Monday, December 17, 2018

Ru$$ophobia Must Never Die

The New York Times and Washington Post and other corporate media outlets are all pushing new documents today pushing the same old Russiagate propaganda.

The reports, contracted by the "bipartisan" Senate Intelligence Committee, seem designed to both shame "Russian-targeted" Black voters who failed to turn out for Hillary Clinton and thus unwittingly gave the 2016 election to Donald Trump, and to gaslight supporters of Bernie Sanders, who remains the most popular politician in America and who threatens Joe Biden and others of the neoliberal persuasion as they vie for the next Democratic presidential nomination.

The Times piece, written by Scott Shane and Sheera Frenkel, uncritically highlights the findings of an Austin, TX-based "brand defense" start-up called New Knowledge. This organization says it discovered that the indicted Russian troll farm, Internet Research Agency, which meddled in our free and fair elections process, was even more evil than they first told us to believe. They produced a lot more cheesy ads on a lot more social media platforms than were immediately apparent when Russiagate first became a "thing" more than a year ago. The ads were just discovered to have been specifically aimed at Black voters and at Bernie supporters. Although there is no proof that the ads actually swung the election to Trump, that possibility exists, says the Times. They will never know. And neither will you.

Sow the doubt, and sow it good and hard. Because doubt and confusion are prerequisites of fear. And fear is essential to compliance.

Meanwhile, a quick visit to the New Knowledge website tells you what the Times doesn't bother disclosing:  it was founded and is run by former (and who knows, maybe even current) employees of, and advisers to, the US military, the NSA and the State Department.

My published comment on the "blockbuster" story:
This article doesn't inform readers that the co-founder and chief operating officer of New Knowledge, contracted to write the report on Russian influence, spent 15 years at the NSA working on SIGINT and has also served in US Army's Joint Special Ops.
 https://www.newknowledge.com/our-company
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/01/nsa-global-surveillance-sigint-seniors/
 It's always a good idea to investigate the sources of one's information, both in cheesy, amateurish Facebook and Instagram ads, and in highly respected mainstream media outlets.
This article also serves the subtle purpose of denigrating the popular Bernie Sanders, at whose supporters the ads were directed. If you didn't vote for Hillary, if you voted for Jill Stein, and if you simply voted for nobody at all, and if you are still a Bernie fan, it is possible (but of course not provable as the article hastens to add) that the Russians infiltrated your brain. And the Russian trolls are even snidely joking about it in their subsequent ads!
Solutions? Quit Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and agitate for more public education funding, specifically teaching kids basic civics and critical thinking to help them identify propaganda, whatever the source. And pay teachers a living wage so that more people will enter this important and undervalued profession.
And reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, which mandated broadcasting in the public interest. Here's looking at the biggest disinformation troll of all: Fox News.
 The Times article also doesn't disclose that the author of the New Knowledge report, Renee DiResta, is a venture capitalist and derivatives trader in a parallel professional life. This presumably gives her the expertise to declare that while "very real racial tensions and feelings of alienation have existed in the United States for decades," the Russians make them worse by exploiting them. After all, she sunk some her own money into the New Knowledge startup.

New Knowledge actually gets its funding from several venture capital firms, including GGV Capital, Moonshot Capital, Haystack Ventures, Geekdom Fund, Capital Factory and Spitfire Ventures. 

Nowhere in the New York Times piece is the question asked why Ryan Fox, the NSA veteran and special ops spook running New Knowledge, didn't come up with the goods on Russian meddling a long time ago, when he was developing all that advanced global eavesdropping technology and defending our precious national security interests. Maybe, and quite probably, he did. And he and the other spy state operatives dismissed it out of hand as being too trivial and commonplace to even worry about.

Then Hillary lost, and her campaign operatives needed to come up with a big excuse in a big hurry. Enter the good folks in the public-private Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex and some old intel gathering dust in the cyberfiles of the NSA and its various partners.

And so it's time once again to cast doubt in the minds of people who still support Bernie Sanders or who otherwise champion progressive and socialist ideas. The Times article does it, none too subtly, with this paragraph:
Of 81 Facebook pages created by the Internet Research Agency in the Senate’s data, 30 targeted African-American audiences, amassing 1.2 million followers, the report finds. By comparison, 25 pages targeted the political right and drew 1.4 million followers. Just seven pages focused on the political left, drawing 689,045 followers.
While the right-wing pages promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the left-wing pages scorned Mrs. Clinton while promoting Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The voter suppression effort was focused particularly on Sanders supporters and African-Americans, urging them to shun Mrs. Clinton in the general election and either vote for Ms. Stein or stay home.
Whether such efforts had a significant effect is difficult to judge. Black voter turnout declined in 2016 for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, but it is impossible to determine whether that was the result of the Russian campaign.
The spooks and private equity capitalists at New Knowledge, meanwhile, want you to discard your previous knowledge, and just trust the predatory lords of capitalism to divide the good discourse from the bad. Without a hint of irony, given the security state's current vendetta against truth-revealing whistleblowers like Ed Snowden and Julian Assange, its mission statement asserts:  
 We are living in a crisis of trust - and societies in which citizens can’t trust their information sources are vulnerable to collapse. It’s no secret that in today’s information-rich society, the lines between fact and fiction have blurred. 
New Knowledge is on a mission to make it easier to monitor and defend against damaging social media security risks and disinformation so the truth will prevail in our public discourse.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Meanwhile, try very hard to censor your own independent thoughts, while they go about monitoring your online activities and censoring any information that might hurt their profits and damage their waning credibility.

8 comments:


  1. Who's worse: Times writers or Times readers?

    Following the article in question, hundreds of commenters endorsed the writers' phony scoop that Putin's hackers had more cleverly rigged the election than previously thought. The top commenter (pro Russiagate) has 686 votes (so far).

    On the other hand, critical reactions to the Times article are few and far down the line of reader picks. When I last looked, Karen's comment (with 27 votes) ranked 68th in a field of nearly a thousand comments. Not bad, but not good either. I hasten to add not because of the quality of her comment but because of her deficient audience.

    The ratio of 27 reader votes to 686 reader votes is about 1:25. Could it be that, among Times readers, only 1 in 25 takes facts into account, has a skeptical bone in her body and can think critically? The other 24 swallow just about all the news The Grey Lady feeds them in the Times's font called 'Imperial.'*

    If la crème de la crème of newspaper readers is that gullible, what about the immune response of the rest of the country to elaborate, oft-repeated lies and propaganda?

    Reciting facts, telling the truth and connecting the dots over and over do not work. When will we admit that inconvenient truth? Since the invention of the wheel truthful minorities have repeatedly failed at improving the world by plainly, or even wittily, announcing the truth.

    Methinks we must fight fire with fire. We must adopt a more effective stratagem, which just might be to out-lie the liars with good propaganda to counter their bad propaganda. Good propaganda to bring out the best in us can be no worse than white lies, which are permissible according to ethicists I respect. Saves time and cushions impact.

    We must not neglect the myths that made America great: you know, City on a Hill; Pioneers; Land of Plenty; Can-Do Spirit; Defender of the Weak; Never Lost a War; Manifest Destiny; Separation of Branches as well as of Church & State; Land of Opportunity; Progress; Government of, by, and for the People; Give Me Your Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free; Jazz; Breadbasket of the World; Science Leader; First in Everything; Philanthropy; Etc., Etc. Worth a try, might work.

    (* 'New Times Roman' was dropped in 1967.)

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  2. All completely true. And I read this "essay" that you are writing about but didn't do as much research as you. The one thing that gets me is that we give the kapitalist overlords too much credit for being "smarter" than we - the populist masses - are. Let's blame it on the Jews after all they killed god's son, right?! Are those folks really all that smaht and not just greedy bastards? (talking about the kapitalist overlords) Remember that business about how dimwitted, fat amerikan travelers actually wore shorts into hallowed places? And they thought everyone spoke amerikan and couldn't believe it when they didn't? Those things were true, too. Rich right-wingers. Willfully ignorant people. Sheesh.

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  3. It would appear that both above commenters committed the sins that Karen Garcia laments in her column! Lack of critical thought! I found this article somewhat informative but disappointing.
    Putin & the Russians are not here to help.
    Clinton was a bad candidate who ran an average campaign. It wasn't terrible, it was mediocre. The real problem was running her in the first place. Hillary is despised by a third of the voting public. I predicted Trump had a serious shot at winning. He's perfect for the 'stubs. An ignorant, loud mouthed, lying bigot who never accepts responsibility for his own mistakes and wants power for it's own sake.
    He was compromised by the Soviets - now Russia - decades ago. Trump's total failure to see his own mistakes is what will always doom anything he attempts. But the world is full of chumps - people who will believe what someone else tells them to believe just so they can be on the "inside". Lack of critical thought.
    The Russians are here. Putin & the KGB/GRU/FSB/SVR have no Love of Liberal Western Democracies. We (Our allies, A free press, America & NATO) are the single biggest threat to Putin's grip on power.
    The CIA engaged in barbaric mind control experiments in the 1950's and Senate hearings were held on it in 1977. These are facts. MKULTRA ended up being the catch-all name for what the CIA euphemistically called "Behavior Modification". All verifiable facts.
    The Nazis were well known for keeping copious documentation & written notes on everything they did, The Nazis also performed even more barbaric experiments than the CIA in an effort to brainwash and establish mind control, among other unspeakable horrors. The Soviets captured much of this information at the end of WWII when they walled off East Germany.
    Anyone who thinks that was the end of mind control experiments and research is beyond foolish, you are probably under someone's influence.
    Controlling the populace has been the end goal of every regime in history. How could anyone think Governments & Corporations would ignore the probability of being able to have hundreds of millions of people do what is asked of them? Buy Cadillac! Buy Toyota! Vote Republican! Putin is a stronger leader than Obama! Democrats want open borders!
    The Russians call the cyber attacks on Liberal Western Democracies non-linear warfare.
    Russia is not America's ally. The Russians are not our friends.
    Pretending that Russia doesn't want America to fail is sticking your head in the sand.
    WE live in an information age, that information has been weaponized. Ignoring that reality is akin to denying AGW & Climate Science.

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  4. @Doktor,

    The point of my post is that Russian propaganda on social media is being used as an excuse for the corporate state to censor discourse it considers outside the realm of the accessible. The media is dishonest in failing to disclose the moneyed interests behind Russigate. Criticism of these latest reports is not equivalent to defense of Putin. Too many people have internalized this kind of binary thinking.

    Before accusing others of lack of critical thinking skills, you might want to retread your own comment.

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  5. Make that read "outside the realm of the acceptable,"

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  6. @Karen

    The media is blatantly dishonest, Russian mind control is considered too ridiculous to mention. CIA mind control is a state secret. Brain washing is legal by default.
    A third of the population believes whatever blatant lie Trump spews in any given hour.
    Fox news has become state run propaganda in the US.
    There is still a widely held belief that there exists a nebulous Liberal Media somewhere - I would posit that that is a total myth propagated by the media itself - the corporate media is demonstrably conservatively biased.
    While I agree that binary thinking is only good for computers, we can't ignore phenomena just because it coincides with a narrative we don't like.

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  7. Has no one taken note of this latest photo of the Capitol ? Good Grief! What further proof need we that the Russians are playing us like a balalaika?

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/19/russophobia-and-the-specter-of-war/

    Yet the blind Liberal Media, which might not exist in the first place, is saying nothing about what's happened at the very center of our democracy.

    Lefties, you can't keep ignoring what fills your visual field, thanks to photographers and writers from the Times, the Post, and the woke among us. The wily Russians are not "coming"; they're already here. Fortunately, the coming war––Bring It On!––, with or without nukes, will put an end to so many doubts, questions and wrong answers.

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  8. 'The Year of Putin-Nazi Paranoia'
    - C.J. Hopkins

    https://consentfactory.org/2018/12/19/the-year-of-putin-nazi-paranoia/

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