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The Plantation Never Died: How Incarceration Fuels the Corporation Slavery did not end in 1865. It evolved. The plantation was never dismantled; it was absorbed into the corporation of white supremacy. What once happened under the whip now happens under the law. The same system that auctioned Africans on blocks now auctions prison contracts. The same hunger for Black labor, Black profit, and Black control still feeds—only the chains have changed. \ From the moment the 13th Amendment carved out its exception—"except as punishment for crime"—the corporation had its loophole. Freedom was offered with one hand and stolen with the other. Black life was criminalized, policed, and funneled back into the system, not as citizens, but as assets—bodies to be tracked, exploited, and controlled. This was no accident. Vagrancy laws, Black Codes, and convict leasing became corporate policy long before mass incarceration had a name. The courts, the police, the prisons—all became subsidiaries...

Misinformation

If fear is the spark, misinformation is the fuel. The corporation doesn’t just control with cages and guns—it controls with stories.

From the very beginning, lies have been dressed up as truth to justify violence. Enslaved Africans were called “savages,” so their labor could be stolen in the name of “civilization.” Jim Crow painted Black people as criminals, so segregation looked like safety. During the “war on drugs,” entire communities were demonized so that mass incarceration could be sold as “justice.” After 9/11, Muslims were branded as terrorists so endless wars and surveillance could be disguised as “protection.”

The pattern never changes:

  1. Pick a villain. A scapegoat, a face for the fear.

  2. Spread the lie. Repeat it in newspapers, on TV, now on social media—until it feels like common sense.

  3. Justify the violence. When the state arrests, bombs, cages, or kills, it doesn’t look like oppression. It looks like safety.

  4. Move on to the next group. Yesterday it was slaves. Then it was immigrants. Then it was protestors. Tomorrow, it could be you.

Now, the battlefield has shifted. Lies no longer crawl—they fly at the speed of Wi-Fi. A headline, a meme, a deepfake video can circle the globe before truth has even opened its eyes. Algorithms don’t care about accuracy; they care about attention. Outrage, fear, division—these spread faster than facts, and the corporation knows it.

Think about it:

  • A protestor becomes a “thug” in a 15-second clip stripped of context.

  • An immigrant family becomes an “invasion” through one viral headline.

  • A politician’s mistake becomes a scandal amplified by bots, while real corruption gets buried under noise.

  • Entire communities are fed targeted ads designed to pit neighbor against neighbor.

Misinformation today is more dangerous than ever because it doesn’t just convince us of lies—it isolates us into different realities. Two people standing in the same street, breathing the same air, scrolling the same phone—yet living in completely different worlds shaped by what the feed chooses to show.

This is how misinformation works: it makes oppression look like order, and truth look like chaos. It convinces the public to cheer for their neighbor’s suffering, never realizing they are next in line.

But history teaches us something else too: truth always survives. Enslaved people sang it in the fields. Activists shouted it from jail cells. Families passed it down when textbooks erased it. Truth is a stubborn thing—it waits, patient, until someone is brave enough to speak it again.

Misinformation shapes headlines. But truth shapes movements. And every generation that refuses the lie proves the same thing: the corporation is not invincible.

The danger isn’t just that we are being lied to. The danger is that we are being trained to prefer the lie—until we no longer recognize the truth when it stands before us.

And once the truth is buried deep enough, the corporation doesn’t need chains—it only needs your silence.