Category Archives: The Media

August 18, 2018 · 3:27 am

Forlorn Hope?

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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.

Despite the Left’s spin messaging being long-established, highly organized, run by professionals, 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 react and to 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:

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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,

Right now @HeidiPryzbyla 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 that yesterday was pontificating about free speech and the Left 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:

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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 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

March 22, 2018 · 4:02 pm

Bad vibes growing

The azaleas along the side of my house have started blooming and here in coastal GA it is beginning to look like Spring.  Most days lately, I try to focus on my everyday hobbies, but I read some news online, here and there throughout my day.  Lately, I’ve been wondering how long this 2016 scorched earth SPIN war can rage before we reach a serious constitutional crisis.  There are a lot of bad vibes growing.

The mainstream media, colluding with the Democratic Party machine, replete with their hit squad pundits in the media have escalated their attacks on all the same fronts as during the election – the Trump women are a constant hysterical fixture these days, the “Russian collusion” spin still gets spewed non-stop and the “Trump is unfit for office” spin gets ramped up constantly, through mainstream media, breathless reporting based on innuendo and 2nd and 3rd hand reports of “Trump’s thinking”.

Trump aids his enemies by responding to the media’s baiting by lashing out.  Trump feeds their spin always.  There’s a SPIN effort being pushed to attack FOX News as nothing more than a Trump propaganda network, which completely belies the fact that CNN and MSNBC, along with several of the largest print news media outlets are nothing more than platforms for the Democratic machine to attack Trump and spew relentless anti-Trump SPIN.   Ralph Peters, who relished FOX giving him a platform to attack President Obama,  jumped into that “FOX News is just a propaganda channel” spin effort with both barrels blazing, which made me wonder if he has signed a new contract with CNN or MSNBC.  Call me a cynic…

Yes, FOX News is filled with massive agitation propaganda to incite Trump supporters, but CNN and MSNBC do the same thing to incite the #Resist crowd and Left.  Andrea Mitchell at NBC sounds like Hillary Clinton’s biggest cheerleader and on it goes with the news media partisanship.

Trump is always being Trump, which is reacting emotionally to every taunt the Dem spinmeisters lob at him.   They have mastered baiting him.  Trump’s circle of enablers and fixers are now launching an offensive to feed enough spin aimed at trashing Mueller and his investigation, to bolster support among Trump supporters and FOX news watchers (large overlap in these groups), to set the stage for Trump to fire Mueller (or order Rosenstein to fire him).

That’s what these stories rehashing Mueller’s history in Boston, being spun by reporters like, Sara Carter, in recent days are really about.  They are part of the Trump SPIN effort.

There’s also the problem of former FBI and intelligence officials, Comey, Brennan and Clapper, being the largest offenders, who have now become large political players in the takedown Trump effort and they are using their supposedly apolitical experience and access to intelligence for purely political purposes in their efforts to destroy President Trump.  Tom Rogan wrote a good piece about Brennan’s partisan antics and how his endless media appearances attacking Trump and spewing innuendo are a disservice to the CIA and to his CIA career, while at the same time feeding the Trump “deep state” spin.  Rogan suggests: “But while I, and you, should thank Brennan for his service, we should also ask him to jump off his partisan war horse.”

Brennan, Clapper, and Comey were instrumental to fomenting the Trump/Russian collusion SPIN and they have helped feed the Democratic machine SPIN effort from the beginning, so they aren’t going to slow down. In fact, they will probably escalate their attacks on Trump.   They chose a side in this SPIN war when they fell in line with the Trump/Russian collusion SPIN effort before Trump was even inaugurated.

Trump is not going to cave and despite assurances from his inner-circle, I expect him to fire Mueller.

Congress has had plenty of mealy-mouthed members urge Trump not to create a constitutional crisis, but this crisis isn’t being created by Trump alone and it won’t be just about Robert Mueller’s investigation.  All the movers and shakers who created this Trump/Russian collusion SPIN are equally as culpable, perhaps maybe more than Trump is, for this impending constitutional crisis.  They created the Trump/Russian collusion SPIN (LIE) and they have fed it and propelled it using their willing accomplices in the mainstream media to hype it constantly.

The constitutional crisis, if it comes, won’t be just Trump’s fault.   The vast, wholesale public corruption in 2016 was very much a bipartisan thing.

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

March 17, 2018 · 3:58 pm

A week of wild news loops

The DC news loops twirled into so many tangled knots this past week, that Tuesday’s bombshell firing of Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, by today feels like ancient news.  The era of Trump increased the speed of the 24/7 news cycle dramatically, with the news media spinning out of control, often reporting hours of poorly vetted and unvetted information via tweets and retweets on Twitter, which the cable and print media then circulate.  It leaves many Americans consuming incomplete or false information sold as “news”, but even more than that it creates such a large volume of information piled up, that it becomes a daunting task to even sift for facts.

A very disturbing effort at character assassination took place this week too.  With the announcement of Mike Pompeo as President Trump’s choice to replace Rex Tillerson, came the announcement that Gina Haspel, a Deputy Director of the CIA was nominated to become the CIA Director.  Haspel became the target of a concerted media effort to destroy her reputation and tar her as a war criminal, who oversaw torture of prisoners at a CIA black site.

Once Haspel’s good name and reputation were completely sullied, ProPublica, which ran the damning report, which sent the mainstream media into its full-throated smear effort, issued a correction.  They admitted they got the story wrong and Haspel wasn’t in charge of that CIA black site during the alleged interrogations (the ones the media dubs torture).  Then in the most amazing feat of hypocrisy and self-delusion, these very same “journalists” began tweeting praise for ProPublica’s transparency and how wonderful it was that they corrected the story.  There seemed to be no awareness that they and ProPublica deliberately spent days destroying the good name and reputation of Gina Haspel and NONE of these other journalists bothered to get off their butts and independently investigate the FACTS in ProPublica’s story.  They all ran with ProPublica’s story.

Once Tillerson was fired many big name reporters also began a high-pitched, non-stop whispering campaign, about which other cabinet officials President Trump was going to fire next, citing unnamed sources naturally.   Reporting like this, from ace Trump whisperer, NY Times journalist, Maggie Haberman highlights this type of reporting:

  •  Mar 15

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    Trump is done with McMaster and has been for some time. McMaster is also essentially saying “screw it” and not pushing to stay. But four admin sources say this anti-McMaster push is led much more by Kelly than Trump right now.

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    Kelly sees McMaster as being aligned with administration officials who undermined Tillerson with Trump. Kelly has been openly critical of the decision to fire Tillerson all week.

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    So while Trump is through with McMaster, push this week has not been primarily from him, per the four administration officials with knowledge of Kelly’s efforts.

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    And, again, another change – McMaster, who struggled to find equilibrium with a disdainful Trump last year, no longer really cares and is fine if he is dismissed, per ppl close to him.

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McMaster was said by many ppl in the White House to be gone as soon as tomorrow – again, timing accelerated by Kelly. But, as Trump often does, a media story can push him away from where he was leaning in the first place and all around him end up tarred.

11:51 PM – 15 Mar 2018

Your head will literally be spinning with some of her breathless innuendo, always presented as “facts” and always cited as having numerous WH sources close to the matter.  When her innuendo doesn’t pan out, she excuses it as Trump changed course, because of their reporting…  It’s really risky to report as “fact” things people have NOT done yet.  It’s also risky to report on the “thinking of one person” based on second and third hand sources, but this SPIN effort to deliberately paint the White House in chaos was a full-court mainstream media effort from Tuesday to Friday.  The mainstream media was determined to present the White House as crumbling.

Within the White House, this type of mainstream media SPIN effort fuels distrust and anxiety among the President’s staff, which is what the mainstream media SPIN effort was intended to do.  It is part of the Left’s effort to take down Trump.

President Trump plays into a lot of this chaos and he also seems to feed on the power trip of having his staff walking on eggshells, wondering if they might be next to be fired or perhaps in Trump’s reality TV presidency production, cliffhangers like this staff chaos are good for viewers.  He doesn’t seem to be able to view the presidency as a serious position of trust, which demands he behave befitting the Office of the President.  With him, the presidency plods along as a reality TV production, to the detriment of the American people, but even more to the detriment of himself, because he has done nothing to bridge any of the divides in America or win acceptance among of over half of the country.  He also has not managed to defeat the Left’s #Resist effort, so he is stuck in this endless, death-match SPIN battle.

Friday almost passed with no big bombshell Trump news, but then late last night news broke of Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, firing Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s #2 top guy.

Today has the mainstream media railing about how badly McCabe has been treated, quoting Eric Holder and John Brennan as moral guideposts and pretty much in a state of hysterics.  So much for any objectivity.  And of course, within hours, there was President Trump throwing more fuel on the fire, tweeting:

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Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI – A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!

12:08 AM – 17 Mar 2018

The Left, which includes most of the mainstream media and Trump are still locked in this scorched earth information war and it’s still a war where neither side seems to be able to win.

The clear loser, as usual, is the American people.  We are held hostage to their SPIN and trying to sort through the mountains of distortions, disinformation, misinformation and downright fabrications spewed by both sides is an almost impossible task, unless you have plenty of spare time to devote to fact-checking and research.

No end in sight anytime soon…  The 2016 scorched earth information war flickers on and on and on…

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Politics, The Media, Twitter Tales

March 10, 2018 · 3:40 pm

Short Sharyl Attkisson YouTube video

This Sharyl Attkisson Ted Talks video  on fake news is just under 10 minutes  and worth watching:

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Filed under General Interest, Information War, The Media

January 10, 2018 · 12:20 pm

Trump’s OODA loop

The Clinton/Obama/Dems/mainstream media coalition vs. Trump information war drags on and Trump continues to confound his enemies, who still react in dismay that he is still in office.

Both sides remain very committed to continuing the fight.  Trump often seems to act on gut instinct, instantaneously reading his enemies’ motives way more clearly than his enemies read him.  Trump learned his enemies’ information warfare strategy, but his enemies have no real understanding of how Trump won the election or how to counter his strategy.

Yesterday, I read an editorial piece by Josh Marshall, Thoughts on the Greatness of Ulysses S. Grant, at TPM, which made me think about how Trump is still standing, despite the relentless information war being unleashed against him.  The piece is very interesting, so put aside your partisan blinders and read Marshall’s thoughtful views on Grant’s leadership and writing.  He offered some insights into Grant’s leadership, that I had never thought about before. Marshall writes about Grant’s transformational military leadership and the ways in which Grant threw the traditional military playbook out the window and experimented with maneuver warfare, but even more interesting than that insight, Marshall explains a theory of military operations, which Grant intuitively utilized to great advantage, even though the theory was not developed until a century later.  Marshall writes:

“A century later, a military intellectual and US Air Force Colonel named John Boyd developed a theory of military operations known by the shorthand “OODA loops.” OODA stands for the process of Observe – Orient – Decide – Act, a framework to think about the constant interaction between our observation of our environment and the decisions we make in how to respond to it. Boyd’s insight was that if a combatant can move through this cycle sufficiently faster than an adversary he can get inside his opponent’s ‘OODA loops’. Specifically, if you can move rapidly enough from observation to decision and action, you can change the environment your opponent has observed while they are still deciding how to react to it.That causes a cycle of missteps and confusion leading to defeat. Boyd, a fighter pilot, developed his theory around aviation dogfights. But without the acronyms, game theory and mathematics, it was a similar insight that was allowing Grant to see the impact of mobility in defeating his opponents. Speed is not simply the pace at which actions occur. Sufficient speed changes the nature of those actions or, more specifically, changes the reactions to them and in so doing changes them as well.”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thoughts-on-the-greatness-of-ulysses-s-grant

Marshall devotes a good portion of his piece to explaining the importance of writing reflecting clarity of vision and thought.  He asserts Grant’s writing reflects an amazing clarity and ability to express himself concisely, which is assuredly more important than style and fancy phrasing in a military leader.

While President Trump is in no way a military genius and it’s a safe bet he has never read either Grant’s autobiography or about Boyd’s OODA loops, Trump has an intuitive genius (yes, I hesitated using that word in relation to Trump) for throwing his political enemies off-balance and for controlling the information battlefield, which the Left learned to dominate and control using the sycophantic, liberal mainstream media to disseminate and saturate the media reporting with talking points, narratives, memes, all designed to manipulate and control public opinion.

For decades the SPIN form of information warfare  has allowed the Left to easily and successfully manipulate public opinion and reinforce it, by relentless repetition of the short talking points messaging filled with buzz words, which was then used to manufacture public opinion polling.  The polling, which was really the result of what amounted to mass media brainwashing, with the repetitive spin, was sold as the definitive marker on what Americans believe and it was used to marginalize conservatives and political opinions that deviated from the Left’s spin.

Trump’s opponents keep recycling through their tired spin attacks (his taxes, his lying, Russian collusion, his mental instability, the sexual predation allegations), but they keep failing to take him down.  Although most of Trump’s attacks are petty, filled with lies, often sound unhinged,  and more often than not, are rather sloppily written tweets, what Trump has done is completely break through the Left’s lock on controlling the SPIN cycle.

Observing Trump’s use of Twitter and his public speaking, it’s easy to dismiss Trump as a loudmouth, know nothing, corrupt, lying, reprehensible excuse of a leader.  His leadership, especially his penchant for playing even his own team members against each other, is assuredly toxic leadership, but when it comes to using his vastly smaller media platforms to fight the Left’s massively larger and powerful forces, Trump has learned to use his own charismatic showmanship to demolish their carefully constructed spin attacks and completely control the 24/7 news cycle, mostly using just his personal Twitter account and a handful of tweets a day.  He doesn’t rely on drafting cumbersome, focus group-tested wording or emailing talking points, then disseminating to thousands of operatives and friendly media Leftists.

Trump does watch a lot of TV news, which the Left is using to discredit Trump, but what they don’t understand is he watches and then, without giving away his next move, he tweets or makes a few public statements, which invariably throw the Left’s carefully orchestrated spin attacks into disarray.  Trump has an innate sense for how to manipulate the media, but he has a genius for getting inside his opponents’ OODA loops, leaving them scrambling and stuck recycling through their old spin attacks, while he has completely moved ahead of them and owned their information platforms.

Winning an information war is not about having the best “spin” or vast information platforms that far outmatch your opponents, it’s about understanding people and understanding the things that they care about.  Trump understands people and he has a canny knack for manipulating people.

Trump spins faster and more effectively than his enemies and he has demolished the Left’s control of America’s media information platforms… using mostly a free, personal Twitter account.  He doesn’t rely on expensive focus groups or fancy data experts; he trusts his own instincts.

Trump has broken through the Left’s information warfare OODA loops.

He broke through and demolished their SPIN cycle.

Whether he can win the information war remains to be seen, but he has the Left off-balance and in a constant state of panic, regrouping and recycling failed talking points messaging.

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Filed under General Interest, Information War, Military, Politics, The Media, Twitter Tales

December 18, 2017 · 8:51 am

Final Battle Approaches

Just a short post this morning.   Hysteria on the left is building, in anticipation of President Trump firing Robert Mueller.  The White House insists that isn’t even being discussed.  The Left, including fast and furious Eric Holder, were all over Twitter this past weekend ginning up hysteria, urging people to organize massive street protests – once again going for their “crowd size” street optic, which they will spin across the mainstream media relentlessly, to create the impression that most of America wants Trump removed from office.  The mainstream media will, of course, jump into action carrying the Left’s talking points and spin messaging, as they’ve been conditioned to do for decades.

The #Resist crowd rails about Trump’s attacks on our institutions and his comments often are an attack on our institutions, however he has taken no official action that is really an attack on our institutions.  He has the constitutional power to fire the FBI director.  He may go too far at some point, but he hasn’t yet.

However, the Left’s non-stop efforts to overturn a duly elected president are a true affront to our constitutional system.  They rant and rave daily about how Trump must be removed, they have the mainstream media engaged in spreading innuendo, highly distorted leaked information, and constant fear mongering as “legitimate, vetted news”.  They refuse to accept the outcome of the 2016 election.

They refuse to abide by The Constitution.

What is really going on is the Left refuses to play by the rules and accept the outcome of the 2016 election.

We are approaching the final battle in the never-ending 2016 information war, between the sorest loser ever and the sorest winner.

I pray that America will survive these subversives, on both left and right, who have no respect for the rule of law.

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, Gladius Maximus, Information War, Politics, The Constitution, The Media