How Disinformation Specialists Hijack Freedom Movements

     You may have had this experience: You receive a feel-good email message that expresses something you’ve been feeling for years. Sure, there are one or two points that don’t quite fit your beliefs, but a few points in a two- or three-page article may be overlooked. It’s the overall, feel-good message that counts. You forward it to others on your email list and forget all about it.

     But wait. What if you re-read the message before passing it on, only this time in a more critical frame of mind? On the second reading, you may realize that, in two or three pages, none of the feel-good passages say anything new. The only new material is in the one or two points that you found disagreeable.

     Welcome to the world of idea placement advertising. It’s kind of like product placement advertising, except that ideas rather than products are being peddled.

     Our minds have a guard at the gate. Each time a message comes to the gate, the guard decides whether the message is true. If it’s considered true, the message is allowed into the short-term memory and, with good behavior, it will be allowed into the long-term memory. At that point, it’ll be hard to erase.

     Try this experiment: Find someone whose name isn’t George and start calling him George. No matter how many times you call him George, the guard at his mental gate will reject the suggestion that that his name is really George.

     The guards at gates, however, can be fooled in a variety of ways. If the guard can be fooled into thinking that it’s not really a message—that it’s really entertainment—the message goes straight to the long-term memory where it becomes one of that person’s core beliefs.

     Remember also the Russian proverb, “The best place to conceal a knife is in plain sight, with a spoon and fork.” That’s one of the ways that the corporate media and other disinformation specialists slip their messages past our brains’ guards at the gate.

     To be forewarned is to be forearmed. Allow me one example: I recently read a feel-good article supposedly written to promote a sense of national unity among Americans but containing a hidden message to support the agenda of the global elite.

     In a recent article, neoconservative propagandist Michelle Malkin wrote an article called “We, the unhyphenated Americans: Meet my people.” Right away, the title of the article makes us feel good.

     From my own perspective, it was pleasing to know that the author is a native Filipina. I lived in the Philippines for four months and formed a fondness and admiration for Filipinos that has endured for 40 years. Many Filipinos attend my church. Thus, for me, Michelle Malkin’s heritage enhances the impressiveness of her article’s title.

     After the first few paragraphs, though, I got suspicious and did a quick Internet search of her professional credentials. Here are some comments I later made concerning what I had found in the article and the Internet search:

     “Michelle Malkin, the author of the...article falls into the same trap (or more likely sets the trap) as the people she derides. In the article, she pretends to be inclusive of all Americans, but "her people," as she calls them, are exclusively Republicans. Don't forget that the Dubya Bush administration and their co-conspirators gave us 9/11, the USA PATRIOT Act, TSA groping and high-tech voyeurism, the Department of Homeland Security, torture, the end of habeas corpus, the end of posse comitatus; and endless wars against literally millions of innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

     “Are those criminals "her people"? Apparently so, since she posits everyone who opposes these wars, abuses, and usurpations are people who have no argument beyond accusations of Islamophobia.

     “It's supposed to be an urban legend that people slip razor blades into Halloween candy, but Ms Malkin has given it a new twist and made it a fact. She's slipping poison into a highly agreeable concept.

     “That should not be surprising when you look at her career.

     “She worked in Washington, DC, as a journalism fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Never heard of it? They're funded by the Ford Motor Company Fund, CFR co-founder Exxon Mobile, CFR premium member Pfizer, and the Earhart Foundation. The Earhart Foundation is noted for funding such neocon schemes as the American Enterprise Institute which, in turn, gave us the Project for the New American Century, which favored "a new Pearl Harbor" several months before 9/11.

     “She hasn't forgotten who has been feeding her all these years. During her career of barking for her supper, she has barked at the tables of MSNBC, the Boston Globe, and Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel.

     “In 2004, when Vietnam War hero John Kerry was running for President against a selfish coward who had pulled strings and even broken a lawful contract to avoid the draft, Michelle Malkin derided Kerry for not being as big a war hero as Kerry had claimed. Through clever wording, she said that Kerry's "wounds were self inflicted." When asked by Chris Matthews whether Malkin's comment implied that Kerry had wounded himself to get a Purple Heart, she ducked the question but allowed the suggestion to stand.

     “Michelle Malkin is clearly a RINO neocon operative whose money trail leads back to the Rockefellers, Goldman Sachs, the disaster capitalists, and other threats to peace and freedom. Be very careful when--or if--you read one of her feel-good articles. Her candy is likely to be laced with arsenic or razor blades.”

     Michelle Malkin is only one of many Trojan horses in the freedom movement. I singled her out only because it was her article that was forwarded to me—not by a disinformation specialist or a paid Internet troll but by an innocent dupe. 

     Remember that the devil comes to us as an angel of light.  Pray for wisdom and freedom from manipulation; and read with care.

The Only Strategic Voting that Works

All of us are familiar with the Goldilocks Dilemma of election voting: Three candidates are running for the same office. One is too hot, one is too cold, and the other is just right. We'll call that one Baby Bear. The problem is that Baby Bear can't win.
"How do you know that Baby Bear can't win?"
"Uh, well, I don't know—everybody knows he can't win."
"How does everybody know that?"
"Well, uh, well, look at all those gaffs he's been making."
"Oh, you mean the things he's been saying?"
"Of course."
"Well, do you agree with the things he's been saying?"
"Yes, but he shouldn't be saying them because saying them will lose support."
The conversation on that one keeps going around and around. In the end, everybody knows that Baby Bear can't win, but nobody really knows how they know. I learned a long time ago that the things “everybody” knows but don't know how they know, and that no one should question, are the very things you should question.
Here's how that scenario plays out: A lot of people who support Baby Bear would take think of Mama Bear as the lesser of two evils, and Mama Bear can't win without the support of Baby Bear supporters. The “reasoning” goes, a vote for Baby Bear would divide the lesser-of-two-evils vote and cause Papa Bear to win. Thus, we're told that a vote for Baby Bear is a vote for Papa Bear, and we shouldn't do that. Why shouldn't we? Because that's what somebody named Conventional Wisdom tells us, and we should always do as we're told—without question. Or should we?
I spent 20 years active in politics, 10 years involved in political action groups, and I helped plan and manage a few political campaigns. One of the first things a political strategist does in a campaign is check to see how people voted in past elections. He rarely examines the reasons they voted that way; he's interested only in how they voted. This helps him to plan a winning strategy.
The results of each election tell future election strategists what voters are willing to accept in the next election. Whatever gets the most votes in one election, candidates will promise more of in the next election. Whatever doesn't get votes is not even mentioned in the next election.
That's one of the reasons voters are being offered fewer and fewer desirable options in elections. When you vote against Baby Bear, you're voting against his policies. When you vote against Baby Bear's policies, you give future campaign strategists a signal that Baby Bear's policies don't get votes. It doesn't matter that you voted the way you did because you thought Baby Bear couldn't win. You voted against what Baby Bear was offering, and you won't be offered as much of it—if at all—in the next election.
There's only one kind of strategic voting that works, and that's voting on principle. Vote for Baby Bear, even if you think he can't win. You may be surprised at how much support he really has, and you won't really know until the votes are counted—assuming that they don't use Diebold vote-counting machines or the easily rigged touch-screen voting machines.
If Mama Bear's goose gets cooked because she took Baby Bear's supporters for granted, she's going to be courting them in future elections. If you want proof of this, just look at the 2008 presidential election.
In 2008, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham made a speech in which he said that old-line conservatives and libertarians had no place in the Republican Party. To him it was a neo-conservative party, and that was that. He told them in so many words to leave the Republican Party. In many states, Republican organizations violated party rules, state laws, and even federal election laws to ram their candidate through the convention. As a consequence, libertarians and old-line conservatives took Graham at his word, left the party, and the Republicans got their clocks cleaned that November.
At the same time, Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr, another neoconservative, effectively shut libertarians out of their own party.
Today, millions of Americans from across the political spectrum (including liberals who feel that they've been shut out of the Democratic Party since 2009) have formed loose-knit groups called Tea Parties. Lindsey Graham, Bob Barr, and other Establishment stuffed shirts are trying to court their votes.
Regardless of how you feel about libertarians, conservatives, or the Tea Parties, the bottom line is this: They are now riding high because they stood by their principles. On principle, they were willing to take a hit in 2008; and now they're in a stronger position for 2010 and 2012.
Stand by your principles. Vote for the person you believe should win, even if you don't believe he will. It's the only strategic voting that works.

Americans are Coming Together

I recently read an email from a neoconservative, would-be Paul Revere. Or,at least he seemed to be riding on Paul Revere's horse. In his post, he breathlessly warned everyone interested in reading his screed that “liberals” were “infiltrating” the Tea Parties as part of a “divide and conquer strategy.”
Let’s back up a few years—say, about 46 years or more. In 1964, there were two main branches of the Republican Party: Goldwater Republicans and the Rockefeller Republicans. Outside the party were the unabashed liberals.
The liberals embraced Tea Party issues even back then, although their views on the matter were somewhat inchoate.
As of 1988, when the elder Bush ran for President, Rockefeller Republicans became known as neo-conservatives. The neo-cons are now found in both major political parties. Henry Kissinger (Republican) was a protégé of Nelson Rockefeller; Zbigniew Brzenzinski (Democrat) is a protégé of Henry Kissinger. It was the Rockefeller Republicans (neocons) who were most responsible for giving the Republican Party its reputation for being a party of the rich at the expense of the poor.
We were all foolish in those days—most of us, anyway. Liberals tended to condemn any corporate profit as fascism, regardless of how honestly the profits were obtained. Conservatives would roll their eyes and praise any profit making, and call it free enterprise, regardless of how much of it was profiteering at taxpayer expense. No matter how many billions were stolen by the malefactors of great wealth, it was excused on the fraudulent rationale of free enterprise. On the other hand, any welfare mother who kept her small bank account a secret from the Welfare Gestapo was a “welfare queen.”
Now, both liberals and conservatives are faced with blatant fascism on a multi-trillion-dollar scale. Remember, the liberals were the first to cry, “Fascism,” and, “Corporate Welfare.” Now that the Tea Partiers have taken up the cry, do you see them telling the liberals that they’ve seen the light? No. Many of them are letting the Rockefeller Republicans con them into telling the liberals to stay away from “their” party.
I'm not saying that liberals and conservatives are acting from the same motives. Take the attempted healthcare overhaul for example. Conservatives oppose it mainly on the constitutional ground that healthcare is not a federal issue; and on the free market ground that, for all its faults, America's healthcare system is still more efficient than the government healthcare system found on Native American reservations. Liberals oppose it because it appears specifically designed to shovel billions of taxpayer dollars at corrupt corporations in such industries as Big Pharma and the health insurance monopolies; and that it would bring American healthcare down to the level of that which is found on the Native American reservations.
Either set of arguments flies very well, but the liberals, having the more populist argument, have the best chance of resonating with American voters. It is any wonder, then, that the Rockefeller Republicans and Rockefeller Democrats are so eager to keep the liberals away from the Tea Parties? Talk about “divide and conquer!” It's the neocons who are desperately trying to keep Americans divided against one another.
Apart from one another, the liberals and the conservatives can do little to sweep the rats out of Congress. The numbers of either group are too small, especially if liberals and conservatives work against one another. Together, we can do it; and together we must do it!
The one issue that unites us is whether our congressmen represent us, their constituents; or the banksters, war profiteers, and other scoundrels of their ilk. We have just over 200 days between now and the 2010 congressional elections. I'll try to share as much as I can to help you decide—no, I won't decide for you—whether your congressman is one of the few honest men or women remaining in Congress and deserving of re-election. Of the 345 members of Congress, I seriously doubt that there are more than 45 honest men and women; the rotten barrel has spoiled that many apples. If in doubt, vote him out.
In a future article, I'll share with you the results of several polls that show that, for the first time in memory, we can change Congress. We can drive the money changers from the temple and replace them with honest Americans. But, to do this, we must work together.