https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly19/everything-fake7-19.html

Charles Hugh Smith

That we fall for the fakes and cons is understandable, given that’s all we have left in the public sphere.

What do we mean when we say corporate media is fake? We mean it’s a carefully crafted con, a set of narratives, cherry-picked data and heavily massaged statistics (the unemployment rate, etc.) designed to instill the reader’s confidence in a narrative that serves the interests not of the citizenry but of a select few pillaging the citizenry.

Once upon a time in America, no adult could survive without a finely tuned BS detector. Herman Melville masterfully captured America’s culture of cons and con artists in his 1857 classic The Confidence-Man, which I discussed in The Con in Confidence (October 4, 2006).

An essential component of the American ethos is: don’t be a chump. Don’t fall for the con. And if you do, it’s your own fault. America in 1857 was a simmering stew of con artists, flim-flammers and grifters exploiting the naive, the trusting and the credulous, and that remains the case in 2019.

We now inhabit a world where virtually everything is a con. That “organic” produce from some other country–did anyone test the soil the produce grew in? It could be loaded with heavy metals and be certified “organic” because no pesticides were used during production. Are there any nutrients left in the soil or has it been depleted? What’s in the water used to irrigate the crops?

The point of the con in offshored “organic” is the higher prices fetched. This is why it’s critical to ask of every narrative, story, product and data set: cui bono, to whose benefit?

The employment/unemployment statistics are obviously a con...

“Healthy choice” snacks: fake:…

Social media privacy: fake:…

Democracy: fake:…

Prosperity: fake:…

Melville understood that we want to be conned: we want to believe the elixir will make our aches and pains go away, that the new face in politics will clear out the rot of corruption, that rising prices for everything means we’re getting richer and so on.

Orson Welles’ weird and wonderful documentary F for Fake reminds us that a successful fake is essentially identical with the real thing: so the S&P 500 hitting 3,000 means we’re all getting more prosperous, right?

Despite all the craftsmanship, though, fake is still fake. And today virtually everything is fake, a con designed to trick or distract the marks (us) from the looting, plundering and predation of those running the con for their own self-interest…

Be seeing you