Saturday, January 14, 2017

The Deep State Fights Back: The Weaponization Of Rumors (aka 'Lies And Distortions')





Virgil: The Deep State Strikes Back: The Permanent Campaign Against Donald Trump



In the first installment of this series, we observed that globalism is an ideology, maybe even a theology.  And so of course, globalism generates plenty of passionate support among the planetary elite.  And yet passion must be translated into political power.  And of course, the globalists have plenty of that, too.  In this second installment, we will see how the globalists still seek to get their way, even after losing the 2016 elections.  For them, Target #1, of course, is Donald Trump.  



1.  The Weaponization of Rumors



Every Breitbart reader is familiar with the general outlines of the Russia hack story: Beginning in June 2016, someone or something known as “Guccifer 2.0” was taking credit for hacking the computers of top Democrats and, working through Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, doling out juicy information. 
The hacks were clearly damaging to the Democrats.  And because the  leaks proved to be true, they had significant repercussions. The revelations forced, for example, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, to resign last July. 
Soon, the Democrats developed their counter-strategy, which can be summed up as, It’s Donald Trump’s fault.  That is, whoever and whatever Guccifer was, he or it was doing the hacking to help Trump.  So again, Blame Trump! 
By the fall, the Democrats had a further point to make: The Russians were doing it.  So was it, in fact, the Russian spy agencies FSB, or GRU, that were behind the hacks?  Virgil doesn’t know, but he does know this: The Democrats were accusing the Russians, at least at first, without any solid evidence.   
Meanwhile, at around the same time, the Democrats decided that they themselves should play the Russia Innuendo Game. 
So beginning in July, rumors began to circulate that an investigation had uncovered bombshell revelations about Trump and the Russians.  Yet the evidence was flimsy, at best: it consisted of various statements, attributed to unnamed sources, accusing Trump of various things.
In other words, nothing was proven, and so even the Main Stream Media, hungry as it was for anti-Trump hammers, chose not to touch the allegations.  The one exception was a vague October 31 item in the left-wing Mother Jones, which reported–perhaps one should say, “reported”—that a “former Western intelligence officer,” hired first by anti-Trump Republicans, and then by Democrats, had assembled a dossier suggesting that Trump had been “compromised” by Russian intelligence.   



2. The Deep State Makes Its Moves



Ever since Trump’s triumph, the anti-Trump drumbeat has grown ever louder.   And it’s not just Democrats.  We have since learned, for example, that in December, Republican Sen. John McCain personally delivered anti-Trump allegations to the FBI.  And of course, there could have been other political players—many others—involved in the anti-Trump effort. 
In fact, it’s accurate to say that the vast bulk of DC officialdom is anti-Trump.  Here at Breitbart on December 12, I took a look at this officialdom; it’s been called the “Deep State.”  That is, the Deep State is the permanent political combine that runs Washington—or at least tries to.  As I defined it a month ago:
The term “Deep State” refers to the complex of bureaucrats, technocrats, and plutocrats that likes things just the way they are and wants to keep them like that—elections be damned.  

It’s obvious that the last thing that the Deep State wants to see is the DC swamp being drained.  To them, it’s home!

Virgil wrote again about the Deep State vs. Trump on December 19, noting that the Deep State will soon have its natural leader, Barack Obama: 

The 44th president won’t be going far.  Come January, he’ll be moving just a mile or so uptown, to the swanky Kalorama neighborhood, where, it’s a safe bet, he’ll hold court as if he were still president.  So the Deep State will still have a rallying point as it plots its next move against the Dreaded Trump.  Or should we say, it will have another rallying point, because, in fact, it already has plenty. 

Virgil might note that this story was written three weeks before Politico revealed the soon-to-be ex-president’s future plans.  Here’s the headline from January 9: “Obama retools his political operation for another run: He will use his foundation and an updated Organizing for Action group to try to salvage his legacy and rebuild the Democratic Party.” In other words, Obama will be a force to be reckoned with. 

Meanwhile, anti-Trump lawyers and other activists from across the country are planning to descend on the Capitol for the Inauguration.  And we just learned that Deep Staters stationed in Israel have warned their Israeli counterparts not to trust Trump.  



Yet the Deep State is most active inside the DC Beltway: For example, one energetic Deep State anti-Trumper is Walter Shaub, director of the Office of Government Ethics.  Yes, he’s a federal employee, but Shaub has turned his supposedly non-partisan office into a partisan machine, advancing his anti-Trump campaign including, even, on Twitter.  
Interestingly, the research group America’s Rising has observed that Shaub, a Democrat who donated to Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, has never seemed bothered by Hillary Clinton’s multiple ethical transgressions.  As the group puts it:

Shaub’s history as a Democrat and the double standard he employed as head of the OGE, should give the media pause before taking Shaub’s words seriously. 


3. The Battle of the Beltway



Then, last week, the story heated up even hotter.  And the flashpoint was that dubious dossier—the one, as we have noted, that had been floating around for months. 
Recently, the “Big Four” intel chiefs—that would be Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and National Security Agency Director Admiral Mike Rogers—decided that the document was worth taking seriously after all.  That is, the “Western” operative mentioned by Mother Jones—publicly identified recently as a Briton, Christopher Steele, a former British MI-6 spy—was suddenly given a promotion; now, he and his info were deemed to be a credible source.  So credible, in fact, that the Big Four needed to tell Trump all about it.  

So last week, the President-elect was briefed on some of the allegations by senior US intelligence officials.  And here’s what’s strange: Even though that quartet of Deep Staters is supposed to be good at keeping secrets, the news of that briefing immediately leaked.  

CNN ran hard with the Trump story.  It was “breaking news,” the channel declared, that “the nation’s top intelligence officials” had briefed both Trump (and, at other times, Obama and Joe Biden) on information that “compromised President-elect Trump.”



For his part, Trump was wise to what the Deep State was doing to him. Deriding his enemies as “sick people,” he tweeted:
Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to “leak” into the public.  One last shot at me.  Are we living in Nazi Germany?
As we have come to expect, that was some tough talk from Trump.  And yet his obvious anger aside, the President-elect was also shrewdly firming up his base, which has long believed the worst about the MSM and the Deep State.   
Indeed, in that January 11 press conference, Trump seized the opportunity to go on the offensive.  He not only dismissed the accusations, but he also labeled CNN as “fake news,” no doubt provoking loud cheers all across Trump Nation.  


Interestingly, amidst this backlash against the now-notorious bad briefing, one of the briefers, James Clapper, has chosen to distance himself from the others.  Late in the evening of January 11, he issued a statement declaring that the intelligence agencies had “not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable.”  To which Virgil says: “Nice try, Mr. Clapper, but the time to speak up about your concerns was before the briefing, or during the briefing, not after the briefing—after the bleep hit the fan.” 
Of course, Clapper’s retrospective regrets notwithstanding, the Deep State is full speed ahead, still seeking to torpedo Trump. 
For example, former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook compares the matter toWatergate.  The implication is clear enough: Just as the Deep State succeeding in driving Richard Nixon out of office back in 1974, now today, the Deep State should seek the same fate for Trump. 

Of course, Trump is not planning on going anywhere; in fact, it’s been reported that staffers are already working on his 2020 re-election campaign
So the Battle of the Beltway will continue. 





It’s got money, jobs and it voted Brexit: the town of Milton Keynes near London represents a slice of middle-class voters fed up with a political elite ignoring their concerns.

Just as in the United States, it was not just struggling blue-collar workers fed up with the flip side of globalisation who rebelled last year.
“We continually underestimate the silent majority,” said Richard Heffernan, an expert in government at The Open University, which was set up in Milton Keynes shortly after the town was established in 1967.

Three days after the inauguration of billionaire property tycoon Donald Trump as US president on January 20, the town will celebrate its 50th anniversary.

In the 1975 referendum on Britain’s entry into what was then the European Economic Community, “we voted for the common market, not a loss of sovereignty,” she said.
“We are a powerful country, we value our independence.”

But the depth of its euroscepticism did not set alarm bells ringing for the establishment, despite political parties spending years doing focus groups in Milton Keynes, seen it as a microcosm of public opinion.
“A lot of people who study politics and analyse it are part of a metropolitan elite,” Heffernan told AFP.
“The liberal elite’s inability to represent many people was held against them.”
Following the Brexit and Trump votes there are now a plethora of anti-establishment movements in Europe seeking to rise up against urban and political elites, as well as against Brussels, and “return” their countries to the struggling middle classes.

“Politicians are now like rabbits caught in the headlights. They’re aware the guy driving at them doesn’t like them — and they don’t know what to do.”








And it worked out just as well for them this time as it has for the last year or more, too. Only this time, the Deep State, in the form of the CIA, was fully involved. Bill has the best quick-and-dirty summary out there:


So, the Deep State and its allies in the NeverTrump and Leftist media went to war with President Trump a few days ago, by releasing a pack of lies masquerading as news, and then playing it up for all it was worth (to them) – intrinsically, however, it was worthless.
This attack on Trump mirrors another attack launched at the last minute on George W. Bush – in this case, records of his drunk driving conviction were leaked in order to aid Al Gore’s campaign. Bush survived that one, barely, but it was an example of the sort of tried and true methods the left and its Deep State allies have always used, generally successfully.
That ended yesterday, I expect.
Let’s go to the tape:
1. An extremely weird cabal of NeverTrumptard Senator John “Senile” McCain, Rick “Bottom Feeder” Wilson, some Brit Clinton oppo figure, and various Deep State unknowns in the intel “community” (community is another name for “gang,” in this case), conspired to create, float, and transmit a pack of lies about Donald Trump hiring prostitutes to piss in a bed the Obamas had once slept in, because Trump hated Obama so much. Also, that one of his chief lieutenants had been involved in some sort of corrupt shenanigans several years ago in Prague, which laid Trump open to Russian blackmail.
2. Once this story floated to the surface like a bouyant turdball, pushed up by a “pile of garbage” leftwing blog called Buzzfeed, a host of “legitimate” news cites like CNN, NYT, WaPo, and many others spouted thousands of words and dozens of column inches giving it heavy publicity. Some tried to cover themselves by claiming that while none of this had been actually verified, it was still worth covering because they weren’t covering it, they were covering Buzzfeed‘s coverage of it.
3. The media was looking forward in slavering anticipation to Trump’s upcoming presser, and stoked the frenzy even higher. Now, at last, they had the means to finally slay the Trump monster. They would hammer him with dozens of questions about this fake scandal, and reduce him to quivering jelly. Their lead paladin, apparently, would be CNN’s White House reporter Jim Acosta.
4. Trump crushed them.

He sure did—completely enough that the miserable worm Clapper felt obliged to release a groveling statement expressing his “profound dismay” at the attempt, and putting in a phone call to the God Emperor which I can easily and happily imagine the tenor of. The DC swamp needs draining way worse than some of us might have thought, and it’s a really, really big swamp, especially fetid and noxious. But, as Bill says:


The terror in evidence was palpable.
Now, today, the smear campaign against Trump lies in smoking ruins, destroyed by nuclear-level pushback from Trump himself.
This fiasco will rapidly fall down the media memory hole, but a part of it will be permanently imprinted on the press’ DNA: Don’t fuck with Trump. He bites back – hard.

Actually, I’d have to quibble with the idea that they learned anything at all from it. Why would they? They demonstrably haven’t learned a damned thing in nearly two years of this. And you can be assured that next week, they’ll be back with another desperate and feeble “OHHH, we REALLY got him now!” attempt at undermining him.
They’ve been coming out with this risible twaddle at the rate of about one every ten days or so, and every last one of them has blown up in their faces. Hey, anybody remember all those women supposedly “groped” and “assaulted” by Trump they were so merrily trotting out a few months back? Anybody heard anything from any of them lately? Even one of ’em?
Umm. Yeah.
Truth is, anybody who thought that getting us off the hot rails to liberal hell was going to be anything less than a full-time, all-out war was kidding themselves. They’ll be back, again and again and again. And every time they do, they’ll accomplish nothing more than solidifying Trump’s base of support, and guaranteeing their own humiliation and defeat. They will learn nothing from any of it. They seem incapable of it.
Now, you CF lifers may recollect a few years back when we had a pretty severe and ongoing dustup with Glenn Greenwald over…I don’t even remember what now. So hold onto your hats while I quote him, and admit that his take is pretty much right on the money, aside from the routine and facile slaps at Trump:


FOR MONTHS, THE CIA, with unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and sought to defeat Donald Trump. In August, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell announced his endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” The CIA and NSA director under George W. Bush, Gen. Michael Hayden, also endorsed Clinton and went to the Washington Post to warn, in the week before the election, that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin,” adding that Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”
It is not hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton over Trump. Clinton was critical of Obama for restraining the CIA’s proxy war in Syria and was eager to expand that war, while Trump denounced it. Clinton clearly wanted a harder line than Obama took against the CIA’s long-standing foes in Moscow, while Trump wanted improved relations and greater cooperation. In general, Clinton defended and intended to extend the decades long international military order on which the CIA and Pentagon’s preeminence depends, while Trump — through a still-uncertain mix of instability and extremist conviction — posed a threat to it.
Whatever one’s views are on those debates, it is the democratic framework — the presidential election, the confirmation process, congressional leaders, judicial proceedings, citizen activism and protest, civil disobedience — that should determine how they are resolved. All of those policy disputes were debated out in the open; the public heard them; and Trump won. Nobody should crave the rule of Deep State overlords.
Yet craving Deep State rule is exactly what prominent Democratic operatives and media figures are doing.

Well, hey, as long as it’s their Deep State coup, what the heck. Right, guys?
Greenwald has more of the nuts and bolts of this pitifully inept smear job, as does Sundance. But in the end, the takeaway remains this: there are two things you can take to the bank, two assumptions that are always safe and will wind up justified. One: whenever somebody shoots up a mall or airport, blows up a building, or drives a truck into a crowded city street during a major public gathering, it’s going to be a Muslim behind it, upon which “discovery” the media will drop the whole story like a hot rock, never to mention it again, and Two: whenever you hear of another supposed “troubling” “scandal” involving Trump, it’s either going to be a big pile of nothing, or an outright lie, and will be exposed as such toot fucking sweet—whereupon Trump will lambast the Lying Media as they deserve, the libtards will wring their hands about “unprecedented” attacks on “honest journalists” and the First Amendment, and the rest of the country will stand up and cheer. I’ll let Rush lay that bit out for ya:

So the media has become accustomed to this technique of taking out political opponents with bilge like this working. But again they don’t know what they’re up against with Donald Trump. They think that the techniques that they’ve used for decades to destroy political opponents are gonna work on Trump, and they just don’t understand why they don’t work. They don’t understand the connection Trump’s voters have with him. They don’t understand connection of Trump’s supporters. They don’t believe that Trump actually won the election.
They’re living in a really deluded place, and they’re totally unhinged. So it was finally exposed to be fraudulent, and all these media people began to back off. Oh, by the way, Neil Cavuto had a brilliant point yesterday. Neil Cavuto of the Fox Business Network and Fox News Channel. Cavuto said… I’m paraphrasing, but he essentially… I’m paraphrasing. He essentially said to the media, “Hey, media, what’s it feel like to be attacked by a president? Hey, media, you never defended us at Fox when Obama came after us or Rush Limbaugh for the last eight years,” and he’s gotta great point.
Whenever Obama would trash Fox or trash me and talk radio, the Drive-Bys didn’t act like there was anything wrong. In fact, many of them piled on Fox News along with Obama. So now here’s Trump, and he’s not just trashing the media for the sake of it like Obama trashed Fox News; he’s trashing the media because they’re a bunch of frauds! He’s trashing the media because they are engaging in fake news and he’s calling ’em out on it! So Cavuto’s point was, “Hey, media, you never came to our defense when Obama was attacking us. So go sit in it. Find out what it’s like.
“You’re acting like this has never happened before. You’re acting like this is beyond the pale. Your buddy Obama spent eight years doing this kind of stuff to Fox News and to talk radio and to Rush Limbaugh, and you haven’t said a word in support. Now when Trump comes after you, you’re acting like all kinds of societal norms and traditions are being blown up.” Cavuto is exactly right about this. It’s such a good point that I wish I had thought of it.


They only have the one playbook. It’s out of date and no longer effective, and they don’t even realize it; they’re still trying to run a single-wing against a prevent defense, and now they’re being made to look very Pop Warner-league indeed. And that’s a good thing.
Three famous quotes from Wellington apply quite nicely here: “Publish and be damned.” “Wise people learn when they can; fools learn when they must.” And: “They came at us in the same old way, and we defeated them in the same old way.” That last one’s from Waterloo; there’s a lesson in there for the Napoleon media, but they will assuredly learn it only when they must…if ever.







2 comments:

WVBORN56 said...

Glad we are getting out of here soon. The evil deep state treachery and out right treason is something I never we would witnesses to this extent! Come Lord Jesus!

ally said...

QUICKLY!!!!!