Alt-Media Needs To Stop Overdosing On Copium & Finally Recognize Reality

President Putin himself cautioned Russian strategic forecasters against indulging in wishful thinking earlier this summer and it’s about time that the Alt-Media Community finally listens to him. What’s being proposed in this piece isn’t impossible so long as key influencers retain their integrity and are also publicly held to account by their audience.

The Alt-Media Community (AMC) has been overdosing on copium, which refers to “5D chess” conspiracy theories that spin every setback as a success, for years already but everything got out of control since the start of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine. It’s understandable why those who are sympathetic to this newly restored world power’s envisaged leadership of the Global Revolutionary Movement in the New Cold War want to always portray it as winning, but they’re ultimately doing more harm than good.

President Putin himself cautioned Russian strategic forecasters against indulging in wishful thinking earlier this summer and it’s about time that the AMC finally listens to him. By artificially inflating their audience’s hopes through their incessant spewing of increasingly ridiculous “5D chess” conspiracy theories, they’re only setting them up for an even more painful inevitable letdown the next time that something disadvantageous happens, after which they risk becoming susceptible to hostile innuendo.

For instance, those who’ve been literally brainwashed into thinking that Russia is “always winning” might eventually experience such intense cognitive dissonance the next time another undeniable setback occurs that they begin extending credence to claims that deliberately misportray its policies. Some of its supporters are already growing disillusioned upon realizing that Russia doesn’t reign supreme in Central Asia or the South Caucasus after recent conflicts there discredited the AMC’s spin.  

They’re only a proverbial hop, skip, and a jump away from wondering whether the US-led West’s Mainstream Media (MSM) was at least partially correct in claiming that Russia is supposedly a so-called “declining power”. Had they been accurately informed of its policies in the former Soviet space and the limitations inherent to practicing them, then they might not have been all that disappointed or even surprised by the latest events in what they’d come to regard as Russia’s “sphere of influence”.

The fact of the matter is that Russia is simply one of several poles that are emerging in the global systemic transition to multipolarity, all of which are presently struggling to find their place in the new world order amidst this transformative decade’s “Age of Complexity”. Each of them will experience setbacks and successes, with none ever reigning supreme like the US did during the brief period of unipolarity, nor should any of them ever be portrayed as “infallible” like it was during that time either.

Everyone, especially those who rely on the AMC as their trusted source of news and analysis, must accept this objectively existing and easily verifiable fact. The de facto fetishization of certain players in the emerging Multipolar World Order is no different than obsessing over Marvel superheroes in the sense that both are equally immature and speak more to the specific person’s underlying psychological instabilities than anything else.

Therein lies the unspoken secret of the AMC in that a lot of it is literally a grift carried out by those who desperately crave clout and/or salivate at the thought of soliciting donations by appealing to their audience’s wishful thinking fantasies. The MSM does the same, but most of the world no longer regards it as credible, unlike the AMC to which many have since turned across the last few decades in response. It’s therefore incumbent that the latter drastically improves the accuracy of its work.

To that end, those who propagate “5D chess” conspiracy theories should be politely challenged by their audience and held to account by them whenever their predictions fail to unfold. The honest among them will usually account for why that happened in forthcoming information products, but such examples are far and few between precisely because of the grift that drives many key AMC influencers, not to mention their egos that also play a major role too.

In the context of the Ukrainian Conflict, countless such influencers have already been discredited after they predicted a swift Russian victory and then spun their geostrategic superhero’s setbacks in Kharkov and Kherson Regions as some sort of cunning trap for Kiev. There’s nothing wrong in and of itself with making an ultimately discredited prediction, but those who do so should have the decency to publicly account for why they were wrong in order to retain credibility in the eyes of their audience.

After all, many folks trust key AMC influencers because they’re considered to be accurate sources of news and analysis due to their principled opposition to the MSM and embrace of multipolar views, but they’re quickly beginning to sour on most of them after they’ve been proven wrong so many times and failed to publicly account for this. One needs only to remember the optimistic predictions about Russia supposedly plotting an impending move on Odessa to realize how out of control it’s all gotten.

It might seem like so long ago that many were expecting this but it was only just as recently as literally the last few days ago that the AMC stopped talking about it after Russia announced its partial pullback from Kherson Region that thus made this scenario all but impossible to expect anytime soon if at all. It’s one thing to advocate for Russia to do something and explain the reasons why this should happen and another entirely to repeatedly precondition the public into expecting something that never happens.

That’s immoral because it leads to their audience’s false expectations inevitably ending in painful disappointment time and again, after which folks risk becoming susceptible to hostile innuendo about Russia’s policies and the motives behind them out of desperation to make sense of their cognitive dissonance. The latest military development in the special operation should urgently serve as a wake-up call exposing the wishful thinking that’s consumed the AMC at best and the grift that infects it at worst.

Going forward, every AMC influencer must acknowledge the responsibility that they have to their audience in publicly accounting for whenever their most dramatic predictions fall to unfold. They mustn’t sweep them under the rug any longer but should instead be politely challenged by their audience on social media to explain why whatever it was didn’t happen so that everyone can learn the real reasons. This will in turn help the AMC produce work that more accurately reflects reality.

Anything less than that isn’t just a disservice to the AMC as a whole, but also a strategic soft power risk to Russia due to the credible chances that members of this community might consider “defecting” by embracing hostile innuendo about that country’s policies and the motives behind them. This multipolar Great Power mustn’t continue being deified as the subject of a new secular religion but finally regarded for what it truly is, a major player in the global systemic transition but one that isn’t infallible.

Like all of its peers in the international community both similarly sized and comparatively lesser, it’s bound to experience its fair share of setbacks. That said, radically reversing the AMC’s dogma by pumping out doom-and-gloom scenarios is just as counterproductive as continuing to ridiculously deify Russia since the first-mentioned basically amounts to amplifying the MSM’s own wishful thinking fantasies. A careful balance must therefore be struck in order to avoid either extreme.

It'll take time, but what’s being proposed in this piece isn’t impossible so long as key AMC influencers retain their integrity and are also publicly held to account by their audience. This symbiotic relationship is integral to the community’s success, without which the former will risks being consumed by ego and grift while the latter will risk being influenced by hostile innuendo and doom-and-gloom narratives. There’s never been a better time for the AMC to reform than now, which must start as soon as possible.