You’ll become accustomed to this playbook and you’ll get jaded very quickly.

As a rule of thumb, the best default position is to take the opposite of whatever the US tells you about other countries. It’s not guaranteed to be the correct position but you’ll be on a better footing than if you go with it.

Anyway back to the playbook thing, you see the US State Department issuing their ideological positions - these are the bad guys, these are the good guys, this is a threat to peace/democracy/the gays/America, this is our ally.

This message filters down to political pundits and think tanks and news outlets and similar organisations that are effectively ideological apparatuses of the state.

This then filters down to commentators (e.g. Lazerpig, China watchers, R*ddit armchair experts).

Finally, this filters down to the long-form cultural content like movies and TV shows which take longer to produce than some shitty opinion piece or a dudebro yakking into a mic while livestreaming a video game.

The order that this flows in can change somewhat but that’s how it typically goes.

The intensity of the messaging also determines how much gets filtered down to the lower levels. For example, not that I keep up with modern gaming or movies or TV, but I’d be really surprised if we saw much in the way of Venezuela/Maduro being posed as the bad guy in media (or stuff coded to be Maduro/Venezuela). China, on the other hand…

So if you look back over media from history you’ll get little tips of the hand to whoever was the current villain of the hour. Sometimes it’s coded fairly heavily (e.g. the original Predator movie being about SE Asia, and specifically Vietnam) and sometimes it’s blatant (e.g. Back To The Future [the first one, I think?] where Libya is posed as a minor antagonistic force and a major nuclear and terroristic threat to the entire world - in a scene previous to the one linked I think there’s discussion about how they acquired plutonium from the Libyans.)

Obviously games like Call Of Duty and shows like Homeland are really heavy-handed with it and so it’s much easier to identify the messaging but even in comedy movies and stuff like children’s TV shows you’ll find these messages peppered in. But basically it’s just one long chain of stenograghy that spans the breadth of western media consumption.

When you see the same message across US government press releases, newspapers, TV shows, commentators, games, movies etc. then it’s a really good indication that this is coming straight out of the stenograghy apparatus.

One thing that’s bitterly funny to watch in this, as this same pattern repeats over and over again, is when you get those moments where there’s a big inversion or reversal of the good guys and the bad guys.

One of the most obvious examples is Reagan in the whitehouse pictured meeting with the Mujahedeen, many of whom would later go on to form the Taliban, Rambo being dedicated to the Mujahedeen, and that infamous New York Times article touting Osama Bin Laden as a freedom fighter. Obviously somewhere along the way, things took a sharp turn.

I wasn’t alive for it but there would almost certainly have been the same media flip-flopping with Saddam Hussein back around the time of the first Gulf War because he was actually once considered to be somewhat of a US puppet - Bill Hicks touched on this in one of his routines. I would expect the same sort of thing happened with Noriega back in the day as well.

Of course, in recent times we have the small blips on the media radar about the Azov Battalion and Right Sector et al., who were represented accurately as fascist paramilitaries but then suddenly when the Ukraine war started that narrative was dropped and all of that stuff disappeared down the memory hole and suddenly these fascist (often former) paramilitaries who openly wear Nazi symbols and fly the UPA flag are actually just noble freedom fighters now.

Of course the villain is always weak and destined to lose while also carrying out outrageous atrocities (that the US and its allies definitely aren’t carrying out themselves at the same time, promise!!) but you’ll see it switch - it’s Hamas at the moment and it’s very likely we’ll see more attention on Hezbollah/Lebanon and especially Iran because of this but Yemen is also going to be in the sights too. Of course yesterday it was Russia, and the day before that it was Syria, and the day before that was Belarus, and the day before that it was Venezuela… China is a mainstay these days and over time I only expect that to trend upwards overall but there will need to be a lull in the interrupting villain of the moment before we will resume our scheduled program of Chiner Bad!!