21st Century Wire

By Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
October 14, 2011

A disturbing new trend has quietly taken hold over simultaneous nationwide protests in the United States over the last few weeks.

Visible throughout the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests, is a technique dubbed as “The People’s Microphone”. It has been deployed nationwide, and is fast becoming the dominant vehicle for group interaction and communication. So what is it?

Well-behaved crowds use call-and-repeat with a series of basic hand signals to protest the establishment

According to the official OWS wiki page:

“New York City requires a permit to use “amplified sound.” Since Occupy Wall Street does not have a permit, police have interpreted that to mean even the use of an electric bullhorn. As a response to such limitations, a phenomenon known as the “People’s Microphone” has evolved, where a person making a speech pauses while the nearby members of the audience repeats the previous phrase (somewhat) in unison.” The entry adds, “The (People’s Microphone) effect has been called “comic or exhilarating – often all at once.” Some feel this provided a further unifying effect for the crowd.”

Advocates of this new method claim that it is a work-around to restrictive city ordinances, serving as a ‘progressive communication’ tool which allows groups to speak and achieve “community consensus”, where the audience is asked to listen in a whole new way and to actually help transmit the message to others. They will tell you that accuracy and transparency are crucial elements of the People’s Microphone.

NLP device: the ‘call-and-return’ and technique

OWS’s new People’s Microphone is quite simply a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) application or technique. Its consensus arrival method, also known as “call-and-return”, has now become the audio device of choice- spreading across the country as quickly as the protests themselves.

How it works: crowd participants slowly repeat each phrase the leading speaker is saying to them, with a series of hand signs used to provide the speaker and the group with feedback.

To the casual observer, this new system of communication may appear as compelling as it is metaphoric. It might also remind you of the infamous ‘pass the conch’ scene from the Nobel Prize-winning novel by William Golding, Lord of the Flies. 

It is a very slow and tedious process, often resulting in very few actual issues being fleshed out. In most cases, it takes triple the amount of time to convey the same amount of information that a normal speaker would accomplish by talking directly to the audience. But ‘call-and-return’ can only be done when the group is forced to repeat the words of the lead speaker, so this speaker is forced to talk slowly, using fewer words at once. In this way, it is also an extremely mesmerizing and hypnotic group communication tool.

Such NLP methods can also be used to promote ‘group-think’ and would be described by some as collectivist mind control education at its very finest.

It’s common knowledge that successful NLP systems like this are commonly used in the military, by sales people in business, as well as in advertising, and of course in politics, always working in restricted blocs of words and with restricted vocabularies.

Group moderators insist that this is done so that ‘everybody is safe’, and that the group is ‘doing things properly’. Any interaction with a speaker can only be done by employing a series of parochial, child-like hand-signs, normally reserved for children attending school in K-8 grades.

Participants insist that by using this method they get a feeling of  ‘being part of the community’, where group leaders will ask the crowd for a ‘temperature check’ in order to determine “How ‘the bloc’ feels about what someone has said”… and if what someone said is in consensus with “the bloc”. The audience will offer up a hand signal of waiving both hands to show their approval. Once a consensus is identified, it’s typical that members of “the bloc” will feel that they are part of the group collective, and thus, “part of the change”.

Unfortunately, in this type of system, most of the group have little idea of the meaning of what they are actually repeating, or who and what they are supporting with their consensus hand signals, waving their hands, or making a triangle sign to communicate.

In terms of social engineering a group-think, creating passive crowds, this OWS development is quite surprising, as more sophisticated or even passionate communication techniques would be expected from the ranks of educated, ‘socially aware’ protesters.

Watch as the speaker in the following video explains to his ‘bloc’ that their ‘collective’ will be banning any applause because the clapping of hands might drown out someone within the collective who is trying to be heard. See this unfold in the bizarre Occupy Atlanta video below:

In the end, Occupy Atlanta organizers and the group became so enthralled with their People’s Microphone that Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis was not allowed an opportunity to speak to ‘the collective’. The ‘process’ took forever, and eventually sent the Congressman packing, even though the majority of the crowd were interested in what the Congressman had to say. Dominant members of ‘the bloc’ ruled that the goals of the collective outweighed, and  “are more important than any single human being”, as was stated by a speaker early in that video. This is how using NLP to bind a ‘collective’ group can easily engineer a false consensus.

Many Americans are completely unaware of how this very same device has been used throughout history to compartmentalize and marginalize the true will of people.

This NLP ‘call-and-repeat’ mechanism can no doubt be used to hypnotic effect. Often these type of techniques are used in order to filter out the free thinkers, where intense self-policing at its most stringent. Notice that when group members are disagreeing, their hands are much lower, but at their maximum when ‘the bloc’ seems to all be in agreement.

What these protestors are hardly aware of, is that they may be participating a form of modern day group-think. It is a form of social control whereby everyone in the group believes that they must all agree and must all be of the same mind. Armed with this powerful new tool, professional consensus promoters can be bussed into sites around the country, training groups to chant key group-think talking points using various mnemonic phrases.

The collectivist trap

The concept of ‘the collective’ or ‘the community’ is a power one when applied to activism. For this reason it allowed a number of radical regimes to sweep into power during the 20th century.

Participants in a collective truly believe in the process and that their process is very ‘democratic’, civilized, radical, effective, and thus, revolutionary.

But few within these groups are actually aware of the NLP concepts they have opted into, nor are they familiar with tried and tested mind-control methods, or the powerful political tool of collectivism. So it is not surprising that most will enthusiastically join in the group and religiously abide by its laws of conversation, following some scripted agenda instead of being spontaneous or truly radical.

The People’s Microphone can also lead a group to believe by using these hand signal votes they can create a law and enforce it. This can often result in an oxymoronic “totalitarian-consensus”, whereby a perceived consensus occurs, but in reality, a consensus was only reached because each member of the group was afraid to be ejected from ‘the collective’. Other video examples include Occupy Amherst, Occupy Tampa, and Occupy DC filmed by Adam Kokesh. All three can be viewed below:

This form of mob mentality can be dangerous because the leader of a group is leading the flock in his or her direction of choice, whilst still offering them the illusion it is ‘what everyone in the community wants’. In the classic film Dr Zhivago, scenes appear in which leading “intellectual” group-thinkers demolish the private property of others because, according to the collective, “they don’t deserve to own it”.

Taking  this concept is taken to its extreme form, a mob or individual within the mob might willfully intimidate, or even physically assault a person, during which time the mob believe they are just watching what ‘the collective’ or ‘community’ wants to happen.

Hardly grass roots

It is already well documented that the original Occupy Wall Street protest was seeded by a collectivist George Soros funded foundation called Ad Busters, and allegedly supported by the shadowy agitator hacker group called Anonymous.

For the last decade, globalist foundations promoting democracy and freedom have been active in fomenting uprisings all over the planet, and fresh off their international successes they have finally come home to roost within the OWS movement.

But what is not as well documented is the involvement of the international CIA front organization called the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS). This can be described as a kind of consultancy for would-be revolutionaries, an organization of professional agitators-for-hire who globe-trot, openly promoting their CFR-sponsored agenda- most notably in Egypt, where CANVAS trained and managed Egyptian protestors as early as 2009 in preparation for the fabled ‘Arab Spring’ in 2010-2011.

Their projects are clandestine, kept secret while in preparation, names of clients are not publically available, and are extremely well funded by American intelligence services. And yes, they are now active on US soil.

It is important that readers understand how CANVAS was created- from the Serbian political youth movement called OPTOR!(translated as ‘Resistance!), who’s initial project was the US-backed overthrow of the Slobodan Milosevic government in Yugoslavia in 2000.

OPTOR’s support and funding network reads like a who’s who of CIA and globalist front foundations, including well known CIA front organization USAID, George Soros’s collectivist front foundation Freedom House, and the National Endowment for Democracy whose operational successes include the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, each heavily financed and backed by groups funded by or connected to the U.S. government. Likewise, events in Tunisia, North Africa and Egypt were orchestrated out of the finest detail, and it seems that events surrounding the OWS movement are no different.

Key operatives in OPTOR!, and later for CANVAS are Serbians Ivan Marovic and Srdja Popovic. After the fall of Milosovec, the western media hailed Marovic as a democratic genius, but it came out later that his entire program came out of an elite Boston think tank’s ‘regime change’ manual, From Dictatorship to Democracy, written by a Harvard Professor Gene Sharp.

From the first days of OWS, it should be noted that Marovic was already on site, and guiding groups by demonstrating the power of The People’s Microphone. Watch here as Marovic himself leads crowds in the first days of the protests:

Some of the CANVAS professionally developed ‘subversive’ revolutionary methods are outlined in the incredible documentary film The Revolution Business, where paid facilitators are employed to train protesters, acting as a guide through the process which also includes communication techniques and the circulation of media talking points.

Mind control and the dumbing-down of America

“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality”
– H. L. Mencken

These NLP techniques have taken hold quickly across OWS events and are techniques that have been previously implemented throughout the America’s public education systems and also present in popular children’s programming.

Typically, participants in a mind-control exercise engage in group-think, not unlike the participants shown in these videos. Members of the group will also get an endorphin rush similar to what one might receive during an evangelical church performance, or even at hip-hop concert, where the MC shouts, “now wave your hands in the air, and wave ‘em like you just don’t care.”

Charlotte Iserbyt was a Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, where she blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America’s classrooms shown in the documentary film, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.

Most Americans participating in OWS have come through the state education system, whose chief objective, according to Charlotte Iserbyt, is teaching groups, and thus individuals… to be obedient.

The dominant message which is now coming out of the OWS protests across the US appears to be  the collectivist idea of an unequal distribution of wealth in the United States, which looks a lot like any social engineer’s blueprint for a 21^st century Bolshevik Revolution in America, and it is playing out right before our eyes as the millions of young, disaffected Americans search for simple collectivist answers to society’s many complex ills.

One can certainly argue here, that the dumbing-down of America would serve such an agenda.

Establishing fear in a police state 

Notice that we already have “free speech zones” in the US, while prospective protesters in the UK must apply with the city police for a ‘public license to demonstrate’.

Aside from the incessant need by most young Americans to be led by a lone, some singular voice, the underlying social engineering tool which has enabled the intellectual and sovereign castration of Americans, is quite simply… the fear of being arrested.

One singular thing that a decade of free speech zones, homeland security, surveillance and a comprehensive dismantling of the Bill of Rights(equally under both Bush and Obama) has achieved – is just that – a constant fear of a shadowy police state. Without this underlying fear, the repressive Soviet-style group-think scenes we see in these video could never have been possible.

The whole existence of The People’s Microphone is down to the fact that NYC police have imposed draconian measures like banning megaphones. As far as requiring a license to protest in public, not using a PA system in public, or restricting filming in a public space, true patriots and believers in a free society should not seek ‘permits’ for anything, nor should they respect ‘prohibitions’ on a citizen’s right to free speech and assembly.

Notice that not all cities in the USA prohibit bull-horning or amplified speakers, yet, American activists have still voluntarily defaulted back to the collectivist NLP method, The People’s Microphone, initially unveiled at OWS in NYC.

More than anything, these videos of mindless call-and-repeat chanting show the deep problems any true freedom movement must overcome in reaching ‘the 99%’ in America.

Where it’s heading

From its onset, many writers and pundits within the independent media and freedom movement threw their support behind OWS, with the sincere hope it focused on the deeper, fundamental globalist control issues- like restoring the Constitution, the need for smaller government, the creation and counterfeiting our currency through the Federal Reserve System, causing the inflationary boom and bust cycles that have been periodically culling the world’s upwardly mobile working and middle classes. Instead, the focus of both protesters and media has drifted towards system actors like corporations, CEO’s, bankers and politicians, rather than addressing the very system itself.

If you take into account the level by which the Occupy Wall Street movement has already been co-opted by the ‘progressives’ and the Democratic Party, and endorsed whole-heartedly by staunch globalists within the US power-structure like Ben Bernanke, President Obama and Nancy Pelosi, this writer believes strongly that OWS will likely morph into a permanent left wing counter-weight to the now Republican co-opted Tea Party movement.

The movement may appear to be growing organically, but as we saw with Ron Paul’s initial Tea Party spark back in 2007, once a movement’s political gravity reached a certain stage, the establishment will have already deployed its professional agitators, political operatives and mainstream media gate keepers in order to control its motion and shepherd its evolution. This was as true back in 1968 as it is in 2011. Already, the mainstream media have injected the talking point which most Americans are already parroting, that is: “America’s Occupy Movement is the Democrats’ equivalent to the Tea Party”.

What these movements do is function as an easy access, pressure-release valve for the controlled Left and Right wings. Both parties in the US have become too rigid, offering little to a 21^st century society that is now information-rich, but still insight poor, and generally cater to the lowest common social denominator. With unemployment and debts high, and opportunities sparse, the simplified message of collectivism championed by OWS celebrity filmmaker Michael Moore, will certain hold an attractive appeal to many Americans who are unfamiliar with collectivism’s well documented past horrors.

Soon, the Occupy London movement will begin in the UK. Based on recent trends in the US, this writer will also strongly predict that OWS’s British counterpart will quickly morph into anti-Tory government, pro-socialist, climate change/green movement, not least because the majority of protesters in the UK will be among the ranks of the unemployed, indebted students, and chronic state benefit recipients- a fact which almost guarantees their loyal support of the UK’s social entitlement control-grid, as well as memberships to the ultra collectivist EU and UN supra-national organizations.

In times of economic strife, populations are easily lured into the simple, Marxist ideological trap of collectivism. Under these conditions, most participants in the OWS movement would be completely unaware that an organization like CANVAS or Freedom House is directing and steering their new ‘grassroots’ conversation.

To avoid the collectivist trap, participants in OWS events all across the US must first learn to read between the lines, or they may unwittingly become party to something completely different to what they thought they had signed up for in the first place.

-

Author Patrick Henningsen is Editor of 21st Century Wire and Associate Editor of Infowars, and also reports for TV network Russia Today.

-