Speech is power, speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. – Emerson
Hopefully I can get this blog post together tonight and posted. Yesterday, besides my real life chores, I spent more time watching Twitter than I really wanted to, but that’s a main battlefield in America’s ongoing scorched earth information war. I find it mind-numbingly boring, but I try to analyze the spin battles, watch how the main spin commandos on both sides operate and most importantly keep my attention focused on the messaging. The words are the main weapon in all spin information warfare. My words here aren’t as organized as I had hoped, but I am very tired these days taking care of my husband, trying to keep up with my housework and chores, while still following this spin info war. Haven’t decided yet which is more draining, lol.
Many news organizations & individual journalists have been aligned with spreading the Dems and Left talking points messaging since the 1990s, while still proclaiming “journalistic ethics” and “unbiased reporting”. Along with the news operations, the Left widely disseminates their spin messaging among the vast entertainment industry, where their spin messaging often gets spouted by celebrities, on TV talk shows and even written into scripts in TV shows and movies. The Dems and Left developed a vast network to disseminate their spin messaging.
Over the years, the Left has amassed a wide array of well-funded political groups working to increase the reach of their messaging, but they also have loads of professional political operatives, academics, data analysts, tech experts, polling groups, social psychologists, etc. working to improve their spin messaging operations. As I stated in previous posts, the Left had a lock on spin information warfare since the 1990s, when it made its debut in America by the Clinton war room political operatives.
The Left’s strategy has been to rely on “professionals” to hone their messaging using all sorts of testing messaging with focus groups and the modern tech savvy that retailers and advertisers use to lure Americans in with very deceptive language and sophisticated manipulation to play on people’s emotions. It’s a messaging operation that relies on long-established messaging collusion with the big media venues in America, except for talk radio, which the Right dominated since the 90s. The Left’s messaging is used to advance both Democrat politicians and political causes.
The Left’s spin messaging has been long-established, highly organized, run by professionals, but the Clinton political machine wields a heavy hand on the Democratic Party and since the spin operations began with Clinton loyalists, the most extreme scorched earth spin messaging efforts have gone into propping up the Clintons.
Trump borrowed his scorched earth spin from the Clinton model. Trump’s spin messaging operation begins and ends with bolstering Trump’s erratic tweeting and impromptu outbursts. Trump brags about his strategic thinking, but he’s a very impulsive reactionary. He’s more reactionary than the Left, taking to the streets and fainting couch hysterics constantly and that’s pretty darned reactionary. His spin operators end up rushing to clean-up and prop up Trump’s loose cannon guerilla attack spin messaging, which is more like a three-year old throwing a tantrum, determined to be the center of attention.
Trump’s erratic, impulsive way of operating requires his “Spin Force” to spend more time on damage control than on any sort of sophisticated political messaging like the Left operates. More often than not, even his own communications people in the White House can’t keep their messaging on track with Trump’s ever-changing opinions and outbursts. It’s constant discordant messaging. Hence, the FOX News Trumpathons evoke an amateurish third-world dictator’s media operations aura, where the media exists only to prop up the dictator and odd fits and starts are common, but when the TV switches to folk dancing or goes dark, beware there’s likely a coup attempt in progress. For instance after a damaging Trump outburst a few weeks back, Tucker Carlson was caught in limbo and went with UFOs, while Hannity went with more Hillary corruption hysteria, as they awaited some clue as to how to do damage control for Trump.
Beyond messaging glorifying Trump’s “greatness,” the ideological messaging all stems from simplistic, jingoistic sloganeering, which Trump and his Spin Force use to incite his followers. And while Trump’s larger spin messaging is a hobbled together effort, with FOX News being his largest news spin platform, he’s also amassed an array of pundits, political operatives and friends. As Trump has become more erratic in his tweeting and outbursts lately and the mainstream media goes into hysterics recycling through old 2016 Dump on Trump spin themes (his finances, the Russians, his women, his authoritarianism), his FOX News spinners revert to running endless whataboutism spin about Hillary & Obama corruption or nefarious “deep state” fear mongering, hysterically opining about Trump’s victimhood.
I expect Trump to escalate his spin efforts and to become more erratic in his outbursts, as the pressure builds with the Mueller investigation findings looming, pressure from Putin over Trump failing to deliver with “the ball in his court” and threats like Omarosa to Cohen all around him closing in.
Another dimension to this scorched earth spin info war is both sides gaslight and engage in projection constantly, not just Trump. For instance the Left and mainstream media ran a coordinated effort yesterday denouncing Trump’s attacks on the free press. Along with their hysteria about Trump’s attacks on the media, they project constantly about the grave threat Trump is to free speech in America.
While Trump’s “fake news” and “enemy of the people” spin assuredly deserve condemnation, it needs to be noted that the Left loves only the “free press” that backs their causes. The “fake news” spin is messaging Trump hijacked from the Left and turned it back on them. The Left has been working to silence political speech they find undesirable for many years with “hate speech” codes, PC efforts to dictate words that can and cannot be used, and constantly trying to find ways to limit speech on the right, casting those views as a threat to America. The initial “fake news” hysteria effort was meant to force social media to remove “fake news”, which really meant news leftist “fact-checkers” deemed fake. That quickly turned into a farce. Trump hijacked the term and mocks the mainstream media constantly. Trump however lies constantly too, so his “fake news” is as much of a farce as the initial “fake news” effort by the Left.
Another aspect to the Left’s hysteria, is it always is intended to manufacture a crisis, which they can use as cover to propel political action. Amidst the free speech sanctimony from the mainstream media there’s some ominous undertones, because they endlessly debated whether to not give air time to Trump (the POTUS) and to his WH spokespeople on the grounds they are liars, yet they reported on Obama “narratives”, which were assuredly bold-faced lies too. Yet there was never any hysteria about silencing Obama “narratives”. A couple of weeks ago the WH banned a pool reporter from a WH event, ostensibly because she was rude. The media went into full hysterics, then Trump baited them with more “enemy of the people” taunts. The media was back to:
libertybelle Retweeted Andrea Mitchell
Trump’s antics are disgusting, but so are the media’s. Lord, the media can never make up their minds about Trump outrage. Now you’re debating relying on one reporter’s reporting on Trump rallies and a week or so ago you were outraged a reporter was barred from a WH event
libertybelle added,
In a likely future scenario, where Trump’s chaotic outbursts escalate, the media and the Left, that yesterday were pontificating about free speech, would likely start touting ways to silence Trump, FOX news or Trump-supporting pundits. This movement from the Left is already happening with Alex Jones, shadow-banning of conservatives on social media and bans of “undesirables”, as determined by liberals moderating social media platforms.
The solution in America is never to silence unpopular voices, it’s more free speech.
The attacks in this spin info war can digress to a level of pettiness and childishness that boggles my mind. From Trump’s petty name-calling to attacks about Melania wearing high heels on the plane to Houston flooding to recently some Trump Spin Force commandos started mocking some Never Trump conservatives, like Bill Kristol,who organize annual cruises for their group, by retweeting Kristol’s tweets and commenting with an emoticon of a ship. This is the level of childishness back and forth. Here’s an example of the depths of Trump sycophants:
MoreWe have been duped into viewing politicians as royalty when our Founders intended them to be only temp public servants. Complaints
@realDonaldTrump is not “presidential” are because he acts like one of us-exactly why our Founders fought in Rev War to win independence from royalty
“Duped into viewing politicians as royalty” – what the hell kind of nonsense is that??? Really, “he acts like one of us???” If you’re engaged in petty-name-calling or bragging about grabbing women by their you-know-what, like Trump brags about, you truly are acting like a lowlife jerk. If acting “presidential” is too high of a bar, how about acting like we expect young children to behave??? Like I said at the beginning of this post, following the spin war on Twitter is draining, but I have been following it, analyzing it, and trying to find a strategy to defeat scorched earth spin information war in America since 1999.
I believe this form of mass media information warfare is a grave threat to our republic.
I think there are numerous Russian front operations embedded among the right-wing punditry and news media. Now, here’s where the Left runs off screaming about “Russian collusion,” but the truth is the Russians and other hostile foreign intel penetrated America’s media, political system and especially American academia controlled by Leftists, decades ago. The Soviets found more dupes and fellow-travelers among American academia than they will possibly ever need. The American Left is awash in brainwashed Marxist, socialists and anti-American zealots. The entire PC movement reeks of old Soviet propaganda messaging. I have believed, long before 2016, that our American media and political system were deeply infiltrated by hostile foreign intelligence operators.
The threat from hostile front operations, I believe comes in ways like yesterday, some Trump Spin Force Twitter commandos were tweeting about some CIA failure in regards to Chinese spying during the Obama years news story(to smear John Brennan). That news story was reported in Zero Hedge, a site reported to routinely run Russian propaganda. What I know about Zero Hedge is during 2016, Drudge Report (a news aggregator with a visually unappealing site, that has outsized political reach in America) removed the site, RedState (a site that had gone very anti-Trump), from its listings and added Zero Hedge. Zero Hedge “reporting” is often picked up by Trump spinners and on the right.
Another Drudge Report effort occurred over a number of years, before 2016, where Drudge began highlighting stories from Alex Jones’ site. Drudge worked to mainstream Alex Jones. Russian agitprop efforts aren’t geared only toward particular elections, they have always been long-term efforts to be a “march through the institutions”. The Drudge Report leaped onto the American political scene by breaking the Lewinsky scandal
An honest assessment of America’s scorched earth spin war is Trump and his Spin Force are vile liars. The Dems & Left with the many in the mainstream media spinning for them and constantly working to create hysteria are vile liars too. And then we have hostile foreign intel operators gleefully working to egg on both sides and agitate wherever they can.
All in all a pretty grim assessment for the future of America’s political institutions and the news media.
I believe the only hope for America is to defeat scorched earth spin information war, which doesn’t rest with Trump or the Left’s #Resist efforts “winning”. Here’s where we get to my strategic take on the situation. For spin information warfare to work requires massive amounts of mass media collusion to spread the spin messaging and a gullible, lazy, ill-informed populace, who believe all these lies and mindlessly follow.
A news media committed to strong journalistic ethics and careful, factual reporting would eliminate a large volume of the spin messaging in America. Politicians benefit from spin, so the chances of them forsaking spin (lying) is probably hopeless. However, every American has the power to defeat spin messaging in their own lives by recognizing it and not buying into it. That requires a heaping load of learning to think for yourself and resisting reacting to every hysterical news report or piece of information to flit across your social media feed or TV screen.
Efforts to defeat this scorched earth SPIN information war consuming America’s soul seem like a forlorn hope, but I’m going to continue to be one voice speaking out against the use of SPIN information warfare – that’s the bigger picture battle than the Trump vs. the Left/mainstream media war of words.
libertybelle diaries 
I wanted to refer back to an old blog post, where I explained the military strategy that explains Trump’s ability to win control of spin cycles against the vastly larger and much more sophisticated Left/mainstream media spin operations: https://libertybellediaries.com/2018/01/10/trumps-ooda-loop/
I feel confident that Trump has no clue about OODA loops, but I believe it’s an innate ability of a fast-talking con man, who knows his marks.