Tag: propaganda

CIA (Dis)Information Operations Come Home To The US

Reporters joke the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions and say “No comment’ before heading to Happy Hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information about itself. They meanwhile choose to profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people.

Leon Panetta, the Director CIA from 2009 to 2011 explained bluntly his CIA did influence foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to “change attitudes within the country.” The method, Panetta said, was to “acquire media within a country or within a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message or work to influence those that may own elements of the media to be able to cooperate, work with you in delivering that message.”

The CIA has been running such information ops to influence foreign elections since the end of WWII. Richard Bissell, who ran the agency’s operations during the Cold War, wrote of “exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of securing the desired outcome in an election.” A report on the CIA in Chile boasts the Agency portrayed its favored candidate in one election as a “wise, sincere and high-minded statesman” while painting his leftist opponent as a “calculating schemer.” At one point in the 1980s foreign media insertions ran 80 a day.

The goal is to control information as a tool of influence. Sometimes the control is very direct, simply paying a reporter to run a story, or, as was done in Iraq, simply operating the media outlet yourself (known as the Orwellian Indigenous Media Project.) The problem is such direct action is easily exposed, destroying credibility.

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Barack and Michelle Obama Creating Netflix Animated Series to ‘Reframe’ Children’s Understanding of Government

Barack and Michelle Obama are creating a Netflix animated series designed to “reframe” how children think about government and civic engagement, with musical performances by artists including Adam Lambert, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Janelle Monáe.

Netflix announced the ten-episode We the People is set to debut July 4. The Obamas, who have an ongoing production deal with Netflix, are serving as executive producers on the series, along with Doc McStuffins creator Chris Nee and ABC’s Black-ish creator Kenya Barris.

In a press release sent to multiple news outlets, the streamer called the show “an exuberant call to action for everyone to rethink civics as a living, breathing thing and to reframe their understanding of what government and citizenship mean in a modern world.”

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Israel Narrative Management Is Getting Incredibly Desperate And Brazen

The National Director Emeritus for the Anti-Defamation League has announced on Twitter that he is cancelling his subscription to The New York Times, claiming that a front-page story featuring the photos of children killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza this month constitutes “blood libel” against Jews.

“I am cancelling my subscription to NYTimes,” tweeted Abraham Foxman. “I grew up in America on the NYT- I delivered the NYT to my classmates- I learned civics- democracy and all the news ‘fit to print’ for 65 years but no more. Today’s blood libel of Israel and the Jewish people on the front page is enough.”

Foxman’s statement drew criticism from all corners, including from loyal establishment pundits like Jonathan Chait, for his ridiculous assertion that merely humanizing Palestinian children killed by Israel is the same as promoting the ancient antisemitic canard known as blood libel.

Supporters of Israeli apartheid and mass murder are losing control of the narrative, which has led to redoubled perception management efforts ranging from the cringey to the iron-fisted. In the former category we’re seeing them pen entire articles attacking Seth Rogen for tweeting a fart emoji at virulent Israel apologist Eve Barlow and claiming that putting “fart” in Barlow’s name is the same as a literal pogrom. In the latter category they’re blowing up entire press offices and arresting Palestinian journalists. This is narrative management at its least subtle.

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CIA commemorates 60-year anniversary of one of its most infamous failures in history – Bay of Pigs invasion – with ‘victory’ coin

Whatever possessed the CIA to issue a coin commemorating one of its worst disasters, the failed 1961 “Crusade to Free Cuba,” it gave Twitter users a chance to mercilessly mock the US spy agency with Fidel Castro memes and such.

“This silver coin commemorating an anticipated (but never realized) Bay of Pigs victory features an outline of Cuba with a rebel invader advancing past a fallen member of Castro’s military in the foreground,” the agency tweeted on Tuesday, with a photo of the artifact.

The jokes practically wrote themselves, with one user commenting that “anticipated but never realized” victory is an interesting [way] of saying “we lost.”

More than one comment called the coin the CIA version of a “participation trophy,” referring to the consolation prize doled out at school sporting contests in the US.

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Why Are Israeli Defense Forces Soldiers Posting Thirst Traps on TikTok?

With her long, lush blond hair, almond-shaped blue eyes, and expertly manicured brows, influencer Natalia Fadeev bears a striking resemblance to model Gigi Hadid. On TikTok, where she’s racked up nearly a million followers, she’s mastered the art of the coquettish facial expression, balancing it with angles that show off her rear end. She’s cultivated a brand as an Airsoft shooting game enthusiast, maintaining a separate Instagram account under the handle @gunwaifu sponsored by a tactical gear store, and she regularly posts catgirl videos and kawaii (a Japanese-inspired cutesy aesthetic) cosplay on her TikTok page.

In addition to being well-versed in the art of monetizing her personal brand, Fadeev is a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces, and much of her page is devoted to pro-Israeli military content. Earlier this month, she posted a video of Israeli soldiers playing soccer with Palestinian children; in another, she dances and preens at the camera while the caption, “when they tried to destroy your nation but you ended up having one of the most powerful armies” flashes on-screen. In the context of the most recent turmoil in Gaza, which has left 13 Israelis and over 240 Palestinians dead, many criticized Fadeev’s content for making light of the Israeli military’s actions and attempting to put a sexy face on the conflict.

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How Truth was Destroyed So Americans Would Crave Propaganda

One of the most vital fundamentals in understanding how the ruling elite / predator class facilitate their agendas is the role of controlled media to create perception. Perception is, in essence, reality. What is perceived is usually widely believed.

For example, the notion that the sky is blue. Scientifically speaking it actually is not, we only perceive it as blue due to the refraction of light waves through earth’s atmosphere and into the retina of the eye. Ask anyone without an understanding of this scientifically fundamental fact and they will undoubtedly espouse that the sky is indeed blue — as that is the “reality” created by their perception. This is a harmless false perception, but others are not so.

The same is true for the illusionary reality versus objective reality. An empirical observation of how the world really works as opposed to a manufactured perception based on incomplete or inaccurate information represented as authoritative and propagated in repetition.

Unfortunately however in our ever increasingly polarized society it is the manufactured perception that is espoused most fervently. In some cases those who choose to ignore facts in favor of narrative, echo chambers, and tribalism, live in a somewhat alternate reality, albeit a willfully ignorant one.

A control paradigm plays a crucial part in this. And as this report will demonstrate, the current incarnation of US news media, by way of deliberate obfuscation facilitates this paradigm by default.

One stark example of this would be manufactured outrage. Manufactured outrage is a term to describe the intentional misrepresentation of events with the aim of invoking a furious reaction from one or more groups of people. Intentionally praying on the emotional vulnerability of the human condition, typically in the form of gaslighting. Done so in a way that those galvanizing the reaction would find beneficial to their own aims.

Manufactured outrage is a tactic used frequently by the media, typically as a tool of controlled opposition used within identity politics to maintain division.

As this article exemplifies the multiple facets in which the media has been co-opted for use towards these manipulative agendas, the context for the use of manufactured outrage will become clear.

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Feds Caught Deleting Data to Make It Appear That “Climate Change” Causes Wildfires

A federal agency has been caught tampering with historical wildfire data in an obvious effort to make wildfire prevalence and severity appear to be correlated with alleged global warming.

Created in 1965, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) maintains statistics on annual wildfire counts and the number of acres burned in those fires. Until recently, the NIFC posted on its website wildfire statistics for every year since 1926, as evidenced by this Internet Archive screen capture. However, the agency now only posts statistics from 1983 to the present. Why?

“The answer,” asserts climate realist Anthony Watts, “is simple; data prior to 1983 shows that U.S. wildfires were far worse both in frequency and total acreage burned. By disappearing all data prior to 1983, which just happens to be the lowest point in the dataset, now all of the sudden we get a positive slope of worsening wildfire aligning with increased global temperature, which is perfect for claiming ‘climate change is making wildfire[s] worse.’”

To prove his point, Watts created graphs from both the original data and the now-scrubbed data. The graph of the complete dataset shows that from the 1920s to the early 1980s, there were far more wildfires covering far more acreage than there have been since. The graph of the current NIFC dataset, on the other hand, suggests an increase in both statistics over time.

Another graph generated by Watts sheds further light on the complete dataset. The worst of the wildfires occurred during the 1930–1941 “Dust Bowl” era and again during the 1976–1978 drought in the West. Meanwhile, 1982–1983 saw a “super El Nino” that soaked the western states, causing 1983 to have the fewest and least-destructive wildfires on record. After that, wildfire and acreage counts naturally increased, but thus far they have seldom approached most of the pre-1983 counts and have been far below the counts from the peak years of that era.

Watts traces the history of the NIFC’s public statements on the pre-1983 data and finds a curious pattern: Since Watts’ publicization of the data’s death blow to the claim that “global warming” causes wildfires, the NIFC has cast increasing doubt on the reliability of the older data to the point that it now claims said data is so bad it cannot be posted publicly.

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