Speech is power, speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Left’s hysteria over “Russian influence”, to “Russian collusion” and now “Russian interference” resonates like a McCarthyite Red Scare. The Left’s hysteria amounts to, “Oh my goodness, there are diabolical Russians around every corner trying to control our minds, our elections, even our very democracy.” And of course, their remedies to stop the Russian influence operations, in order to ostensibly preserve our constitutional republic, always come back to trying to undo the 2016 election, which of course, there is absolutely no constitutional means to do. That would mean discounting the results of a legal election, where millions of Americans voted Donald J. Trump and he won the electoral college vote.
To save us from these diabolical Russians, we’ve got Pauline Revere, aka the smartest woman in the world, riding the TV talk circuit, combining her sore loser book tour of 1,001 reasons why she lost the election, combined with her new spin effort to sell Americans the lie that the 2016 election was not legitimate. She is colluding with her supporters in the liberal media and Hollywood, using the same mass media information warfare that she is asserting Trump and the Russians used.
These massive media SPIN efforts work only with massive collusion with mass media, who ruthlessly repeat the same talking points and phrases. This creates an opinion cascade, as Americans start repeating those same talking points (it’s a form of mass media brainwashing). The political operatives and their friends in the media then begin to repeat the poll numbers, to reinforce those spun messages and create the illusion they reflect the “will of the people”. Since the 90s, this phrase equating polls as some form of legitimate expression of the “will of the people” has been repeated and reinforced by politicians and the media, especially by those on the Left, who mastered this form of mass media information warfare to brainwash those, the Left’s sleaziest political operatives dubbed “low information voters”
The key point about the 2016 election is Jeh Johnson, the Obama Homeland Security Director, stated that there was no tampering detected on election day. That makes the election LEGITIMATE.
The Russians’ escalated information warfare activities during the election should be investigated, but in our effort to “protect” Americans from “influence”, more laws or crackdowns on speech will do nothing to protect Americans, but will assuredly do more to destroy our constitutionally protected liberties than anything the Russians can do with their info war against American democracy.
As someone who pointed out the information warfare being waged using “SPIN cycles” since 1998, to include the vicious gang-up attacks on the Excite message boards during the Clinton impeachment, this hysteria about Russian information warfare now seems laughable. All of a sudden, the people who were the most vicious combatants using this vile form of information warfare are hysterically warning that it’s a dire threat to American democracy…
Again, Donald Trump was only able to knock off 17 other Republican candidates during the GOP primary with the knowing and willing COLLUSION of CNN, MSNBC, and FOX news, along with many print journalists and pundits SPINNING his talking points and memes 24/7, running his rallies live and in their entirety and touting his “GOP Insurgency”. This was Bill Clinton’s triangulation strategy. A leaked Podesta email referred to this as their Pied Piper strategy. They wanted the most extreme Republican candidate to win the GOP primary and they were colluding with the media to sell Trump. Trump received billions of dollars worth of free media in the primary.
The Bill Clinton triangulation strategy was simple: paint Trump as the far-right fascist kook, paint Bernie as the far-left commie kook, clearing the middle for Queen Hillary to prance back into the White House.
It backfired.
Mueller may find criminal actions relating to Trump and/or some of his campaign associates. If so, impeachment could very well be a legitimate remedy. The Clinton resistance efforts will make it harder for Congress to act, because their constant information warfare is as counterproductive to American democracy as what the Russians are doing. And then to compound the mess, President Trump is waging the same kind of no holds barred information war too. They all want to control the hearts and minds of the American people using SPIN, relentlessly repeating and assaulting the American people with gross distortions of the truth and outright lies.
Pauline Revere is several decades late warning about Russian information warfare in America.
Yesterday CNN reported on a fake Tea Party Twitter account and Facebook is working to stop Russian political ad buys. but this hysteria about Russians infiltrating right-wing political sites is so myopic, that it’s stunning. The Russians infiltrated the American Left, from their political institutions to academia to Hollywood, thoroughly since inception of the Comintern in 1919. The Russians have a century’s worth of experience building an information warfare capability within the bastions of the American political Left.
I strongly suspect they never left when the Soviet Union collapsed. I believe SPIN information warfare had some strong foreign information warfare influences in it since the 1990s, although I don’t have proof of that. All I have is my personal experience during the Clinton impeachment drama, stemming from writing comments on the Excite message boards. I don’t have proof of what happened there either.
However, if I’m right, then the problem of Russian influence, using mass media information warfare, is larger than just 2016, President Trump, FOX news and Russian run “American right-wing” twitter accounts and sites. The Soviets had a very captive audience among American academia, Leftist politicians, the press and Hollywood, to spread their messaging. The Russians didn’t have to work hard to find plenty of useful idiots among the Left to carry their messaging .
That the Russians now have FOX News and many other information avenues working 24/7 to pervert conservative Republican messaging and replace it with a mishmash of Trumpian messaging, strikes me as they now have the means to undermine both political parties, Hollywood, academia, and the media. That “GOP Insurgency” was meant to destroy the Republican Party. The Clintons have left the Democratic Party in total disarray. Congress is dysfunctional. The courts still function thankfully.
The last bastion where The Constitution is revered, protected and defended is in the U.S. military and President Trump is working to undermine the integrity of that institution with his PR blitz to bolster his support among the military. Messaging targeting the U.S. military, to undermine morale and military values, will escalate, I believe. I expect much of that undermining messaging to be at the hands of President Trump, with his endless stream of “don’t take him literally” strong-man word salads and using military backdrops to bolster his “popular” image.
The messaging war is going to get crazier, of that you can be sure.
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