’t propagandists simply take credit for their work?
One of Bernays’ famous campaigns paired bacon and eggs for breakfast, which today we think of as an organic American staple (it isn’t). His client Beech-Nut Packing wanted to sell more packaged bacon. Bernays bribed doctors to declare that heartier breakfasts are healthier, and we arrived at a phenomenon (“Bacon ‘n Eggs”) that benefits all involved, particularly the happy consumer. Yet no one thinks of Bernays during breakfast.
Another food example: what we refer to as “calamari”—deep fried squid served with tomato dip—derived from a similar propaganda campaign articulated in a thesis paper by a graduate student named Paul Kalikstein. Why don’t we call it Kalikstein’s Calamari?
The answer is obvious:
“The leaders who lend their authority to any propaganda campaign will do so only if it can be made to touch their own interests. There must be a disinterested aspect of the propagandist's activities. In other words, it is one of the functions of the public relations counsel to discover at what points his client's interests coincide with those of other individuals or groups.”
If we could see the invisible hand we’d be less easily persuaded. “Try Calamari” sounds interesting. “Try Calamari Because Restaurants, Distributors, the Fishing Industry, and Food Media Have a Mutual Interest in the Giant Margins to be Gleaned from the Glut of Ultra-Cheap Chinese-Fished Squid” sounds gross. The propagandist must be invisible. Nobody likes to feel manipulated. Once we see the wizard, we lose the illusion of choice.
Balkanization & Celebrity
I think often of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign website. On the bottom menu, it had a link for each subgroup of potential Hilary Voters. African Americans for Hillary. Latinos for Hillary. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders for Hillary. Women for Hillary. Millennials for Hillary. It was divided this way because this is how our invisible propagandists seed their messages—group by group. One reason we’re divided into trackable subgroups from the time we’re born is so propagandists can more easily deliver us messages they know we’ll receive.
“It is essential for the campaign manager to educate the emotions in terms of groups. The public is not made up merely of Democrats and Republicans. People today are largely uninterested in politics and their interest in the issues of the campaign must be secured by coordinating it with their personal interests. The public is made up of interlocking groups —economic, social, religious, educational, cultural, racial, collegiate, local, sports, and hundreds of others.”
This doesn’t just apply to political election campaigns, but to all types of propaganda across all channels. The more specific your audiences, the narrower your channels, the more effective your campaign will be.
Propaganda offers two examples, one involving a presidential breakfast, and another involving a piece of legislation. The first:
“The Shepard-Towner Maternity Bill was passed because the people who fought to secure its passage realized that mothers made up a group, that educators made up a group, that physicians made up a group, that all these groups in turn influence other groups, and that taken all together these groups were sufficiently strong and numerous to impress Congress with the fact that the people at large wanted this bill to be made part of the national law..”
Furthermore, the more “influence”—fame, celebrity, public concern—you can attach, the easier it is to access the groups in question.
The second example:
“When President Coolidge invited actors for breakfast, he did so because he realized not only that actors were a group, but that audiences, the large group of people who like amusements, who like people who amuse them, and who like people who can be amused, ought to be aligned with him.”
Note his casual assumption that celebrities can be used as puppets. This is because he understands the purpose of celebrity, perhaps a bit easier to detect before it took over the world. Namely: the purpose of celebrity is publicity. Why do musicians do movies? Why do actors put out albums? Why do sports stars become announcers? Because almost all of them have the same profession: stay famous. Why do they want to stay famous? Money. How do they stay famous? By being usable to propagandists.
I worked briefly for a major Hollywood commercial agent who did deals for A-list stars. The deals included one or two commercial shoot days, then a package of seven, fourteen, or twenty-one “publicity days” in which the celebrity had to do pretty much whatever the brands wanted. Publicity isn’t a side hustle, it’s their main job. They’re needed to open the doors to the balkanized subgroups, based on which celebrities those subgroups are known to admire.
Grouping the population this way has other advantages. Divided people are weaker, less able to coalesce into a nation. It’s in the interests of a tyrannical regime—or any regime—to keep people neatly separated.
The Common Denominator of Interest
Everything up to this point reflects the average American’s understanding of propaganda. Yes, we know we’re grouped, we know celebrities have the power to drive actions, and we know there are propagandists behind the scenes putting it all together. Step three is where we go behind the curtain. Where we enter tinfoil hat territory. But it’s not a conspiracy; Bernays laid it all out a century ago.
Put simply, great propaganda isn’t, at its core, driven by the desire to shift public opinion. Its truest cause and effect is money. This is why so many people participate in it without knowing they’re doing so. Bernays provides a detailed example:
“The soundness of a public relations policy was likewise shown in the case of a shoe manufacturer who made service shoes for patrolmen, firemen, letter carriers, and men in similar occupations. He realized that if he could make acceptable the idea that men in such work ought to be well-shod, he would sell more shoes and at the same time further the efficiency of the men.
He organized, as part of his business, a foot protection bureau. This bureau disseminated scientifically accurate information on the proper care of the feet, principles which the manufacturer had incorporated in the construction of the shoes. The result was that civic bodies, police chiefs, fire chiefs, and others interested in the welfare and comfort of their men, furthered the ideas his product stood for and the product itself, with the consequent effect that more of his shoes were sold more easily.
The application of this principle of a common denominator of interest between the object that is sold and the public good will can be carried to infinite degrees.”
When I read the above, I’m reminded in the scene in Gangs of New York where Bill the Butcher opens his palm:
“Mulberry Street... and Worth... Cross and Orange... and Little Water. Each of the Five Points is a finger. When I close my hand it becomes a fist. And, if I wish, I can turn it against you.”
Like the Five Points, Turbo America is run like a cartel. A unified conglomeration of private interests secretly plotting and planning to get you to act in certain ways. And those ways are always, at the end of the day, about money. This, more than anything else, is the missing piece in the American Right’s understanding of propaganda, and why they have lost so many battles for so long. They believe that the “leaders” needed to influence the population will be convinced by rational arguments…all while the “leaders” are getting paid by the other side. They’re like guys who think strippers actually like them.
Another word for this process is patronage. Every player in a piece of propaganda gets paid. They amplify the message because it's in their shared interest to do so. And the best propaganda makes sure they only get paid if the initiative is successful.
Bernays offers another example of a local leader attempting to pass a lower tariff:
“If he were a propagandist, on the other hand, although he would still use radio, he would use it as one instrument of a well-planned strategy. Since he is campaigning on the issue of a low tariff, he would not merely tell people that the high tariff increases the cost of the things they buy, but would create circumstances which would make his contention dramatic and self-evident. He would perhaps stage a low-tariff exhibition simultaneously in twenty cities, with exhibits illustrating the additional cost due to the tariff in force. He would see these exhibitions were ceremoniously inaugurated by prominent men and women who were interested in a low tariff apart from any interest in his personal political fortunes. He would have groups, whose interests were especially affected by the high cost of living, institute an agitation for lower schedules. He would dramatize the issue, perhaps by having prominent men and women boycott woolen clothes, until the wool schedule was reduced. He might get the opinion of social workers as to whether the high cost of wool endangers the health of the poor in winter.”
Every time you read “experts say…” you should immediately smell propaganda. It’s not that experts say some true things and some untrue things. It’s that experts don’t say anything unless it’s part of a propaganda campaign. Like celebrities, this is the function of experts. Experts are no more than paid witnesses in the trial of public perception.
Creating a Complicit Press
In Propaganda’s best passage, Bernays unpacks the X Factor—a complicit press—using a concrete analysis of the day’s paper. Oh, that we could all have such redpill eyes!
“The extent to which propaganda shapes the progress of affairs about us may surprise even well informed persons. Nevertheless, it is only necessary to look under the surface of the newspaper for a hint as to propaganda's authority over public opinion. Page one of the New York Times on the day these paragraphs are written contains eight important news stories. Four of them, or one-half, are propaganda. The casual reader accepts them as accounts of spontaneous happenings. But are they? Here are the headlines which announce them: "TWELVE NATIONS WARN CHINA REAL REFORM MUST COME BEFORE THEY GIVE RELIEF," "PRITCHETT REPORTS ZIONISM WILL FAIL," "REALTY MEN DEMAND A TRANSIT INQUIRY," and "OUR LIVING STANDARD HIGHEST IN HISTORY, SAYS HOOVER REPORT."
Take them in order: the article on China explains the joint report of the Commission on Extraterritoriality in China, presenting an exposition of the Powers' stand in the Chinese muddle. What it says is less important than what it is. It was "made public by the State Department to-day" with the purpose of presenting to the American public a picture of the State Department's position. Its source gives it authority, and the American public tends to accept and support the State Department view.
The report of Dr. Pritchett, a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, is an attempt to find the facts about this Jewish colony in the midst of a restless Arab world. When Dr. Pritchett's survey convinced him that in the long run Zionism would "bring more bitterness and more unhappiness both for the Jew and for the Arab," this point of view was broadcast with all the authority of the Carnegie Foundation, so that the public would hear and believe. The statement by the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, and Secretary Hoover's report, are similar attempts to influence the public toward an opinion.
These examples are not given to create the impression that there is anything sinister about propaganda. They are set down rather to illustrate how conscious direction is given to events, and how the men behind these events influence public opinion. As such they are examples of modern propaganda.
This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common. Virtually no important undertaking is now carried on without it, whether that enterprise be building a cathedral, endowing a university, marketing a moving picture, floating a large bond issue, or electing a president.”
Bernays assumes, like he does with celebrities, that the press will play along. And this is a fact. But why though? Why does the press play along? Celebrities participate in the propaganda economy for money; at a core level they know it’s their primary job. But without the press, celebrities wouldn’t open any doors at all. Bernays makes press complicity look like the easiest thing in the world. Is it?
The answer, from my relatively substantial experience with publicity, is absolutely yes. I’m on record saying that roughly 85% of news stories (more than Bernays’ 50%) derive from press releases and publicity initiatives. Today’s reporters are lazy, dumb, and fearful. Smarter and harder-working PR people cultivate relationships with them and plaster them with all kinds of gifts and trips and opportunities, not to mention stories pre-written for them, on a silver platter. As social media destroyed newsrooms, their desperation has made journalists only the more stretched and ready to sell out. You will see stories in even the top publications now laden with errors. Many publications, for e.g. Forbes, have become virtually all pay-to-play—layers upon layers of “contributor articles” that, behind the scenes, it publishes for a few thousand bucks each.
I have witnessed one of my own ideas make it onto Good Morning America on behalf of a major PR agency in exchange for millions of dollars. It was an attempt at creating a press-friendly “moment in culture” that ultimately failed. Was it framed by the news station as branded content? Absolutely not. It was framed as a philanthropy initiative that just so happened to be sparked by a large bank (similar to Pfizer/Kelce’s “educational ads” discussed below). A win in the minds of literally everyone involved—the celebrities, the brands, the news stations, even the downtrodden philanthropy recipients and the public itself. Who cares if it’s a little misleading? Everybody’s happy. There’s no downside. All the “leaders,” including the press, amplify the propaganda. The more successful it is, the more their little economy benefits.
A truly successful piece of propaganda, however, can’t just use the press, it must successfully use the press. Today, it does this by creating, or more likely piggybacking on a “moment in culture.” A mimetic blip on the radar. Movie premieres. Awards shows. Festivals. If you don’t have one handy, you spark one yourself. Even in Bernays day, cultural moments were manufactured out of whole cloth—he did it repeatedly, for e.g. with the GM Parade of Progress, designed to manipulate the public into viewing corporations more like governments.
Part of the reason the regime is taking such a brazen approach is because it’s losing its grip on cultural moments. Look at the power of memes, then look at the plummeting viewership for propaganda vehicles like the Oscars. The mainstream’s reliable tent poles are slipping through their fingers, democratized to audiences who aren’t captive anymore. Information leaked around the Twitter Files and other mass censorship initiatives around mis, dis, and malinformation prove that intelligence agencies, so-called journalistic organizations, and media-centric nonprofits quickly disregarded the Constitution when social media subverted their effective media channels.
Thus, propagandists will do just about anything for access to two things 1) cultural moments they can create themselves (e.g. celebrity couples or anything else that “breaks the internet”) and 2) the few big reliable “moments in culture” we have left.
And the biggest of those?
The Super Bowl
Our invisible governors have fewer doors to go through, and fewer celebrity puppets to open them. Because of this, they’re losing control of the zeitgeist. The Overton Window is fogged up. Bud Light was an actual monetary disaster. TikTok turned Gen Z antisemitic. Rap stars are coming out pro-Trump. The propagandists are pulling their invisible hair out.
And thus, the NFL, not the natural favorite of a longhouse regime, has suddenly become center stage for all the plotting and planning of a thousand adderall-fueled DC theater kids. Legions of careerist gay men and women have decided to addict themselves to American Football.
Before we get into detail, let’s break down the regime’s rightward pitch on Bernays’ terms.
First, we have invisible wirepullers, the propagandists themselves: broadly speaking, a globalist regime facing an existential threat from nationalists and their leader Donald Trump. More specifically: Bud Light’s corporate global parent ABInbev, celebrity publicity/agent teams (see below), Pfizer and its assorted propaganda agencies, the NFL and its assorted propaganda agencies, Dem patronage networks, and the music industry. This set composes essentially the same group who canceled Alex Jones, Kanye West, Andrew Tate, and their ilk. The best word for them is Globohomo.
Then, the subgroups. White people. NFL fans. Swing voters. Flyover Americans (e.g. Kansas City Chiefs fans). Beer drinkers. Super Bowl watchers. Podcast listeners. The list could go on forever. But the point is that all these subgroups need to be convinced of one thing—The Regime is Your Friend. Donald Trump is Not.
Third, “leaders” with a common denominator of interest to deliver the message in exchange for benefits. We already know the NFL easily bows to progressive pressure—they wrote “don’t be racist” on the field. For Kelce, tight end, the sky’s the limit. He and his managers/agents/publicists get paid beyond their wildest dreams. Big paydays also for Shane Gillis, Dana White, Post Malone, etc and their legions of agents and managers. For Bud Light, a pathway back into the hearts of normal Americans. Complicit press? Big clickable headlines around a celebrity couple and the last big cultural tentpole they can still control.
Not Conspiracy, Publicity
To understand the arc of the Travis Kelce machine, you must start with the Eanes Brothers. According to The New York Times,
“The reality is that most of [Kelce’s] ascent has been years in the making — the result of a carefully manicured business plan developed by the 34-year-old Eanes brothers that blossomed at precisely the right moment.”
The black twins were college buds of Kelce at University of Cincinnati. Party promoter types who got him into clubs. Nobodies in the right place at the right time. Kelce brought them with him. At a certain point, they decided they were going to “make Kelce as famous as the Rock.”
For a decade, this plan failed miserably, just like identical plans dreamt up by the homegrown homies of every other NFL tight end. Before Kelce, your average American female could name zero tight ends—there’s a great TikTok trend “Taylor put Kelce on the Map” mocking this very reality. But Kelce was different. Several months before he “aggressively pursued” Taylor Swift “through his publicist,” Kelce, an unknown, hosted SNL. Surely the first tight end ever to do so.
How? Why? The key is understanding how publicity works. The celebrity you see is the tip of an iceberg of invisible propagandists. Besides the Eanes brothers—visible propagandists being thrown into the spotlight to obscure the real ones—Kelce has
“...a creative strategist, a community outreach coordinator, a Los Angeles-based publicist, a personal chef and a trainer. He has four football agents, led by Mike Simon at VMG. In the spring, he also became a client of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to feed his budding acting itch.”
And what does this iceberg say? You can hear it ringing from the publicity-articles in The New York Times and Vanity Fair—Travis Kelce has “crossover appeal.” This “crossover appeal” has “been part of the Eanes brothers' plans since the beginning.” Bullshit. The Eanes brothers are simply the correct-colored emissaries who knocked on the door of the regime at just the right time. They arrived at CAA at just the right time, when the regime happened to be looking for a flyover-state star to influence flyover-state voters. Not only that, one who was very likely to make the Super Bowl. So by sheer stroke of luck, the Eanes brothers’ dream actually came true. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s publicity. Not CIA, CAA.
After Dave Chappelle “went crazy,” his first show back ended with a dark illustration of how the very powerful people around him manipulated him in ways he couldn’t have imagined. Kanye West’s “trainer” Harley Pasternak threatened to commit Kanye if he didn’t shut his mouth. Who did both stars later blame? Agents. Managers. Ari Emanuel, Scooter Braun, CAA, WME. String pullers who also happened, by the way, to run afoul of Taylor Swift. Stand-ins for the regime, connected by well-known pipes to planmakers in DC and Davos. They are the wirepullers. And they hate being made visible.
The Rollout
Kelce arrived at the regime’s door ready to sell himself. Censorship had failed to kill nationalism, so it was time to try some celebrity propaganda. So they vetted him, and decided to make him both a “leader” of the subgroups in question and a “cultural moment” at the same time—perhaps not realizing just how many propagandists would need to use him to execute their own rightward pandering. Interestingly, Kelce owed his brother, the even less well known Eagles center Jason Kelce, some favors. Jason had helped the more erratic Travis find the straight and narrow. If you’re making me a star, Travis said, you’re bringing Jason with me.
Kelce became the global face of Pfizer. They framed the ad as an “educational campaign,” when of course it’s anything but—Pfizer doesn’t want us to know more about the vaccine, they want us to blindly take it and have our insurance companies pay the bill. Pfizer is hemorrhaging the excess profit it made off mandated vaccines to combat its plummeting revenue by any means necessary. This is not controversial.
The concept campaign features Kelce “doing two things at once”—like grilling and lawn mowing at the same time—what you’re supposed to do with your next Covid and flu shots. This sort of comic concept bears all the marks of a big agency ad. Strangely, it bears little resemblance to normal pharma ads, usually ruined by warnings and other constraints. I worked in pharma advertising—no matter what you do, it’s impossible to make a funny pharma commercial. Too much red tape. Not so with this Pfizer ad.
Concurrently with this, Kelce also appeared on TV as the spokesman for DirecTV McDonald’s, Subway, Valspar, State Farm, Experian, Campbell’s Soup, DraftKings, and the NFL itself. Unprecedented for even a famous quarterback to appear in so many national spots with borderline competing products (e.g. Subway, McDonald’s) during the same summer. For a tight end? Beyond unprecedented. Manufactured.
And then there was everything else. An Amazon Prime documentary on both Kelce brothers. The duo suddenly had the top podcast in the country, their hollow blabbering beating out comedians (Rogan, Gillis, Theo Von), pundits (Tucker, Shapiro), and true crime. The fact that progressives/globalists couldn’t crack the Podcast Top 10 surely drove them nuts, which was another reason they bet on Kelce. Jason (not Travis) was runner up for People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. After winning the Super Bowl, a Travis soundbite explained he and Taylor Swift’s “values” are the reason they’re so beloved. Complicit press announced that Kelce would produce a movie with “Obama green tax cuts.” Obama green tax cuts are available to every filmmaker. all filmmakers use them, where applicable. It’s not “news” for Kelce or any filmmaker to use them; only if publicists decide to make it so.
Amazon documentaries and national TV spots—particularly ones with clever comic concepts—don’t happen overnight. At very minimum, they take months to produce and roll out. All this doesn’t add up to a psyop, but the creation of a celebrity doorway to the flyover white people the regime needs to win back. The regime has fewer and fewer “leaders” to rely on, and absolutely no one to capture a white majority who are increasingly turning their backs. If you don’t have one, you make one.
Publicity Relationships
It doesn’t actually matter if Taylor Swift is complicit in Travis Kelce’s attempt to become the regime’s wigger king, but we must still address the relationship question. The idea that Taylor could betray women by participating in a propaganda economy absolutely appalls many on the intellectual right, particularly the women, despite Swift’s many other propaganda bona fides, e.g. wearing butt pads on stage to appear more relatable. Like her stuffed underwear, the Kelce issue is also a genuine wedge. Our increasingly longhoused Dissident Right finds it offensive that MAGA-tards think Swift would fake it—they say it’s a “loser mentality” and will scare away abortion-loving female voters.
So is Swift complicit? Does she know this is all a publicity campaign geared towards convincing white people to fall back in love with a regime that hates them? There is of course no way to know. We don’t have camera footage, and even if we did, so much of this stuff is unspoken. When a bank’s philanthropy initiative supports Good Morning America, it’s understood, not spoken, that favorable coverage will follow.
But my personal belief is that yes, at some level Taylor knows that she’s participating in a charade. I think Kelce is likely gay, and I think Swift is so busy, her entire life captured by projection, that “real relationships” aren’t even close to possible. Her whole life is a charade, so why would her love life be different? When you’re at the height of fame, it’s rarer to have a “real” relationship than a fake one. I always remember what Shia Labeouf said about Megan Fox, while she was “married” to some other guy.
“Look, you’re on the set for six months, with someone who’s rooting to be attracted to you, and you’re rooting to be attracted to them. I never understood the separation of work and life in that situation. But the time I spent with Megan was our own thing, and I think you can see the chemistry onscreen.”
For Swift, there is no separation between work and life. Relationships at that level of fame are almost never real. Which is why they almost never last. This has been true forever. It’s not that “Hollywood is run by pedophiles,” it’s that Hollywood, like DC and every other power center, is run by people for whom monogamous relationships are part of the spectacle, part of the character you play on the stage of life.
I think that Swift may have had some favors to pay back after going up against Scooter Braun and the same CAA/WME Hollywood network of progressive wirepullers that tried to destroy Kanye. Unlike Kanye, who called them out as Jewish, Taylor used a different approach. But she still made serious enemies. My guess is that she is receiving something big, spoken or unspoken, in exchange for elevating Kelce.
But this is pure speculation, and it doesn’t actually matter. If you accept that Kelce himself is a puppet, and that he became a puppet before he “aggressively pursued” Taylor, whether or not she’s fully aware of her role in the initiative makes no substantive difference, besides to the fragile female egos who would be hurt by learning that their idol is a typical celebrity. Yet they all eagerly consume the HBO show “The Idol,” a detailed account of how agents/managers congeal into a propaganda iceberg. It’s MAGA, again, that has the right size of it, using only their noses to detect the truth: Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift are a propaganda economy.
The Opposite of Censorship
When the regime forced the NFL to put anti-racist slogans on its end zones, it did so with a lazy, heavy hand. An exhausted teacher telling her classroom to shut up. No nuance. “END RACISM.” A rule emblazoned on a board. They didn’t care about the NFL. They’re gay theater kids and women. It showed.
But now, as Trump seems inevitable and Covid failures pile up, we’re seeing the eye of Sauron shift towards the NFL. They’re actually interested in it now, just as they’re actually interested in country music, camo hats, and fly fishing, gaze shifting from the South Side hood rat to the Lake of Ozarks redneck. And it’s not all tactical. The white right winger has become so alienated they’ve become exotic, just as black kids born in the projects once were. And, as always, the regime’s first instinct is to buy up all the rebellion in sight.
Do they really mean it? Do they actually care about flyover whites? It’s possible that, in shifting their attention, some genuine empathy may rub off on their new playthings. But that doesn’t mean they care about the white poors any more than the black poors before them.
But there is one major difference. Namely, there’s fewer and fewer straight white dudes left inside the culture factory. White male staff writers in TV writer’s rooms have plummeted from 75% to 35% in a decade. And how many right wingers among them? Zero. Zilch. With activist blacks or feminist women, you could hire them, groom them, get them to make their subgroups believe that the regime loved blacks and women. Bernays himself did just this with his legendary Torches of Freedom feminist cigarettes campaign. But now, regime propaganda looks like it's donned a white skin suit—it feels eerie and fake because there’s no right wing white dudes left to make it real. They can get Gillis to hold up a can of Bud Light. But could Gillis survive a longhoused writer’s room?
We say “Cthulhu always swims left” to explain why Americans in any given year always see the morals of ten years previous as unacceptably conservative. This is true even when culture shifts briefly right—even in the 1980s, when Reaganism and bankers became cool, the underlying motion of values continued leftward. In a way, even “greed is good” libertarianism was a leftward shift, at least insofar as leftism equals chaos. But now, it would appear that there is simply no further leftward we can go. So either Cthulhu really is going to shift right, and we’re witnessing the telegraphed motions of a sincere sea change that will see pro-life Christians and pro-choice feminists working side by side at global corporations. Or, much more likely, Cthulhu has absolutely zero intention of moving right, only appearing to do so. This is a poorly executed charade. And the fracture in American society will only deepen.
What do? For right wingers, the only answer is to adopt the effective propaganda tactics of Cthulhu, as painful as that may be.
Propaganda is, in a way, the opposite of censorship: adding information instead of removing it. The American Right feels comfortable identifying and critiquing censorship because it usually involves government intelligence agencies. They don’t care if it leads to them being labeled conspiracy theorists. Revelations unearthed by those rare non-complicit journalists like Matt Taibbi and Mike Benz show networks of administrative organizations like the FBI, CIA, and DHS collaborating with patronage groups like the Atlantic Group, the Aspen Institute, and the NCoC to implement initiatives with names like the Virality Project and Civic Listening Corps on media platforms like Time and Twitter. The rise of social media gave birth to a type of censorship we’re only just beginning to understand. The Right accepts and acknowledges this, although there’s little we can do about it, at least until we establish control over the intelligence agencies. We can, however, do something about propaganda.
But propaganda makes the Right squirmy. It involves just as many creepy three letter “agencies” (CAA, not CIA) and power mad globalists, yet conservatives suddenly become naive when we enter the world of marketing. It’s hard to overstate just how devastating this weakness is, as recent discourse around right wing patronage networks, or the lack thereof, has revealed. But by understanding Bernays and how propaganda economies work, propaganda itself becomes less mysterious, less amoral, less of a “conspiracy. If regarded without fear, it’s a malleable substrate that carries messages beyond the mind and into the heart, because it implicates the shared interest of its targets just as it does its promulgators. Cthulhu may be superficially turning right, but the people aren’t buying it. Only we can build the real right-coded culture monster. If we can only follow the playbook.
A guest post by
Isaac Simpson
rebel propagandist isaacsimpson.com willtheagency.com
