Chronicle of Dissent - Why Public Is Enemy #1
Rant in an age of narrative
Military operatives target politicians and journalists who question Covid response
Lowly soldiers follow orders but to whom do those at the top report?
Sidelining of Parliament and rule by diktat suggest the Army has a higher master
See also:
Rule By Mind War And Disinformation - AP fires reporter for claiming Russia attacked Poland but was he following orders? (Nov 22, 2022)
(2,000 words or 10 minutes of your time.)
Jan 31, 2023
In a post-news world people are bored of information: they prefer rants. For a while much of the mass favoured the rants of CNN and Microsoft NBC.
Trump was a ready-made caricature and on-screen performative artistes such as Anderson Cooper of CNN had little to do except peroxide and point.
The secret is that hard news is easy; if you follow it, it’s a doozy. Gauging the public’s response to the rant of the moment is harder. That’s why CNN eventually lost the plot; evidenced by the collapse in its ratings.
As Seth Godin wrote, industry no longer markets the product, it sells a narrative. That goes for information as much as any material good.
The most prestigious of the fact checkers, Hamilton 68, linked to the Alliance for Securing Democracy — a nonprofit that used its connections to top names in U.S. national intelligence to identify Russian influence on social media — turned out to be a total fake.
Fellow-traveler frauds included former Clinton campaign manager John Podesta and the neoconservative Bill Kristol.
They sold rant as the front end; the use of emotion to mist and manipulate the public eye.
Computer says no
Its “Russian bot dashboard” was cited by lamestream reporters as their primary source — unquestioningly.
These stories and their source were not news — they were a smear tactic to influence or defame anything or anyone to which or whom the “Russian bot” could be attached.
The problem is that as early as 2018 Hamilton 68 co-founder and former FBI COINTELPRO operative Clint Watts as admitting to Buzzfeed: “We don’t even think they’re all commanded in Russia — at all. We think some of them are legitimately passionate people that are just really into promoting Russia.”
That same year Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) pointed out that Twitter was “clogged with bots” and lots of them were operated out of the United States, so ascribing them to Russian operatives was a fool’s errand. [1]
That didn’t stop the state and lamestream media (sorry for the loaded phrase but Twitter is also corporate media and has cleaned up its act)”
Fallout of Austin Bombings Exposes Racial Tensions, Russian Bots and Media Distrust (France 24, 4/1/18)
After the Parkland Shooting, Pro-Russian Bots Are Pushing False-Flag Allegations Again (Washington Post, 2/16/18)
Google has “disappeared” many of the Russian bot headlines since the expose of Hamilton 68 by the new incumbents at Twitter. That’s a shame because re-examining those headlines would be a valuable learning experience for journalists.
They could learn the difference between reporting news and manipulating public perceptions — what FAIR calls “a conditioning exercise more than a story.”
It is not journalism to repeat information from a “computerized dashboard” — using Dr Evil air quotes from the Austin Powers movies.
Reporters display a lack of initiative ridiculed in the comedy series Little Britain — “the computer says no.” [2]
This reflexive stenography gave us Russia collusion, Russiagate, and the establishment narrative for the election of president Donald Trump.
It was swallowed and repeated unquestioningly by the vast majority of the employees of news organizations — and as someone working in international news at the time, the author can assure the reader that they subscribed, to almost every man and woman.
The U.S. print media in particular devoted column yards to the hoax, and Fakt Cheka such as Snopes and Politifact cited Hamilton 68 as sources. [3]
The lamestream media insists the problem is misinformation, brought about by the Internet. But the decline of news media started long ago — back in the 1980s, long before the public could share news online.
Newspapers were already axing their investigative journalists and hiring celebrities to contribute columns in place of reporters. The biggest shift was from news reporting to features.
In the 1950s, Britain’s Daily Express had almost 60 full time foreign correspondents. By the 1990s, few news organizations strayed further than London, Washington and Tel Aviv.
Age of narrative
Hamilton 68 is no outlier. It was part of an extensive operation run by corporations in cahoots with the military to use the Internet as a tool of psychological manipulation.
In military doctrine this has its roots in MindWars, a guide to mass deception, written by Col. Michael Aquino in 1980. In fifth generation warfare, the military no longer delineates between the state of war and peace. The public becomes the enemy or, at best, collateral damage.
NATO and the European Union adopted this proactive approach to narrative management through their Rapid Response Units, promoted under former UK prime minister Theresa May, whose demeanour suggested she had missed her calling as a secret policeman.
The British government, or rather the Sainsbury family’s Institute For Government, sponsored the development of the MINDSPACE document (2010) in which it is admitted, “Citizens may not fully realise that their behaviour is being changed… Clearly, this opens Government up to charges of manipulation.”
Britain’s head of the Army until Nov 2021, Gen Sir Nick Carter, warned that “political warfare has returned… a strategy that is designed to undermine cohesion, erode economic, political and social resilience.”
Did it escape his notice that The Great Reset ushers in precisely that: a governance system that in which “governancers” are unaccountable, elected leaders are shoved aside and decision making is opaque and corrupted.
Britain’s Integrated Operating Concept “challenges norms of civil-military relations and the dynamics of Westminster agencies: The old distinction between foreign and domestic defence is increasingly irrelevant.”
As the militaries of European nations and the U.S. weaponize Covid as a pretext for The Great Reset one must ask whom the British, Canadian and American generals are working for.
From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory, was written by Col Michael A. Aquino, a psychological intelligence officer with the U.S. Army and a founder of the Temple of Set. [4]
Last week the British Army was exposed for targeting politicians and journalists who raised doubts about the Covid response. A so-called “information warfare” brigade gathered information on people who simply questioned the modeling behind the Neil Ferguson’s discredited death forecasts. [5]
The spying operation was run out of the Counter Disinformation Unit, based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the aforementioned Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office. They targeted not only prominent individuals but potentially the social media comments of anyone posting online.
An army whistleblower told the non-profit Big Brother Watch: “'It is quite obvious that our activities resulted in the monitoring of the UK population... monitoring the social media posts of ordinary, scared people. These posts did not contain information that was untrue or co-ordinated — it was simply fear.”
In the UK the 77th Brigade and 13th Signals of the British Army do the same as the U.S., Israeli, British, Australian, NZ or Canadian military.
In 2021 Canada’s military was exposed using surveillance and psychological manipulation tools it perfected in Afghanistan but on the domestic population. Reporter David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen, showed how the army had been using fake social media accounts since at least 2015 for what Chief of the Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance called the “weaponization of public affairs.” [6]
That is the same year that Britain’s 77th Brigade was established to conduct “non-lethal” forms of psychological warfare and use the likes of Facebook and Twitter to “fight in the information age,” according to Gen Carter. [7]
As the narrative of the Covid response unravels — Japan has launched an official investigation into deaths following the Covid shot; Denmark has suspended its Covid injectables programme; Thailand’s royal officials have launched an inquiry into the shot after the king’s eldest daughter was placed on life support; Germany’s government admits an “alarming number” of vaccinated people are developing “AIDS-like symptoms” — the co-ordination of Western military comes into question.
Psychological manipulation is a key tool of government nowadays, as the psychologists in the UK's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) have admitted. Laura Dodsworth has the details in her book A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic, published in May 2021.
See Moneycircus, Sep 2021 — The Never Normal is Forever
Let’s remind ourselves that The Great Reset, or Going Direct — the seizure of wealth and replacement of cash by a new form of exchange controlled by those who have hijacked the economy — is being coordinated globally, with the collaboration of politicians, journalists, academics and teachers, social workers and psychologists, corporate managers, bureaucrats, doctors and functionaries of every kind.
The role of Davos, whose annual summit was held this month, is the symbolic snowy summit, upon whose pinnacle heroic mountaineers point, as they call the path ahead, like figures in a Soviet or Nazi propaganda poster, proclaiming they see through the clouds, beyond the peaks, our path to the promised land of bankers and financiers.
Green Horizons! — in the words of Mark Carney, former governor of the private central banks of Canada and England. BlackRock are his engineers, the team that proposed to the Federal Reserve the policy of printing trillions and giving it direct to corporations (wealthy investors) to buy up assets while they crushed small business and main street with Covid lockdowns.
This does not fit into a neat dialectic, any more than the bland slogans of the World Economic Forum make any logical sense or the constellation of think tanks (all funded for a purpose by corporations and billionaires) honestly identify a fractious world that fits their preferred narrative and pecuniary interest.
“Prop Or Not,” run out of Ukraine, claims to identify “more than 200 websites as peddlers of Russian propaganda.”
U.S. Senator Josh Hawley has obtained new documents showing that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did indeed convene a so-called “Disinformation Governance Board” to monitor and suppress citizens’ speech — and that DHS head Alejandro Mayorkas lied in May when he told Congress that the board was scrapped before it had even met.
The new information also shows the DHS had co-opted Meta’s Head of Security Policy Nathaniel Gleicher, the same individual who helped suppress discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop on Facebook.
Nina Jankowicz stepped down in 2022 as head of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board (DGB). She worked with the Integrity Initiative, a project of the Institute for Statecraft, a group of state propagandists funded partly by the UK Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office, using tame journalists to sabotage politicians like the UK’s former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn or the appointment of Pedro Baños as Spain’s security minister.
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who owns The Intercept, was involved in plans to establish the DGB and his staff shared documents with Jankowicz, which she forwarded under the heading “Z Memo” in March. A week later she shared an opinion column by Omidyar staff with colleagues. She bowed out in May, after her links with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion were exposed, including the propaganda site StopFake and a “kill list” of Ukraine’s “enemies” called Myrotvorets or Mirotvorets — which connections her Mary Poppins theatrical performances failed to disguise.
In Nov 2022 Jankowicz registered as a foreign agent due to her work in the UK, where she is associated with the Foreign Office and its various disinformation units like the rebranded Integrity Initiative, the Institute for Statecraft and other propaganda fronts. See The Grayzone for more.
The Ukrainian arm of NATO is closely connected to the Myrotvorets “peacekeeper” website that doxes and calls for the death of critics of Ukraine.
Back to rant
If people prefer to hear, let them have it: shout and they will come. It is the easiest trick in what passes for journalism, across the alt media.
But rant is the fish, thrown to the fisherman, that puts him out of business.
Arm him with news and information, and he can fight back.
[1] FAIR, 2018 - Media Warn of ‘Russian Bots’—Despite Primary Source’s Disavowal
[2] Little Britain, YouTube – “The Computer Says No”
[3] Alliance For Securing Democracy – Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard
[4] Col Paul Valley, Maj Michael Aquino, 1980, revised 2003 - From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory
[5] Gen Sir Nick Carter, Dec 2019 - Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter's annual RUSI speech
[6] Jacobin, 2021 - Canada’s Military Is Spying on Canadian Citizens
[7] The National, 2020 - Defence chief says 77th Brigade is countering Covid misinformation
Brilliant, simply brilliant! Thank you!
"Back to rant"
Simple and eloquent short paragraph on the issue.
I find myself wanting to "pump up your tyres" almost every blog.
Substack so far has become the new focal point of journalism.