We are being manipulated. We have always been manipulated, but in the past decade or so, it’s been more obvious. How does something like the George Floyd case get world-wide attention? Yeah, the incident is terrible, but in a country of 350 million people, all sorts of things happen all the time.
Read the whole thing, but here’s the executive summary.
First – an event occurs. AP® or some other news outlet reports the facts. Now, if the facts don’t support the Narrative, they are brutally suppressed – they’re just not reported on.
The Hunter Biden laptop comes to mind. NPR blatantly said that they weren’t reporting on it. This was two weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
Second – that event is interpreted in a way that fits with the Narrative. Events which are at odds with the Narrative are suppressed. The central clearing house is generally the New York Times, which uses experts from various NGOs and “think tanks” to further refine how the event fits the Narrative.
With the Hunter Biden laptop, 51 former intelligence officials, five of whom had been in charge of the CIA, said it was likely to be a Russian operation
Third – media outlets report the interpreted event out – the bigger the event, the harder the push. The Late Night TV Funny Joke Men like Colbert and Kimmel join on. The message is slickly packaged, but the language is the same from everyone. How did the words “Russian Asset” get in everyone’s mouth at the exact same time?
It’s simple. They read the memo.
This is the easiest to spot because it doesn’t depend on knowing more about an event than is being reported. Pay attention to MSNBC, CNN, NPR and NYT, and they are all using the same phrase.
In 2007, Ezra Klein created a private Google Group for Leftist journalists from a variety of media outlets. The fellow travelers coordinated the message on the JournoList group. Journalists and commentators may also wait to see the phrase that NYT uses.
Fourth – repeat and grow the Narrative to make sure it remains an accepted fact to the targets being manipulated. Note, that the Narrative doesn’t have to be internally consistent.
Recall that health officials prioritized the BLM protests over the Covid quarantine. Citizens were confronted by the police for walking on a beach unmasked, but BLM protests were encouraged. Either the quarantine was unnecessarily harsh or the BLM protests were a huge public threat.
It is enthusiastically sexist for a man to say that he has always felt like a woman. All women don’t feel the same way or are required to behave in certain ways. We are compelled to accept that a man can feel like a woman.
The examples are endless because Progressive movement is built on contradictions.
Fifth – deplatform anyone who tries to tell any story that is counter to the Narrative.
I posted about being banned from the Teacher Forum on Reddit. That happened a month ago. Reddit is decentralized, so moderators on a forum can be as authoritarian as they’d like. Complain about being shutout of a forum, and the moderator can ban the user from the entire platform.
All social media companies were compelled by the Biden administration to protect the narrative. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he returned it to a free speech platform. The US government was censoring American citizens by pressuring social media companies. Musk made this public by directing a group of independent journalists to comb through the records. Matt Tiabbi was one of the journalists who exposed the Twitter Files.
Like I said, we have always been manipulated. Authoritarians haven’t paid a price for what they’ve done in the last decade or so. They aren’t gone, and they won’t go away. Corporate media has discredited itself and social media companies are no longer being compelled to censor.
Manipulating the population isn’t necessarily bad. At NoRo, my colleague was going on maternity leave, so her long-term sub came in to meet the department. I asked her if she knew how to manipulate students. She said, “Sure, no problem”. If she was offended by the idea, then I’d know she wasn’t a wise and honest teacher. Manipulating people to do the right thing is how we maintain a culture. The intended outcome is critical.
We have to be vigilant. Information on the internet never goes away, but it can become impossible to find. Social media has algorithms that can manipulate public perception. That’s one reason I post here, where few people read it, rather than on social media where an algorithm can make sure that nobody reads it or I and my content can be easily removed.