America is in a totally different place with our partisan divides than even 20 years ago with the Clinton impeachment drama, which fueled an aggressive Clinton-orchestrated scorched earth SPIN effort to keep Bill Clinton from being removed from office. Thinking back to the 1998 scorched earth SPIN war, many questions, in my mind, still remain.
One of the biggest questions I have goes back a bit further than the Clinton years. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. The Soviet Union ran massive, aggressive active measures in America, including disinformation operations for decades. What happened to all of the Soviet Union’s active measure operations and operatives (many of them Americans) involved in operations against America after the Soviet Union collapsed? Where did they go?
Even more importantly, during the 1990s, what happened to America’s aggressive efforts to monitor and counter Soviet active measures? Did we put down our guard and assume the Soviet threat was defeated and stop paying close attention to Russian operatives? Where did the Americans working on the Soviet dime or followers of communist ideology, who fueled Soviet disinformation operations in America go to find new homes in American political operations after the collapse of the Soviet Union? They didn’t all just quit. Did they just shift to working in American partisan political “media operations” and “opposition research” organizations or were many of them already embedded in American partisan activities? American academia and media were heavily infiltrated by Soviet disinformation operations for decades, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. What happened to these Soviet operations after the Soviet Union collapsed?
In late December 2018, news broke of a Democrat disinformation operation called Project Birmingham, which was run against Republican senate candidate, Roy Moore, in his 2017 campaign. This Dem disinformation operation imitated Russian disinformation operations and was funded by a big Dem donor, Reid Hoffman, who claims no knowledge that the money was going to Project Birmingham. Many Dems, including Doug Jones, condemned the Project Birmingham operation, and are publicly distancing themselves from it. On December 27, 2018, the Washington Post reported:
“The looming threat of new state and federal investigations adds to the scrutiny facing those involved in the campaign to undermine support for Moore and bolster Jones. Project Birmingham appeared to broadly mirror some of the same tactics adopted by Russian operatives who spread social and political unrest on Facebook and Twitter during the 2016 presidential election. In Alabama, its backers even introduced fake evidence that automated Russian accounts, called bots, were supporting Moore in the race.”
A few days ago the NY Times had a report, Democrats Faked Online Push to Outlaw Alcohol in Alabama Race, about another Dem false flag operation during the Roy Moore run, which was dubbed “Dry Alabama”. The NY Times reports:
“The “Dry Alabama” Facebook page, illustrated with stark images of car wrecks and videos of families ruined by drink, had a blunt message: Alcohol is the devil’s work, and the state should ban it entirely.
Along with a companion Twitter feed, the Facebook page appeared to be the work of Baptist teetotalers who supported the Republican, Roy S. Moore, in the 2017 Alabama Senate race. “Pray for Roy Moore,” one tweet exhorted.
In fact, the Dry Alabama campaign, not previously reported, was the stealth creation of progressive Democrats who were out to defeat Mr. Moore — the second such secret effort to be unmasked. In a political bank shot made in the last two weeks of the campaign, they thought associating Mr. Moore with calls for a statewide alcohol ban would hurt him with moderate, business-oriented Republicans and assist the Democrat, Doug Jones, who won the special election by a hair-thin margin.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/politics/alabama-senate-facebook-roy-moore.html
Further in this NY Times piece are details of the people involved in organizing this Dry Alabama false flag operation and this bio stuck out at me, “Evan Coren, a progressive activist who works for the National Archives unit that handles classified documents.” A person working for the National Archives, handling classified documents, moon lighted as a progressive activist, orchestrating online false flag operations in a Senate race in Alabama. Anything amiss or unethical with his moonlighting activities here? Any concerns about him having access to classified documents?
This SPIN agitprop has now devolved to Leftist operatives waging false flag operations to make a Republican senatorial candidate’s social media followers look like Russian bots… We have assuredly jumped the shark in this scorched earth SPIN info war.
The reason I keep pondering about the beginnings of the America’s mass media SPIN information war is because how spin works has always smelled like classic Soviet disinformation operations to me. It’s a mass media brainwashing operation to control “public opinion” (sold as the “will of the American people”) as determined by polls. The media and politicians in America sell the polling and assiduously work to herd Americans to conforming their beliefs to align with this manufactured “public opinion”. The SPIN operations rely heavily on vicious smear campaigns.
Until Trump, the Left and mainstream media (also predominantly leftists) controlled SPIN operations in America. FOX News ran a counter SPIN operation, feeding far-right movements and fear mongering about Dems and the Left, but they never managed to meld together a SPIN operation colluding directly with top Republicans, until Trump.
American political news remains abuzz about “Russian collusion”, but the Steele dossier, a melding of Democratic operatives, a former star reporter turned “commercial research and strategic intelligence” entrepreneur, former British intelligence officer/expert on Russia and unknown Russian sources produced information purported to come from sources close to the Kremlin. That information was fed to the FBI and top American intel officials as an intelligence product from a former British intelligence professional and it speaks to a melding of partisan SPIN ops deliberately used to corrupt the judgment of FBI and top American intel officials.
The circuitous routes used to feed the Steele dossier to FBI and DOJ officials speaks to a determination to create an aura of legitimacy about the information in the dossier and to deceive and manipulate them into buying into the dossier. John McCain despised Trump. McCain was targeted by a former British ambassador and sold on the dossier. McCain’s friend, flew to England and personally met with Steele to get a copy of the dossier. John McCain hand-carried that dossier directly to James Comey.
I can’t prove what happened to me, but during the Clinton impeachment in 1998 I wrote comments on the Excite message boards attacking the Clinton spin, which was worded to corrupt foundational American principles. I also explained how SPIN works and how it seems like something more at home in Russian disinformation efforts. My story, Messsages of mhere, at the top of my blog, although written in a rather snarky tone, is what I believe to be the truth about what happened to me in 1998. I believe false information was deliberately fed to a retired general, who hates me. I believe he was recruited to silence me. I can’t prove any of that though. Realizing the underhanded ways the Steele dossier was fed to top FBI and DOJ officials reminded me of 1998.
Why did James Comey and his top people treat the Steele dossier as legitimate intel, even though they couldn’t verify it? Why doesn’t Comey care about who funded the dossier? Why didn’t Peter Strzok, the FBI’s top Russian analyst, make tracking the dossier funding and information back to its original sources a priority? This Trump SPIN hysteria not only manipulates ordinary Americans and corrodes their judgment, the Trump SPIN hysteria appears to have corroded and corrupted the judgment of top officials in the FBI and intelligence agencies. The Trump SPIN hysteria has also clouded, in some cases, even corrupted the judgment of our elected leaders.
In the Roy Moore situation, I dislike Moore’s politics and find his bigotry repugnant, however as that smear campaign against Moore raged on in the media, with more and more 30+ year-old allegations of Moore preying on underage teenage girls ramping up SPIN hysteria, I noted how many conservative Republicans began to speak out against Moore and they completely bought into the Dem-orchestrated media smear campaign. Initially, I was willing to believe the first allegation in the Roy Moore smear campaign, until Gloria Allred showed up and it bothered me that there were no allegations of Moore’s alleged preying on underage teen girls beyond those 30 + year-old allegations, which struck me as odd. I wrote a blog post:
I believed the first woman who made allegations against Roy Moore, but once Gloria Allred showed up, the media non-stop redo of the Access Hollywood started, coupled with the Trump is delusional spin and this new “moral purity” purge on the Left began, well, let’s just say I am not sure how to even begin to decide on what is a “credible allegation” after finding out that the WaPo descended on AL, along with #Resist dirt-diggers to turn up these allegations. At first the media hyped there were 30 some witnesses to corroborate that Moore chased teenage girls, but I no longer have real trust in any of this reporting. I keep wondering if he was a total perv, who chased teenagers, where are more recent victims? Does he have a long list of affairs or anything like that? I am open to listening to new allegations, but at this point, I see more evidence this was an orchestrated smear campaign and less that he was a child molester. I still want to believe the first lady. The one Allred rolled out and all that crying looked just like the Access Hollywood victim she coached.
https://libertybellediaries.com/2017/12/07/metoo-lunacy-begins/
The orchestrated Brett Kavanaugh smear campaign rolled out the same way. And going back to the 2016 campaign, the Dump on Trump smear campaign rolled out the same way too, with the Access Hollywood tape and the Gloria Allred victim line-up. Trump, a womanizer, does have real dirt mixed in with the pure Dem spin fabrications, like the Alicia Machado, “fat-shaming” allegation, that Hillary Clinton launched at the end of a presidential debate. She was totally in on that orchestrated SPIN hit.
These smear campaigns aren’t the result of some peon political operatives run amok; they are run by powerful people in the Dem machine. The level to which the Dems will go to demonize Trump’s record with women, knows no bounds and while I find the man’s behavior totally unacceptable, so much of the SPIN about Trump and women is deliberately manufactured to incite women against him.
In Dec. 2017, with the Trump/Russian collusion spin and the Trump the Authoritarian spin ramping up, a short-lived spin attack on Trump launched about him “trying to kiss former FOX News employee, Juliet Huddy in an elevator around 2005-2006, painting this as Trump sexually assaulting Huddy. Huddy quickly backtracked and said she hadn’t felt threatened, but liberal media and even top Dems, like Donna Brazile, retweeted and hyped this story. The reality check is Huddy was on a date with a rich businessman/celebrity and he leaned over to kiss her after the date, but the media was running wild painting this as Trump tried to sexually assault Huddy.
The Dems at the top are well aware of these smear campaigns and they are the ones, who do nothing to put the brakes on them. Yet, when some embarrassing details of their corrupt SPIN ops leak out, everyone involved claims they knew nothing. That Steele dossier had the fingerprints of top Clinton sleaze operatives involved, so I believe the Clintons were the ones in charge.
The entire Clinton SPIN operations from its beginning, in the 90s, which evolved to be embraced by the entire Democratic Party, needs some serious investigation for both corruption and for hostile foreign infiltration. Ditto that for Trump’s SPIN operations, oh nevermind, Mueller has spent two years investigating that, while the Dems, media, Comey, Clapper and Brennan keep throwing up a massive smokescreen about the Steele dossier. They pretend that some conservative news organization was behind the GPS Fusion effort and the mainstream media assiduously avoids investigating the Steele dossier. Instead they give Clapper, Brennan and Dem mouthpieces endless airtime to ramp up Trump/Russian collusion and to insinuate the dossier is a legit intelligence report.
There are strong warning signs that there’s plenty of hostile foreign infiltration of the American news media, especially our political news media. SPIN disinformation speaks to a melding of Cold War era Soviet-type disinformation operations into the very fabric of American political operations and news reporting. Figuring out how much is homegrown corruption and how much is hostile foreign info operations remains a pressing national security concern, that no one seems to notice.
In the 90s the domestic partisan SPIN war in America erupted with constant Clinton scandals (some real and some right-wing operative hyped). The Clintons ran their own SPIN “war room” and vast networks of political operatives, on both sides, emerged as America’s top spin warriors. Interestingly, many of those original operatives, on both sides, are key players in this endless 2016 scorched earth SPIN info war, but one can only wonder what the extent of hostile foreign infiltration of our partisan SPIN fronts in America really is?
Looking back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, followed by the eruption of our domestic SPIN war in the 90s, my worry is, that perhaps we missed a whole bunch of signals, because of the constant SPIN noise.
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