Yep, I’m still on the scorched earth SPIN information war consuming America. I like doing timelines and then stepping back and looking at them, looking for patterns and trends that get lost in the rapidly shifting spin cycles in America.
SPIN information warfare began in America in the 1990s with the Clinton war room.
During the 90s, the constant spin back and forth escalated and America was enmeshed in constant Clinton scandals.
On the Right numerous media operations began to “expose the Clinton corruption” (the scare quotes in no way mean the Clintons weren’t corrupt, they mean that was the “mission” (ends, if you will) of the operations. For instance, Judicial Watch began and to me that looks like an American Wikileaks operation ferreting out every bit of FOIA info they can get their hands on and spinning it to the max against the Clintons & Dems. Many long-established conservative news media outlets joined the “expose Clinton corruption” efforts, but the thing is there was a constant effort to spin wild conspiracy theories to prod the Right further and further toward grassy knoll territory.
By the time Clinton Impeachment rolled around, the American Right was in full Clinton Derangement Syndrome mode. A couple of names come to mind as becoming overnight star agitation propaganda players on the Right. Matt Drudge and his Drudge Report broke the Lewinsky scandal and Ann Coulter became a firebrand pundit on cable TV and penned a book on High Crimes and Misdemeanors. Kellyanne Conway, back then Fitzpatrick, Laura Ingraham and the late Barbara Olson became pundit stars spinning against the Clintons. Kellyanne Conway worked for Frank Luntz (more of that polling kabuki inc. in America).
The Bush/Gore campaign was the entire hanging chad hysteria, followed by 8 years of Soros group-funded SPIN agitation propaganda, stirring Bush Derangement Syndrome. The name, David Brock comes to mind as a big right-wing agitprop player from the 90s working for conservative The American Spectator, who then switched to becoming Soros’ right-hand man running a vast network of agitprop groups on the Left.
America has been played back and forth since the 90s – imagine some movement like Black Lives Matter, which agitates racial distrust and pits black Americans against the police – to discredit law enforcement in America.
Through the 2000s we had more agitprop and a full-blown right-wing effort emerged with the Tea Party movement sucking in American conservatives. And there was Obama Derangement with Birtherism. We’ve had non-stop hysterical SPIN info war working to tear America apart.
Ann Coulter has President Trump’s ear, Kellyanne Conway is in the WH whispering in his ear, and Laura Ingraham is on FOX talking at him too. The Murdoch/Soros efforts look to be the two biggest players working to tear America apart and I wonder if there are hostile foreign hands involved too.
Just for historical reference, the Soviets & East German Stasi loved using women to manipulate men.
I find it very interesting that Don Jr. now has a FOX News babe surrounding him. The POTUS has Kellyanne, Coulter and Ingraham prodding him. With Melania, I think it would be prudent to gather intelligence on Trump’s foreign business efforts and how Melania came into his orbit. Her subtle “cyber-bullying” cause and that “I Don’t Care” jacket smack of deliberate agitprop efforts to create more Trump Derangement on the Left. I liked her though and she seems so nice, so I hesitate to believe that, however I think a clear-eyed, unemotional investigative effort by our intelligence experts is long overdue analyzing this entire SPIN information warfare operation blowing across American media 24/7.
The Tea Party effort spawned a whole new cadre of agitprop operators on the right. The Glenn Beck operation was another massive con job, probably the test run for using the large crowd rally format to con conservatives, which Trump is using to great effect.
George Stepanoplouslos, a former Clinton War Room Spin Commando sits as ABC’s chief news anchor. The SPIN FORCES on both sides in America wield total control over American news media.
In recent years, I noticed that The Drudge Report began mainstreaming Alex Jones, featuring stories that were linked to Jones’s site. This took place over several years.
Some liberals were writing about the right-wing media empire being nothing but grifters and they are, but I believe it’s way worse than just the hawking merchandise and non-stop book mill efforts. Many of the commercials are geared to fan doomsday (Flight 93, anyone) hysteria.
We are getting close to Trump moving near impeachment territory and even America’s mayor is now so lost in the scorched earth spin info war that he said, “Truth isn’t truth”.
The POTUS and Don Jr. are being manipulated by women and even the State Dept spokeswoman is a FOX babe, who moved to the top of the food chain quickly there.
President Trump recently brought another FOX media pro, Bill Shine, into the White House as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications, so I’ve been concerned all the pieces are in place to orchestrate a massive political and constitutional crisis in America.
Last night POTUS tweeted:
I have asked Secretary of State
@SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.”@TuckerCarlson@FoxNews
Tucker Carlson’s show hyped this news and that tweet looks like someone other than the POTUS wrote it. I suspect it was meant to jazz the white nationalist element of the President’s base, but even more than that it sent the Left and mainstream media into hysteria mode again. In 2017 Trump retweeted an Ann Coulter tweet praising Jayda Fransen, a British far-right radical. She worked to make sure Trump saw that. This South Africa tweet, I believe someone else in the White House wrote that in coordination with FOX having Carlson hype that. On the Left there’s the Steele dossier working to fuel endless hysteria on both sides, but most alarming is the effort to heighten racial tensions again.
Timelines, oh my, a retired COL is a gung- ho Trump Spin Force Twitter commando – insulting and name-calling non-stop, betraying his Army values -like RESPECT, every step of the way. He was recruited by Breitbart. There’s a former military officer on the Left spewing non-stop Trump Derangement Syndrome too, much of it anti-military…
So many worrying signs all around in the America’s scorched earth SPIN information war and all our so called national security experts on TV do is join in the scorched earth SPIN hysteria.
Finding a way to peacefully and legally defeat America’s scorched earth SPIN information war is a grave national security imperative. We are ripe for hostile foreign efforts to push us into a major political crisis or system breakdown and we have no means to unify America around anything.
Scorched earth SPIN information war blowing hot across America 24/7 is nothing less than a mutually-assured suicide pact.
“Houston, we have a problem.”
libertybelle diaries 
I didn’t want to go on and on with this blog post, so I did a rather quick listing. Keep in mind that there were 8 years of Obama spin agitation propaganda creating birtherism, Tea Party movement, etc. The other recurring theme is there is widespread corruption in our political system. All in all, we are ripe for a major political crisis. The “Russian collusion” hysterics on both sides miss the point, I think. The Right rails that in 2016 the Obama administration didn’t act quickly enough to confront Russian cyber attacks. The Left rails Trump is colluding with the Russians, but I’ve been worried since 1998, when I started writing comments on the Excite message boards explaining that I thought spin was information warfare more at home in totalitarian countries.
What happened to me (Messages of mhere at the top of my blog), should never happen to any American citizen, that is why I continue to write about mass media spin information warfare and remain committed to exposing it and urging other Americans to work to defeat the mass media spin information war in America. I’ve been worried that the Russians never left when the Soviet Union collapsed, but that their efforts moved into a more diverse network of criminals and big money players, who have gotten filthy rich off of the spin wars manipulating Americans into mass hysterics and in-fighting. These types of hostile foreign elements would find a welcome home with the corrupt cesspool in Washington. Hopefully, some of our national security peeps get their heads out their butts and start expanding the Russian interference investigation into the vast network of spin information warfare operations in America.
Admittedly LB the effort to flesh out the problem regarding, in my opinion, the fund of knowledge absolutely essential to operate and make decisions per the third paragraph of my comment of your most current post, was, very clumsily tapped out.
Not so very many blocks of years ago I’d not “felt the prod” to react and respond so hastily. I would have stewed on your words. If, as I do, I agreed with your premise I’d stewed on my response some goodly time and then stewed some more editing and clarifying as I either tapped it out (but more likely wrote it out) before affixing my stamp of approval and mailed it.
And if I’d disagreed with you I’d stewed still still more extensively on each step of my rebuttal. (Or, more likely, dropped it in my outbox lol.)
As I recall those emails I expect you recall that little tome I was going on about titled Cultural Literacy? The gist of the author’s argument being that, “that information must be firmly embedded in the very tissues of our countrymen”?
Fortunately I now have recourse to “The Magic of the Internet.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/book-excerpt-matthew-hennessey-zero-hour-for-gen-x-digital-addictions/
Paragraph 10 Historian David McCullough.
[Of course the golden kernel of your exposition is “through active social media” which necessitates very quick, ie “natural” response. I’d prefer our tacticians be thoroughly grounded before engaging. I don’t want any General Reality Winner gamboling the corridors of the Pentagon.]
“The gist of the author’s argument being that, “that information must be firmly embedded in the very tissues of our countrymen”?”
Thanks for your input JK! I ordered that Cultural Literacy book, after you mentioned it. Read it too, lol. Possessing a self-directed, eclectic education rather than a formal college education, I assessed serious gaps and still need a great deal of work at improving my own “cultural literacy”.
I worked at my local Walmart from 1999-2015, with a short, year and half break early 2000s. Working in a Walmart can be an American sociological study all its own and I like watching how people operate. One thing I noticed over the years is that it’s easy to identify home-schooled children with pretty reliable accuracy, just watching how they behave in Walmart.
A couple weeks ago, at an Army hospital, while waiting for the required half-hour after my allergy shot, this young woman with 4 young children came to the waiting area and left the kids alone in the waiting area while she went to the bathroom. Those kids sat down quietly and behaved. The youngest one had started talking to me, when I told them they could put cartoons on the TV, if they wanted to. In this waiting room, there’s a remote for the patients to use. The little girl told me she doesn’t really like cartoons. The mother returned and I complimented her children’s good manners and then I said, I presume you homeschool them. She looked at me funny and said she does homeschool them and I told her it shows – the manners and calmness. This lady told me her husband is deployed to Korea for a year – his 5th deployment in 9 years. She said he’s getting out of the Army, even though he loves it, because it’s too much time away from his family.
On the other side of the parenting spectrum, witnessed all too often at Walmart were the young children running wild, often dumped in the toy department to rip and tear to their heart’s content. A pet peeve of mine is mothers who take their children out in public dirty, hair a rat’s nest and particularly babies not dressed in clean clothes. Too often I saw, kids who appear to be raising themselves, while their parents pursue their own interests (and addictions).
From this same Walmart “people watching” experience, I find the Trumpian attitude among too many poor white people toward Mexican illegal immigrants quite amazing. Sure, there’s a criminal element among illegals. Nearby there are large farming areas, where they rely on Mexican migrant workers (highly likely some are illegals). Some of those farms have old school buses, which are used to drive those Mexican farm families to Walmart on weekends. Our store beefed up stocking up on fresh produce and food items used in Mexican cooking to better serve those customers (improve our sales, just like we stocked up on items when we knew Army units were returning from deployments). Now, something I noticed about those Mexican children is they were clean, hair neatly brushed, girls usually in pretty dresses, boys in pants with their shirts neatly tucked in. The children stayed right with their parents and behaved.
Not sure how on earth we’re going to embed information into the tissue of countrymen, unless way more parents begin to view child-rearing as a vital, “duty” again. So many parents seem more invested in their own wants, where fulfilling their dreams take precedence over all else. Stay-at-home mothering became a stigma decades ago, along with the trend of fathers completely abandoning their children.
Candidly I don’t know either.
I do think though, the homeschooling movement can be nothing less than of positive benefit. That is, if “the recruiters” can be enticed to wander away from the ossified traditional university hunting grounds and onto the less traditional.
***
Gut tells me LB, you didn’t find yourself irretrievably and hopelessly unfamiliar when you found yourself in the list of things Mr. Hirsch enumerated.
Well, JK, I am an extreme perfectionist and hate not knowing things, that upon reflection I think a well-educated person should know.
Years ago, I intended to read my way through The Harvard Classics (5-Foot Shelf List), but haven’t stuck to it as dedicatedly as I should.
https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics_(Bookshelf)
LB on this terrible anniversary I’d suggest there’s “something worse than Trump” we Americans, in our so politicized society, will, even though we survive Trump will surely lose our Republic to.
A question is posed at 44:30
https://www.c-span.org/video/?451225-1/combating-terrorism
[Best to, given the date, listen to it from the beginning.] Recall my recently posting a comment saying John Brennan’s reorganization of CIA was, earlier on even, gonna be “problematic”?
As to the Trump factor, he and Hillary being the candidates of our two parties speaks to the deepening corruption of our political system, I think. Both are symptoms of the spreading disease.
So much of what passes for geopolitical strategic-thinking fails to see the forest for the trees. The biggest jihadist recruitment benefit of our 17 years of war is the resulting destabilization of nation states in the region and even the destabilization of traditional tribal leadership, I suspect. Add in the continuing massive refugee populations from war-torn and failing states in the Muslim world and the collapsing cultures provide an ever-growing population of angry, marginalized, displaced young men, ripe for radicalization.
The jihadist threat, I believe, will explode in the next 20 years, even though most Americans got tired of even paying attention to it years ago. Our military has been severely worn down from endless rotations and when it’s not uncommon to have soldiers on 8th or 9th deployments, well, it’s obvious that just a very few Americans are paying the cost for defending America’s interests. Sadly, our military and political establishments still turn to the same “experts” within their tight-circles for strategy and all they come up with is recycling the same tired catch phrase strategies.
American military confrontations aren’t going to defeat jihadism.
Stabilized governance and a massive effort to return refugees and rebuild some semblance of stable civil societies might though. To undertake anything like that would take some dynamic Muslim leadership, to become the face of the effort, and so far the most dynamic leaders in the Muslim world go the jihadi route. Funny thing is Americans are much easier to persuade that military action is necessary than they are to persuade a long-term economic and humanitarian investment is worth the expense.
“As to the Trump factor, he and Hillary being the candidates of our two parties speaks to the deepening corruption of our political system, I think.”
Me too.
Of course I’m not the former federal prosecutor that Andy McCarthy is:
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-mccarthy-report/e/56229641?autoplay=true
“Funny thing is Americans are much easier to persuade that military action is necessary than they are to persuade a long-term economic and humanitarian investment is worth the expense.”
Here’s a book you might want to … unless of course I’ll be in trouble, read:
Well, JK, I’ve been known to gripe about American expenditure, even in foreign policy efforts I agreed with, like The Marshall Plan or NATO. When it comes to the “War on Terror”, well, the zero accountability of money and aid handed over to foreigners is enough to infuriate any taxpayer, but the highway robbery of private contractors should have ended a lot of careers – political and military ones…
Are we lacking material LB?
See especially Item #28 from “Superseding Criminal Information”:
Click to access 388597889.pdf
Here’s the Statement of Offenses filed yesterday (9/14/2018)
Click to access D-D-C-1-17-Cr-00201-ABJ-423-0.pdf
If we truly don’t inhabit the MSNBC Alternate Universe I think, some people may be displeased that Trump hasn’t shut down Mueller.
Too I’ve found it very very curious that a certain six or seven pages of a FISA warrant hasn’t by now been declassified. Might you know LB whether protocol calls for a White House counsel to be in the room when lobbyists are discussing foreign “matters”?
JK, I think you must read more reports and documents than anyone in America. I’m really tired of all this political theater, where no matter what the facts are, both sides pick and choose, calculating political advantage or political damage they can inflict, which facts are facts and which facts are just inconvenient obstacles to spin away.
This young woman, Julia Salazar, who just defeated a long-time Dem incumbent in a NY state senate primary, might be the face of America’s future politics. She just kept reinventing her personal bio and still won: https://www.thecut.com/2018/09/julia-salazar-state-senate-candidate-controversies-explained.html
I did a bit of reading of that Georgetown study that has Trump flipping out last night – they estimated excess mortality. Arguments over the death toll in PR assuredly is politicized, with rabid Trump pundits, like Ana Navarro, ranting about the deaths.
Click to access Acertainment%20of%20the%20Estimated%20Excess%20Mortality%20from%20Hurricane%20Maria%20in%20Puerto%20Rico.pdf
The thing is I don’t doubt a lot more people died in the aftermath of Maria than likely would have died if there hadn’t been a hurricane. Lost in arguing over the death count, is this study has a lot of useful information on improvements in disaster preparedness, training and governmental policy issues between the different levels of government, to prevent deaths in future disasters. Doubt anyone, especially the rabid partisans on each side, will ever focus on the lessons learned part.
The electricity was out for months, lots of people lacked adequate clean water, medical care crumbled. I have a friend in PR, whose sons live here in GA. She flew up with her elderly mother and got her mother settled here with family, because the basic living conditions were so difficult after the hurricane. I’ve known her since the mid-90s when we both did Red Cross work. She went back to PR, lived without electricity for months, and even though she had retired from the Red Cross, she volunteered to help with the Red Cross disaster assessments, traveling all over the island, talking to people and figuring out what help they needed. She posted stuff on her facebook page.
Grasping the things she was sharing on facebook throughout – photos and comments, gave me a totally different perspective of problems the most vulnerable encountered from what I got from the news. Once disasters become a partisan bludgeon, all efforts to really glean the problems, implement programs, training and policies, and fix governmental failures at all levels goes out the window.
Trump’s comments are totally counter-productive, but that mayor of San Juan’s partisan flamethrowing on national cable TV, replete with dumb hats and t-shirts to mock Trump, were awful too. No one in the mainstream media will ever criticize her antics though
“I’m really tired of all this political theater, where no matter what the facts are, both sides pick and choose, calculating political advantage or political damage they can inflict, which facts are facts and which facts are just inconvenient obstacles to spin away.”
Fair enough. I’m as sick of all this kabuki as I was when GW was doing it.
Patriot Act and what I said ring a bell?
Far as PR goes … all anybody needs to do “a lookback” to see there was pre-existing doofusness (and criminal territorial governingship) would be to watch that Anthony Burdane (CNN) guy display the problems pre-hurricane.
Lemme see …
Ummm paywall. Try again: