by Stephen Soukup
We live under manufactured narratives—modern myths engineered to direct our outrage, reward performative heroism, and push ordinary people to bear the costs of elite political theater.
I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy nut, but we’re being manipulated. By “we,” I mean all of us—you, me, anybody who is exposed to any media at all, but especially social media. We’re not being lied to, exactly, but we’re being force-fed a version of the truth that is intended to control our emotions, influence our reactions, and direct our behavior. The powers that be—and this is very much a part of the rupture between the ruling class and the country class—want to encourage specific social and political responses from us and are doing everything they can to make them happen.
A little more than a century ago, the French engineer and leftist radical Georges Sorel wrote extensively about the most effective ways to motivate large groups of people and commit them to a particular cause. Like many other leftists of the time, Sorel advocated for a workers’ movement that could convincingly wield the threat of a violent “general strike” and, as a result, shut down all industrial production, thereby enabling a revolutionary takeover of the means of production. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Sorel didn’t think that the reality of a general strike was necessary, nor even the reality of a movement that could accomplish such a strike if necessary. Rather, Sorel believed that all that mattered was the idea of the strike, the perception that such a thing might be possible. Sorel referred to this as the glorious “myth” of the general strike, a manipulation of observation and assessment that would be both powerful enough to frighten the capitalists and create heroic workers willing to fight and die for the cause.
Although he is largely forgotten to history, Sorel’s theory of revolution and his idea of the glorious myth became important and effective tools in the leftist arsenal for shaping and directing public opinion. He argued—and history has confirmed—that the creation and promulgation of myths is much more practical and persuasive than are economic theories or obtuse philosophical discussions.
Today, we no longer talk about “myths.” We talk about “narratives”—which are, essentially, the same thing. Like Sorel’s heroic myth, narratives are versions of the truth, specifically cultivated to spur heroic action or, in some cases, non-action. In the case of the latter, almost a decade ago, Ben Hunt—one of the co-founders of Perscient, a narrative-focused investment research company—wrote about the Civil Rights movement and the creation of the narrative that encouraged good, decent, non-racist white Southerners (like his father) to remain unengaged from the fight against Jim Crow and for equality:
Alabama media coverage—the media coverage that my father would have seen—focused entirely on the agency of the NAACP in breaking the law. There was zero assessment or discussion of the law itself. There was an enormous assessment of the de facto illegality of the acts and the intentional use of children to perform illegal acts.… THAT’S the Narrative that my father heard. THAT’S the Narrative that moderate whites all over the South heard. It didn’t turn my father into a segregationist or a racist. But that was never the intent. The intent was to take my father off the political board. By constructing a dominant and immersive Narrative where opposing the status quo was defined as criminal, status quo institutions made it impossible for my father to actively support the civil rights movement.
This is not unlike the narrative emphasized today by the Trump administration. Look at the headlines or especially at the social media posts of Trump-friendly journalists and others: it’s all about the criminals arrested by ICE, or the innocents killed by illegal immigrants, or the law enforcement officers murdered by immigration “protestors.” To be clear, all of this is 100% accurate, true, and relevant. Thanks to the fecklessness and recklessness of the Biden Administration, the United States has a massive problem with violent and criminal illegal aliens. This is indisputable. But it is also only a part of the illegal immigration story. It is the part that the administration and its supporters want us to hear. “What we are doing is good and right and just. Only criminals and their allies could think otherwise.”
Of course, the Trump team is hardly the only constructor of narratives in this case. Indeed, its narrative creation is nowhere near as aggressive and unrelenting as its opponents’.
This, too, is reminiscent of the Civil Rights movement. The advocates of civil rights were hardly passive observers of their fates. They too worked long and hard to craft the right version of the truth for the world to see. As Hunt notes, “E.D. Nixon [the head of the NAACP in Alabama and, more or less, the stage manager of the bus boycotts] played a hell of a metagame!” It took some time, obviously, but eventually, Nixon’s vision was adopted by most of the rest of the country, which resulted in the end of segregation and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The differences between then and now, however, are twofold. For starters, the civil rights advocates were inarguably in the right. The laws against which they protested were morally corrupt. Theirs was a righteous cause. By contrast, the anti-ICE and pro-immigration protestors have no such moral clarity. The laws they abhor today were perfectly acceptable two years ago—just as they were abhorrent six years ago and perfectly acceptable ten years ago. They oppose Trump (or Republicans more generally), not the laws themselves. The nation’s immigration laws may, in fact, need revision, but those laws were enacted by bipartisan majorities and are not obviously morally unjust. As for the tactics that the left opposes as brutal and unjustifiable, those are, by and large, a result of the protests and the protestors themselves. This is an oversimplification, of course, but ICE agents wouldn’t need to mask their faces, get rough with white boomer ladies, or use force against Tren de Aragua suspects if the left would behave as it did during the Biden or Obama administrations. Yes, ICE has escalated its tactics, but largely by necessity.
In other words, the left’s narrative today, while technically true, nevertheless serves only to corrupt reality.
The second difference between the Civil Rights era and today is the quality of the leaders and the creators of the myths on the side of the “resistance.” I have written repeatedly (at least three times in the pages of American Greatness) about the psychological motivation that animates the angry and sometimes violent social and political collective actions of our age. In short, normal, average, everyday men and women are desperate for community, desperate for belonging, and desperate to make heroes of themselves for all the world to see and revere. They “get involved” to be part of the in-group and “take a stand” for what they have been convinced is important.
What I’ve never written about—and maybe never even realized until now—is that this isn’t a phenomenon that is exclusive to normal people, the country class. It predominates among our political and cultural leaders as well. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, for example, sees himself not as the head of the executive branch of his state’s government, but as a noble statesman, saving the poor, oppressed masses from the clutches of oppression. A weak and impotent man in real life, Walz has been taken advantage of by every fraudster, fly-by-nighter, and flibbertigibbet in the upper Midwest. He knows now that he was chosen as his party’s vice presidential nominee specifically because he was expendable. After all, the party’s elders knew full well that Kamala Harris was going to lose and didn’t care that his career would be destroyed in the process. And so, he talks tough. He blusters about “fighting” the evildoers. He threatens civil war. And he does it all from the comfort of the governor’s mansion.
The only thing Walz has going for him is the fact that his feebleness is somehow, some way, miraculously eclipsed by that of his fellow Minnesotan, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. I can think of more than a few words to describe Frey and his wretchedness, but none are printable in a family publication. He may be the most pathetic excuse for a man ever to walk the face of the earth. And he knows it—which is why he drops F-bombs at press conferences, pretends that he is “cool” with his skinny jeans and his dance routines, and encourages other people to put themselves in harm’s way, while he worries about whether or not his hair looks good.
Do you know why Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail served as such a powerful testimony to the righteousness of the Civil Rights cause? Well, in part, it’s because the letter is eloquently and engagingly written. In bigger part, however, it’s because it was written from a Birmingham jail. MLK had the courage to stand up for his convictions. Walz, Frey, and the rest of the Democratic politicians are perfectly happy to let others do their dirty work and pay the price for their resistance LARPing.
And that, by the way, is what Renee Good did the other day. She paid the price for others’ LARPing. She put herself in a bad situation, no doubt. And she made her own terrible decisions. But she was manipulated into doing so by the narratives crafted by some of the weakest and most cowardly “leaders” in American history, all of whom fashioned themselves the heroes of their stories.
Stephen R. Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/01/12/myth-narratives-and-the-death-of-renee-good/
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