🎧 Audio Companion to Field Note 3¾ — The Rainbow Connection: Don’t Believe Everything You Think
This bonus episode kicks off Season Three of No Shortcuts to Now — a journey through myth, memory, and meaning in turbulent times.
Here, frogs croak, flies buzz, and media bubbles shimmer — but behind the noise lurks something older: the timeless tricks of propaganda. Inspired by Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and the playful wisdom of Kermit the Frog, this Field Note explores how digital echo chambers twist our thoughts and how reclaiming independent thinking can be an act of resistance.
From enchanted fairy-tale frogs to authoritarian disinformation campaigns, we trace how stories shape us — and how to break free from the ones that bind us.
If it resonates, share it. These stories grow stronger when they travel.
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“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
— Michel de Montaigne
“Don’t believe everything you think.” This paradox keeps me honest — and sane. It helps me let go of certain echoes that bounce around in the back of my brain. For not all brain activity counts as thinking.
I have to admit: not all the voices in that cave are mine. Nor do I have to affirm every one of them. But I do have to listen, if only to discern which make sense — and which are nonsense.
In his little gem of a book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder urges us to pay attention, and to beware a certain kind of nonsense, a habitual non-thinking that, in the aggregate, leads us barefoot down the primrose path, and into the nightmare of a post-truth society. He warns: “Post-truth is pre-fascism.” And so he advises:
“Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey the thing you think everyone else is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.”
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Which brings me to a cautionary tale.
Imagine: you’re sitting at the counter in a Denny’s, reading the news through the window of your iPhone — minding your own business, sipping your coffee. Just as you add a touch more milk, maybe some sugar, a toothless old man on the next stool turns, mutters in a gravelly voice, and fixes his foggy eyes on you:
“Lemme tell you somethin’, son. You think it’s just coffee you’re drinkin’? That there oat milk’s got estrogenic disruptors — the same kinds that’s turnin’ the freakin’ frogs woke!”
You pause. You reflect. You turn inward.
Fog.
You thought it was whole milk. Now you see.
The old man was right: it’s oat.
California.
And in the vast expanse of your own mind, you toss a small stone. A splash — ker-plump! — and from the deep, the gravelly echo returns:
“…turnin’ the freakin’ frogs woke… frogs woke… woke…”
And you shake your head.
“Woke frogs… that ain’t right.”
A pause. Your brow furrows.
“But… Kermit?”
A thought bubbles up.
“Is that why there are so many songs about rainbows?”
You nod, and frown.
“Well, that just ain’t right!”
Turning your mind’s eye again outward, your attention latches onto a lone fly trapped in an empty Coke bottle by the window — the last of his swarm — struggling to get out and be free.
You swallow hard, grab a napkin, dab your eyes, and throw down a tip — a 15% tip… just enough jingle to signal virtue.
And besides, Forty Seven said seven hundred times through his trickle-down lips: no more taxes on tips.
“No more taxes on tips… taxes on tips… on tips…”
You stand, as if to protest. The fog has lifted. You’ve made the rainbow connection.
Damn PBS. Damn Miss Piggy. Damn the corporate pork of America’s mass-produced flyswatters.
It’s all rigged.
Then you nod to the wise old man with foggy eyes, pull back your shoulders, puff out your chest, and leave a parrot — I mean a patriot — once more: a deeply proud boy… but just a little perplexed.
Woke frogs?
Cultivating a voice you can trust.
We live in a world so saturated with alt-facts, conspiracy theories, and propaganda that we’re nearly amphibious. One moment we walk upright on rocky trails — the next, we’re swimming through language so fluid, it’s hard to tell which way is up.
We’re steeped in phrases, slogans, narratives, and interpretations — authored by others, many of whom have anything but our best interests at heart, and are all too ready to turn us into croaking frogs, gig us clean, and fry up our meaty legs.
No, we’re not battered by North Korean–style loudspeakers, pounding the regime’s message into our skulls with syntactical precision.
But we do resemble that other frog — the one in the well — unaware of the world beyond its narrow rim.
And perhaps worse: we dwell in vast, dripping digital caves, mistaking echoes for truth — and the glow of light through retinal screens for the world itself.
We drift through them in algorithmic thought-bubbles, half-awake — crossing busy streets while staring into the glow of our phones, unable to look up, and like that fly in the Coke bottle at Denny’s, next to the window, unable to get out.
Blown along by propagandists who, if nothing else, know how to blow hard.
These hucksters churn out thought-bubbles by the million — and make millions selling us down the road.
We float through their thoughts daily — or hop — and all too often, mistake their echoes for our own ideas.
And that’s how frogs get slowly boiled.
Take, for example, the bubble-lord Elon Musk. He spent $44 billion on Twitter to do more than boil frogs:
he purchased public consciousness below market value.
A shrewd businessman, he grasped what others missed: that stupidity could be commodified — or weaponized — that people could mistake the thoughts of others for their own.
He understood what perched, chirping in its branches — and how to rouse the beguiling serpent below.
He knew how to rattle the roots of our digital tree of knowledge, and shake the truth loose from its limbs, like Ratatoskr on the world-tree Yggdrasil — as explored here in The Trailhead (an introduction to the Ratatoskr metaphor), and further in The Ratatoskr Files, Unearthed.
And he’s not alone. Russia, too, has loosed its digital bears — automated and enraged — to claw at the trunk of public discourse.
Some influencers — knowingly or not — have even paraded these little Siberian “puppies” through our public parks, where our children still play in the shade and climb public trees.
In short: propaganda has never been more widespread, more intimate, or more relentless. We are living through one of the most heavily propagandized eras in history.
The skill now required to avoid being swept into some nefarious character’s enchanted thought-bubble — or mauled by a Russian bear disguised as a puppy — is extraordinarily high.
We need tools. Powerful tools.
We need leaden boots — not valenki — the kind that keep our feet on the ground and prevent us from being swept away by shimmering lies or tugged aloft by someone else’s thought-bubble.
We need bear spray — and the courage to use it on puppies.
And we need to keep our imaginations alive — and our language our own.
When we stay too plugged into the here-this-minute churn of media — carrying our captors’ apps and tools in our own pockets — the repetition of propaganda leaves a kind of hard-packed scar on the brain. A shortcut to now.
But when we recall old myths, ancient ideas, and modern philosophies — reimagining them with care, and using them to reinterpret the world, as we do here at No Shortcuts to Now — we carve new paths. We give our minds better trails to follow, and new vistas from which to see.
From up here, the map begins to change.
And with that clarity, we reclaim something essential: our independence of mind.
As Snyder reminds us: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”
In reclaiming our language and imagination, we reclaim freedom itself.
☕ Help fight propaganda — one cup of coffee at a time. ☕️
Even a small gesture keeps this work caffeinated, independent, and ad-free.
🐸 If you want the frogs to woke, tap ❤️ so the work doesn’t croak.
📌 Related Waypoints:
🐿️ Waypoint 1.3: The Trailhead — Rototaskr, the trickster squirrel
🎭 Field Note 1.3(b): The Rototaskr Files — Mythic trickster masks, and a wound
🧠 Waypoint 1.4: The Map Is Not the Mountain — How shortcuts scar brain-paths
🧭 Want to follow the journey as it unfolds? 📘 Begin here
