We Are Not Insane
There is a low-grade hum that tells you your eyes are wrong. Your instincts are wrong. Your outrage is misplaced.
There is an accepted narrative, a default frame of reality, that makes it easy to believe the problem is your perception.
It isn’t.
“We are being lied to, and we are all victims of this propaganda matrix.” — Abby Martin
I heard Abby Martin say this during Q&A after her new documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy at MiraCosta College in Oceanside last night. It landed like a diagnosis.
The Propaganda Matrix
A propaganda system pushes false information, yes. But it also shapes the boundaries of what is sayable.
It decides which words are “extreme.” Which facts are “controversial.” Which deaths are “regrettable.” Which industries are “necessary.”
Look at the U.S. military.
Rarely mentioned in climate debates. Exempt from international climate agreements. Almost never framed as an environmental catastrophe.
Yet as Abby Martin’s documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy makes devastatingly clear, the Pentagon is the single largest institutional polluter on the planet.
Carbon emissions.
Poisoned water.
Scarred landscapes from Guam to Okinawa to Gaza.
A global military empire of this size is incompatible with a habitable planet.
And still, there is silence.
Or worse: reframing. Minimization. Patriotic branding.
This is how the propaganda matrix works. It doesn’t deny reality outright. It edits it and packages it.
And if you point that out?
You’re “radical.”
You’re “misinformed.”
You’re “insane.”
“That’s why the propaganda has become so desperate, the violence so extreme, because they know they’ve lost the collective consciousness.”
Truth destabilizes entrenched systems.
If the public truly internalized that the largest driver of ecological destruction is militarism, not just plastic straws or individual carbon footprints, the political consequences would be seismic.
If people truly grasped how the media launders empire through language, credibility would collapse overnight.
If voters truly believed there was no meaningful opposition, that the political establishment is a single corporate organism wearing different colored ties, then the vacuum would become visible.
And power hates a vacuum.
The Political Vacuum
Why does the political landscape feel hollow?
Why does every “debate” feel pre-scripted?
Why does dissent get funneled into spectacle instead of structural change?
“There is no opposition to this. It’s a vacuum.”
That vacuum is engineered.
When institutions converge around the same foreign policy, the same military budgets, the same corporate donors, and the same language constraints, what you’re left with is managed theater.
That’s why figures like Trump don’t emerge in a vacuum of ideology; they emerge from a vacuum of trust.
When people feel lied to long enough, they don’t necessarily move left or right.
They move toward disruption.
Not because they are insane.
Because they know something is wrong.
Earth’s Greatest Enemy
If you care about climate, you cannot ignore the largest institutional polluter on Earth.
If you care about justice, you cannot ignore the machinery enforcing global extraction.
If you care about democracy, you cannot ignore the economic architecture that makes perpetual war profitable.
That is the thesis of Earth’s Greatest Enemy, and it’s why the film feels dangerous.
It connects dots that are supposed to remain separate.
Climate and empire.
Militarism and capitalism.
Silence and complicity.
It forces viewers to confront a simple but destabilizing truth:
You cannot save the planet while maintaining a global war machine.
You can watch the trailer, explore screenings, and support the tour at: https://earthsgreatestenemy.com/
Why They Need You to Feel Crazy
Gaslighting is a political strategy.
If enough people sense deception, the system has two choices:
Reform or pathologize the dissenters.
Guess which one is cheaper?
When you say the media lies, they call you conspiratorial.
When you say the military drives climate collapse, they call you naïve.
When you say institutions are unified in protecting power, they call you extreme.
But here’s the thing, they are afraid of the truth. If our words didn’t matter, they wouldn’t spend billions shaping them.
If our voices didn’t threaten power, they wouldn’t algorithmically bury them. If truth were irrelevant, propaganda wouldn’t need to be this aggressive.
Films like Earth’s Greatest Enemy are not just documentaries. They are organizing tools. They create language where silence used to be. They bridge environmental movements with anti-militarism movements.
They remind people that love of the planet requires confrontation with the empire.
And that confrontation begins with refusing the lie.
We are not insane.
We are witnessing the cracks.
And cracks mean pressure.
And pressure means something is shifting.
The establishment feels it.
That’s why the response has become so desperate.
Truth is destabilizing.
And destabilization is the beginning of change.