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As all conservatives, and most Americans, know, our mainstream media has been feeding us a pack of lies and propaganda for years. This isn't news, and, alas, there doesn't appear to be much prospect for near-term improvement.
Knowing that you're being lied to is one thing; figuring out what the truth is, even once you know what it is not, is far more challenging. So understanding more about the ways in which we're deceived can be helpful, if only in ruling things out.
And, to our surprise, we've recently realized that the deep-state propagandists are rather more sophisticated and better at targeting than we'd previously feared.
We all understand the concept of credibility. If your 7-year-old aspiring baseball player tells you he didn't break the window, you may trust him, but you'll likely also investigate and verify. If your spouse says the child didn't, though, odds are you'll move on to other suspects immediately.
The same is true for media. No conservative is going to pay much attention to anything that issues forth from Rachel Maddow or Brian Stelter. Sean Hannity would at least get a hearing, and Rush, God rest his soul, would likely get the benefit of any doubt. Each of those individuals has established a years-long reputation that colors the way we listen to them.
Of course, if your political perspective were reversed, so would your pre-judgments be - a lefty would likely consider Maddow and Stelter to be Holy Writ, vs. the bigoted likes of Rush and Hannity.
While in theory we should be able to examine the evidence ourselves and reach our own conclusions, in practice nobody has time for that. We have to trust our sources and do our best to choose sources that can be trusted before drinking too deeply of whatever brand of kool-aid they offer.
Which means the shadowy forces paying close attention can artfully manipulate not only what is revealed, but to whom. Consider the recent flap over whether Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, committed treason by calling his counterpart in the Chinese military to supposedly promise him advance warning if President Trump ordered an attack.
On the face of things, this is an open-and-shut case: if Gen. Milley did in fact promise to warn our enemy of an impending attack by our military, that is the very definition of treason, isn't it?
On the other hand, when you get into the higher stratosphere of international geopolitics, things get murky. It's not totally inconceivable that the Chinese, being annoyed by Mr. Trump's other attacks on them over covid, trade, and all manner of things, seemed to be extending that to military fears. Whatever fears they would normally seek out in order to request bigger budgets from their masters (as do ours) would be amplified by Mr. Trump's preferred bull-in-a-China-shop persona combined with the constant Trump Derangement Syndrome drumbeat from our media.
It's not too hard to imagine a situation in which civilian
authorities - the Defense Secretary, say, or the National Security
Adviser - tell our top general to call the Chinese and assure them
that, no, we aren't going to just nuke them out of the blue, and urge
the
General to give 'em a tingle on the telly saying something like, "Come
on, General Wu, you know we don't do sneak
attacks like that, we'll warn you first."
For ourselves, we have no idea what actually happened. The problem with Gen. Milley is that he's become notorious as one of the "woke generals" who is more concerned with getting mentally ill and sexually dysfunctional people into the military and derring-doing white males out of it than killing our enemies. Conservatives want him gone, and getting him executed on a treason charge would be welcome icing on the cake.
Gen. Milley's defenders don't need to persuade CNN that he's a good guy. CNN viewers already believe that, precisely because of the intensity with which the right hates him. No, they need to convince conservatives to turn down the heat.
And, what do they do? They "leak" anonymous information to Fox
News'
Jennifer Griffin claiming that, indeed, the call followed proper procedure and wasn't a
"lone wolf" creating his own foreign policy contrary to the President's.
Now, one can parse this leaked claim, but what's most notable is that it was made to Fox News. Obviously, whoever's behind it could easily have gotten CNN to trumpet it, but what would that have accomplished? From the perspective of the right, it would simply more lies to be distrusted and disregarded. If anything, it might be considered proof that Gen. Milley is in fact guilty. If he were truly innocent, a fake news source so evil and anti-American as CNN wouldn't bother defending him so hard!
No - by getting Fox News to present this report, Gen. Milley's side is expecting conservatives to at least give it a fair hearing and a moment's consideration. That's smart, and crafty. It also says something about how the Deep State views conservatives - as fair-minded people who will listen to a person's defense with an open mind, at least if it's coming from someone they haven't already written off as a pathological liar.
Assume the leak is genuine. Even if the phone call went as the leaker described - that is, a group of high level officials from the Departments of Defense and State were listening in - promising to warn the CCP if our duly-elected Commander in Chief ordered an attack is high treason regardless of who initiated, authorized, or participated in the call. Not only should Gen. Milley be cashiered and jailed, so should everyone else involved.
It was either Gen Milley's idea or he was ordered to do it. If it was
his idea, Leavenworth should be his next port of call. If he was
ordered to do it, if his oath of service or his professional honor
meant anything, he should have resigned on the spot.
The Afghanistan "withdrawal" shows that neither honor nor duty mean anything to him. Either our Commander-in-Thief said "get us out of Afghanistan soonest" and left the details to him, or China Joe micromanaged it. In the former case, if he commanded the rout, he should be cashiered for incompetence, having lost yet another war. If the Commander-in-Thief ordered it to be done in such a ridiculous manner, he should have resigned. He didn't, so he's unfit for office either way.
But, as President Nixon famously pointed out, "When the President does it, that means it is not illegal." If a deranged Mr. Trump had pushed the nuclear button, it might have been a moral abomination, but it wouldn't have been illegal, nor would it have been illegal for Gen. Milley to obey. If he found the order repugnant, it wouldn't have been illegal for him to resign on the spot instead of carrying out what he was convinced was an illegal order. Exactly the same goes for abandoning Bagram.
If he had resigned, Gen. Milley would have lost power and possibly be in disgrace, but mostly fair-minded conservatives wouldn't call for his imprisonment or his head. He and his supporters know this, so by pointing out the subtle details, they believe - with good reason - that they may enable him to skate.
If conservatives can't agree on whether he should be fired, jailed, or executed, likely none of the above will occur, which is what he and the lefties undermining our military want. If nothing else, leaking in this manner sows confusion.
Indeed, it accomplished this even among the solons of
Scragged! A fierce internal debate has raged here all week over
whether promising the Chinese to warn them of an impending attack is
automatic treason ipso facto,
or whether there are circumstances in which it might be legal, valid,
even good statecraft - the President ordered it, say, or it was a way
of calming or conning them to prevent a war we didn't want.
One way of looking at it is that the leak simply expands the list of
people who
deserve to be tried for treason, but we don't know how far that idea
will go, given that The Editors themselves don't even agree on that!
Why does this evidence that woketivists believe that conservatives will listen and attempt to fair-mindedly think things through, matter?
Because, our opponents understand correctly that conservatives are
willing to listen to someone they
trust say something they do not want
to hear. Conservatives would like
to see Gen. Milley in front of a firing squad - but it is possible for
their supposed allies to convince them that that wouldn't fair, and
they'll give them a chance to try persuading them accordingly.
In contrast, consider what happened when CNN's Kasie Hunt took the opportunity of California's recall election - which Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom won handily - to nevertheless try to warn Democrats not to get too cocky:
"CA GOV BIG PICTURE: One of the top Democrats in the country got caught living like an elite while everyone else suffered. Elites vs. the rest is the driving force in our politics right now and Democrats have a tough needle to thread. Democrats need to prove they can govern for EVERYBODY," Hunt wrote as part of a lengthy Twitter thread.
"Obviously California is a Special Place -- but the fact that a Democratic national star in waiting *faced* a recall and then had to fight hard for it [and great expense using vast sums raised from the wokerati - ed] midway through the campaign does say a lot about the potential challenges Democrats face across the map," Hunt continued. "Especially if President Biden can't demonstrate he's capable of getting the resurgent pandemic under control, has another competence crisis a la Afghanistan, can't get his budget plan through Congress, etc."
Hunt's comments were quickly ratioed as prominent lefties appeared irked that CNN's chief national affairs analyst didn't toe the company line.
Hunt's former MSNBC colleague Malcolm Nance didn't appreciate her analysis.
"Oh this is just plain old stupid," Nance wrote.
Now, think about this for a moment. Hunt works for CNN and is a fully-credentialed doctrinaire leftist with an impeccable track record. Like all save the tiniest handful of mainstream reporters, she sings exactly the same song as the rest of them, which is, whatever is the farthest left imaginable on any given day.
And, in no way is she attempting to help Republicans. To the the contrary: she is attempting to point out a hazard to Democrats in good time for them to do something about it, thus (she hopes) increasing their chances of further success.
Yet not one single big-league media person - never mind any actual politicians - cares to hear timely words from a friend:
USA Today editor Doug Farrar responded that Hunt "gets reporting and opinion confused to a truly gobsmacking degree."
Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali called it "terrible analysis," while conservative writer Carmine Sabia noted "Kasie Hunt nailed it and liberals are pissed."
Far-left, former MSNBC star Keith Olbermann declared it is "genuinely hard to believe you have spent any days prior to this one covering politics."
This backs up what far-left but generally honest reporter Glenn Greenwald recently wrote concerning the spectacular media malpractice, lies, and overt censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story:
There are no editorial standards as long as you feed liberals what they want.
What he doesn't say in so many words, but clearly proves through his analysis, is that the opposite is equally true - it doesn't matter how true something is if it's what liberals don't want. Regardless of factuality, it'll never meet their "standards" for publication, dissemination, or, really, access to the public square at all.
The Intercept - which I co-founded seven years earlier to be adversarial, not subservient, to evidence-free assertions from the intelligence community, and which was designed to be an antidote to rather than a clone of The New York Times - told me that I could not publish the article I had written about the Biden archive because it did not meet their lofty and rigorous editorial standards: the same lofty and rigorous editorial standards that led to uncritical endorsement of the CIA's lies just days earlier. It was that episode, as Matt Taibbi recounted at the time, that prompted my resignation from the outlet I created in protest of this censorship, in order to report instead only on free speech platforms
So we see a major philosophical difference between the left and the right that is clearly understood by the most intelligent of our enemies: The right is willing to listen to bad news or disagreeable news from people they trust. The left simply is not - any bearers of bad news, no matter how true and no matter how previously trustworthy and friendly, will be instantly dispatched with fury.
Any student of military tactics going back to Sun Tzu can see this monstrous, monumental, glaring, crippling weakness: if the other side cannot and will not listen to anything they don't want to hear, they cannot possibly make effective or wise decisions.
So... how are we going to use this inspiring insight? There's got to be a way even the Stupid Party can use it find some traction.