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Yesterday, the New York Times ran a cover-page, top-of-website story —not an op-ed— headlined, “Trump, Preparing to Challenge the Results, Puts His 2020 Playbook Into Action.” Before we even begin, note that after getting through the overlong story, readers discover (1) Trump has never said he was “preparing to challenge the results,” (2) there is no actual “playbook,” and (3) the Times’ editors all identify as infant armadillos. Not house trained. (Eww.)

The Times even made up a detailed, lengthy, step-by-step “playbook” that they then attributed to Trump for overturning the election. Except Trump didn’t write the playbook, never wrote one, nor did Rudi Giuliani, Elon Musk, RFK, or Hitler. The Times wrote the playbook. ...

Readers dumb enough to invest any time in this “article” (don’t) quickly discover the whole thing is a Trump-deranged, speculative, liberal mushroom hallucination. It even described literal playbook steps (“Step 1—Claim Victory”) as if it had received some leaked memorandum. But it turns out they made the whole thing up. The unscripted narrative, or “preemptive framing,” pushed to its readers just before Election Day, is: ho hum, Trump ALWAYS claims he lost because of cheating.

Considered through the lens of our working hypothesis that during the pandemic, the deep state wholly or partly captured corporate media (for national security), this story looks nothing like news. It looks everything like classic propaganda. You could easily imagine airplanes dropping this same story on enemy troops as leaflets.

It also looks just like a diabolical, Obama-style “permission structure,” intended to reach Times readers before Election Day, and to teach them to close their minds and refuse to consider any claim of cheating by Republicans, however compelling. They’re simply not allowed to consider that cheating might have happened, regardless of the evidence. For them, the safest thing to do is not even listen to the evidence. They’re supposed to remind each other, listening to that nonsense is just playing right into his hands.

Proving the piece was written by clever psychologists instead of reporters, the story bizarrely connects —in advance!— any and all claims of cheating in the election to the worst day in the nation’s history, a date that will live in liberal infamy, the mythical destroyer of democracy, the carefully crafted psychological trigger called January The Sixth...

Let’s not pass over that ridiculous but insidious passage too quickly. Consider the nefarious message: January 6th has never ended. It’s like that hallway in horror movies where the doomed protagonist starts walking and then the hallway just keeps getting longer and longer and stretching further and further away until madness! Except within the Times’ narrative frame, the hallway is January 6th, and it’s packed with jeering protestors wearing MAGA hats and they are all icky and middle class.

The story’s comments section was disabled, preserving the purity of the propaganda dose and making sure it wouldn’t accidentally be diluted by pesky questions or folks pointing out the obvious problems. In other words, not ruined by free speech.

There’s no good explanation for why the Times would do this if it were operating as a true news corporation, if it weren’t hollowed out by security state operatives. Even if something like this hysterial fantasy were appropriate to be published at all, this propaganda piece should have run in the opinion section. They are spending reputation coins like a 12-year-old at an arcade. This story is reputationally expensive, it erodes the Times’ prestige as a serious news player and reinforces skeptical stereotypes about its bias.

It’s the cordyceps fungus all over again, and it’s killing the host. Media has been hollowed out by increasingly desperate national security state working overtime like swarms of zombified ants to stabilize the narrative. That’s why we get ridiculous, WWII-style, over-the-top propaganda like this stupid, commentless NYT article.

Remember: this kind of thing only works in the dark. They can’t survive any transparency. So shine some light on it. Call it out when it happens.

Some of you will inevitably focus on the other implication of this story, that the deep state clearly expects Trump to lose again, and they obviously expect the circumstances to be highly suspicious again. I don’t doubt they think that, or at least are working toward that result. We are, in fact, in a war. Battles over the election security are happening at many different levels, some seen, some unseen.

We should only focus on what we can control. Don’t get distracted. Vote and nag others to go vote.

And remember, Christians, Jesus commanded us to not worry. Secular folks, it’s time to whip out your copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.

CNN has accused President Trump, who has himself survived assassination attempts, of saying that Liz Cheney “should be fired upon”. Source. Yes, the same CNN that outrageously called vaccine injuries ‘falsehoods’. This is right up there with the other great misleading takes on Trumpisms, like the accusations that he said that all Mexicans were rapists (source), that he said there were fine Nazis, that he mocked a reporter for being disabled (source), and even that he violently ended an anti-racism protest to stage a pic with a Bible. Any honest person would understand that Trump, a long-time critic of forever wars (though CNN and MSNBC loved him when he threw some bombs around), was talking about war hawk politicians happily sending their people off to war while they sit in safety, getting fat off the public money teat. Here’s what Trump actually said:

I don’t blame him for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter’s [Liz Cheney] a very dumb individual, very dumb. She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay. Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, “Oh, gee, we’ll - let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.” Source.

Okay then.

Extra: Though the mainstream media apparently seeks to constantly opt for the worst possible interpretations of Trump’s words, it was a little different with President Biden’s recent alleged comment that Trump supporters are ‘garbage’. CNN quickly reinforced Biden’s claim that the garbage comment was not to do with Trump’s supporters, but with the comments about Puerto Rico.

Trump also defeated the Media. They called him every alarming name they could think of. They described in loving detail every breathless paranoia fantasy their sold-out reporters who wish they were fiction writers could dream up. And yet, despite the constant drumbeat from corporate media that he was the worst person who’s ever lived, a majority of citizens still chose Donald Trump for President of the United States of America.

The corporate media is a spent force.

Instead, disintermediated social media, podcasts, and Substacks have eclipsed traditional media platforms. Maybe if they hadn’t lied so much, media’s tragic downfall would have happened slower. Who knows? ...

It’s not completely corporate media’s fault. During the pandemic, media was captured by murky, acronym-loving government agencies wielding overbearing national security laws. Media was used up and will be tossed aside just like Kamala Harris is about to be.

Maybe more importantly, the Democrats used their captive corporate media to try to create a fake candidate. They believed that enough positive press could cure Kamala’s record-high unlikeability scores. In other words, they thought they could propagandize America into believing a lie about their selected Manchurian candidate.

They were wrong. You can see why they hate social media so much. It spoils the narrative.

To the 45 percent of the country who are unhappy with the election results, I’d say, don’t fret. Nationwide abortion ban, Project 2025, enemies put in front of firing squads, ban on interracial marriages, and 99 percent of the rest of the insane bullshit you’ve been fed: NOT.GOING.TO.HAPPEN. Almost all of this BS was either made up out of thin air or spliced from 10 second, out-of-context quotes. When all these things don’t happen over the next four years, maybe it’d be a good idea to identify the credibility of your “news” sources, because in 4 years the very same people will be saying the same kind of thing about the 2028 Republican nominee, along with his deplorable, garbage, Nazi supporters.

And for people on the right, never forget how much the media tried to propagandize a “Kamala surge,” such as this story from the Independent predicting an obvious Kamala win that was played up by multiple networks. Then, of course, there’s the Des Moines Iowa poll showing Kamala up by 3 points that was on 24/7 repeat for much of MSM (she lost the state by over 13 percent). These stories and others were carefully crafted to discourage and suppress the Trump vote.

CNN’s star has fallen faster than an expired StarLink satellite. Once the gold standard of network news, CNN only garnered 5.1 million viewers on election night, “severely trailing behind MSNBC and Fox News.” The podcasting business is about to get a lot busier. Top CNN anchors like Anderson Cooper and Erin Burnett are reportedly on the chopping block. ...

It’s baffling. How could this happen, given all the talent at MSNBC? While Kamala Harris was losing on election night, as CNN’s white anchors listened and nodded sagely, black anchoress Joy Reid opined that the high numbers of black voters bubbling ballots for Trump resulted from “black anti-blackness,” and opined those black voters were “down with White Supremacy.”

Black White Supremacy. That’s the kind of keen, insightful analysis that MSNBC viewers “enjoy.”

President Trump Sues Leftist Media Outlets Including the New York Times for Total of $10 Billion, Alleges Multiple “False and Defamatory” Statements

Columbia Journalism Review reported on Thursday that just days before the presidential election, Trump’s lawyer, Edward Andrew Paltzik, sent a letter to the far-left New York Times and Penguin Random House demanding $10 billion in damages awarded to Trump for “false and defamatory statements.” The letter points to specific statements about Trump in articles by Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner.

The letter highlights two stories by Buettner and Craig are connected to their new book, “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.” The CJR reports the letter also mentions an October 20 article by Baker titled “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment,” and an October 22 article by Schmidt with the title “As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator.”

The extra-long article —it prints to 7 pages, single-spaced— contained only one attributed quotation. Everything else was anonymous. And that single named quote was just a throwaway line attributed to hawkish Republican Representative Michael Turner (R-Oh.), who dares Russia to start World War III.

As a critical news consumer, always inventory the sources for any news claims. The bigger the claim, the more sources you usually want. This particular article coughed up seven full pages of information without even once saying where the information came from. Fail.

Even if it actually came from an inside source, no responsible journalist would agree to stenograph all this information without some kind of external confirmation. Otherwise, what makes these reporters any different from being secretaries?

In other words, since the three reporters —apparently, nobody wanted the full credit (or blame)— all soiled their midwit reputations to deliver a steaming pile of non-journalism, it seems most likely this article was a deep-state press release. So, based on evidence from the article, the deep state stirred the Proxy War pot this weekend by releasing this “news” through its pet media outlet, the New York Times.

We simply cannot know why they did it. There may be some great, secret reason. Since they aren’t saying, we can speculate. My best guess is they are trying to poison the peace well by making the Russians madder than wet Siberian huskies, in a snowstorm, even if doing so risks full-on nuclear war.

But it’s late in the game, and these kinds of maneuvers are unpredictable. They can just as easily create new possibilities as bollux things up. I note that President Trump himself posted nothing responding to the now widely-reported Times exclusive, which is a solid negotiating tactic.