With that trumped up Blasey-Ford case, Dems tried to normalize "guilty until proven innocent" for sexual harassment & sexual abuse cases (#MeToo) – trying to create a truly two-tiered system that would have eroded our core principle of "innocent until proven guilty."
I quote-tweeted Mollie Hemingway and I want to be clear that while I disagree with her about Ukraine and some Trump-related issues, I’ve read her articles and watched her political commentary on TV for years and respect her work. She’s always so composed and well-spoken on TV and I admire good public speakers (probably because I would rather undergo surgery without anesthesia over attempting public speaking). I also agree with her on many other issues.
I’ve written about what happened to me in 1998 on my blog many times before – short story is I posted messages on the Excite politics message boards and things happened that I can’t prove, but I do believe were efforts to scare me and silence me. That’s why I continue to fight to challenge the spin information war.
As the years have gone by, I’ve devoted a lot of time to trying to understand the Dem/liberal media spin information war and then, during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Trump campaign embraced the corrupt Dem spin information war model too. Millions of people on the right love that Trump “owns the libs” and punches back with as vicious and corrupt attacks as the Dems/liberal media wage. Funny thing about how so many people on the right, who proudly talk about their Christian faith, is they have embraced a vicious “eye for an eye” morality, but there you have it. They even dismiss Trump’s lying and vicious commentary as just trivial “mean tweets.”
Back during the 2018 Kavanaugh confirmation hearings I was very active on Twitter – “trolling” I guess is what people call it, but I’m going to explain why I “troll” on Twitter. I often feel like a lone voice in the wilderness, trying to speak out against this corrupt spin information war that is being waged to tear America apart. It’s worth being labelled a “troll” to speak out on Twitter/X, which was a main spin war battlefield, if I can get even one person, who does have real influence, to see my message or if I disrupt any of the spin info war attacks. Granted on Twitter and now X, anyone can mute or block someone they find annoying, so of course, I realize the odds aren’t in my favor of ever having anyone pay attention to what I’m saying. Plus, when you post too many messages, it can drown your own message, I’ve found out – so I try to rein in my gung-ho attitude and limit my posts on X. I also am the queen of redundancy and am terrible at trying to come up with clever, short quips, which makes for popular tweets or posts. I end up with threads, unfortunately, and realized long ago that my effort doesn’t stand much chance of succeeding, but I felt it was worth trying.
The Dem effort to derail the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings centered on the balance of liberal vs. conservative justices on the United States Supreme Court. There were mobs of protestors on Capitol Hill and headlines like, More than 300 protesters arrested as Kavanaugh demonstrations pack Capitol Hill and Protesters pound the doors of the Supreme Court following Kavanaugh confirmation. Amongst all that drama of insane Dem/liberal media orchestrated smear attacks against Kavanaugh to derail his confirmation, there was also the hysterical #MeToo movement working to incite women & urging them to publicly air all their accusations about personal incidents of sexual harassment and sexual assault. It was easy to miss that what Democrats and the activists behind the #MeToo movement were trying to do, besides stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation, was an effort to mainstream the belief that in sexual assault cases the accused should be held to a different legal standard, by insisting victims must be believed and the accused should be presumed guilty. I bet hardly anyone even noticed this Dem effort. This would have flipped one of our foundational principles of innocent until proven guilty on its head. Here’s a short explanation of the presumption of innocence from LawInfo:
“Technically speaking, it’s not. The Constitution does not mention this right by name. Instead, the general principle comes from English common law. It has since been backed up firmly in numerous court rulings, such as Coffin v. United States in 1895.”
“While the phrase “presumption of innocence” is not in the Constitution, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments both touch on “due process.” Due process generally means that the government cannot deprive you of your freedom or property unless they go through the right processes. It is understood that your right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty is a fundamental element of due process. In that sense, it is a constitutional right, even if it is not directly addressed.”
It wasn’t just crazy liberal activists pushing this idea, it was people like Democrat Senators Schumer, Hirono and even Klobuchar (I quote tweeted them challenging that idea – they would say “trolled,” I’m sure).
Of all places to find someone challenging this idea, besides my Twitter spin disruption effort, here’s an article from October 5, 2018 on the World Socialist Web Site, The #MeToo campaign versus the presumption of innocence. Here’s the opening to that article:
“In the US, the Democratic Party and its celebrity and media allies, through the vehicle of its #MeToo campaign, are waging a battle against the presumption of innocence. By seeking to whip up hysterical moods surrounding allegations of sexual misconduct, they are trying to popularize the idea that those accused of sexual assault should be presumed guilty. This campaign is, in its essence, reactionary and should be opposed.”
We live in a crazy world these days, where it’s a world socialist website that’s supporting one of our foundational principles and prominent Democrats trying to abandon it, but there you have it. The important point I wanted to make is that amidst all the drama and loud distractions it’s easy to focus on the loud noises and miss the signals that do matter. Eroding that foundational principle of presumption of innocence would have eroded our justice system in America and created a true two-tiered system.
I’m now going to rehash a bit about how I approach the information overload we all face these days and also explain how I think the Dem/liberal media spin information war works.
I’ve gotten caught up in a lot of the partisan spin noise at times too and I’m working hard to try to focus on things that I think really matter, like American national security, freedom, law and order, and civics rather than getting drawn into the identity politics of the left (all the grievance groups & environmental extremists) or on the right (Trump drama).
There’s a homesteading guy I watch on YouTube, a very nice guy, and he talks about how he gets so much information from another YouTube channel where the guy fills his videos with “data points” and connects them all, which invariably leads to this guy often buying into the craziest right-wing conspiracy theories that fly by. The thing about using that methodology of just putting down every bit of data and then trying to construct some grand theory connecting all the dots, is that probably most of those “data points” aren’t relevant, aren’t verified information, and really aren’t connected in any meaningful way.
It’s time-consuming to verify information and it’s time-consuming to sift through a lot of information, but working to narrow your searches and trying to filter out all that noise (data points everywhere) and then trying to focus on finding real signals helps me analyze information. I’ve never been trained to analyze information, so I could be wrong, but I realized years ago with that Glenn Beck chalkboard schtick, he was just working to incite right-wing rage against the Obama administration and often all those “data points” he put up were just people on the Left he knew would get his audience foaming at the mouth. Beck pushed all my conservative buttons about far-left Obama’s policies and I wanted to believe some of his connect-the-dots schtick, even though rationally I knew what he was doing was a schtick. Just like all his “reverence for the founding fathers” stuff and finding your inner George Washington. I’ve had my “inner George Washington,” since probably the American Bicentennial in 1976 and have read a lot of books about George Washington.
The liberal media does this with their Trump coverage too – years now of creating non-stop “data points” and concocting one conspiracy theory after another. Obama, Biden and Trump likely have been engaged in corrupt activities, just like the Clintons, but this methodology of tracking every Trump “data point” (real and imagined wrong-doing, because sometimes the liberal media attacks on Trump have been bonkers) just seems to be a gimmick to me and not a constructive methodology to analyze information.
During the Kavanaugh hearings, many top Democrats were spinning aggressively trying to con the American people to embrace a change to one of our foundational principles, through a media spin war effort and fomenting mass hysteria about #MeToo. In the blink of an eye America could have surrendered a foundational principle via a media-driven mob effort.
If they had succeeded, I feel certain, their next effort would have been running aggressive “polling spin,” hyping polls that show most Americans agree with that position, because sexual assault is so terrible and women aren’t taken seriously when they report it. For some examples of this polling spin effort, look at how much gay marriage was spun up and then as polling indicated a shift to where they had some polls where over half supported it, the media hyped those polls, and also used these “the majority in polls” to corral anyone who publicly stated they were against it.
Media talking heads often conflate polls as being some important expression of the “will of the people,” when truly they’re really the opinions of a very small number of Americans. It’s a media and political spin tool to con the American people. Polls are used to hype “majority” viewpoints (manufactured through aggressive, media-driven information cascade efforts), but they’re also used by media and politicians to marginalize people, by framing opposing views as “your view is out of the mainstream.” (based on some stupid poll presented as a reliable gauge).
The trans movement spin effort has worked the same way and along with the polling is endless messaging campaigns to condition us to use new words and phrases – like “gender-affirming care.” On the right there’s an “aggressive polling spin” effort being waged currently by the the Trump campaign to convince Republicans that the primary is over and Trump won – despite not a single vote in the GOP primary having been cast yet.
I actually laid out this Dem/liberal media spin information war operational model back in 1998 on the Excite message boards, but don’t have those posts. Here’s what I wrote in 2016 on my blog: The Pieces of the Media Messaging Puzzle:
“It is a form of mass media brainwashing and antithetical to American free speech principles! To succeed this strategy requires MEDIA COLLUSION.
It can NOT work without that media collusion.
Here are the components:
Talking points and buzz word messaging, which are relentlessly repeated by both political operatives and the media.
Mass media domination of the messaging, to control the 24/7 NEWS cycle, which requires mass media collusion.
Relentless repetition of polling data by both the political operatives and media, to facilitate the manufacture of opinion cascades (winning in all the polls)”
The repetitive polling spin manufactures opinion cascades. It’s not really reflective of anything other than that people are very susceptible to conformity bias – most people will adjust their beliefs to fit in with the crowd. When Democrats, the liberal media, Hollywood are all spouting the same thing (trying to dominate and control political messaging in America), it’s very easy to drive their culture war to transform America.
Since 2018, we’ve gone through efforts to silence conservatives and others via social media banning various types of speech labelled “disinformation” or “misinformation” and also all sorts of limiting the reach of online posts on social media. On YouTube, I’ve seen numerous content-creators talk about how some of their videos were demonetized or even pulled for using the wrong words. And some have been banned for speaking out on forbidden topics – like COVID.
In April of this year, the Biden administration set up a Disinformation Governance Board working with the Department of Homeland Security to try to control free speech in America. That board was paused after three weeks. Here’s Wikipedia’s entry:
“The Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) was an advisory board of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), announced on April 27, 2022. The board’s stated function is to protect national security by disseminating guidance to DHS agencies on combating misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation that threatens the security of the homeland. Specific problem areas mentioned by the DHS include false information propagated by human smugglers encouraging migrants to surge to the Mexico–United States border, as well as Russian-state disinformation on election interference and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.[1][2][3]”
“On May 18, the board and its working groups were “paused” pending review, and board head Nina Jankowicz resigned, as a result of public backlash.[3][4][5][6] On August 24, 2022, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas disbanded the board.[7]”
I believe this spin information war is a serious threat to America, which is why I bother with X/Twitter, despite finding most of the blue check mark crowd smug and wrapped up in their own self-importance. I have walked away at times, because I kept wondering if it’s even worth the effort to try to defeat the spin information war. Sadly, I often wonder if most people in America have core principles or any concern about protecting our constitutional republic and our fundamental freedoms.
The social media generation talk about “influencing” in terms of how many followers they have, making money and the political ones seem invested in currying favor with the media and political elites. I don’t want to be friends with any of the media elites or political class. I have no interest in monetizing my blog or trying to attract followers on X and monetizing. I cared when I saw no one challenging this corrupt spin information war in 1998 and I still care today.
Each side likes to blame the other side for the chaos in our politics and for the widening divides, but truly almost all of us who pay attention to politics in some way have played a part, because even if we aren’t actively a part of the media or the political class, if we buy into all the divisiveness or fall into rabid partisanship, we’re part of the problem, not the solution.
This aggressive media-driven spin information war has been a driving force in turning America into rabid, ungovernable factions, since the 1990s And that is a path to America’s collapse, as dangerous as the looming financial catastrophe or some of the other big threats.
Taking time to really think about where you stand on issues, being skeptical about partisan talking heads and narratives is a good first step toward centering your own mind. Another thing that helped me form my views was reading the Constitution and trying to understand the foundational principles and I am rusty on some things, but reading The Federalists Papers and referring back to that, has helped me understand foundational principles better. I’m not an expert though. Often as I read more, I realize that some of my views or understanding of issues was wrong or that I had a shallow understanding. Being open to admitting you were wrong is hard for most people, I think, but it’s important. It’s hard for me, because I have very strong opinions.
If you made it through this long post, I want to say, thank-you. I should have broken this down into several posts and probably edited out at least half of it, I know. And here’s a heads up, there will be post-publishing editing, because the WordPress autosaving went on and I’ll have to copy and paste this into a new window and try to get it published.
WordPress keeps going to autosaving and I can’t edit my last post right now – each updated effort has created more jumbled paragraphs, even though I didn’t change any settings. This happens frequently when I write politics posts – not to sound paranoid, it just does happen with my politics posts.
This PBS documentary about Elizebeth Smith Friedman (yes, her first name is spelled like that, not Elizabeth) showed up in my YouTube feed, so I decided to watch it. Considering my YouTube feed is mostly cooking, homesteading, prepper and craft/needlework stuff, I have no idea why this video showed up, but I found it fascinating.
Friedman and her husband developed many of the principles of cryptology during WWI. During the prohibition years she was recruited to help with encrypted messages used by organized crime and international smuggling operations. In WWII she was called back into action to help fight the Germans. She and her team were the primary codebreakers for the South American threat, where the Germans were very active – targeting American ships and working to topple the governments in South American countries.
It’s always fascinating where people sometimes end up when they venture off the beaten path. She did a year of teaching school after college and hated it, so was looking for a job. How she got involved in cryptography sounds surreal. An eccentric rich guy, George Fabyan, had set up a facility, Riverbank Laboratories at his estate to study cryptography. One of Fabyan’s pet projects was he believed that the works of Shakespeare were really written by Sir Francis Bacon and contained encrypted messages. Friedman had majored in English literature in college and studied Latin, Greek and German. Fabyan hired her to work with two other researchers and search for encrypted codes in Shakespeare, which they did not find. She met her husband, William F. Friedman, who was working on cryptography at Riverbank too. Wikipedia states:
“Riverbank gathered historical information on secret writing. Military cryptography had been deemphasized after the Civil War to the point that there were only three or four people in the United States who knew anything about the subject. Two of those people were Elizebeth and William Friedman.[1]: 67 When the United States entered World War I, Fabyan established a new Riverbank Department of Ciphers, with the Friedmans in charge, and offered their services to the government,”
That quote contains an important lesson about America – we have too often let down our guard and national defense readiness after wars and crises. After the Civil War, no one cared about intelligence work. We also didn’t really work to have a professional standing army until after WWI. Somewhere there’s got to be a balance between maintaining readiness and being dangerously unprepared. America was woefully unprepared for WWI. We didn’t even have an army capable of deploying to fight on the Western Front. Here’s a bit from an article, World War I: Building the American military, from the US Army website:
“On April 6, the U.S. Army was a constabulary force of 127,151 soldiers. The National Guard had 181,620 members. Both the country and the Army were absolutely unprepared for what was going to happen.”
“The United States had no process in place to build a mass army, supply it, transport it and fight it. Continental European powers had a universal military service program in place, and when war broke out, reservists — already trained — went to their mobilization points and joined their units.”
Elizebeth Smith Friedman was never recognized for her work during both world wars and she had signed an oath to never speak about her wartime work. Years after her death she was inducted to the NSA Hall of Honor, according to Wikipedia. It’s become rather trendy to distrust and rail about the CIA and NSA and while I do support limits on government surveillance activities, I think it’s important to also remember there have been thousands upon thousands of Americans, who have devoted their lives to working quietly doing intelligence and military work that keeps us safe. This was one lady with unique skills who stepped up to the plate whenever her country asked her to help and she never received any awards or accolades; she just did her duty as an American.
We don’t talk enough about the fact that Joe Biden gave a national address, flanked by the military, in which he declared tens of millions of Americans to be a national threat. pic.twitter.com/sbs2cCEiNT
Finally, getting to my sort of book report post on The Journal of David Q. Little, by R. Daniel McMichael, which was published in 1967. I’m sure I’ll reference this novel in future posts and to be honest, I’m only halfway through (it’s 557 pages), because I keep jotting notes on post-it flags and sticking them in the book and also writing down notes on paper. I can see how this novel influenced President Ronald Reagan, because it’s a story set in the late 20th century, after a US president signs onto a World Order of Nations (W.O.N.) agreement with the Soviet Union and other nations of the world to avert nuclear war (nuclear blackmail by the Soviet Union).
This W.O.N. agreement sets up a new international organization with vastly more power than the United Nations and it supersedes the US Constitution, even though the people of the United States are led to believe that this is all about world peace and trying to get along with other countries. There’s also a Treaty of Friendship the US signed onto. In reality with the stroke of a pen, an American president signed away American sovereignty to the Soviet Union and the remaking of America and dismantling of American beliefs in freedom and individualism blaze across the nation, as this novel begins.
The nuclear blackmail incident centered on the Soviet Union secretly building a massive nuclear arsenal – “she had a nuclear superiority of about 20,000 megatons capable of rapid delivery, compared with the U.S.A.’s rapid delivery nuclear capability then of only 2000 megatons – down from a previous high some years earlier of about 53,000 megatons.” This suggested to me some previous unilateral downsizing of the US nuclear arsenal, which over the years I’ve heard many liberals advocate.
The story is written as a journal of some average guy, David Q. Little, that is found in the year 2223. Historians keep gathering bits of old Americana from the time the world devolved into tyranny under this W.O.N. one-world system, akin to how historians in our day search for clues to unravel the fall of Rome.
The author wrote this fictional novel with footnotes to fill in background of Little’s journal, which is a very interesting way of plotting a fictional novel. I love reading footnotes and appendices in non-fiction books, so this is my cup of tea. The explanation of the nuclear blackmail comes with Little’s mention of DD-Day in his journal, with this footnote, “Newspapers used this expression in referring to the December 20 “destruction deadline” set by the USSR; the day on which she, presumably, would have exploded nuclear devices over 24 United States cities.”
Obviously, you can see how Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was likely influenced some by this novel.
A couple days ago I mentioned Stella Morabito’s piece from 2016 about this novel and then I followed with an X-thread of mine, so I want to be clear what I meant. Stephen Miller had commented on the above X-post about President Biden making that bizarre speech on September 1, 2022. Here’s a FOX News headline, Biden shocks viewers with ‘hellish red background’ for polarizing speech. He has continually fumed about Americans, who hold right-wing political beliefs, as being “MAGA Extremists,” and that term “MAGA extremist” could be applied to anyone who doesn’t agree with the left’s progressive views and agenda.
In this dystopian novel, David Q. Little comes to realize that anyone who dares question anything about the new rules being implemented can quickly be labelled an “extremist” and end up being tried in televised, staged public hearings, where the crowd has been coached on rallying a mob atmosphere to denounce the extremists, who are smeared as “Mr. X.” The hearings begin with a prayer about “the fulfillment of mankind’s oldest aspiration – peace” and then a new Pledge of Allegiance. The witnesses testifying in these public hearings are co-workers, friends and even family members. Then, if warranted the guilty are turned over to a world court system for trial.
Many of the communist indoctrination methods described in this novel remind me of how the progressive Left in America plays these same type of forcing new words and phrases on the American public and then tries to engage in public-shaming exercises to force people to comply. The intimidation of threatening people’s jobs for failing to comply seems eerily similar too. If Dems could get hate speech laws severely limiting speech passed in America, I feel certain they would avidly criminalize speech they want silenced. In Little’s journal anyone holding to the old ways, like American patriotism, rambling about the Constitution, questioning the new rules, possessing a firearm (guns were confiscated), and the list goes on and on, becomes a target of being labelled an “extremist.” Everything is rationed, travel is restricted, passes are needed for everything and worst of all the people are being forced to spy on each other and report their neighbors, friends, and even family for being extremists or breaking any of these new rules. So much of this sounds like the Great Reset green dreams and COVID social mitigation excesses.
Amazingly, most people in this novel adopt a go along to get along attitude and keep deluding themselves that they aren’t living under communism and rationalizing that making some adjustments to work for world peace is worth it, considering the alternative of nuclear annihilation. The main character, David Q. Little, a rather conformist type guy, begins to wake up to what’s really going on and begins his private journal as the only place he can express his thoughts and feelings openly. His wife is all-in on the “peace” plans. He is a man consumed by guilt, as he got sucked into testifying against other people and pressured to lead a march.
The footnote on the legislation prohibiting possession of firearms explains that law was enacted some years before the Treaty of Friendship “in order to assure greater public safety.” It also states the treaty sought to re-enforce this law.
President Biden and Dems repeating this “MAGA Extremists” public tarring has struck me as so egregious for any American president to try to engage in creating a mob mentality against a segment of society, especially “extremists,” who are so vaguely defined, that the smear can be adjusted at will – just disagree with the left’s agenda and you might be a MAGA extremist, just like anything imaginable now gets labelled as “racist.” I felt disturbed by this MAGA extremist smearing before I even heard of this novel.
I have several books on Ronald Reagan and in another book, I had read he often mentioned a book he read when he was 11, The Printer of Udell’s, as helping shape his moral sense, but I had never heard of this dystopian novel about the US surrendering to USSR nuclear blackmail, under the guise of signing onto a new international order dedicated to peaceful coexistence.
It’s become very trendy among the American right to rant about Marxists and communism these days, but I suspect most of the people doing that labelling have no understanding of the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and the decades long Cold War era.
I’ve written about the left-wing Marxist-tinged movements, like BLM, the trans movement and the collectivist one-world governance effort being pushed by an assortment of unelected elites at the WEF, UN, international banking, and ultra-wealthy business leaders, in cooperation with many world leaders under the auspices of the UN’s 2030 Agenda and various green energy transformation initiatives and DEI programs.
America’s most determined adversaries assuredly target both political sides in America with efforts to sow divisions, fuel distrust and latch onto any means possible to manipulate Americans via the media. Minority factions have always been key targets by Marxists to exploit divides and ignite anti-American sentiments. Since Dems and the liberal media invested so much effort with the Clinton Trump-Russian collusion dirty trick effort and labelling just about anything “Russian disinformation,” at this point that term is pretty much meaningless, but that doesn’t mean the Russians, Chinese and other foreign actors aren’t busily fueling divides in America via information war and other penetration efforts. For instance see the Confucius Institutes. The Wahhabi movement has been a global movement too and put effort into spreading Wahhabism to American black universities and prisons. There are other international groups dedicated to spreading Marxist ideology too. And there are also melded ideologies of Islamic extremism and Marxism, like The Nation of Islam. The founders of BLM stated they were inspired by Marxist ideology.
I don’t believe Trump is a Russian agent but, I do believe he reveres strong men and authoritarian leaders, in addition to having no respect for following the rules. In fact, one of Trump’s big selling points in 2016 was about how Trump doesn’t follow the rules. He did encourage rally attendees to punch protestors that showed up in 2015-2016. A 78 year-old man got caught up in that “fight back” atmosphere that Trump escalated, when protestors disrupted the rally and the elderly man sucker-punched a protestor. That elderly man ended up getting arrested and charged – while Trump pretended none of that incitement effort was his fault (the same as what he did on J-6). Trump leaves other people facing their legal bills, and until just recently had offered no financial assistance to J-6 attendees facing charges for their legal costs.
Trump followers go to great pains to cherry-pick Trump’s public cover-his-butt line about urging protestors to go to the Capitol and remain peaceful, but I watched that rally and all of the speakers were using incendiary language to rile up that crowd and urging them to “Stop the Steal.” And while I do believe there was serious law enforcement failure that day and the FBI might have had informants in the crowd, Trump set up that rally to pressure Mike Pence to do something he had no constitutional authority to do.
So, we have this mob formation going on not just on the left with all their hate speech dramas and othering people, but on both sides of the partisan aisle in America now.
Back in the Cold War days there was a term, “useful idiot,” used to describe a person who unwittingly aided Soviet propaganda efforts. I don’t believe Trump is a Russian agent, but he’s one of the most useful idiots for Putin. Trump basked in Putin’s praise, Trump also trashed NATO constantly and talked about wanting to pull the US out of NATO. The US pulling out of NATO would be a huge victory for Putin and President Xi of China. That move would be surrendering America’s position as a world leader, without our adversaries having to exert any military or economic effort. Trump also refers to President Xi, another dictator, as a friend and he loved yucking it up with Kim Jong Un, the leader of one of the most repressive regimes in the world and for very little in return – North Korea didn’t stop any of their weapons procurement or alter their long-range objectives.
What America’s adversaries got was the sight of America’s military leaders having fits over the stupidity of frittering away the prestige of a presidential meeting with no real strategic gains. Trump’s followers believe he’s the greatest dealmaker in the world, but if you don’t even understand the foreign policy stakes for America- in detail – and believe a photo-op with you is winning, then how on earth can you negotiate a deal that’s to America’s advantage? Communist regimes are the most devious and deceptive regimes to work on deals with, because they play endless word games and have turned strategic ambiguity into an art form.
On the left we have a Democratic Party consumed by radical one-world collectivist dreams that reek of stale Marxist ideology. That ideology has literally captured academia in America and many American K-12 public schools and they’re working on turning our American military into a far-left institution too.
Our American political and public institutions really are being hit by both sides and I had hoped the communist threat was over in 1989.
In the author’s notes to this dystopian novel, McMichael, explains how the Soviets were trying to find a way to take down Czechoslovakia, the last remaining democracy, which fell in 1948. The Soviets were trying to sell their international image as working toward world peace and were trying to persuade the Americans to give up their nuclear weapons, so tanks rolling into Prague would have demolished that image. McMichael writes, “A way was found quite in keeping with the enigmas of the Marxist-Leninist world of dialectics. For the Czech problem: just turn everything upside down. Keep the military on the sidelines, stationed in other Bloc satellites but close enough to pose a frightening threat. Then, activate a concerted effort to break the will of the non-communist Czechs against a peaceful solution, this through the arts of propaganda, subversion and intimidation – components of which included: use of popular fronts, protest committees, disinformation, discrediting and decapitating non-communist leadership – all designed to generate loss of national confidence to resist the “inevitability of history and the will of the people.”
McMichael, went on, “The means employed was the continuing use of the strategy of “pressure from above, pressure from below” projects and the application of the “salami” technique to isolate leadership and institutions (such as bankers and banks) from lay public support. Targets involved leadership penetration of parliament, civil service, police, judiciary, as well as the electorate.”
I’ve been pondering the chaos going on in America for the past 20 years and in recent years it’s escalated dramatically, which has left me concerned that now both sides of America are dangerously polarized and unstable. This culture war, largely fueled by a relentless 24/7 spin information war, has played an outsized role in the culture war, I’ve believed since the late 1990s. I write about my thoughts about the spin information war on my blog and I’ve tweeted about it, but I stopped mentioning my ideas to my family members who are interested in foreign policy, because they just dismiss me as if I’m saying something ridiculous. Unless someone in the news says it – they don’t believe it. I have a high school education and when I first started trying to understand this spin information war, no one was talking about these repetitive messaging attacks that the liberal media and Dems launch (now in the right they produce clever videos, like that video of 3.4% fatality that kicked off COVID hysteria)- all the talk was about right-wingers complaining about “media bias.” I don’t care if anyone agrees with me, because I pay for my blog here and as long as I can get blog posts published, which is difficult with that autosaving problem, I mentioned, I’m going to keep writing. I usually end up having to do more background reading to even understand a lot of the issues and terminology I run into, as I wade through books and information online.
I’m going to continue to be a lone voice in the wilderness and I’ll keep reading through stacks of books and online searching trying to dig for information and hopefully find some answers. I highly recommend this dystopian novel, because while it’s very easy to invoke Orwell’s 1984, which I reread last year, I think this novel offers much more relevant food for thought about the culture war in America and the political chaos.
If you’re reading my blog, I sincerely thank you for your time.
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
I posted a thread on X (formerly Twitter) this morning and I wanted to share it. I’m jumping ahead of my promised sort of book report, here, though. I am not done reading the novel I mentioned in a recent blog post. The dystopian novel that affected American history is, The Journal of David Q. Little, which was President Ronald Reagan’s favorite dystopian novel. Reagan gave Margaret Thatcher a copy of this novel. I read about this in Stella Morabito’s book, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer. Her book is very interesting and has expanded my knowledge on totalitarianism a great deal.
Once I started googling a bit, I found this 2016 article, by Stella Morabito, President Reagan’s Favorite Dystopian Novel Has A Message For Us. Morabito is always ahead of the curve and I have learned so much reading her articles and her book. Her book is filled to the brim with footnotes, which I’m using as a guide for further reading on totalitarianism. During my Cold War era reading days, I read a lot of books on various aspects of the Cold War, but my main interests were military strategy and foreign policy, plus a lot of spy drama stuff. Here’s a bit from her 2016 article:
“For most of the story, David chooses to live as a middle-of-the-road, unexceptional mid-level manager hoping for advancement, but always trying to get by and not make waves. His wife is especially anxious to keep their semblance of the American dream alive—nice house, three kids, good employment. But they soon learn that the price of keeping their own heads above water is to obey a system that demands they betray their colleagues and surveil their neighbors. They try hard to ignore all the telltale signs that the system’s collapse is not just inevitable, but has already happened.”
“The Littles maintain a façade of normalcy for a little while, thanks to the privileges of the cronyism a nomenklatura system—that is part and parcel of socialist societies. But it all quickly wears away as the fundamental transformation of America unmasks itself as a program of crony-orchestrated desolation. As every sector of life becomes internationalized, human relationships devolve into various forms of prostitution and pimpery.”
Oddly enough, I came across mention of President Reagan's favorite dystopian novel in a book I was reading. It's from 1967 & titled 'The Journal of David Q. Little.' Reagan gave a copy to Margaret Thatcher to read. I'm reading this novel right now. https://t.co/g6LckFUd8D
I like timelines, because it helps me to sort out events & try to see the big picture, which can get lost in mountains of details. So, the last democracy in Eastern Europe was taken down in 1948.
Sorry for the repeated NATO post, but I can’t figure out how to copy the entire thread and post it, so I tried copying the links individually and ended up with this. Anyway, repeating the NATO founding timeline, which followed the Soviet Union takeover of Eastern Europe bears repeating.
I apologize for all the typos and grammatical issues with my blog posts. I’ve been struggling for a long time with using WordPress, because frequently when I write political blog posts, an autosaving function starts and then I can’t save or publish my blog post – I’m just stuck. So, I end up opening another window and opening WordPress. I click on New Post, then work to copy and paste my post from the frozen “autosaving” window to the new window. Yesterday, while transferring my blog post to a new window, “autosaving” came on and the second window was frozen too, so I opened a third window and rushed to hit publish. Then I end up trying to edit the already published blog post. I have no idea why it’s only my political-themed blog posts that have this “autosaving” issue.
I find myself hurrying to publish and perhaps I need to start writing my blog posts somewhere else and then copy and paste them to my WordPress and publish them.
In case you notice all the post-publication editing, I wanted to explain this, because I am not tech-savvy and have no idea why that autosaving message comes on and then I’m unable to hit save or publish – I’m just stuck.
For a long time, I have not been a Tucker Carlson fan, even though just about everyone I know, who is right-leaning loves him and believes he’s some sort of noble truth-teller. I have felt he’s mostly a fraud, especially with his embrace of Victor Orban and praising Putin, all by selling this false framing that Orban and Putin are really good Christian leaders fighting evil Western secularism. I started listening to the Tucker Carlson interview of Victor Orban and in the first minute he flipped the narrative.
My impressions of Carlson being disingenuous and a polished liar aren’t going to be popular with hardly any right-wing partisans, who believe he’s some sort of heroic figure trying to take on the lying liberal media. I think he’s as much a fraud as the liberal media liars.
Long ago, there was a big news story in the US, where a young mother claimed her two young sons were kidnapped by a black man, during a carjacking. My mother was talking to me about this case in a phone call and she was so upset about that case. We had both seen the first interview the mother gave to the media and I believed she was lying. I told my mother, I think she’s lying and my mother got very upset with me and asked how I could be that cruel about a mother whose children were kidnapped. Afterwards, when the facts emerged my mother told me that I have always been a good judge of character and I don’t think that’s particularly true. I just watch and listen closely to what people say. Tucker has all sorts of deceptive mannerisms, especially the feigned sincerity and how he carefully sets the stage to get certain responses and lead his guests toward the narrative he wants to sell.
Ep. 20 Hungary shares a border with Ukraine. We traveled to Budapest to speak with the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán. pic.twitter.com/LOzpMrQNIz
At the 00.32 point in the very beginning of Carlson’s interview of Orban, Carlson lays the trap for gullible Americans and unfortunately too many conservatives in America have swallowed this lie whole. Carlson says, “If you take a step back, the point of NATO is to provoke war with Russia.” This is a total lie.The point of NATO was to prevent the Soviet Union from gobbling up more of Europe at the end of WWII, after the Soviet Union had seized control of the eastern European countries. So, Carlson set-up the rest of this interview with that false premise and too many Americans will buy into that and everything else he sells.
Carlson has flipped the narrative and while I can’t speak to his motives – I can say this is completely untrue and it’s intended to convince Americans to turn on NATO and their own government’s support of Ukraine, a country, which the US agreed to aid with security – to prevent against Russian aggression (just like Russia launching this full-scale invasion last year). This deliberate false-framing is also a tactic that was used for decades by the Soviet Union in their propaganda efforts in the West. Once someone sets up this type of false-framing – beware, because they’re trying to turn you against your own country. It’s very interesting how Carlson also uses this Orban and Putin are really good Christians leaders premise too, when the history of Putin is one of suppression and oppression of any sort of personal liberty in Russia, vast corruption, and a willingness to use extreme measures to destroy any political opponents.
Hungary does have a strong Catholic heritage, but only 12% of them attend church regularly. Spending 45 years under Soviet domination, where religious suppression and atheism was the state policy definitely left a strong mark on Russia and the former Eastern bloc countries. Religious education and activities were restricted in the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries.
Victor Orban is very careful not to criticize Putin, because he’s spent the past decade forging close ties with Putin and Hungary relies on Russia:
“Landlocked Hungary gets 80-85% of its gas from Russia, and Szijjarto said that last year about 80% of crude imports also arrived from Russia.
While countries in western Europe have made serious efforts to wean themselves off Russian gas, Hungary has been receiving 4.5 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas per year from Russia under a 15-year deal signed in 2021.”
In this interview, both Carlson and Orban keep doing this WWIII fearmongering constantly and that’s an old Soviet propaganda tactic too, to get Western countries to lose their resolve and to convince people that the communist goal is all about seeking “World Peace”. Unfortunately, most Americans have forgotten all of these Cold War lessons. The Soviet Union set up a front organization at the end of WWII called the World Peace Council, to spread anti-West propaganda:
“The World Peace Council (WPC) is an international organization with the stated goals of advocating for universal disarmament, sovereignty and independence and peaceful co-existence, and campaigns against imperialism, weapons of mass destruction and all forms of discrimination. Founded from an initiative of the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties, WPC emerged from the bureau’s worldview that divided humanity into Soviet-led “peace-loving” progressive forces and US-led “warmongering” capitalist countries. Throughout the Cold War, WPC operated as a front organization as it was controlled and largely funded by the Soviet Union, and refrained from criticizing or even defended the Soviet Union’s involvement in numerous conflicts.”
In that quote on the World Peace Council, there’s the framing Carlson has been selling – Russia is peace-loving and it’s NATO and US warmongers, who are the threat to “world peace” – despite the fact Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign country, SIX months after our humiliating Afghanistan withdrawal debacle. In Afghanistan, China immediately moved in to fill the gap and forge close economic and security ties with the Taliban. Here’s a February 6, 2023 Fox news report: China moves in on Afghanistan as relationship with Taliban grows: ‘We welcome Chinese investment’.
Carlson has probably been the single most effective person in American media to cultivate this “oh it’s so dangerous to help Ukraine.” The truth is Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year and yet Carlson consistently portrays Putin as the victim of NATO aggression and the bad Ukrainian government. He often has a retired Army colonel on to spew anti-Ukraine/pro-Russian takes on the situation too.
In this interview Carlson works to get you to doubt NATO and believe it’s provoking war with Russia, despite, again let me repeat the fact that Russia planned and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine – six months after an American retreat in Afghanistan, that both Russia and China are capitalizing on. The other interesting narrative flip going on in anti-Ukraine media messaging lately is an effort to try to peel off American support of Ukraine and get Americans fuming about aid to Ukraine. There’s also an effort to sell this idea that Russia isn’t the threat, China is, and we should be focused on China, not Russia. Then there’s a framing I’ve heard in the past week about how we’re somehow pushing Russia and China closer together by aiding Ukraine. The truth is Russia and China have had close ties since post WWII and Soviet Russia was instrumental in Mao’s communist revolution in China. They were close allies during the Korean War, they were close allies during the Vietnam War too.
All over the world China and Russia are on the move trying to become the world powerbrokers economically and just last week there was this headline from ABC: BRICS announce major expansion with 6 countries joining in 2024. BRICS is an economic group of countries to counter the US-led economies. China, Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa were the founding countries in BRICS. If the US retreats from aiding Ukraine, that would embolden both Russia and China and weaken America’s position as a world leader. We would be handing Ukraine over to the Russians and abandoning our NATO allies.
Once you allow yourself to buy into Carlson’s false premise, you’re going to keep talking yourself into more and more anti-American, pro-Russia positions and for me, no matter how much I disagree and dislike the policies of the Biden administration – sorry, I’m not going down the road of making excuses for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and then wringing my hands in fear that what the WEST is doing is so dangerous, when it’s what Russia did (A FULL-SCALE INVASION OF A SOVEREIGN COUNTRY) that has brought us to where we are.
President Reagan would be turning over in his grave if he saw what today’s GOP has turned into.
Note: The Trump “peace idea” that Orban supports is America and NATO surrendering to Russian aggression and that isn’t a road to “world peace;” it’s a greenlight to all of America’s adversaries that we no longer have the will to defend our friends or allies. Trump also expressed disdain for NATO and suggested the US pulling out of NATO, which would be a big win for Russia and China.
Screaming “climate change” on the left or “diabolical global conspiracy” on the right seems to be the default response to every disaster or crisis in the news these days. With the rash of wildfires in Canada this summer, left-wing media ranted in unison about “climate change,” at the top of their lungs, while some in the right-wing media, especially on right-wing social media, ranted about an assortment of conspiracy theories, like the government set the fires, or it was part of the evil globalist plan and other such theories with no proof to back any of them.
“Indeed, the main stage-setter (as in California’s 2020 wildfires) looks to be forest mismanagement in the name of environmentalism.
Imagining that “natural” is always better, greens have pushed to stop controlled burns that clear out brush and debris and so make it less likely fires grow uncontrollable.
In a 2020 paper, scientists warned of a shortage of funding for Canadian forest-fire control, and in 2021 the Globe and Mail called for more small, controlled burns to avoid runaway blazes.
But Canada’s leaders bowed to enviro sentiment, ignoring the science.
Ironically, that’s led to fires spewing millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere.”
“This trend is also only expected to increase, the report notes, since costs for fire protection in Canada have risen by an average of $150 million per decade since the 1970s, when data collection began.
But by many accounts, Canada’s leaders are not doing enough to respond to the rising crisis.
In the fire-prone area of Alberta, residents complained about the province’s decision to ax their firefighting crews, as part of a broader budget cut — noting that these teams could have been instrumental in helping extinguish the current fires.
“We could have been difference-makers” in stopping some of the fires, which began in Alberta in early May, Jordan Erlandson, a former member of the aerial firefighting crew, told the Calgary City News.
“Wildfire management agencies in Canada are at a tipping point,” the editorial board of Canada’s Globe and Mail wrote in 2021, urging the country to conduct more prescribed burns and forest thinning. “Presuppression and suppression costs are increasing but program budgets are not.””
Poor management and environmentalist-driven policies leading to disastrous environmental outcomes seem to have played a large role in the devastating wildfires, along with, “And conditions across the country are drier. Data from theCanada Drought Monitor shows the 10 provinces experiencing the worst wildfires to date are all experiencing abnormal dryness, or “moderate to severe drought” conditions.” according to the Washington Examiner story.
Both sides have a bit right – the unusually dry weather and the bad forestry management driven by global environmentalist extremism appear to have contributed to the large number of wildfires in Canada
The crazy conspiracy theories now seem as much a fixture on right-wing media as the left’s climate change hysteria and we’d all probably be better off if we didn’t leap into buying into all this drama.
There were also wildfires in Greece in the news and a few days ago Fox News reported: Greek authorities arrest 79 ‘arsonist scum’ in connection with devastating wildfires. The article didn’t include more information on these ‘arsonist scum’ as Greece’s Civil Protection Minister, Vassilis Kiklias, called them, so it’s not clear if they were a part of some organized group or acting alone.
I’m still sticking with my theory that where the influential “globalist” big idea people pose a threat is with getting governments to sign onto crazy policies and international agreements. Certainly, as we found out during the pandemic, those policies can lead to miserable and deadly outcomes, but another part of the equation with the globalist big idea people is just like with all the “central planner” big idea people before them – their ideas invariably don’t work and their ranks are filled with a whole lot of incompetent nincompoops.
At least in America, we are still allowed to speak out and challenge the groupthink, “majority opinion,” and the “experts.” I know that free speech is a very good thing for me, as someone who often holds unpopular opinions. We should all be paying attention to the “hate speech” laws spreading in Western democracies, because that’s a very disturbing trend and one we should speak out against here in America, if we value our personal liberties.
I’ll be doing a book report blog post soon on a dystopian novel from the 1960s I’m reading. It’s about “global governance” and “central planners” run amok. This novel actually influenced American history in a way and until recently I had never even heard of this novel or this bit of history. I don’t want to spoil this story, so when I finish reading it, I’ll tell you more.
Last week, I wrote a post, “The Narrative is back” and I linked this X video about a Dem/liberal media spin effort hyping the WHO 3.4% fatality rate for COVID to kick off the pandemic hysteria:
Great video of mainstream media talking heads parroting the lie that COVID had a “3.4%” fatality rate, though early data clearly showed this was dozens of times too high. The lie that started it all.pic.twitter.com/8RE8zKKQrU
This information is tacked at the end of that post last week:
I wanted to add this bit of information about that video with the hype about the 3.4% fatality rate from the WHO. Timelines matter and this was the spun up hysteria to scare people into complying with all sorts of draconian “social mitigation” policies, including shutting down the economy in March 2020.
Here are a few links to 3.4% fatality stories from early March 2020:
So, for over two years people in China were living under these crazy lockdown policies, but in 2022, a deadly apartment fire in Shanghai led to protests and the government finally started easing some of their restrictions:
I’m adding all this information about China for a reason. The policies that America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many European countries adopted were social mitigation polices that China started employing in 2019 – after that WHO alarmist 3.4% fatality rate, which was dramatically wrong, was used as the rationale. There was no evidence that any of these Chinese draconian social mitigation policies worked. The actual fatality rate is well under 1%.
Iran temporarily released prisoners due to COVID and then very quickly there were liberals in America proposing that. NJ did release prisoners.
Why was America adopting COVID policies from authoritarian regimes with terrible human rights records and also regimes where they routinely cover-up human rights abuses?
Even more disturbing in 2022, the Washington Post had a tech reporter still supporting China’s zero Covid policy and believes the US should adopt that policy:
The new “zero” hysteria is Net Zero… and I fear the radical policy prescriptions for Net Zero will be even more deadly and draconian than the zero COVID efforts.
I warned about any of these leftist utopian policies that have “zero” in the name before. The China zero COVID policy set the goal to get as close to zero cases of COVID as possible – by isolating people in their homes and even in one city there was a report of people with COVID being welded into their apartments.
In 2020, we were subjected to constant media-driven fear porn, to scare us into complying with all these rules and being emotionally blackmailed that if we didn’t comply we were going to kill those most at risk – “don’t you care about Grandma?” A lot of people lost their jobs, lost their businesses, were ostracized, endured orchestrated public shaming efforts, loved ones died alone in hospitals and nursing home – allowed no visitors.
The US military imposed a mandatory COVID vaccine policy. Here’s an article from Jan 2023:
“Roughly 99% of all active-duty troops received the vaccine. More than 8,400 service members were discharged from the military for refusing to take it. All of those kicked out of military service received at least a “general discharge under honorable conditions,” with others receiving the higher “honorable discharge.” The difference affects medical and other benefits service members receive after leaving the military.”
All that turmoil and over 8,000 servicemembers kicked out over vaccines that do not work – they don’t prevent the spread of COVID and they don’t prevent contracting COVID, as promised. There is the Faucian assurances that the vaccines are still vital and also claims that you’ll get a milder cased of COVID and that the vaccines are saving lives… Whatever. It’s important to not forget how the COVID “social mitigation efforts played out – massive political and media fear-mongering, hyping a global crisis, then pushing for the most extreme measures possible.
More is on the way – with a COVID wave starting again, with the “climate crisis” push ramping up and also with the political volatility in America. With Net Zero – the goal is to reduce carbon emissions as close to zero as possible. Part of that effort is to track and monitor every person on earth’s carbon footprint, then force radical lifestyle changes. Just pay close attention to the words Dems, leftist experts/activists and the media use. If you hear the same words and phrases being repeated to spread fear – that’s a signal to be very wary of the information they’re selling. If you hear “zero,” you know it’s another nothingburger, crazy plan.
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