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Yesterday, the New York Times ran an insidious and troubling straight news story headlined, “Trump’s Consistent Message Online and Onstage: Be Afraid.” The deeply deceptive sub-headline added, “Donald Trump has long used fear as a tool to stir up his conservative base. He’s taking his doomsday approach to a new extreme, predicting World War III and other catastrophes.”
Using fear as a tool? Trump? Please. You must be kidding me. After four years of steady pandemic fearmongering, this article —ostensibly about the politics of fear— was deliriously ironic and hyper-hypocritical. Still, at least superficially, the paper held true to brand. But the article’s real purpose was much more sinister and subversive. So let’s rip off the elegant mask of journalistic trickery and reveal the gruesome demon of deception underneath.
You won’t believe how low the Times sunk this time. (Well, you’ll probably believe it, but it’s still shocking.) Here was the narrative you were meant to understand:
Trump has taken his doomsday prophesying to a new extreme,
increasing both its frequency and scope.
He regularly predicts that if he loses to Vice President Kamala
Harris in November, America will be ruined. World War III will
break out, most likely prompting a global nuclear catastrophe.
Pause for a moment and consider how profoundly ironic that the Times spent two full years on daily doomsday prophesying —over a moderate flu season!— just to suddenly reverse fifty years of its anti-nuclear activism and wave away the clear and present dangers as though looming nuclear disaster was more made up than covid.
I needn’t offer any evidence of this self-evident fact, but I will anyway. (Lawyer’s habit.) As recently as January —before Russia’s expanded nuclear policy and before Iran attacked Israel twice— the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its iconic “Doomsday Clock” at 90 seconds to midnight. In the Atomic Scientists’ scheme, midnight is no bueno. It’s game over, finito, plug pulled. In their own words: “the deteriorating state of the world … is ... the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.”
To take the Times’ story at face value, we must assume that mendacious reporter Michael Gold is blissfully unaware of the Doomsday Clock, and that Gold honestly thinks Trump is stitching together the threat of nuclear annihilation out of whole cloth, as a political prop, rather than Trump reiterating what some of the smartest people alive believe to be an established fact.
Reporter Gold didn’t even bother asking any experts to agree that Trump’s World War III claims were exaggerated. What do nuclear strategists and international relations scholars say about the current risks of global conflict? The Times just expected us to take their word for it.
The lack of experts quoted for the article, and the omission of context like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, reveals this disturbing article isn’t journalism at all. It’s a psychological operation.
The Times sought to paint the prospect of global thermonuclear war as merely a hyperbolic political cartoon. But don't be deceived; this article was not actually intended to chide Trump for fearmongering. Or at least, that wasn’t its main objective. The article was a psyop, intended to teach the Times’ liberal readers what to think about the Biden Administration’s nuclear brinksmanship. The writer wants readers to conclude that nuclear red-lining is not, in fact, an altogether new and disastrous development, but that our leaders' pugilistic dancing across Russian red lines is sound policy.
In other words, this article was not meant to associate Trump with fissile fearmongering. It was the other was around. It was meant to associate concerns about nuclear war with deplorable former President Trump. The Times knows its readers hate Trump and reflexively hate and doubt whatever Trump thinks. So if they mock Trump for his WWIII concern, most liberal Times readers will line up and clap like trained seals. Haha! World War III! Like that could ever happen! What a moron!
In other words, the Times is trying to close the Overton Window on criticism of U.S. military policy. Anyone who questions whether the Administration’s military policy is sane will be just like Trump.
Why do they do this kind of psychological manipulation? There are several reasons. It desensitizes people to real escalations in military policy. It discredits any opposition to new military escalation in advance. It makes Biden warmongering look reasonable when contrasted with Trump fearmongering. And it controls the narrative by masking legitimate concerns over Biden foreign policy decisions.
You might ask, what kind of foreign policy decisions does an article like this help to sell? How about a decision to help Ukraine launch U.S. missiles at Russian cities? Or what about a decision to escalate the Middle East conflict? There’s no telling. It’s less clear than ever who is calling the shots. From Newsweek, two days ago:
Biden Said He Wouldn't Send Troops to Middle
East Day Before Deployment
Published Sep 30, 2024
In other words, Biden told reporters that “no” more troops would be sent to the Middle East one day before the Pentagon sent thousands more US troops there. It’s like they’re not even trying that hard to pretend Biden is still running the show.
@MSNBC Producer Admits MSNBC Is 'Doing All They Can to Help’ the Harris Campaign
During an undercover date with an OMG journalist, Basel Hamdan (@BaselYHamdan), a writer and producer for MSNBC’s show “Ayman,” (@AymanMSNBC) was asked what the network has done to assist the Kamala Harris campaign. Hamdan revealed on hidden camera that “what her [Harris’s] message of the day is, is their message of the day,” as MSNBC actively pushes Harris’s narrative to help her win. He admitted that MSNBC is doing “all they can to help,” Harris get elected, with the network operating as an extension of the campaign. He went on to say, "MSNBC is indistinguishable from the party," further highlighting their partisan agenda.
In discussing the relationships between the MSNBC hosts and Democratic politicians, Hamdan reveals, ”The anchor and the politician are just in total agreement about everything.” He adds, “If you watch an interview with a Democratic politician, they just finish each other's sentences.”
Hamdan also didn’t shy away from criticizing the network’s audience, stating, “They’ve made their viewers dumber over the years,” and explaining that MSNBC is “too cozy with Democratic politicians.”
Regardless, we have a new hero to thank today for doing the media’s job and shaming the federal government into begrudging action. Yesterday, Elon Musk tweeted an update from one of his engineers deployed to the North Carolina disaster zone. The engineer, part of a team using private helicopters to deliver free satellite communications gear to stranded citizens, complained how FEMA and the FAA were shutting them down, part of “regulating the airspace.”
After Elon tweeted out the report from his own engineer, a known first-hand source, media accused the space billionaire of spreading misinformation and denied the feds were hampering aid delivery in any way. ...
Elon, an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur, is experienced in solving this kind of bureaucratic whackamole. He called Mayor Pete. About five hours later, Elon posted a thank-you:
Elon Musk 4 X @elonmusk • 11h
Thanks for helping simplify the FAA NOTAM. Support flights are now
underway. Much appreciated.
This happened because Elon has a giant public megaphone. Do you know who else has a giant public megaphone? The media. Except, for political reasons, since we are a month out of the election, the media has buried its megaphone under a toxic solar-panel graveyard. And people are literally dying because the media refuses to report anything that might embarrass the Biden Administration.
You can sort of understand how the far-left corporate media refuses to cover certain important stories due to politics, like the Hunter Biden laptop. It isn’t healthy. It erodes our democratic republic. But at least that kind of media malfeasance isn’t a direct threat to anyone’s well-being. But the hurricane coverage is completely different. In this case, the media’s malfeasance means many Americans in this country who might have been rescued will die instead.
Compare the media’s hyper-critical 2005 Hurricane Katrina coverage to its endless praise and knee-jerk defense of government during this hurricane. Media was all over the government’s response to the 2005 disaster. Local interviews with countless abandoned citizens pilloried slow-motion aid efforts, to the point President Bush was forced to deliver daily press briefings.
But yesterday, in an insectile frenzy, the media frantically fact-checked President Trump, accusing him of lying when he claimed FEMA gave nearly a billion dollars of disaster money to illegal immigrants — because that was a totally different Federal Emergency Management Agency budget category.
What FEMA could possibly have to do with relocating illegal aliens remains anybody’s guess. Here’s a link to the program on FEMA’s website. But yesterday, the media painted the emergency disaster agency’s money funnel to illegals as natural a phenomenon as breathing political air.
@mazemoore
Remember Kamala’s word salad answer about Israel on 60 Minutes? It’s gone.
This is what many Americans will now see.
President Donald Trump has responded after it emerged that CBS News had deceptively edited the footage from Kamala Harris’s “60 Minutes” interview to benefit the Democrat presidential nominee.
Trump is demanding that CBS release the full unedited interview footage to show the American people why the network had to run damage control for Harris.
It comes after a significant discrepancy was discovered that appears to show that the interview was deceptively altered to benefit Harris.
The moment in question came when host Bill Whitaker was discussing with Harris the United States’ financial support for Israel.
“But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening,” Whitaker said to Harris.
However, CBS News released two different clips showing Harris responding differently to Whitaker’s remark.
They thought they had him this time. After Monday’s’ Trump Town Hall event in Pennsylvania, the Harris Campaign released a viral video they claimed proved Trump had a Biden-like ‘cognitive brain freeze’ and couldn’t speak...
The video energized Kamala supporters like an electric shock ran through the Kamala campaign’s lifeless corpse, momentarily animating it with a saccharine simulacrum of life.
But, alas, it was fake! They edited the clip. ABC News, of all places, debunked Kamala’s fraudulent claim...
At the rally Trump spoke for about a half hour. After taking a couple questions, two people fainted and needed medical attention. So Trump told attendees, “Let’s not do any more questions.” Instead, he played nine of his favorite songs, went into the crowd, shook hands, and generally hung out. That was it.
The Times’s article — which I do not recommend reading — was a classic “permissive structure,” the latest example of what we’ve recently discussed. It’s how the deep state communicates telepathically with democrats, signaling what they’re allowed to say and to think without getting canceled by the liberal mob.
Indeed, the Party’s Glorious Leader and Useful Numbskull has granted Democrats permission to call Trump a “fascist”:
Until Vice President Kamala Harris this week made clear - again
and again that it would be just fine with her to use the word.
On Tuesday, as the radio host Charlamagne Tha God interviewed
Ms. Harris, he interjected as the vice president contrasted her
vision with her rival's. "The other is about fascism," he said of Mr.
Trump's vision. "Why can't we just say it?"
Ms. Harris's response: "Yes, we can say that."
... In sum, the Times’ entire argument consisted not of defining a fascist and then showing that Trump meets the definition, but instead just approvingly repeating Hillary Clinton and General Milley calling Trump a fascist, and giving readers explicit permission to emulate them.
This article might be the best example of a Barack Obama-style permissive structure that we’ve yet examined.
This morning, every corporate media platform in the country headlined Donald Trump’s greatest and grandest rally yesterday at Madison Square Garden. Desperate to deflate the giant tent that Trump has erected, which stretched over the five-hour MAGA extravaganza, the corporate media mayhem team busily scribbled its shrillest and most incendiary work yet. For instance, behold the New York Times’ top headline this morning: “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism.” And in the subheadline, the Times ominously warned, “Donald Trump’s rhetoric has grown darker and more menacing.”
This morning’s news is wall-to-wall, front-to-back, top-to-bottom rally coverage. Back in 1939, Democrats and their socialist allies once held a Nazi Party rally at Madison Square Garden, and that fact instantly became an intoxicating catnip that far-left reporters could not ignore. (There’s zero actual connection; the Garden has hosted thousands or maybe tens of thousands of rallies over the last 80 years of every conceivable political stripe or ideology.)
Did Trump plan to trigger the left this way? Trolling the media to make them overreact is a classic Trump marketing maneuver. Their knee-jerk outrage is his publicity. Trump’s messages always come with a tiny dose of controversy to entice more media coverage. Trying to smear Trump this way always backfires, but media keeps doing it anyway. They can’t help it.
And when they do write the articles and run the segments making extraordinary claims like Trump’s rally was just like the 1939 Nazi rally, Democrats eagerly race to their screens wanting to watch the clips, the clips of Trump, expecting to see some truly top-notch goose-stepping and hear some pitch-perfect heil Trumping.
And that’s how he gets them, little by little. Having been exposed to a slim sliver of sanity, Democrats slink back to their far-left fever swamps and echo chambers. But soundbite by soundbite, clip by clip, Trump peels them off the Trump-deranged mind-control stem.
Media’s trouble is, having now advertised Trump’s rally as “worse than Hitler,” they have to deliver. People expect to hear something extremely irrational and incredibly hateful. But the Times’ lone example was Trump calling for the death penalty for illegals who murder Americans and police officers.
To the Times, Trump is acting just like rounding up innocent German and Polish Jews. But Democrat readers, eager for more Trump ammo, become cognitively confused: Trump only called for the death penalty for murderers, not innocent people.
It almost seemed like the Times is downplaying Hitler’s evil rhetoric, and is normalizing the former German Chancellor. So … who’s the real Nazi here?
Here’s another example. The Times tried to cast one of the speakers, described as “a senior Trump advisor,” as a racist, but just created more cognitive dissonance for its readers:
Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser who influenced Mr. Trump's
anti-immigrant crackdown, used nativist language as he argued
that only Mr. Trump would stand up and say "America is for
Americans and Americans only."
Nativist language? What is that? Is it like Cherokee? Nobody but woke academics understand that kind of gobbledygook. It’s a dog whistle for globalists, who think Germany should be for Germans and Mexico should be for Mexicans, but America should be for everybody.
Again, this kind of woke doublespeak fails to close the “Trump as Hitler” case with anybody.
Moving to the rally itself, by all fair accounts it was a massive success, with a cast including some of the biggest and most well-known characters and thought leaders that Trump has collected along his comeback journey. Accomplished professionals like Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and Dr. Phil joined celebrities like Hulk Hogan, conservative comedians, patriotic performance artists, former Democrats like Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, and a slate of Republican favorites.
The clips are all over social media, you’ll see them, and nearly every corporate media outlet has covered the event one way or another. It was a joyful blowout that might have been the best-attended Madison Square Garden in history. More 2024 records.
The enthusiasm on the Right can be scooped up in buckets. How about the other side?
How about the other side?
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