Tag: propaganda

How the Biden Campaign Redefined Misinformation to Control the Online Narrative

Evidence keeps piling up that the use of the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” has become the ultimate tactic to manipulate and censor people and content, invalidate legitimate arguments, and control the narratives.

Matt Orfalea writes about the case of Joe Biden, and the effort his team put into trying to convince voters that any (as it turned out, completely legitimate) talk about the president’s mental decline was “disinformation.”

A Zoom call between three members of that team has now surfaced, dating to the 2020 campaign, when questions were already being asked about the state of health of then-candidate Biden.

And according to them – the manipulative methods that they discuss, designed to dispel those concerns – supposedly resulted in Biden receiving 200,000 more votes than he would have.

Biden-Harris digital director Rob Flaherty, Biden’s Rapid Response Director Becca Rinkevich (after the election, the White House Deputy Director of Digital Strategy), and DNC Counter-Disinformation Program creator and lead analyst Tim Durigan were on the call when they spoke about how to counter “misinformation” regarding Biden’s health and other issues.

Flaherty, who is now Deputy Campaign Manager for Kamala Harris, is considered a key figure in the censorship efforts of the Biden administration during the past four years and is known for trying to influence social media like Facebook to silence Covid vaccine skeptics, including journalist Tucker Carlson.

At one point, Orfalea writes, he even refused to define “misinformation” while under oath.

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The New National Defense Report Misses the Point

The American public must be informed, explains the Commission on the National Defense Strategy in a new report. Despite war propaganda daily flooding Washington, the CNDS complained that people “have been inadequately informed by government leaders of the threats to U.S. interests—including to people’s everyday lives—and what will be required to restore American global power and leadership.” 

In the Commission’s view, the United States is at great risk. Threats are multiplying around the globe. Only great effort can save the country. Americans must turn over more of their money and sacrifice more of their liberties. They must be scared into compliance.

In fact, this is nonsense. For decades the United States has been the most secure great power ever. The U.S. has dominated its continent and entire hemisphere since the mid-19th century. Surrounded by deep waters east and west and weak neighbors north and south, America is largely invulnerable to attack. 

Which enabled it to become the most dominant great power ever. With middling effort at home, the U.S. turned into the decisive power abroad. World War II left America as the globe’s most powerful nation, with half the world’s economic production as a foundation for the world’s most sophisticated military. Almost all of its allies remain dependent on US money and production. Today’s world is becoming multipolar, but military threats against the continental US remain minimal, other than assorted nuclear arsenals, most importantly Russia’s.

With Americans living in an extraordinary security cocoon, the 9/11 attacks came as a shock. Of America’s many conflicts, only the Civil War occurred at home. And it ended 159 years ago. Compare the U.S. to the other major powers. Russia, Germany, China, France, Japan, Ukraine, Iran, Iraq, South and North Korea, and so many other nations have been attacked, invaded, occupied—often repeatedly, and sometimes by the U.S.

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The Propaganda Model Has Limits

Normally, I let my pen rest during the summer months, but for some things, you set aside your habits. What has been happening in the context of the US presidential elections over the past few weeks is, to say the least, remarkable. We are witnessing a social system that – to use a term from complex dynamic systems theory – is heading toward a catastrophe. And the essence of the tipping point we are approaching is this: the propaganda model is beginning to fail.

It started a few weeks ago like this: Trump, the presidential candidate who must not win, is up against Biden, the presidential candidate who must win. After the first debate, it was immediately clear: Trump will win against Biden. The big problem: Biden and Jill are about the only ones who don’t realize this.

The media then turned against Biden. That, in itself, is a revolution. They had praised President Biden to the skies for four years, turning a blind eye to the fact that the man either seemed hardly aware of what he was saying or was giving speeches that could only be described as having the characteristics of a fascist’s discourse.

I’m thinking, among other things, of the 2022 midterm speech in which he, against a bombastic-dramatic backdrop and flanked by two soldiers with machine guns, more or less directly called for violence against the Maga followers. Not to mention the shameless prosecution and imprisonment of political opponents and the intimidation and excommunication of hundreds of journalists (carefully kept out of the media by journalists who sided with the regime).

Huxley would not be surprised that Biden claims in almost every speech that he had to save democracy, including his most recent speech. I’ve shared the quote of Huxley below before, but it doesn’t hurt to read it a second time:

By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

In any case, the media’s love for Biden was suddenly over when it became clear that he could not possibly win the election, even not with a little help from the media. If you want to know how that ‘little help’ worked in 2020, look at one of the most important interviews of the past year, where Mike Benz – former director of the cyber portfolio of the US government – explains to Tucker Carlson in detail how information flows on the internet were manipulated during the 2020 elections (and the Covid crisis). The guy eventually got disgusted with what he was doing and now runs a project striving for online freedom of speech.  I would recommend everyone to spend an hour watching that interview. Such an explanation is what we need: calm, expert, nuanced, and extraordinarily revealing.

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We Reap the Harvest of Lies

Public life has become disorienting. Most people, by and large, previously expected to hear the truth, or some semblance of it, in daily life. We would generally expect this from each other, but also from public media and authorities such as governments or international agencies set up ostensibly for our benefit. Society cannot function in a coherent and stable way without it, as so much in our lives requires us to place trust in others.

To navigate the complexity of existence, we generally look for guidance to certain trusted sources, freeing up time to sift through the more questionable ones. Some claim they always knew everything was fake, but they are wrong, as it wasn’t (and still isn’t). There were always liars, campaigns to mislead, and propaganda to drive us to love or to hate, but there was a core within society that had certain accepted norms and standards that should theoretically be followed. A sort of anchor. Truth is indestructible but the anchor cable connecting us to it, ensuring its influence, has been cut. Society is being set adrift.

This really broke in the past four or five years. We were already in trouble, but now public discourse is broken. Perhaps it broke when governments elected to represent the people openly employed behavioral psychology to lie to their constituencies on a scale we had not previously seen. They combined to make their peoples do things they rationally would not; accept bans of family funerals, cover faces in public, or accept police brutality and the isolation and abandonment of the elderly. The media, health professionals, politicians, and celebrities all participated in this lie and its intent. Virtually all our major institutions. And these lies are continuing, and expanding, and have become the norm.

We are now reaping the harvest of untruth. The media can openly deny what they said or printed just months earlier about a new candidate for presidency or the efficacy of a mandated vaccine. A whole political party can change its narrative almost overnight about the fundamental characteristics of its leader. People paid as “fact-checkers” twist reality to invent new facts and hide the truth, unflustered by the transparency of their deceit. Giant software companies curate information, filtering out truths that run contrary to the pronouncements of conflicted international organizations. Power has displaced integrity.

Internationally, we are pummeled by agencies such as the UN, World Bank, G20, and World Health Organization to give up our basic rights and hand their new masters our wealth on claims of threats that can unequivocally be shown to be false. Paid-off former leaders, grasping legitimacy through the legacy of greater minds, reinforce mass falsehoods for the benefit of their friends. Once aberrations that a free media might highlight, fallacies have become norms in which the same media is openly complicit.

The frightening part is not the lies, which are a normal aspect of humanity, but the broad disinterest in truth. Lies can stand for a time in the presence of a people and institutions that value truth, but they will eventually fail as they are exposed. When truth loses its value, when it is no longer even a vague guide for politics or journalism, then recovery may not occur. We are in an incredibly dangerous time, because lies are not just tolerated but are now the default approach, at the national and international level, and the fourth estate that was to shed light on them has embraced the darkness.

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The Deceived vs. the Indoctrinated

The American public has been subjected to massive propaganda efforts by both our government and our media for years. It’s important to understand the impact this has on the current presidential campaign.

That starts with understanding the difference between deception and indoctrination.

Those who have been merely deceived may be surprised when the deception is exposed. They may even be angry. But they will change their positions when confronted with facts that contradict them.

The indoctrinated will not.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “indoctrinated” as “accepting a set of beliefs without question, refusing to consider any others.” For the indoctrinated, those beliefs become part of their identity; they will not let go of them, even when faced with contrary evidence or explicit falsehoods.

Millions of Americans have been propagandized to believe that former President Donald Trump is “literally Hitler” and “a threat to our democracy”; that he will “destroy this country” or “start World War III.” You can provide all the proof to the contrary you want; it will not change their minds.

I’ve had conversations with friends and loved ones who profess to be terrified about the possible perils of another Trump presidency. In those, I point out just some of the actual conduct of the Biden administration:

— Imprisoning Americans and depriving them of their constitutional rights to due process

— Collaborating with Big Tech companies to censor truthful information about the 2020 elections, the origins of COVID-19, the United States’ role in funding gain-of-function research at the international virology laboratory in Wuhan, China, the efficacy of drugs like ivermectin in treating COVID-19, and the illness and deaths caused by the mRNA vaccines that were forced upon Americans

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That’s militainment! Big Hollywood succumbs to the Pentagon Borg

“The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized,” explained Elmer Davis, a renowned CBS broadcaster, who had just been named director of the Office of War Information (OWI), a Pentagon program created on June 13, 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor.

Later in 1953, as the Cold War was in full swing, President Dwight D. Eisenhower commented on the burgeoning partnership between Hollywood and the Pentagon by stating that, “the hand of government must be carefully concealed and […] wholly eliminated,” adding that the engagement should “be done through arrangements with all sorts of privately operated enterprises in the field of entertainment, dramatics, music and so on.”

Thus, the president who coined the term “military industrial complex,” was, in fact, one of the first major proponents of what would later be called the military entertainment complex or the militainment industry.

Today, this militainment industry is thriving. From Top Gun to the Marvel franchise and even shows like Extreme Makeover, the Pentagon has been able to shape the narratives of more than 2,500 movies and TV shows. No one knows this better than Roger Stahl, the University of Georgia’s Communications Studies Department Head, and author of Militainment Inc. With University of Bath lecturer and Workers Party Candidate Matthew Alford, investigative journalist Tom Secker, and others, Stahl created “Theaters of War,” a concise 87-minute documentary in which he methodically dissects our modern militainment industry, showing the behemoth it has become.

Responsible Statecraft talked to Stahl, Alford, and Secker about the ways our TV screens are weaponized through the Military Entertainment Complex’s oversight over and control of Hollywood scripts and production agreements.

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Does Weed Cause Strokes and Heart Attacks?

Thirty years ago, the sociologist Craig Reinarman observed that there’s something “woven into the very fabric of American culture” that makes us susceptible to believing that a “chemical boogeyman” is to blame for “society’s ills.” He added that every moral panic about drugs since the 19th century has been fueled by “media magnification” in which the danger of a particular substance is dramatized and distorted.

Now that recreational marijuana is legal in about half of U.S. states, and more Americans are consuming weed than ever before, the chemical bogeyman is back, and he’s armed with a new paper in the Journal of the American Heart Association by researchers from Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco.

This study, which was amplified in The New York Times and The Washington Post, commits so many egregious statistical errors that it’s a poster child for junk science. The paper would be comical if it didn’t offer bad medical advice. The researchers did almost everything wrong.

Which is not to say that the authors committed fraud or misconduct. In fact, they did exactly what Ph.D. students are taught to do, what journal editors look for, what referees approve, what universities reward, and what granting agencies fund. Because the paper uses conventional methods to arrive at false conclusions, it speaks to the profound crisis in academic research.

We’ve forgotten that the point of scientific studies isn’t seeking the approval of institutions. It’s the pursuit of truth.

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EXPOSED: Israeli Documents Reveal Concerted Effort By Government to Put Out Zionist Propaganda in the US Media

Amichai Chikli, a member of the Likud Party and a minister in the Israeli government, has been leading a campaign to spread pro-Israeli propaganda in the United State corporate media. 

According to a report by The Guardian, Chikli was brought before the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to inform elected officials on what could be done about the growing set of anti-war protests from young people all over universities across the US.  

Chikli and his team relaunched the “Concert”, a controversial program initially branded as Kela Shlomo in Hebrew. The program has the ostensive aim of carrying out what the Israeli regime has deemed as ““mass consciousness activities” primarily targeted largely at the US and Europe.” This specific iteration is part of a broader public relations drive to target US institutions of higher learning and change the definition of antisemitism according to US law. 

Concert is currently known as Voices of Israel. Previously, it teamed up with groups leading a campaign to enact so-called “anti-BDS” state laws that sanction Americans for participating in boycotts or other non-violent demonstrations against Israel.

The latest iteration of the program is a concerted effort, often run covertly, by the Jewish state to push back against university protests, human rights organizations and other dissenting voices. 

Voices’ most recent activities were carried out through non-profit organizations and other bodies that often do not reveal their donor information. From October up until May, Chikli has presided over at least $8.6m for a budget that’s allocated towards government advocacy to change the public debate.

One American pro-Zionist group that has been working with Chikli’s ministry, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, or ISGAP, was able to achieve a major victory in recent times. The ISCAP allegedly received the bulk of its funding in 2018 from the Israeli agency that was in charge of operating Concert. At an April 7 event at the Palm Beach Country Club, ISGAP boasted about a congressional public relations victory that it achieved. 

In this instance, they were referring to hearings led by Republicans such as New York Congressman Elise Stefanik designed to grill prominent university presidents such as then-Harvard President Claudine Gay and her counterparts in other elite universities. 

Gay ended up resigning earlier this year for engaging in alleged acts of plagiarism. 

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The climate fear-mongering enterprise behind the Planetary Boundaries to stabilise population growth

There is nothing new about fear-mongering propaganda being disseminated by politicians and corporate media, but they are now joined by “scientists.”

A fair amount of catastrophic climate change propaganda has made its way into the scientific method and perhaps in no venue more clearly than the Planetary Boundaries framework, Dr. Jessica Weinkle writes and explains where it comes from and what is driving the narrative.

Last month we published an article that brought attention to the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (“FAO’s”) roadmap to achieve its “global commitment to transform agrifood systems.”  The FAO is an agency of the United Nations.

To publicise this scheme, in January, FAO chief economist Maximo Torero Cullen said a roadmap is necessary because “we are violating six of the nine planetary boundaries.”

In September, 20 scientists funded by the European Research Council, the German government, the Carlsberg Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation published a paper “establishing” 9 planetary boundaries. They determined that 6 of their 9 boundaries had been “crossed.”

As we read Dr. Weinkle’s article below about what is behind the Planetary Boundaries narrative, we should bear in mind that she also writes for The Breakthrough Institute, whose funders include some of the usual suspects driving the false climate change crisis narrative, such as Profiteer Bill Gates (see ‘About the Author’). Why is this relevant? For one thing, while people may feel free to expose nefarious actors, there is the possibility that this freedom might be limited to those who do not fund them.

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Israeli government spends $2 million on covert social media influence operation targeting U.S. lawmakers, American populace

The Israeli government has been implicated in a $2 million influence campaign targeting American lawmakers and the broader populace of the United States.

This operation employs fabricated social media profiles and deceptive websites featuring tailored pro-Israel content designed to resonate with various political beliefs.

Stoic, an Israeli political marketing agency, was contracted by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism following Hamas’ attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The firm was provided an estimated budget of $2 million and given the task of increasing U.S. support for Israeli military actions in Gaza.

The ongoing operation utilizes hundreds of bogus accounts across platforms like X, Facebook and Instagram, masquerading as American individuals and disseminating pro-Israel propaganda.

The Israeli disinformation watchdog, the FakeReporter, initially exposed this campaign in March. However, a report released by the organization on June 5 unveils the operation’s broader scope, extending beyond social media manipulation.

The report reveals an intricate web of fabricated social media profiles and fake websites promoting pro-Israeli, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian narratives. Each website caters to distinct political ideologies.

According to the report, one of these websites presents itself as anarchist and anti-establishment, targeting young progressives who align with the principles of leftism and anarchism. The website uses anarchist arguments to oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank in accordance with the two-state peace solution to the conflict. The website advocates for the rejection of all current state structures and the creation of new states.

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