CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Rise And Fail Of The Griftocrats

I have been writing for decades that Oprah Winfrey was a more effective force insofar as retailing capitalist propaganda than the Joseph Goebbels’ progeny of Fox News/NewsMax outrage peddlers and the corporate-funded nomenklatura/apparatchik clowns of the rightwing think tank shit-circuses.

Oprah’s grift emanates from the same capitalist ideological snake oil of self-bootstraps transcendence; withal, if an individual visualizes the capitalist order’s conception of success with the proper measure of rigorous intensity and unquestioning belief in the magical nature of the system then the universe will align with your entitled destiny. If not the failure is all on you — but not, in any manner due to the (rigged against you) system.

It was in the Oprah cosmology of con artistry that Jeffrey Epstein confidant and enabler Deepak Chopra retailed his New Age spiel that engaging in a ghost dance with constellations of quantum entanglement would deliver the true believer to material success and perpetual psychical bliss.

In essence, the mode of belief is and remains the “power of positive thinking” salesman’s credo of Ronald Reagan (“Its morning again in America”) and Donald Trump (“Make America great again”) political hucksters that trace their worldview back to the “good news” testifiers of Christian evangelists’ so-called prosperity gospel.

In a capitalist culture in which anything and everything, from ghostly quanta to human flesh is fodder for exploitation and passes as normal – i.e., The Epstein Island Of Everyday American Life – then the contents of The Epstein File and the personages named would only come as a shock to the noxiously naive.

UFO enthusiasts posit, we have entered into the “Age Of Disclosure.” One would have to have been abducted by aliens – or be alienated into deep, protective insularity — to have experienced ontological shock........

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