Category Archives: The Media

October 11, 2018 · 10:45 am

A child of the TV age awakens.

My first grade picture from the mid 1960s. Note the chunk I took out of my bangs trying to cut my own hair and the dorky pin, part of a collection of costume jewelry my grandmother showered on my sisters and me (pssst, I still have some of those pins). At least the dress was in my all-time favorite color – pink. Yes, I have always loved PINK… Oh, as a historical note, back then girls had to wear skirts and dresses to public school in PA.

The past few weeks of the Kavanaugh drama got me thinking a lot about my feelings about the genesis of America TV and especially TV news in my lifetime (I’ll be 58 yrs old later this month).

My mother liked to tell this story about my internal clock as a very young child. She told me that I would go outside to play, often happily swinging on our swing set. Lacking anything remotely akin to a daring spirit, I do remember swinging for hours on end as a child. Swinging made me feel free of fear, almost like I could touch the sky. My mother liked to repeat this story that before I could tell time, I would always come inside from playing exactly on time to watch the TV shows and cartoons I liked. She said I would tell her that it was time for my show to start and she never figured out how I could be right on time, because I hadn’t even learned to tell time yet. Sadly, my adult life has never been one where I am right on time, because all too often I’ve been running late, a point of frequent conflict with my husband, who always liked to be early.

In recent years, with too much else on my mind, too many other things to do and most of all a total disgust for most TV offerings, I rarely turn the TV on. With the Kavanaugh drama, I did turn on cable TV a few times and then switched to C-Span coverage of the Senate happenings, which felt like old times for me. I used to be a dedicated C-Span viewer and a dedicated History Channel viewer… back when the History Channel actually ran programming on history.

And that brings me to the point, what in the heck happened to American TV???

Growing up in the era where we had three major networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, the shows of my childhood reflected traditional American values. Who could find fault with Lassie or Bonanza? My father also had, what I think was called a UHF antenna, before cable TV, and we picked up some country music shows, the Grand Ol Opry and some cartoons.

The TV news was in small segments throughout the day, not 24/7 and yet we still felt adequately informed, because along with TV news, newspapers were still considered a prime source of news for most Americans.

In the 70s and 80s American TV completely changed. The Phil Donahue type talk shows, with guests brought on to air their most intimate secrets or sensational topics, began to replace the old entertainment-focused interview shows. Donahue’s format was hailed as breaking new ground to get Americans to talk about controversial or uncomfortable personal topics. Oprah Winfrey expanded the Donahue model of tabloid talk TV shows in the 80s.

Since the late 90s, I’ve been on a soapbox about the damage to our culture the Oprahization of America has wrought. I remember a soapbox comment I posted on the Excite message boards in ’98 on this very topic, sadly being new to the internet, I didn’t even know how to save my posts back then, but suffice it to say, my opinion on tabloid TV has not changed at all. It’s a completely destructive force to encourage people to air their most personal problems, especially family problems on national TV. The tabloid TV craze encouraged people to go on national TV and BETRAY those closest to them, discussing personal and family problems in public, thus lighting a match to any vestiges of TRUST in their relationship. It is the most corrosive form of entertainment in America. Millions of Americans bought into it, wallow in, believe in it though, so the craze continued and advanced.

Reality TV formats grew from the tabloid TV shows, further plummeting American culture into a cesspool of trash TV. There has never been anything aspirational or positive about either tabloid TV or Reality TV.

With American news reporting, I got married in 1980 and my husband and I were both serving in the Army in Germany at the time. We didn’t even own a TV set in that first apartment in Germany. I listened to music on the radio or my cassette tapes. We came back to the States in 1981 and I became a homemaker, caring for our infant daughter, living in Fayetteville, NC, where my husband, served in the 82nd Airborne Division.

Times had changed in America and we had cable TV. For an avid TV watcher like me, it was like my prayers had been answered – 24 hour TV news with CNN, HBO, plus MTV, a channel dedicated to music delivered via highly creative videos. I could not praise Ted Turner enough for his ingenuity for CNN and 24 hour news. The only downside to so much more news was when some crisis happened, I became a non-stop channel-flipper, hoping that I might find more “breaking news” somewhere.

Grenada proved the most difficult, heart-wrenching few news days when President Reagan blocked media from the invasion and my husband was deployed there. My parents were on St. Thomas at the time and my mother kept calling me with the news she was getting there. Oddly enough, the only other truly anxious news void for me happened the day the OJ verdict came in and my sister was stationed in Turkey. There had been a news report of a major earthquake in Turkey and then it was 24/7 OJ coverage. Those were some long hours until my sister called and let us know she was safe.

Where TV is at now in 2018, after such promise in the 1980s, still shocks me. Sure Hollywood still manages to churn out a few excellent TV shows here or there, but the overall quality of TV offerings has declined, as has tabloid and reality TV formats, which only coarsen and sensationalize the worst aspects of American culture.

Sadly, beyond aggressively advancing the leftist social justice agenda, American TV offers little in the way of educational or quality historical information. It offers little in the way of promoting our literary and fine arts heritage. And it glaringly fails to offer even a glimmer of aspirational or unifying patriotic messages.

In recent years, I watch less and less TV, to the point that now I rarely even turn the TV on. My husband watches FOX News in the sun room, all day long, so I see small bits here and there (mostly ones I wish I had avoided since it’s blatant Trumpathon garbage).

I’ve awakened to the reality that American media, almost exclusively, dedicatedly promotes and works to mainstream the Left’s social justice dogma and indoctrinate Americans into Leftist groupthink and use of the American Left’s newspeak lingo – SPIN messaging.

I’ve also awakened to the reality that having American cable news reporting starkly divided along partisan political lines means none of us are getting straight, unbiased news reporting anymore.

And that should alarm every American.

8 Comments

Filed under Culture Wars, General Interest, The Media

September 15, 2018 · 11:49 am

Carly Fiorina explains zoomin’

All week, I’ve been intending to get a blog post written, but so far all I’ve got are some drafts that didn’t go anywhere. So, for now here’s a very worthwhile bit of advice from Carly Fiorina:

Carly Fiorina: Between Trump and the media, ‘Who’s Zoomin’ Who?’

American Insurgency worries

Earlier today, an anonymous New York Times op-ed, I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration, ignited another Trump meltdown. In the first minutes after reading this op-ed, I was angered at the smug self-righteous tone and disgusted by the dereliction of duty to actively engage in this:

“The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.”

Our constitutional system bestows the power to a duly elected president, not to a bunch of selected presidential staffers.

However, within a short while, after thinking about this op-ed and the bigger picture events of the President now completely surrounded by FOX News Spin Force advisors, a disturbing thought struck.

I believe this op-ed was not meant to reassure Americans that there are adults in the room, as the op-ed writer confided. This op-ed was meant to incite President Donald J. Trump. Coming right on the tail of the news media revelations yesterday of White House staffers unflattering comments about Trump, this was timed to push Trump over the edge and egg on more erratic firings and chaos.

Two of the main targets the news media consistently works to incite Trump against are the two remaining generals, John Kelly and Jim Mattis. They were part of the mainstream media Woodward spin, quoting comments attributed to both generals that were very insulting of Trump. They both issued statements refuting the Woodward quotes, but now along comes this letter, which went into detail of the foreign policy/national security efforts to thwart Trump’s impulses.

This op-ed sure smells like an orchestrated hit to prod Trump to oust the generals and stable foreign policy/national security advisers.

There are determined players behind the “GOP Insurgent” who really want way more than to see the GOP burn to the ground. Their “drain the swamp” rhetoric brims with imagery of a coming American civil war and urgings of “burning down the entire system in Washington”.

I firmly believe this op-ed letter was meant to prod Trump into more rash and erratic behavior – especially mass firings from within his inner circle. This op-ed assuredly was not meant to assuage concern or reassure Americans.

The most vital question, now more than ever, is for our national security experts to get a handle on the scope of our scorched earth SPIN information war and identify hostile foreign influences.

11 Comments

Filed under General Interest, Information War, Politics, The Media

September 3, 2018 · 1:42 pm

Jack Ryan enters the digital age

President Trump’s biggest advantages in the ongoing scorched earth SPIN information war rest on his willingness to devote most of the energy of his presidency to waging scorched earth character assassinations and his use of his personal Twitter account to lob attacks that not only disrupt the Left/mainstream media SPIN attack, but to actually successfully win control of the SPIN cycles. Although, everything in this information war takes on names and terminology that make it sound benign, even the shorthand name itself “spinning”, our SPIN information war provides 24/7 media disinformation and confusion about basic facts on most news stories, foments extreme polarization and disunity, erodes America’s reputation abroad and fuels distrust of the news media and our political institutions.

Yesterday, I spent most of my day watching Amazon Prime’s new Jack Ryan series, after my youngest daughter sent me a message telling me it’s very good and she insisted I would like it. She knew I was a Tom Clancy fan back when the Cold War provided the setting of his stories. The writers of this series took the Jack Ryan character and wrote him into a modern-day, fighting Islamic terrorists scenario rather than the Cold War. I was hooked on this series quickly and watched 6 episodes yesterday.

I’ve often wondered if Tom Clancy was a Sidney Sheldon fan, because the Clancy plotting, using alarming, seemingly unconnected incidents around the globe, then gradually pulling all those incidents together in a dramatic, cataclysmic clash between the good and bad guys, reminded me a great deal of Sidney Sheldon’s high-octane, recipe for plot drama. Clancy also added an unmatched ability to parlay highly technical military info into terms laymen could easily understand.

I bring this up, because binge-watching Jack Ryan, several things stuck in my mind about how the terrorists operate compared to the doddering hierarchy in our intel agencies. The terrorists were using a rapid-fire digital means to transfer large sums of money in $10,000 increments, that the fictional new head of ISIS, developed while studying international banking, living in France as a refugee since the 1980s.

Another interesting operational aspect was one that has been reported in the news in recent years as a means for how terrorists can communicate via some online computer games messaging applications. The scene in the show, where the tech savvy intel peeps explain the use of a computer game messaging by the terrorists to older government officials, realistically depicts the generational gap when it comes to modern technology. This gap runs much deeper in real life, I believe, and has caused a grave institutional blindspot to recognizing the threats posed by social media and even recognizing our SPIN information war as actual information warfare rather than benign political public relations work.

Many people working in law enforcement, national security, top military leadership and top government positions don’t use any social media. In recent years, advice galore permeates warning people in government and law enforcement positions of responsibility to eschew or be very cautious in their social media use. Too many of them are totally clueless of social media’s reach, so when young people in a foreign country are waging large protests or mobilize sophisticated terrorist recruitment video campaigns, with global reach, on shoestring budgets, often our elected officials and top executive branch officials seem amazed and alarmed, while still not bothering to study online social media and messaging platforms as a serious national security concern.

This awareness gap is, in and of itself, a gaping national security vulnerability.

Back in 1990s our modern SPIN information war in America began as a one-sided, left-wing operation run by the Clinton’s political operatives. These people introduced SPIN info war to America, although they masked it as just modern political PR efforts.

At the same time SPIN info war gained prominence among the Left, the political Right began to gain a foothold on using talk radio to galvanize conservatives. By the late 90s, the SPIN-dominated mainstream media (Leftists) began to hype right-wing talk radio as a national security threat and after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 , a massive SPIN effort by the Left worked to create, what I believe is more urban myth than reality, a huge national security threat from right-wing militias… who communicated using online forums. In 2016, the Left reinvigorated this old 90s scare-mongering with a vast, new national security threat – the “alt-right”… who, um, da-ding, were organizing and communicating… online. All that is old is new again, especially in the world of the Left’s SPIN messaging campaigns. They are relentlessly repetitive, in thought and deed, rerunning the same tired old themes trying to cast their political enemies as Nazis or gun-toting extremists.

The main media battlefield for SPIN information warfare in the 1990s was the 24/7 cable news networks, which spawned whole armies of partisan spinmeisters to wage non-stop spin war. In 1996, Fox News opened a potent, new front, giving right-wing partisans a foot on the national cable news SPIN information war battlefield.

President Trump, reportedly, does not use the internet or use email, but he does tweet from his private cell phone. His information appears to be gleaned from extensive TV viewing of the cable TV news spin battles. He also uses Twitter, but follows very few people (47 follows today). Although, Twitter does not explain exactly what “algorithms” they use to generate each user’s Twitter feed, it is safe to assume that it is based on your followers list, which informs what your interests are. Trump’s Twitter feed should be of keen interest to America’s national security people, because he is so prone to exploitation and manipulation, with his Twitter supposedly being his only online information source. Trump’s media follows include: The Drudge Report, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Eric Bolling, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Jesse Waters, Geraldo Rivera, Diamond and Silk, Greta Van Susteren

Trump was burned retweeting an Ann Coulter tweet by a far-right extremist in the UK, as I’ve mentioned before. He also got burned earlier than the Coulter retweet over a of a Mussolini quote retweet. Trump retweets stuff he sees in his Twitter feed. Now, let that sink in as to the importance of knowing what on earth shows up in Trump’s Twitter feed and who determines what goes into his feed. I feel sure Trump’s Twitter feed is not left to some benign algorithms to determine what he sees.

Social media political formats come and go. The Excite message boards disappeared shortly after impeachment. Much later I used the Yahoo politics chat rooms, always looking for a way to find an online medium to expose what happened to me in 1998. The yahoo politics chat room crowd migrated to another chat room messaging site, same as how the National Review Disqus comment section ended and supposedly a couple of NRO Disqus moderators migrated to Qwiket to set up a NR refugee comment section. Very quickly that Qwiket NRO refugee site morphed into a more modern version of The Drudge Report… The America First News.

Another interesting 2016 site conversion was the site, The Conservative Treehouse, which sports Andrew Breitbart images on the main page wallpaper background. This site was heavily invested in selling “crowdsourcing” investigations into the black grievance industry pre-Trump. They do come up with a lot of interesting information, that “crowdsourcing” from commenters does not explain. They also run the image of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier weekly and post Bible verses to present the image of a conservative right-wing site. That site morphed into Trump Polling Central during 2016, with detailed, up-to-the-minute Trump rally and polling information. I suspect both might be foreign front operations. That the popular Disqus comment section at National Review would be dismantled in 2016, months before the election, then refugees directed to this Qwiket site (there was a piece in The Corner at National Review announcing this Qwiket location) and then that Qwiket location become a another DrudgeReport type news aggregate site with a comments section seems more than a tad odd. It looked to me like a deliberate effort to sabotage and demolish National Review’s NeverTrump hold-outs.

I’m writing all this, because the “Fake News” hysteria was spin from the Left to use as cover to prod facebook to censor Trump-supporters on facebook and gin up the “Trump/Russian Collusion” spin hysterics. Trump hijacked that “fake news” spin and turned it right around on the Left. In recent months allegations of “shadow-banning” and muting conservatives on facebook and Twitter began rumbling. A couple weeks ago, several online social media platforms acted in unison to ban Alex Jones from their sites.

This seems to me like a precursor to setting the stage to disband Twitter politics. The only problem is American journalists rely on the SPIN messaging advantage Twitter provides them to within minutes, using the power of rapid-fire, mass retweets of Dump on Trump “news” stories, to generate SPIN cycles to attack Trump.

Until the Left and mainstream media, who collude constantly to spread Trump dirt, find another online platform, for now Twitter looks to be their default online battlefield. If they work to dismantle Twitter to take down Trump, they are left with an online vacuum and Trump still controls the POTUS bully pulpit. All these media hysterics about whether to cover WH briefings, let Kellyanne speak, not cover POTUS are all part of the SPIN information war, not about seriously reporting the news. That so many “journalists” engage in these debates publicly speaks to the total corruption of American news reporting, They are as much invested in SPIN information warfare as President Trump.

And back to my original line of thought (until I veered off a bit). There’s a serious problem when top national security policymakers have no real concept of the power of social media platforms, no realization of the serious threat our scorched earth SPIN information war really is, and remain totally unaware of the importance of becoming well-versed in social media operations as another potent means for information warfare to be waged both in and against America.

We have top generals who don’t have any idea about the power of social media, messaging apps or the grave threat that a SPIN war run amok can create an information void, caused by an overload of SPIN messaging being disseminated and no calm, serious means to sift through the SPIN pile-on to get quick, accurate, reliable information to the American people. In this SPIN hysteria mode, with the media vs. Trump often running through several spin cycles a day now, it’s becoming obvious that at some point social media and/or SPIN-generated hysteria will incite mass hysteria incidents, flash mobs, or worse.

Are America’s top national security leaders aware and ready for this looming threat?

5 Comments

Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Information War, Military, Politics, The Media

August 28, 2018 · 12:58 pm

The truth shall set you free

I’m very weary of writing about our scorched earth SPIN information war, but after another tiresome mainstream media SPIN hysterical attack over President Trump’s reactions to Senator John McCain’s death and competing choruses elevating McCain to sainthood or demon, I’m going to write a bit about my experience with scorched earth SPIN information war, again, and why I am so determined to work to defeat the SPIN in America.

I began writing about SPIN information warfare back in 1998, on the Excite message boards, during the height of the Clinton impeachment scandal. I was very new to the internet and while my kids were in school, I began spending a lot of time surfing the internet.

When I was in my teens, I had many pen pals from foreign countries and I thought it would be nice to find pen pals around the world again, but then I stumbled upon the Excite message boards. Being one who loves political debates, I began lurking there for quite a while, but then decided to start posting messages with the user name: mhere.

The entire story of my experience is under the Messages of mhere heading at the top of my blog.

I believe that I was tracked down from those Excite message boards and investigated by Clinton hacks, because my Excite message boards comments were being picked up and used by right-wing pundits in their messaging, during the impeachment spin war raging across cable news networks and in the media. As a side note to my Excite message board experience, I also saw coordinated gang-up attacks meant to silence and intimidate posters supporting impeachment – sort of a precursor to the reported online Russian troll activities in Disqus comment sections online in 2016. Not sure who the “trolls” were engaged in those coordinated gang-up attacks back in 1998.

During their investigations of me, I believe, they came across a retired U.S. Army general who hates my guts. During Desert Storm I sent some negative letters to the desert about his wife’s family assistance efforts in his brigade in Germany.

My husband was a 1SG in a company in one of the battalions in that general’s brigade and I was a family support leader in the company. I sent those letters to my husband’s company commander, an unmarried Captain, who was deployed to Desert Storm with my husband, to keep him informed of the chaos and problems with family support matters back in Germany.

Deploying soldiers to Desert Storm, who were stationed in a foreign country and dealing with the challenging security and family support needs of leaving family members in Germany, under heightened terrorism concerns, created unique challenges for the Army (and German officials), to keep American families safe.

I believe my letters made it to the Department of the Army, in someone’s after-action report. And finally, I believe that general was recruited to work quietly to silence me and since he already hated me, I feel sure he would have believed anything negative about me that they fed him.

I believe at the highest levels of the Clinton administration a retired general was fed false information about me, an unarmed, law-abiding Army wife, and that he was recruited to work quietly to silence me. My husband, a retired U.S. Army Sergeant Major, was still on active duty in 1998. In 1998, I was a homemaker in Hinesville, GA, taking care of our home and four children.

I believe that beyond the injustice to me, this corruption of the military chain of command, strictly for partisan political purposes, must be exposed. We can not have the military chain of command corrupted and politicized by partisans. And assuredly feeding false information to retired generals and sending them on personal or partisan missions can not ever be tolerated in America.

Over the years, we are now at the point where retired generals grace political parties’ convention stages, take up partisan banners in public and we have a sitting president threatening to use his power to revoke security clearances as a partisan tool to fend off his political enemies.

We also have a thoroughly corrupted media, willing to engage in partisan spin attacks, colluding with partisans to spread spin messaging, willing to edit information to feed partisan agendas and way too many who sit on Twitter, working to fuel the daily spin cycles, retweeting news reports without lifting a finger to independently verify the information. Even the so-called “fact-checkers” are highly partisan and prone to “checking facts” with partisan blinders firmly in place, blinding them to even considering facts that don’t conform to their own partisan biases.

The news media organizations and social media platforms, where spin info war rages, are totally corrupted too. For instance, big media and the cable news networks all worked to give Trump billions of dollars in free media during the GOP primary. FOX stayed with Trump, to become, what now disturbingly looks more like state TV than any sort of objective news reporting. The so-called, mainstream media, colluded with Trump’s “GOP Insurgency” to advance the Clinton Pied Piper strategy, a strategy where they wanted to promote the most extreme GOP candidates, in hopes of burning the GOP primary to the ground and leaving the GOP sitting with the worst possible candidate in 2016. Once it looked like that had succeeded with only Trump or Cruz really viable, the mainstream media switched to the Clinton’s Dump on Trump effort casting him as a fascist.

The mainstream news media, FOX and the partisans still remain locked down tight in the scorched earth SPIN information war.

After my experience, I knew that I could never support Hillary Clinton, because I’ve always felt that due to her direct involvement in orchestrating Clinton scandal damage control, she was involved in the attack on me. This is what I believe, but lacking any connections or way to investigate and prove it, I’ve worked to write and warn about the dangers of SPIN information war on my blog, on social media and in various online comment sections over the years.

Likewise, on my blog, I’ve explained why I could never support Donald J. Trump.

I support The Constitution of the United States and believe in following the law. I am a homemaker and full-time caregiver of my husband, who suffers from COPD and normal pressure hydrocephalus. He is a 100% disabled vet. And in my spare time, I still write to try to warn about the dangers to America from our never-ending scorched earth SPIN information war.

I would never support violence or breaking the law for any personal or domestic partisan cause. I have never belonged to any militia, subversive group of any kind, or terrorist group. The most “dangerous” organizations I have belonged to are things like being an American Red Cross volunteer and member of the local quilt guild. I have never owned a firearm in my life and, truth be told, I’ve always been afraid of guns.

And finally, I believe that “spin” is rapidly repeated lies meant to control public opinion.

The most powerful weapon to defeat SPIN information warfare is the TRUTH.

1 Comment

Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Information War, Messages of mhere, Politics, The Media

August 18, 2018 · 3:27 am

Forlorn Hope?

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@october601

More

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,

Andrea MitchellVerified account@mitchellreports

Right now @chucktodd @HeidiPryzbyla @MeetthePress agree why send all the cameras and correspondents to Trump rallies so he can threaten the media? How about 1 camera network pool?

10:05 PM – 3 Aug 2018

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:

@JerryFalwellJr

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We 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

11:37 AM – 16 Aug 2018

“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.

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Information War, Politics, The Media

July 25, 2018 · 10:33 pm

The enemy within

This long, rambling blog post is just my opinion about “spin” messaging. Although, I am sick to death warning about the dangers of our endless 2016 spin information war, I wanted to write one more post about this and then I am taking a break from writing about politics for a while.

I became interested in spin messaging during the 1990s, when I first noticed this new form of political messaging taking hold in America. Sure, politicians have always relied on a soapbox and sloganeering, but spin messaging went way beyond that. I’ve written plenty on this blog about our spin information war.

Despite decades of complaints from Republicans and conservatives about “media bias” and the mainstream media favoring the political Left in America, I have never read anything about spin being mass media information warfare, despite those engaged in it, infusing their spin efforts in militaristic terminology from its first appearance in America.

Over the years, I’ve pondered if there were hostile foreign intelligence operatives behind the birth of our American spin war and while I’m open to that possibility, it is clear the original spin messaging efforts began among politicos on the American Left. During the Clinton years, starting with the Clinton’s “war room” is when I first saw mass media “spin messaging” efforts emerge in American politics.

Among the American Left, communism, Marxism and socialism hold great sway, so it’s very possible that our spin information war is a completely homegrown political effort, but it’s wise to be open to the possibility of foreign hostile hands in the opening salvos in our mass media spin information war back in the 1990s. It’s also obvious that even if there weren’t hostile foreign hands in the beginning, after decades of our constant spin information war, hostile foreign intelligence operators assuredly are working for ways to ruthlessly fuel, interfere in, and escalate our spin war.

The American media and politicians talk and write about “spin” in terms of it being just some benign form of political media operations. Encyclopedia Britannica offers this explanation:

“Political spin, in politics, the attempt to control or influence communication in order to deliver one’s preferred message.

Spin is a pejorative term often used in the context of public relations practitioners and political communicators. It is used to refer to the sophisticated selling of a specific message that is heavily biased in favour of one’s own position and that employs maximum management of the media with the intention of maintaining or exerting control over the situation, often implying deception or manipulation.”

https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-spin

For another explanation, Wikipedia offers this:

“In public relations and politics, spin is a form of propaganda, achieved through providing a biased interpretation of an event or campaigning to persuade public opinion in favor or against some organization or public figure. While traditional public relations and advertising may also rely on altering the presentation of the facts, “spin” often implies the use of disingenuous, deceptive, and highly manipulative tactics.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(propaganda)

I don’t know exactly who developed American SPIN information warfare. I’ve never come across any literature that pinpoints in terms like, “Dizzy Spin developed mass media spin information warfare in 1990.”

Back in the 1990s, I became fascinated with watching the Clinton spin efforts, which then infected the entire Democratic Party and the Left’s political operatives. Their media efforts combined social psychology and aggressive repetitive mass media messaging to dominate the mass media battlefield.

Spin messaging weaponizes lies by packaging them in very deceptive language, but it also includes vicious, orchestrated mass media character assassination attacks, to bombard and bury political enemies under a mountain of dirt. Vicious character assassinations are a feature of spin messaging information warfare, not just a bug. However, spin information warfare is about more than partisan politics and winning elections.

The larger objective has always been to control public opinion in America.

The Left wants to win a larger cultural war, by manipulating public opinion, waging spin messaging information warfare attacks against the American people.

Throughout the 90s, I kept trying to understand how spin messaging works and why it works. Every strategy can be broken down into parts (the ways and means employed to achieve the ends). As the political Right in America kept losing ground in the cultural battles, which were advanced through aggressive mass media spin messaging efforts, the political Right constantly railed about “unfair media bias” to explain why the Left’s spin efforts always succeeded. This “unfair media bias” explanation is way too simplistic and benign to explain why the Left’s spin messaging always won.

Spin messaging in our free society can only work with constant, massive mass media collusion.

Spin often uses language that inverts the meaning of words and terms, to not only confuse people, but also to slowly erode people’s ability to communicate, think clearly and have the ability to counter the spin. This is an old communist tactic to control people. The Left in America has relied on this tactic too and our culture is awash in PC-dictated terms, we are pressured to use.

Those actively engaged in SPIN information warfare efforts, both the combatants and their willing colluders in the media, always cast spin efforts in terms of benign, ho-hum, political media operations, never the sinister mass media brainwashing that it is, nor the fact that it is, in fact, information warfare.

Spin information warfare is waged against not only political opponents, it’s ruthlessly being waged against the American people.

The American people are the primary target of all spin information warfare.

It’s important to understand all of the components of this type of information warfare.

The most obvious component of spin messaging is the short, talking points messaging used. This messaging must be relentlessly repeated by both the politicos and a large portion of the mainstream media. This messaging builds messaging walls, which block out competing messaging and control the terms in which issues are framed. A good example of the Left building a messaging wall was Hillary appearing before the Benghazi Committee in 2015. For 11 hours the Dems on that committee resorted to shamelessly repeating two talking points messages to build a messaging wall:

“This hearing is a right-wing witch hunt” and

“This is costing the American taxpayers $4.7 million.”

The mainstream media carried and amplified those two spin messages and worked to present Hillary as a victim of a “right-wing witch hunt”. The mainstream media then declared Hillary the winner and worked to discredit the Republicans on that committee.

Many media people and political people wrote about spin, but none of them ever explained that the secret sauce to spin messaging is not the ruthless repetition of spin messaging (lies) to build messaging walls, but the ruthless repetition of opinion polling to create the illusion that the spin messaging represents the majority public opinion. It’s a sinister mass media brainwashing operation to herd people to believe spin (lies) and quell dissenting opinion.

Spin messaging manufactures opinion cascades (often called information cascades). Spin messaging from the Left, repeated by a wide swath of the mainstream media successfully monopolizes both the terms used in public policy discussions and constantly reinforces these manufactured public opinion cascades, by bombarding the public with polling data resulting from spin messaging campaigns.

Polling data has taken on an omnipotent power in American politics and all public debate. Polling is used by politicos and the media to convince the American people that opinion polls reflect “the will of the people”. Spin efforts manipulate public opinion and then that manufactured public opinion is used to convince the American people these polls represent the mainstream, majority opinion. Opinion polls are just a sampling of opinions of a very small fraction of people. They mean nothing in terms of the merits of any issue.

Americans love being “popular” and this drive to be “popular” above all else, feeds every social media platform, so it’s no surprise many Americans are very vulnerable to being manipulated by polling data.

A favorite media tactic to reinforce the spin-driven, manufactured public opinion is public shaming efforts, where manufactured opinion polling is used to marginalize dissenting opinions in the public square. Through constant repetition of polling, the American people have been conditioned to being herded into falling into the spin-generated “mainstream public opinion”. How many times have you seen a person on cable news being interviewed, expressing a view, then having the interviewer inform that person something along the lines of , “Polls X. Y, & Z show the American people don’t agree with you.” or “Your view is way out of the mainstream according to all of the polls.”? This tactic effectively marginalizes dissenting opinions, but it also works to create the illusion that the dissenting view is extreme, no matter how thoughtful the dissenting view is presented.

Trump and his media spinners, especially on Fox News, now effectively use this same herding public opinion by citing polls tactic against Democrats and non-Trump supporting guests. For instance, yesterday, Harris Faulkner, a skilled polling data Trump-supporting spin herder, used this tactic against Jeanne Shaheen, a skilled Dem spinner.

Another good example of media spin herding was during the GOP primary when media spin herders constantly cornered Republicans with, “Trump is winning in all of the polls, so don’t you have to support the winner?” Trump was winning in all the polls with the aid of billions of dollars in free media spinning him as the “GOP insurgent”, “great businessman”, and “the winner in all of the polls”.

Without this constant polling kabuki manipulation by politicos and the media, spin messaging would lose a great deal of its power.

Until Donald Trump, the American Right never made any inroads into successfully using spin messaging. The Right successfully used talk radio, some online platforms and FOX News, but the mainstream media still is controlled by the political Left. The 2016 election changed that dynamic, when Donald Trump began campaigning using the Left’s spin messaging tactics.

During the GOP primary, the mainstream media and FOX News gave Trump billions of dollars in free media to aid his “GOP Insurgency”. The mainstream media was working to advance the Clinton Pied Piper strategy to promote the most extreme GOP candidate. This effort was part of Bill Clinton’s old triangulation strategy, where Bernie served as the far-left kook, Trump was supposed to be the far-right kook and this cleared a path for Hillary to claim the middle ground, where American presidential elections are won.

Trump weaponized his personal Twitter account as a means to constantly lob spin attacks at the mainstream media, to influence his supporters and constantly bait both his political enemies and many of the mainstream media (especially those who are dedicated colluders spreading the Left’s spin messaging). He built a grassroots following using rally road shows around the country, to build on his reality TV fame. He created a brilliant branding campaign around a few key slogans, with Make America Great America, being the most popular one. Most importantly, when the mainstream media pivoted to running the Clinton’s dump on Trump spin attacks in late 2015/early 2016, Trump still managed to hobble together a mass media platform using FOX News and some conservative venues to combat the mass media spin onslaught from the mainstream media and Left (the Trump the fascist smear campaign).

The Left’s spin experts love to brag about their spin efforts and months before the 2016 primary season was over, I recall hearing Simon Rosenberg on TV during an interview bragging about how they were compiling massive amounts of dirt to unload on Trump later. It’s important to realize that their “they” included large numbers of mainstream media journalists and news outfits, who sat on their mountains of dirt, until the Clinton campaign and Dems gave them the signal to release their Trump dirt.

Trump proved to be a brilliant self-promoter, but he’s a genius at spin messaging. The word salad, used car salesman, rapid-fire way Trump speaks, both repeating and emphasizing his buzz words, makes him a world-class spinmeister. Added to that he revels in outrageously and shamelessly lying. He was the first Republican to break through the Left’s lock on spin messaging information warfare. He even borrowed most of his damage control “witch hunt” spin messaging verbatim from the Clintons.

While the American Left and mainstream media see Trump’s overt, often sloppy media collusion with FOX News, they still don’t acknowledge their own media collusion spreading the Left’s spin messaging.

The Left and mainstream media constantly work to foment Trump hysteria and hype Russian interference “to steal our democracy” (that is a lame Dem spin message btw). The truth is the Russians don’t have the power to “steal our democracy”. Another truth is the deliberate hysterical Russian spin from the Left and mainstream media is damaging our democracy more than the Russian info war efforts ever will.

Here’s another truth, President Trump’s relentless spin messaging attacks on “fake news”, his petty character assassinations, and his constant shameless lying also are damaging our democracy more than the Russian efforts to interfere in our elections ever will.

The biggest threat to our democracy is our own escalating domestic spin information war, that has been blowing hot since 2016.

Our spin info war continues to destabilize America, deepen partisan divides, leaves us very vulnerable to hostile foreign information warfare efforts and is rapidly destroying America’s credibility around the world.

Mass media spin information warfare is antithetical to our American free speech principles and should be discouraged and shunned by all Americans, especially those running for high elected office and those claiming to be journalists. Ending our domestic spin war should be a top national security priority and a top priority for both political parties. The news media should work to quell spin messaging, stop colluding with political factions to spread spin and quit selling polls as reflections of anything other than the opinions of a small sampling of Americans.

Our endless scorched earth mass media spin information war is our most potent enemy within.

Finding our way back to some common ground on valuing honesty and civic virtue offers the real hope to restore our American spirit and defeat spin information warfare. In our degraded political climate and culture, often I wonder if I am clinging to a pipedream, but I will continue to hope.

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, Culture Wars, General Interest, Information War, Politics, The Media