Tag: propaganda

A BBC Instruction Manual For Kids To Propagandize Their Parents

The day before yesterday, the BBC carried a piece titled “Earth Day: How to talk to your parents about climate change.”

The article begins addressing their target underaged readers:

You want to go vegan to help the planet, but you’re not paying for the shopping. You think trains are better than planes, but your dad books the summer holiday.

Young people are some of the world’s most powerful climate leaders and want rapid action to tackle the problem.

Big changes are difficult, especially when they involve other people. Where do you begin? For this year’s Earth Day, we spoke to people who have successfully had tricky climate chats at home. Here are their top tips:

The piece is broken into three sections targeting what they imply are evils of our times.

The first section focuses on “How to talk about going meat-free.”

The section begins by claiming that “eating less meat is one of the best ways to reduce our impact on the planet, say scientists.”

The piece introduces us to 17-year-old Ilse who has dyed her hair bright red, and her parents, Antonia and Sally.

The BBC claims that the family ate meat twice or even thrice a day, but when Ilse was 13, she “decided to do more about climate change and read that cutting out meat was a good start.”

Sally and Antonia were understandably skeptical about the plan initially. They were concerned about not getting enough protein and the fact that Ilse was too young to make that decision.

But they still complied with Ilse’s wishes and began with a one-day-a-week trial, they proceeded to scale up, and after a year, went totally meat-free.

Sally says that seeing the emotional impact of the topic on her daughter helped to persuade her it was the right thing for her family.

The BBC reveals that Ilse is part of ‘Teach the Parent’, a U.K.-based campaign that “encourages these conversations between generations.”

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Disaster Troll Propaganda

So-called conspiracy theories abound, especially among those who attack others by calling them conspiracy theorists. There are official conspiracy theories, such as the government-approved stories about 9/11, the 7/7 bombings, the Manchester Arena attack and so on. There are also unofficial conspiracy theories, such as the expressed opinion of Richard D. Hall that the Manchester arena attack was a staged simulation without injury or death but performed and reported as if real.

We have to use the term “conspiracy theory” advisedly because, as we shall see, conspiracy theory, as we understand the term, doesn’t exist. “Conspiracy theory” is really just an opinion that the state does not wish anyone to either hold or express.

The BBC’s special disinformation and social media correspondent, Marianna Spring, calls Richard D. Hall a “disaster troll.” She claims that Hall lives in a “dark world” and that his “warped views” have “led him to the doors of terror victims.” Spring says that Hall is spreading “obscene lies” and that he is “at the centre of a network of conspiracies.”

Spring is utilising the propaganda technique of “othering.” She is trying to cast Hall as subhuman—a troll—and, by association, applies the same dehumanising propaganda label to anyone who shares Hall’s concerns about the official account of the alleged Manchester Arena bombing.

“Othering” is an applied psychological strategy widely used by authoritarian political regimes. Prominent historical examples include the “othering” of Jews in Germany during the 1930s by Nazi propagandists.

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Pentagon “Leaks”: 5 ways to tell REAL from FAKE

We promised a longer take on the Pentagon “leaks”, and here it goes. Regular readers will probably be familiar with my view on leaked documents in general, but if you’re not allow me to quote my own 2019 article on the (absurd) “Afghanistan papers”:

An awful lot of modern “leaks” are no such thing. They are Orwellian exercises in controlling the conversation […] carefully making sure the “establishment” and the “alternative” are joined in the middle, controlled from the same source.

That’s not to say ALL “leaks” are automatically and ubiquitously narrative control exercises, clearly some are real…but it’s usually pretty easy to tell them apart. In fact here’s a little checklist.

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Biden DOJ Indicts Four Americans For “Weaponized” Free Speech

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice has just charged four members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) for conspiring to act as agents of Russia by using speech and political action in ways the DOJ says “weaponized” the First Amendment rights of Americans.

The Washington Post reports:

Federal authorities charged four Americans on Tuesday with roles in a malign campaign pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda in Florida and Missouri — expanding a previous case that charged a Russian operative with running illegal influence agents within the United States.

The FBI signaled its interest in the alleged activities in a series of raids last summer, at which point authorities charged a Moscow man, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, with working for years on behalf of Russian government officials to fund and direct fringe political groups in the United States. Among other things, Ionov allegedly advised the political campaigns of two unidentified candidates for public office in Florida.

Ionov’s influence efforts were allegedly directed and supervised by officers of the FSB, a Russian government intelligence service.

Now, authorities have added charges against four Americans who allegedly did Ionov’s bidding through groups including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia, and an unidentified political group in California — part of an effort to influence American politics.

AFP reports that the conspiracy charges carry a sentence of up to ten years, with three of the four APSP members additionally charged with acting as unregistered agents of Russia which carries another five years.

“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights – freedoms Russia denies its own citizens – to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen in the DOJ’s press release regarding the indictments, adding, “The department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”

Looks like the United States has decided to dispense with those freedoms as well.

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Apollo Zero (full movie)

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Think about this: to date, only three countries have been able to put a man merely in Earth orbit – the United States, Russia, and China. That speaks to how difficult it is just to get into orbit. Next, consider how far away the moon is from the Earth: 240,000 miles. Since the alleged moon landings, no country even claims to have gone more than 400 miles from Earth and that was in the Space Shuttle. The International Space Station orbits at 200 miles above Earth. There is a big difference between 240,000 miles and 400 miles. Why can’t anyone make it more than 400 miles from Earth today if we could make a 480,000 mile round trip in 1969?

NASA further asserts that three men were loaded into a rocket, flew 240,000 miles to the moon and then achieved lunar orbit. They say the spacecraft separated and two astronauts flew 60 miles to the surface of the moon, in a vacuum and 1/6 Earth gravity. They then hung out on the moon for up to three days in 250 degree heat, hit golf balls, rode a moon buggy — but what powered their life support and equipment? They say BATTERIES.

They then supposedly blasted off the surface of the moon, docked with the third man going around the moon at over 4000 miles per hour, and made it 240,000 miles back to Earth. They re-entered Earth’s atmosphere going 25,000 mph, but parachutes assured a safe landing in the ocean.”

What one tweet can teach us about “Fake News”

At the time I just laughed it off. It’s an absurd little piece of propaganda, but hardly the most egregious.

But, for some reason, it stuck in my head and started bothering me. After 48 hours or so I realized what about it was bothering me, and that it is actually an interesting microcosmic case study on what the era of “fake news” really means.

Everything about this tweet is fake. Everything.

The letter itself is obviously fake. The absurd zenith of the “children being precociously political” meme that became a running joke years ago.

Even if “Charlotte” exists, those aren’t her words, just a rough regurgitation of her parents’ brainwashing. And Charlotte almost certainly doesn’t exist.

There’s no reason to even suppose any physical letter exists at all and it isn’t just a photoshopped CG image. It easily could be.

The tweet itself is also fake – or at least pretend – because there’s no way President Biden operates his own social media accounts. I honestly doubt he’s even mentally capable of doing so. Rather, as Five Times August points out in another tweet, the Whitehouse employs a few “platform managers” and “social media directors”.

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Propaganda Fail: NordStream Cover Story Rapidly Crumbling

It should be obvious to any honest pundit by now: if you are one of the nominally same individuals who rightly suspected that the United States and its allies destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines – as promised by President Joe Biden himself, “once and for all” – then it’s time to stop being propagandized and compelled to perform mental gymnastics in order to convince yourself not to believe what you see and hear with your very own eyes and ears.

The game was as blatant as it was bombastic: to destroy key European energy infrastructure and then replace Russian gas with American LNG, making US vassal state Germany and the rest of the EU permanently dependent on over-priced and spotty US energy imports.

Now that the US government and mainstream media cover story is falling apart, it’s time to ask yourself and your cohort how long you’re prepared to entertain your own cognitive dissonance.

“Cockamamie yarns like the one involving the yacht suggest not nefarious cunning but simple incompetence.”

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Eat Me, MSNBC

I’m going to be interviewed on MSNBC today by Mehdi Hasan, the author of a book called Win Every Argument. I’m looking forward to it as one would a root canal or rectal.

I accepted the invitation because it would have been wrong to refuse, on the off chance he was planning a good-faith discussion. If you’re reading this, things have gone another way.

I last appeared on MSNBC six years ago, on January 13, 2017, to talk with Chris Hayes and of all people Malcolm Nance, about the then-burgeoning Trump-Russia scandal.

The Trump-Russia story was white-hot and still in its infancy. That same day, news leaked from Israel that Americans warned the Mossad not to share information with the incoming administration, because Russia had “leverages of pressure” on Trump. Asked by Chris about the scandal generally, I made what I thought was a boring-but-true observation, that we in the media didn’t “have any hard evidence” of a conspiracy, just not a lot to go on. This was the TV equivalent of a shrug.

Nance jumped on this in a way I remember feeling was unexpected and oddly personal. “Matt’s a journalist. I’m an intelligence officer,” he snapped. “There is no such thing as coincidence in my world.” Chris jumped in to note reporters have different standards, and I agreed, saying, “We haven’t seen anything that allows us to say unequivocally that x and y happened last year.”

“Unequivocally” seemed to trigger Nance. With regard to the DNC hack, he said, “That evidence is unequivocal. It’s on the Internet.” As for “these links possibly with the Trump team,” he proclaimed, “You’re probably never going to see the CIA’s report.” Nance went on to answer “no” to a question from Chris about whether leaks “were coming from the intelligence community,” Chris wrapped up with a sensible suggestion that we all not rely on a parade of “leaks and counter-leaks,” and the segment was done.

To this day I get hit probably a hundred times a day with the question, “What happened to you, man?” What happened? That segment happened, but to MSNBC, not me.

That exchange between Nance and me was symbolic of a choice the network faced. They could either keep doing what reporters had done since the beginning of time, confining themselves to saying things they could prove. Or, they could adopt a new approach, in which you can say anything is true or confirmed, so long as a politician or intelligence official told you it was.

We know how that worked out. I was never invited back, nor for a long time was any other traditionally skeptical reporter, while Nance — one of the most careless spewers of provable errors ever to appear on a major American news network — became one of the Peacock’s most familiar faces.

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