For the past 12 days, I’ve been struggling. Hacking and clawing at my keyboard, evermore feverish by every nightfall. My hopes, at first, were to put forward an article exploring the relationship between media companies and intelligence agencies.
As covered by Glenn Greenwald back when he wrote for the Intercept:
A veteran national security journalist with NBC News and MSNBC blasted the networks in a Monday email for becoming captive and subservient to the national security state, reflexively pro-war in the name of stopping President Donald Trump
[…]
The NBC/MSNBC reporter, William Arkin, is a longtime prominent war and military reporter, perhaps best known for his groundbreaking, three-part Washington Post series in 2010, co-reported with two-time Pulitzer winner Dana Priest, on how sprawling, unaccountable, and omnipotent the national security state has become in the post-9/11 era.
While I encourage anyone raising an eyebrow to read the full article, I do not advise trying to pin down exactly how and to what amount FBI and news media are in bed together. Such an exercise in futility might only send you down the same tortuous path I threaded.
The abhorrent smear campaign against late Dr Martin Luther King Jr:
In the 60s, the FBI relentlessly smeared the now legendary Civil Rights leader. They tried just about everything, smearing him with allegations ranging from salacious to seditious.The FBI’s damn lies and abuse of hair forensic analysis:
They actually admitted in 2015 to having used dubious matches to expediate cases in favour of prosecution, in the vast majority of cases no less.That time they just harassed a world famous whale watcher for 7 years:
I wish I was exaggerating.
Between all these well documented examples of misdeeds, all involving aid from some media outlet or other, where on earth should I begin? At one point, I was to focus on one incredible microcosm of fuckery in the much belied Waco siege. How convenient that while building my case, I made a discovery that left me incredulous and sick to my stomach: A documentary(?) made and published by CNN.
This atrocity of factual inaccuracies, outright lies and over the top edits straight out of Indian telenovelas, was published by a supposedly reputable source.
As the scope of my article was broadening to encompass this little gem of FBI and ATF propaganda, I made another discovery. Although the comment section appeared available, it was conspicuously empty. So I left a comment…
Hah! That’ll tell em.
Wait, what?
Odd.
Only the “random comment” still stands to this day. Don’t believe me? Test it yourself!
Unless you live in the USA that is…
Oh by the way, do not be surprised if you can’t see my “random comment” on the video The more astute of you may have noticed a little hint I left, but I was actually the only one seeing these comments. My guess would be the comment section was filled with terrible people pointing out the easily verifiable truth. A few rounds of censorship later, CNN likely gave up and pulled down the video, though only in the USA.
Alright.
A modern Tube comment section can look perfectly normal, yet totally isolate you. Hey, at least it still auto-censors key words like “lie” and “propaganda”, just in case you engaged in wrongthink. Isn’t that crazy?
Well, I can tell you I felt crazy. The bigger issue being that now, my article’s scope got enlarged again to account for social media giants’ censorship and control. It’s hard not to be reminded of how they coordinated to bury the Hunter Biden story weeks before election day. The Washington Examiner reports:
The federal investigation, which began in 2018, is focused specifically on possible counterintelligence concerns, including that Hunter’s business dealings with Chinese executives may have included tax and money laundering violations.
[…]
And you know what happened after the New York Post reported on the existence of the laptop and the emails and published the corresponding documents? Twitter locked the New York Post out of its account for allegedly spreading disinformation
Uh… alright… but it’s not like people who know better would lie and the rest of the media would publish it uncritically… right?
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Round the circle goes, back to investigating the media and intel agencies’ incestuous relationships.
Back to feeling crazy.
Which, even that was now slowly morphing into something else; a kind of apprehension I had experienced previously. I remember quite vividly having a conversation with a democrat friend about how the election allegations tied together. The apprehension I had talking about it, is the same I have now.
Lo, behold, their answer was as expected:
There’s no way this could be pulled off, you’d need way too many people to be in the know, those are just conspiracies.
If I am to be completely honest, that’s absolutely, 100% fair. That is the source of this apprehension I feel. I have enough self awareness to know it sounds straight out of a paranoid fever dream.
And then I read this:
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.
A-Alex Jones? Is that you??
After 12 long days of picking at my brain and reading countless articles…
I wake up to an article in Time goddamn Magazine laying it all out bare for the public to gawk at. Except, in their version of reality, that’s not scary at all. Got rid of the orange devil didn’t it? Definitely a good thing!
Below, my actual genuine reaction upon reading this incredible propaganda piece:
I recommend everyone, regardless of political affiliation, read it. I give it up to Scott Adams for the best take on it though:
I don’t even know what to add to the story. Usually I can, you know, I’ll tell what’s in the headline and I’ll give it my humorous or inciteful spin. There’s nothing to say about this. Everything that needs to be said about this is being said openly; this group of people behind the scene determined the president.
I disagree on one thing, there IS something to be said:
Facts are, not all of it was actually legal. This assertion from the Time’s report sounds more like a lawyer trying to get out of trouble than an honest assessment. Already, a judge in Virginia has ruled these last minute election rule changes to be illegal. As reported by the Washington Examiner, those will be prohibited moving forward.
A Virginia Circuit Court judge ruled that the state’s last-minute changes to election law allowing mail-in ballots to arrive late without a postmark were illegal.
W-without even a postmark? You’re kidding me right? What did Time mag call it again?
They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.
Mhm…
And fortify they did. That news only came on the 27th of January 2021 for a reason. They #Fortified the election by making sure one of the most notoriously fraud fraught voting methods was considered squeaky clean in American polite society. An easy task in the television era no doubt, but In the comparably free and decentralized continent of modern media, not so much. They had to weaponize the now infamous role “platforms” play on the internet.
Now, what phraseology did Time choose for that?
steer media coverage and control the flow of information.
Sigh. Just a few weeks ago Jack Dorsey was pretending again that there was no coordination between the social media giants’ erasure of ex-President Trump. Oh but, what in tarnation do I read here?
In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement,” says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.)
The good(?) news is, although a lot of election lawsuits got dismissed on procedural grounds, quite a few got simply stalled to after inauguration. Hell, the Maricopa county election board in Arizona is still contesting the - court approved - subpoena from their own legislature, even faced with imminent arrest.
Maybe more importantly, it wouldn’t be a story about 2020 if it hadn’t all transpired in Zoom meetings:
Podhorzer and his allies are still holding their Zoom strategy sessions, gauging voters’ views and developing new messages.
No reason to stop such a successful enterprise I guess. It is a bit surreal though… what’s next, bragging about it in a prestigious paper?
Oh right.
Welp. I’ll be damned. Where do I even take my article from here?
5 years ago, I wished for Donald J Trump to win. Today, I feel vindicated.
If I had to pinpoint the one variable why, it would be my most begrudged issue in politics. An issue that mysteriously got minimized within the American left, right as the democratic party became the party of Billionaires. Munnies.
To nobody’s surprise, money is a big deal in American politics. And that by itself isn’t necessarily wrong. I believe if a lot of individuals want to make donations, that should definitely count for something.
Hopefully, no one is naïve enough to believe everyone has as much influence as the other in such a system. Millis and Billis exist after all.
While it is great for individual donations to be capped at a certain amount, let’s just say, politicians do not give closed door speeches to show off their orator skills. Not to mention, the Citizens United ruling had the oh-so-surprising effect of making Billionaires even more influential through super PACs and untraceable money. The LA Times describes:
Nevertheless, the ruling Jan. 21, 2010, did unleash a torrent of new money into politics in the form of contributions from wealthy individuals — Charles and the late David Koch,Michael R. Bloomberg,Tom Steyer,George Soros and others. Citizens United allowed them to use super PACs as vehicles for unlimited infusions of money into politics. It also allowed nonprofit groups to more easily keep the sources of campaign funding secret, allowing so-called dark money to influence elections.
By contrast, Trump is a killer when it comes to individual small donations, and that naturally appeals to me. Even left-fondling Politifact admits it.
Keep in mind this was a tweet, there’s a character limit. Yet, they rated the statement as only “mostly” true-
-because McEnany did not mention what constitutes a small donation
Just another reminder that everything you see on the internet is likely fake to some extent. Yes pumpkin, even my writing.
Point is, Trump always ignored the noise from the American and international elite class. You can argue and I would agree; that was and is not always the right way to go. Thing is, such a posture has been so lacking from American Political leadership for so long, it could only feel refreshing. No amount of bitching from CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, and even Faux can take that away from him. Matter of fact, his second impeachment is only making him more popular.
In my previous post, I focused on the “official narrative”, how it gets manipulated by powerful people and organisations.
For this piece, I started out wanting to expose some of these actors within the alphabet agencies. I really did not expect them to feel so self righteous they would do it for me.
American news should be less interesting now that Trump is only sometimes involved. Yet, somehow, the mark he left on the world from the white house remains stubbornly captivating.