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.
