Propaganda, Why Do We Believe the Falsehoods?

By

       M. Richard Maxson

      Have you ever thought about how much of your thoughts are truly and authentically your own and where did these ideas come from? Given the fact that only a handful of corporations control everything we read, see, and watch, it’s easy to see how public opinion and desire gets shaped even when what we take in is not true. The fact of the matter is that we are subject to propaganda, false advertising, opinionated news, and other methods of manipulating our thoughts and perceptions every day.

     Why do we accept and give credence to “false information or so-called fake news?” It's because our brains are wired to believe information automatically—even if it’s false. “It’s a useful skill for us to accept what people tell us, because often what people tell us is true,” says David Rapp, PhD, a psychology and education professor at Northwestern University.

      "When we hear new information, those fresh facts don’t override what we already knew before. Instead, both the new and old information live together in our minds. A few factors determine which one we’ll draw on when the situation comes up. Oftentimes, we’ll quote the information you heard most recently—even if it’s wrong. Because they’re fresher in our minds, short-term memories are easier for our brains to access than facts we heard longer ago.”

     "We are also inclined to buy into the facts that seem more plausible. Often, this means they fit better with what we want to believe, which could explain why people quote such different facts in political debates. “Both candidates said something that was objectively true or not, but people would ignore that information and go with their hopes, wishes, biases, preferences, or gut responses because it aligns with what they hope to be true,” says Dr. Rapp.

      Why do you think everyone seems to own the same things? How much of what you like to wear or eat is actually because you like it, and how much because you’re being told to like it? Everyone wants the newest iPhone or the latest pair of Nikes. We live in a consumerist world, a fact that has become so blatantly obvious that Americans are starting to look like clones of one another. Those who control the media controls what people purchase, talk about and think about.

      For a long time, the elite have used these tools to

influence our thoughts and actions, a tactic often referred to as frequency control. The use of repetition in the media is the tool that solidifies the false narrative. To quote Lenin, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” That works the majority of the time.....unless they get caught.

      That brings us to December 8^th 2017 which was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. It was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, and countless pundits, commentators, and operatives. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

      It’s hard to say exactly how many people were swamped with this “false news” or as some call it “outright propaganda” by the CNN story. But thanks to Democratic-loyal journalists and operatives who decree every anti-Trump claim to be true without seeing any evidence, it’s certainly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands of people, almost certainly millions, were exposed to these false claims and many believed them and still do!!!

       How often do we step aside and question what we’re actually hearing? How often do we it for ourselves and use our own critical thinking skills instead of blindly believing what we’re told. The elite control so many aspects of our lives that it can sometimes be difficult to even think of our lives as being our own anymore. So, if you find yourself surrounded by billboards or listening to propaganda on the news, ask yourself: How is this affecting my decisions and my life? We must be vigilant. By raising our consciousness and educating ourselves, we can shield ourselves from this type of manipulation.

Truth Never Sleeps

by

       M. Richard Maxson

 

      For our year end publication we have compiled some unedited, truthful, thought provoking comments from people of various backgrounds, that have been marginalized in the western media. If any of these find you confused than thiese are a little food for thought as we approach the new year.

ON TODAY'S AMERICA

  "The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” -Thomas Sowell

"In a profound miscarriage of justice, federal law permits FBI agents to lie to us but makes it a crime for us to lie to them.”

- Judge Andrew Napolitano

"The blacklist against conservatives in Hollywood is very real.” 

 - James Woods

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”

- Gore Vidal

"In the America I grew up in, cities didn't shield people who violated the law," 

- Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Thomas Homan

ON MEDIA

"President Trump has been good for business."

-Tony Maddox, head of CNN International

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.” 

- Edward R. Murrow

"Western media has allowed itself to become a conduit for propaganda for one side..."

 - Patrick Cockburn

"We live in a nation where we see exponentially more racist hoaxes than actual racism.” 

- Brian Hendrix

"Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press,” 

- Stephen Kinzer

"I just fear that the public is continuing to be fed propaganda that unassuming Americans don’t realize they’re being fed.” 

 - Amber Lyon three time Emmy award winning journalist.

FROM OUTSIDE THE U.S.

"We did an amazing job in the first decade of Putin’s rule of creating the illusion that Putin controls everything in Russia, now it’s just funny how much Americans attribute to him.”

- Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who helped Putin win his first presidential campaign, in 2000.

"You're kidding, right?”  

- When Russia Today's top editor read the newly released report from the director of US national intelligence on Russia's hack of the U.S. election.

“What kind of idiots does one have to take Americans for to think that they can believe that stupid and incompetent [and] absurd (report)"

- Natalia Veselnitskaya - The Russian attorney who met with Donald Trump Jr. in a highly scrutinized meeting last summer

"Rogue state America needs to stop pursuing its ruthless agenda, defiling rule of law principles, waging war on humanity at home and abroad, operating extra-judicially worldwide..” 

 - Stephen Lendman

"I'm all for the Russians not interfering in Ukraine, if indeed they actually are, when the US stops interfering int he Ukraine, Scotland, England, France, Germany, Cyprus, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto-Rico, the Marshal Islands, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and on and on and on and on. While the US exists none of the rest of us will ever be free.” 

- Jacqueline Brunder 

 

"America objectively poses a greater threat to peace than North Korea,” adding that “the entire world is scared and left guessing if it strikes or not.”

  - Konstantin Kosachev

       As you can see from the comments from outside the U.S. - the world view of America is quite different than what we are told here in this country. That is why I urge every citizen to read news from outside the western elite's sphere of media control. In doing this and using your critical thinking, not believing everything you read, your eyes should be opened to a new and different view of the world and ourselves. One that is not controlled by state induced propaganda.

A Journalist Laments the State of the News Media

As told to:

         George Sontag

     Journalism is broken and we can't agree on how to fix it. The theme that you hear constantly is that 90% of the media identifies as Democrats, Progressives, or Socialists and slants all news towards a Leftist philosophy and the other 10% that are not, are ignored. Consider the contrasting views of former New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse and Emmy Award-winning former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson. Each has written a book detailing her experience as a journalist and their thoughts on where the profession is headed.

      In Greenhouse's book, "Just A Journalist: On the Press, Life and the Spaces Between," she writes: “a journalist doesn't just have the right to express opinions but the obligation to do so.” This is the definition of “fake news” I.E. “Fake news is news reported with opinions and speculation. It is when a journalist selectively chooses and ignores facts, and interprets or paraphrases those facts to reach an unwarranted conclusion that conveniently validates his own views.”

     Attkisson sees things differently. As she spells out in "The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote," she thinks the media is in a mess of its own making. The public doesn't trust the media anymore, she says, because journalists have violated their own standards. "We in the business of journalism have exempted ourselves from the normal rules that used to govern us, and so the most egregious kinds of reporting errors are becoming more common." She added that most Americans "want their news straight up," and they're not getting it that way.

      Why is it this way? Is true journalism dead? Is tabloid journalism now the norm as Dan Rather has stated or is what we have today deliberate propaganda? The reasons for the descent into so-called fake news can be attributed to our own failings because....

• We've broken our own rules. Reporters are supposed to keep their opinions to themselves. Anchors are supposed to tell you the news, not tell you what to think.

• We're surrounded by the like-minded. Many journalists are white and come from the same socioeconomic backgrounds and live in large urban areas.

• We've become too comfortable with hypocrisy. The recent wave of sexual harassment scandals involving media figures — Charlie Rose, formerly of PBS and CBS News; Mark Halperin, formerly of ABC News and NBC News; and Michael Oreskes, formerly of NPR and The New York Times, etc. — shows that journalists don't do a good enough job of policing their own backyard.

• We try to be social workers and social engineers. We've gotten sidetracked into the idealistic mission of making better people and building a better society. That's not journalism.

• We take our cues from Washington and New York. These big cities have been given free rein in shaping the national discussion, while paying too little attention to what matters in small towns and rural areas.

• We let our bias show. Most all of us are anti-Trump and pro-Democrat. We don't even bother to hide it anymore. In fact, many of us seem proud of our activism and partisanship, which has no place in journalism.

• We tell ourselves that the ends justify the means. This is especially true in our battles against "deplorables," including the one in the White House. We cannot or refuse to be objective.

• We don't differentiate clearly the difference between editorials, columns, and news articles. Television viewers confuse reporters, anchors, and commentators. We've mixed it all together.

       To get back to real journalism we need to look in the mirror and confront what we've done wrong. We have to stop being defensive, be more introspective, and admit we have a problem. If we can do this, in time, the public may begin to believe us again.

America Going Downhill - What's Going Wrong?

By

 

       Zeno Potas

      A consortium of think tanks from almost 90 countries released their Economic Freedom of the World Report. The United States is no longer among the top ten countries when it comes to size of government, rule of law and property rights, soundness of the money supply, regulation, and free trade. We now rank twelfth, down from second as recently as 2000. For the record, we now trail Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, Mauritius, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Australia, Jordan, Chile, and Finland.

      U.S. legal system and our respect for property rights

we have fallen to 36th, trailing countries like Malaysia, Namibia, and Cyprus. The report concludes that the United States “experienced a significant move away from rule of law and toward a highly regulated, politicized, and heavily policed state.”

How did we get to this point?

      The world sees us differently than we see ourselves.

In today's world Americans live in a splendor compared with the rest of the world. We have achieved the highest stage of human progress ever known to mankind yet, all we ever hear are complaints about how horrible it is to live in such a rich, powerful country that has done so much for the world. There are many who want that to change. They want to tear down the foundation of what America has accomplished for their own version of utopia.

So, how did we get to this point?

     

      We refuse to teach patriotism to our kids, instead our kids are taught in schools and in media that our country is a horrible place and that everything that happened in America’s past as evil and backward and was founded by imperfect men that no longer are relevant. So it should come at no surprise that millennials lean to the Left when they constantly have liberalism shoved down their throats by their schools, their favorite musicians, and Hollywood?

      We coddle our best and brightest college students so much that they get “triggered” by hearing things they don’t like. We expose them to professors that are Communists and radical anti-Constitutionalists then expect them to be tough, competent and capable enough to keep the Republic going forward.

     Black and Hispanic Americans are incessantly encouraged to create and nurture racial grudges by the Left. Caucasians are constantly be put down, degraded, and discriminated against via programs like Affirmative Action, but still most Caucasians won’t increasingly adopt the same racist attitudes that the Left encourages minorities to hold.

      We bring in enormous numbers of immigrants from non-Western, Socialistic and often backward countries, immerse them in a Leftist culture that strongly discourages the assimilation that their fore bearers embraced.

      We ignore lawbreaking by illegal aliens while playing political games with our justice system based on whether a Republican or Democrat is being targeted and wonder why Americans are losing respect for the rule of law.

      Congress has written laws that are too complex for its own members to read and understand. Members of Congress in fact rarely read any legislation before voting on it and each political party is controlled by a small leadership group that punishes members who defy it instead of doing what is right for the country.

      We run up an astronomical debt that we never intend to fully pay off, large parts of which are held by nations hostile to us.

      We allow speakers we disagree with on college campuses to be violently shut down but continue to claim to have our right to free speech honored.

 

       The police now can charge exorbitant fees to allow someone to publicly exercise his Second Amendment rights and social media giants can quiet anyone they want with so-called “fact-checker censorship” financed by those outside the country that are not even American citizens.

    

      We trash the police at every opportunity and give the benefit of the doubt to the criminals they arrest instead of to them.

       We abandon the pure capitalism that made our country so rich, pile regulation on top of regulation, and exorbitantly tax the most productive members of society in order to create a system of Socialistic Corporatism. 

 

      The United States has been on the wrong course for decades. It is the proverbial snowball rolling downhill continuing to gain speed while rolling over everything in it's way. The question is – What will America resemble when it hits bottom?

Conspiracy - The Outing of the Deep State

By

       George Sontag

     

     Since the election last November, there has been a sustained, coordinated attack on President Trump's legitimacy following his victory in a free and fair election. Within 24 hours of Clinton's concession speech, campaign Manager Robby Mook and John Podesta had assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up and up. The DNC had engineered the primaries to ensure a Clinton victory and her defeat was unimaginable. For a number of hours they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

      The Clinton campaign had cozy, unethical relations with members of the mainstream media and it's embedded CIA operatives. A compliant media responded to the Clinton campaign's blame Russia strategy by pushing stories alleging wrongdoing by Russia. Not since the days of McCarthyism have so many in Washington been accused of consorting with Russians who wish to undermine American democracy. This had the potential to cause far more lasting damage to America than Trump's controversial style.

      The “Deep State” was not happy with his victory. They wanted his Democrat rival Hillary Clinton to prevail. For one urgent reason, that she was willing to pursue a more confrontational foreign policy toward Russia. Trump’s oft-repeated desire to normalize US-Russia relations runs counter to their vested interests.

      It is not surprising that after the election President-elect Trump began surrounding himself with military leaders as he hinted that he would take up President Kennedy's mantel of dis-mantling and revising the agencies. Some in his campaign thought an assassination was a real possibility. Surrounding himself with the military to stymie the undercover agencies was a means of protection that has so far, worked.

      Former CIA chief George W. Bush's speechwriter and current never-Trump activist David Frum echoed the CIA message to Trump; “you mess with us, get ready for a leak storm of Biblical proportions.” Shockingly, intelligence agencies were being publicly encouraged to abuse their power to stop Trump at all costs before he had even assumed office. After placing the military around him and giving them anything they wanted there was a change a plan from physical assassination to a political one. An avalanche of leaks and so-called “fake news” began to hit the American people. 

       Many allegations containing Russia have been taken seriously based solely on the institutional credibility of the accusers. It appears that members of America's intelligence community are some of the president's most passionate opponents. Aside from the lack of concern about the accuracy of the charges, intelligent chiefs were not discriminating about what was leaked in their anti-Trump crusade.

       On June 8, 2017, former FBI Director Comey acknowledged that he had a secret relationship with at least one newspaper with whom he shared classified or proprietary government information that advanced articles critical of the president. In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee former FBI director, James Comey admitted under oath that his leaks to the New York Times were designed to force the hiring of the special prosecutor.

      Subsequent analysis showed that the former director might have been engaged in this covert media operation for far longer and in many more press placements than he has acknowledged to date. Comey admitted to having the motivation, access, and ability to conduct what would effectively be a covert influence operation designed to damage the president.

      This has been only the beginning. The unprecedented level of unauthorized media leaks aimed at damaging president Donald Trump over the past year is an issue that goes way beyond freedom of press rights. It’s proof of the existence of the “Deep State” and confirms how powerful, secretive forces within the US state want this president ousted. To date, the only crime a related to the Trump/Russia investigation is the criminal leaking of classified information by U.S. intelligence officials.