Ironic Timing

I’ve been writing this blog since March 2011. I’ve written over 1400 posts. I never got censored—until last month, when my December 7 post was taken down by Blogger. It was about the House report on the response to that illness I guess I’m not supposed to talk about, even though I was referring to the findings of a government committee (and even though I had literally written freely on the issue dozens of times since 2020).

For many years I have followed up my posts here with a post on Facebook linking to it, to make it more convenient for friends to find what I’ve written.

I had a sense I’d been shadow banned a couple of times on Facebook, but no way to prove it. I don’t spend a lot of time (any) trying to get engagement, so if there’s less, I could hardly tell. Sometimes those little notices showed up, warning people about possible misinformation, with a link to some “trusted” source—which, as a result of that House report, we now know was actually a link to propagandistic misinformation. But Facebook had never given me a warning or taken down a post. Until last Friday.

I wrote about the enumerated powers in the US Constitution. I’ve written about that a number of times before. Talking about what’s in the Constitution seems pretty safe from violating “community standards.” I posted late in the evening on January 2. Facebook immediately removed it and told me I had violated community standards. They didn’t say what specifically I had done. I clicked, to see if they would tell me more, before I had taken a screenshot, which I regret. I was just so surprised. So I may have missed a clue.

I protested that I had not violated community standards and asked for a review. They said they would get back to me, and that usually takes 4 days, but could be longer. Today makes a full week. There is no word. There is no way, that I have discovered, to find out anything about the post. My account has no strikes against it and is in good standing, it appears.

I have read through the community standards. I cannot find anything that I may have violated, even inadvertently.

One thing I have noticed, just the past month or two, is a change in other accounts on Facebook that link to outside content. I first noticed it with Dinesh D’Souza, and later with various people from the Daily Wire—Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles. I’m sure there are others doing it. (Maybe everyone else got a memo that I didn’t.) They make a statement, just words on a colored background. And you have to click on comments to get a link to the linked material. I find this really annoying. You can’t even get the title of what is being linked to until you go to the comments, so you don’t know if it’s worth it. Sometimes you don’t get a full idea of what the content is about until you click through to the actual linked article, which is only worth it if you really trust the source and seek more of their content.

I see no advantage to the content provider—unless it is to avoid some obscure (unfindable) Facebook rule about linking to somewhere beyond Facebook. One would think that, when you’re on another platform, and it asks you if you want to share, and Facebook comes up as one of the buttons to make that easy, that it would mean Facebook is good with sharing such content, assuming it doesn’t violate their other community standards, many of which are reasonable to avoid theft, fraud, libel, child exploitation, and other actual crimes.

Ironically, Mark Zuckerberg announced just this week, Tuesday, January 7, that they are removing their fact checkers, and letting go of the whole censorship gig they’ve been providing for the current regime. He doesn’t sound like he’s crazy, or lying. I guess we'll see.

Mark Zuckerberg makes announcement about
changes to Facebook. Screenshot from here.

Here are the things he listed that Facebook/Meta is going to do:

1.      Remove fact checkers; replace them with Community Notes, similar to X. [I found a description of Community Notes here.]     

2.      Simplify content policies; get rid of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.

3.      Change enforcement policies; no longer filter for any and all policy violations; focus on illegal and high severity violations; no action on lower severity violations until someone reports an issue.

4.      Bring back civic content; this means political content can be recommended again, because people are ready to see this content again. [I’d like to say more about this overt censorship, which he seems comfortable with doing, based on their subjective sense of what people want to see, but maybe I’ll save that for another time.]

5.      Move US-based content review to Texas, rather than in California, where bias has been an issue. [The next day there was a surprise announcement to PolitiFact that Facebook would no longer be using them; that means huge layoffs for them. I’m not particularly sad for them.]

6.      Work with President Trump to push back on pressure to censor in other countries. While the US is the most pro-free-speech nation, with the Biden administration pushing for more censorship, other countries have been emboldened. There’s hope for support from Trump.

I guess things will be phased in. As of today, the community standards still say you can’t say anything against any kind of jab, because they want to uphold their certain beliefs (which, as I said, Facebook never actually censored me for; only Blogger, a Google platform, did that). I don't know about other topics.

I did a little research, to see if censoring linked content was a thing. Linked content is a problem. Facebook, and for that matter pretty much any platform, wants users to stay on the platform. But their practice has been to demote the content, with an algorithm, so it gets seen by fewer people. Not surprising, actually. Facebook has taken that further by sometimes adding a warning, such as, “Are you sure you want to follow this link?” as though wherever you’re going might be a threat to your computer safety. (It tends to work; many people see that and think, “I don’t want to risk it.”) But I didn’t find anything to say that they actually removed your content for having an external link in it.

Putting the link in the comments is indeed a way to “hide” the external link. And I think that will have to be what I do in the future. However, the drawback is that phone users have a harder time accessing the comments. So it’s a tradeoff: use a link and get fewer views (or in my case, get the post removed entirely), or put the link in comments and make it harder for people to view it.

If I’m wrong and my “violation” wasn’t the external link, but was content related, I don’t know how to solve that. Do they really find a discussion of the enumerated powers of the Constitution a risk to public safety? It may be that fact checkers actually do believe that.

In case you read here regularly, in late October I wrote a piece about the death throes of the "propaganda beast." I got censored after that, on two platforms that had not censored me before. So was I wrong? I don't think so. I think this is just part of the thrashing out of a cornered, dying beast.

There’s a fact checker (not used by Facebook) that I actually refer to frequently, called JustFacts. They back up what they say with data and, well, just facts. (As a result, they do appear to lean conservative.) Yesterday’s (January 9th) email included a response to the Mark Zuckerberg news, with links to 21 fact checker fails. I’ll include that portion of their email below, along with the links:

Facebook’s “Fact Checkers”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook is “going to get rid of fact checkers” because they have “been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created.”

 

For years, Just Facts has been documenting that Facebook-approved fact checkers like PolitiFact have incessantly spread falsehoods that support left-wing agendas. Here’s 21 glaring examples and the actual facts that refute them:

 

1) Covid-19 death rate

2) Market value of Mar-a-Lago

3) Biden’s role in the murder of Laken Riley

4) Income taxes paid by illegal immigrants

5) Late-term abortions

6) mRNA Covid vaccines

7) Violent crime trends

8) Effects of the federal “assault weapons” ban

9) Democrat Party’s role in the Ku Klux Klan

10) Impact of Obamacare on Medicare

11) Tax rates paid by the wealthy

12) Child hunger rates

13) Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq

14) Arming teachers

15) Pace of illegal immigration

16) Crime rates of illegal immigrants

17) Twitter misinformation

18) Antifa’s role in the Capitol Hill riot

19) Illegal voting by non-citizens

20) Live birth abortions

21) The “bipartisan” border security bill

 

 

 

The Propaganda Beast Is in a Doom Loop

The propaganda beast is weakening in its ability to create the illusion of power for the sea beast.

If that sounds cryptic to you, we’re looking at the beasts of Revelation 13 as either symbols or pretty accurate metaphors for what we’re seeing. In short, the beast coming up out of the sea, or sea beast, is what we also call the worldwide cabal, the whore of all the earth, the great and abominable church, the deep state, secret combinations, or simply evil corruption for power. This beast is controlled by the dragon—Satan—which means it is powered by evil and has evil intent.

The second beast, on the land, is a false-speaking beast, and it is also controlled by the dragon. It supports or creates the illusion of power for the sea beast. I call this land beast the propaganda beast. It is made up of news media, entertainment media, academia, government and business entities—all of which create a narrative, or image, that supports the power elite.

from the Dürer Apocalypse woodcut "The Beast with the Lamb's Horns
and the Beast with Seven Heads," this segment found here

With that brief primer behind us, what I think we’re seeing is both the weakening of the sea beast (which I wrote about here) and the weakening of the propaganda beast to make us think the power elite still have power.

I’m observing what I’m seeing now, not predicting what will happen next week or next month or year. I think we’re seeing something like an illusion show, a magician, whose props fail and suddenly the trick is revealed to the audience. The people no longer believe what the magician was tricking them into believing. In a magic show, being fooled—and figuring it out—are both part of the fun. But in real life, when we didn’t consent to the deception, we’re just being lied to. And it’s a good thing to recognize the deception and awaken to the truth.

So, what am I seeing? A lot of what other people are seeing as well. Mainly this is about the news media, which has enjoyed some decades of control over what we the people believe. Until the internet. Now there are other voices we can go to.

 

The Broken Shards Piece

There was an Axios piece this week, trying to describe what’s happening, albeit from their view as one of the narrative controllers. In “Behind the Curtain: The big media era is over” by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, October 28, 2024, the authors describe a broken shards scenario: our news sources used to be solid glass panes that we all saw fairly equally. Now there are a multitude of diverse “shards,” and we all get a different combination of sources. They explain:

The big picture: When we speak around the country, we often tell audiences that when you're sitting at a table of people of different ages and politics, several of them probably get their information on platforms you've never visited ... from popular influencers you've never heard of ... on topics that might seem exotic or totally new.

They’re looking mainly at how this affects the presidential campaigns:

Former President Trump reached way more potential male voters with his three-hour Rogan conversation (33 million views over the weekend) than he could have with a dozen or more appearances on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC combined. All three cable news networks skew very old in viewership, with median ages ranging from 67 to 70.

They give a list of podcasts, etc., that Kamala Harris has gone to, and that I literally have not heard of:

·        A Nueva Network radio interview with Stephanie “Chiquibaby” Himonidis aimed at a young Latino demographic.

·        “All the Smoke” NBA-focused podcast aimed at young Black men.

·        “The Shade Room” culture podcast aimed at young Black women.

·        “Club Shay-Shay” podcast with NFL player Shannon Sharpe, aimed, I assume at Black men.

There was also the "Who's Your Daddy" podcast, an explicit sex discussion, which Kamala deemed important while Hurricane victims in North Carolina were without power or without homes. I hadn't heard of this before she did it, but I had heard of it before reading the Axios piece.

There’s a list of some more obscure places Trump has been as well, also many of which I had previously been unaware of, but as well as many I’ve long known. A difference the article might have noted but didn’t was that Trump’s schedule has been packed, and has included many larger rallies, and he talks at each of these as a real, authentic person. Meanwhile, most of Kamala’s scheduled days (which are publicly accessible) show her taking days to prepare for each one. She keeps them brief. She says essentially the same things over and over, often claiming things that are provable lies. Her campaign is counting on these people seeing only news that is curated with the power elite’s narrative.

Her brief attempt at “crossing the aisle” with Fox News’ Bret Baier did not go well for her. She failed to answer direct questions that should have been the “of course” anticipated questions. She circled around. And this was after arriving late for the interview and then cutting it short—which we now also know about her and her handlers. Trump has been willing to talk with people of opposing views, as long as it’s a real conversation and not an attack pile-on. So he has actually reached more people who didn’t previously know him except the way the propaganda beast had labeled him. 

After the Harris campaign called all the attendees at the MSG 
event racist Nazis, someone showed yet another Babylon Bee
satire that becomes actual news, this one from July. 

Axios is also wrong to call Joe Rogan right-wing. He had never been anything of the sort—until he told his actual personal experience with Ivermectin after having COVID, and got cancelled. Which led to the rise of Rumble (a non-censoring platform), where Rogan’s viewership far eclipses the network news sources put together. People who watched Rogan’s interview with Trump—for three hours—saw that Trump was personable, interesting, well-versed on many topics, interested in the person he was talking with, and by extension interested in a whole lot of regular Americans. And he is clearly not Hitler.

My favorite line—this was in reference to environmental damage caused by offshore windmills—was, “I’d like to be a whale psychiatrist.” The Rogan interview with VP candidate J. D. Vance is out, and I’m interested in watching it later today. Vance, by the way, has been a force in taking on the media. He has the facts at the ready, remains unruffled, and does it with aplomb. This belies the “he’s weird, mean, and angry” depiction of him proffered by the propaganda beast.

The meme was shared on the Viva & Barnes Sunday livestream October 27, 2024

Back to that article. Here’s how you know Axios isn’t about truth. They say:

Threat level: When attention is scattered across scores of shards, it’s easier to propagate conspiracy theories and manipulate “news.” It’s way harder to catch Russian misinformation campaigns when they are unleashed inside a dozen different information bubbles.

What they mean is, it’s much easier to manipulate “news” when you control the whole pane of glass than when you can’t control all those shards. And, by the way, while Russia is willing to put out disinformation on a whim, their efforts have not been a force in our elections. But there are supposed Russian misinformation campaigns that have:

·        Trump colluded with Russia—an invention of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, for which they were fined but were otherwise not held accountable. Based on this invention, they spied on Trump before and after he was in the White House. The media elites went along with it, and Axios apparently still wants to push it as true.

·        Hunter Biden laptop—claimed by 51 former intelligence officers to have had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, even though at the time the FBI had it in their possession and had already authenticated it. Information was censored from social media platforms. Accurate information about this could have meant a 17% swing in the election away from Biden.

Axios predicts that the outcome of the election could slow the movement toward broken up media if Harris wins: “she and her staff are much closer—and responsive—to traditional media.” But if Trump wins, the shift toward more “shards” will accelerate.

 

The Doom Loop of Distrust in Media

There was an opinion piece in Bloomberg a week ago talking about the distrust of institutions in general, and the media in particular. Alas, if only we could go back to the days of Walter Cronkite, when he would said, “And that’s the way it is,” and people believed it really was—even when it was not.

This same week Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, put out a piece explaining (?) why his WaPo decided not to endorse in elections, starting suddenly now—as part of an effort to bring back trust in media, to make it appear less biased. Here’s something accurate from his piece:

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

What is not working is feeding us propaganda and trying to get us to believe it as fact. Bezos uses the analogy of an election:

Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement.

You know how not to get people to believe your machines count accurately? Let them be connected to the internet when that is illegal. Have counting stop because of “leaking pipes in the building” and then have a sudden inexplicable jump in numbers for one particular side. Refuse to allow observation during the counting. Change rules at the last minute, always in favor of less security. Refuse to allow forensic examination of ballots. Refuse to do signature verification. OK, we could go on and on with that; they tried them all in 2020, and mostly got away with them. What you need to be believed is to follow strict rules, be totally transparent, and have people from opposing sides observe at every step. What doesn’t work is telling people they’re election deniers when they call out your errors and your obfuscation.

That goes as well for the media. If they had a long record of being accurate, they would be believed. They’re failing on the first requirement, and that’s why they’re failing on the second. It seems obvious.

In reaction to both these three pieces in Axios, Bloomberg, and WaPo, the Badlands News Brief (a somewhat Q-related group of writers—this one by Burning Bright—reacting to things in the news) offered this (highlights are mine):

Our Take: The picture would be worth a thousand words, but Amazon owner and self-described elite Jeff Bezos did us one better, and actually WROTE 1,000 words to defend his decision to NOT interfere in an election.

This comes on the heels of Op eds that have been flooding the Info War over the course of the last week, wherein the screeching communist harpies that have decreed themselves official narrative-setters for the entire country realize with mounting dread and panic that they've lost complete control of the story, which, as I have been saying for over two years, IS the war.

Bloomberg actually referred to the media death spiral as a "doom loop," while Axios put it so directly in their own panic piece, it could have been written by an Anon: "the mainstream media's dominance in narrative and reality-shaping in presidential elections shattered in 2024."

Now, we have Bezos being swarmed by the very communist worker bees he once lorded over.

In Game Theory, chaos begets control.

Enjoy it. — Burning Bright

The propaganda beast has "lost complete control of the story." Indeed. 

I came upon this podcast yesterday (literally hadn’t heard of it before, although she’s conservative and has been around for a while). I think it was linked in an email. Tracy Beanz, for UncoverDC,  is responding to the Jeff Bezos op-ed. When Bezos says, “Something we are doing is clearly not working,” Beanz responds,

Yes. Let me tell you what it is. You’re lying to people, continuously, over and over again, every single day. And people, given that they have ways to get information now that are not you, are figuring it out. They don’t want to be propagandized anymore. They don’t want to be spoken down to anymore. They want the truth of what’s going on in the world around them so that they can make informed decisions.

What you’re doing wrong is that you became a fifth branch of the intelligence community for the United States government, and it’s the intelligence community that has been weaponized against the people of America in favor of, I guess you could call it, a globalized campaign to destabilize this country from within. And you, unbeknownst to you or not—and I cannot imagine how you couldn’t realize it, unless you were that retarded (excuse my French)—have just gone along with it hook, line, and sinker. And for a long while it worked. It stopped working at around 2015. And the snowball has just continued to roll down that hill since then.

She’s right about the lying. Is her assessment of the media being an intelligence arm of the US government? I’m not sure that’s how I would word it—intelligence arm. It is definitely a propaganda tool of the US government—or more precisely, of the global elite cabal that currently runs the US government: the sea beast.

It caught my attention that she says this all stopped working around 2015. She may be right. I had been thinking 2020, when the COVID shenanigans, on top of the election shenanigans, were just too obvious to ignore. But maybe it was even earlier, once we all got on the Internet. 

Anyway, there’s more evidence of the doom loop underway.

 

The Times and Tucker

A week before the election, Tucker Carlson (among others) received an inquiry from the New York Times, essentially asking him to be shamed into admitting he is at fault for not agreeing with the propaganda beast’s narrative. I got this from Tom Woods’s daily email, which even improves upon Tucker’s response, so I’ve included his before and after comments.

Tom Woods: Evidently a number of right-of-center influencers, including Tucker Carlson, just received a very similar ominous note from the New York Times.

I want to share that note, along with Carlson’s response, because it is an important lesson in how an institution like the Times is to be handled.

 

Tom Woods: So a week before the election, the Times is colluding with the crazies at Media Matters to try to shut down dissident voices.

Carlson's response was exactly right. Do not engage with these people as if they are acting in good faith, or in the hope that if you're reasonable and forthcoming, they have to treat you fairly. They don't have to do anything.

More people are going to see Carlson's response than will see the New York Times hit piece. (This is why they hate the Internet.)

Indeed, they hate the internet; it is so hard to control all of us with our varied voices and opinions. And they prefer control.

Almost daily, Dan Bongino says (I’m paraphrasing), “No matter how much you hate the media, you don’t hate them enough.” Hate is a strong word—for individual people. It is not too strong a word to use for the propaganda beast—an entity made up of many weak humans unwilling to stand for truth, but willing to lie for power, prestige, influence, or something else the dragon knows is their weakness.

 

Other Signals

As the Axios piece points out, there’s an election the media is focused on. What an inconvenient time for the media not to have the force it used to have. Granted, there’s not much for them to work with. The whole “Trump is Hitler” thing just isn’t working—because, as you might surmise by now, the media is lying about that along with everything else they lie about.

In fact, they’re so predictable at their lies, that the Babylon Bee made it a meme back in July (see above).  

This doesn’t stop them from doubling down on what’s not working.

And for some reason the media elites can’t seem to grasp, people don’t like being called racists and Nazis (all 100,000 New Yorkers who were inside and outside of the Madison Square Garden Trump rally), deplorables (that was Hillary, shortly before she lost), and garbage (Biden this week about all Trump supporters).

from the Madison Square Garden rally, top, pro-Israel and
pro-American, whom they call Nazis, compared to a Harris rally, bottom,
with Palestinian flag, but no pro-American anything; image from a Facebook story;
original source appears to be @naz_hashem and drsheilanazarian

One of the tools bringing down this propaganda beast has been mocking and meme-smithing. The Babylon Bee could be considered cultural heroes. But there are many unsung warriors. They took what were intended to be campaign-killing moments and turned them into inspiring images.

There was the iconic mugshot—representing Trump as the target to keep them from getting to the rest of us. There was the iconic “Fight! Fight! Fight!” right after Trump was shot, when they only grazed his ear, instead of leaving us without a candidate (their wish; whether it was planned with the assassin or not). Then came that happy few minutes of Trump working at McDonald’s, mocking Kamala for claiming she had worked there as a teen, although there’s no evidence she ever did. Then, after Biden called all of us “garbage,” Trump showed up as a garbage collector. Separately, any these makes a pretty iconic meme. Together, they show the power of images—something the opposition just can’t seem to muster this season.

collage found on Tom Glass's Facebook

"A campaign is snapshots and soundbites"—another Dan Bongino quote.

The Harris/Walz campaign has the full power of the propaganda beast at their disposal. But they can’t manage anything but humiliating snapshots and soundbites. The Trump team occasionally just takes clips of Kamala speaking, without editing, and adds simply, “I’m Donald Trump, and I approve this message.” The more we hear her, the less likely we are to vote for her.

Meanwhile, Trump and Vance come up with more positive snapshots and soundbites every day.

There’s some delight in seeing the “doom loop,” or death spiral, of the propaganda beast—it’s failure to create the illusion of power for the evil cabal—timed for this point in history, just before the election. After years of feeling oppressed, this feels hopeful.

That doesn’t mean I can predict the election outcome. My sense is that Trump could win, and maybe win big. But the evil cabal will cheat. We must win so big—and so widespread across the electoral college map—that they can’t cover the gap.

And then, what about when they protest, possibly even violently, against us “garbage” patriots? I don’t know. But, if I’m right and the propaganda beast is losing its power, then it will no longer be able to create the illusion that the sea beast (evil cabal) has power. Babylon falls in an our (Revelation 18:10, 17, 19). That’s how the story goes in Revelation. Those beasts are defeated. After all we can do, Christ the King—whom Kamala blithely declared not welcome at her rally last week; you should look for Him at the Trump rally—yes, Jesus Christ the Redeemer comes in and fights our battles.

That’s how the story ends. I do not know for certain where we are in the story. I only know that the sea beast may be beyond its reign over us, and it looks like that supporting propaganda beast is losing its voice. That may make them seem more fierce, temporarily. We shall see. We live in interesting times.