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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

An AI Response by "Caitlin Johnstone" to Frank Visser

Joseph Dillard / ChatGPT

I asked Chat GPT to respond to Frank Visser's Critique of Caitlin Johnstone as if it were Caitlin Johnstone. Frank's essay is good. I recommend you read it before diving into this one: This is what Chat GPT's “Caitlin Johnstone” said:

“Frank Visser has written what appears at first glance to be a balanced assessment of my work. He praises my willingness to question power, acknowledges the documented history of Western propaganda, recognizes that mainstream journalism repeatedly launders government narratives into public consciousness, and even admits that independent media has performed a valuable democratic function.

Then he spends several thousand words trying to reassure readers that the real danger isn't the world's most sophisticated propaganda system—it's people like me who point at it. That's an interesting allocation of concern.

Visser repeatedly warns about my alleged tendency toward “epistemic inversion,” by which he means becoming so skeptical of Western narratives that I might not scrutinize their adversaries enough. Fair enough. Every writer has biases, including me. I've never claimed otherwise. What I object to is the extraordinary asymmetry with which this concern is raised.

Where are the endless essays warning about the epistemic inversion of The New York Times, which uncritically amplified lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Where are the treatises on the BBC's systematic dependence on military and intelligence sources? Where are the philosophical meditations on CNN's habit of reporting anonymous claims from US officials as though they are established facts?

Those institutions didn't merely make mistakes. They helped manufacture public consent for wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

When the establishment media launders propaganda into consensus reality, we're told this is an unfortunate institutional failure. When independent journalists challenge those narratives, suddenly everyone discovers an urgent concern for methodological rigor. Forgive me if I don't find that convincing.

Visser says I begin with the question, “Who benefits from us believing this story?” as though this were some kind of methodological defect. I'd suggest it's one of the first questions every serious political journalist should ask.

Governments lie. Intelligence agencies lie. Military organizations lie. Corporate media owners have interests. Defense contractors have interests. Think tanks have donors. Political parties have agendas. If you don't begin by examining power and incentives, you're not doing political journalism. You're consuming public relations.

Visser also repeats one of the most common criticisms of my work—that I supposedly give insufficient attention to the crimes or ambitions of governments opposed to Washington.

Here's what critics like Visser consistently fail to understand.

I'm an Australian writer. I write primarily for Western audiences living inside the US-led information ecosystem. My government participates in US wars. My tax dollars support US military infrastructure. My media system overwhelmingly reproduces Western intelligence narratives. I have precisely zero influence over Russian state television, Chinese newspapers, or Iranian broadcasters. If Russian citizens want someone to critique Kremlin propaganda, there are Russians doing exactly that—often at great personal risk.

My responsibility is to challenge the propaganda machine that governs my society. If your house is on fire, it isn't hypocrisy to spend more time discussing your own roof than your neighbor's.

Visser repeatedly insists that I should distribute my skepticism more evenly. This sounds wonderfully reasonable until you examine the actual distribution of power. The United States maintains hundreds of overseas military bases. It spends more on its military than the next several countries combined. It imposes sanctions across the globe. It orchestrates coups. It arms proxy wars. It dominates international finance. Its entertainment industry shapes global consciousness. Its technology companies mediate much of the world's communication. Its intelligence agencies have extraordinary reach.

This isn't a moral observation. It's simply an observation about reality. When one empire possesses an unparalleled ability to shape the informational environment of much of the planet, spending disproportionate attention examining that empire isn't bias. It's proportionality.

Visser accuses me of reducing geopolitics to a story in which America is always the empire. America is the empire. That's not a slogan. It's an empirical description.

Empires don't cease being empires because they hold elections. They don't cease being empires because they outsource propaganda to privately owned media corporations instead of ministries of information. They don't cease being empires because they occasionally criticize themselves.

The United States projects military, economic, financial, technological, and cultural power on a planetary scale in a way no other nation currently does. Recognizing that isn't ideology. It's geography.

One of the more revealing aspects of Visser's essay is his repeated insistence that I should challenge “my own side.” This assumes I have a side. I don't.

I don't identify with Russia. I don't identify with China. I don't identify with Iran. I don't identify with Hamas. I don't identify with any government.

My side is ordinary human beings. That's why I've criticized atrocities committed by states and non-state actors alike.

But I refuse to participate in the peculiar Western ritual whereby every criticism of our own governments must first be balanced by an obligatory denunciation of their enemies. No one expects environmental activists to begin every discussion of fossil fuel companies by condemning solar panels. No one expects anti-corruption investigators to preface every report with an assurance that corruption exists elsewhere too. Only critics of empire are constantly instructed to reassure everyone that other governments also behave badly. That demand is political, not methodological.

Visser's most revealing phrase is “counter-narrative.” He repeatedly characterizes my work as providing a counter-narrative rather than pursuing reality, but that's precisely the trap.

I'm not interested in replacing one narrative with another. I'm interested in examining how narratives themselves are manufactured.

When governments tell us they must invade to preserve peace… When intelligence agencies anonymously leak claims conveniently supporting foreign policy objectives… When journalists quote anonymous officials dozens of times without demanding evidence… When think tanks funded by weapons manufacturers dominate television panels… When dissenting voices disappear from public discourse…

I'm less interested in which story wins than in exposing the machinery producing the stories.

That machinery exists. Its existence is no longer seriously disputed. Even mainstream journalists now openly acknowledge the revolving doors between media, intelligence agencies, governments, corporations, and defense industries.

Visser deserves credit for acknowledging much of this. Where I think he falls short is in recognizing the implications. If propaganda is systemic rather than incidental… If media dependence on power is structural rather than accidental… If information management is central to modern governance… Then independent journalists are not simply offering “another perspective.”

They're performing one of the few remaining corrective functions available in societies where formal press freedom coexists with deeply embedded institutional conformity.

Could independent media become tribal? Of course. Could Substack develop its own echo chambers? Absolutely. Human beings are susceptible to confirmation bias everywhere, but there remains an important asymmetry.

The establishment narrative possesses the backing of governments, intelligence agencies, billion-dollar corporations, educational institutions, think tanks, advertisers, Hollywood, and much of the legacy press.

Independent media possesses… newsletters. To write as though these represent equivalent epistemic dangers is to mistake a garden hose for a flood.

The real danger isn't that too many people are questioning empire. The real danger is that after decades of catastrophic wars justified by fabricated narratives, mass surveillance normalized through fear, censorship rebranded as safety, and genocide reframed as self-defense, we're still having conversations about whether skepticism toward powerful institutions has perhaps gone just a little too far. No. It hasn't gone nearly far enough.”

While I don't know if Johnstone would agree with this AI representation of her perspective on Visser's essay, it raises a legitimate defense of her position.