artificial grass roots

never trust the song of a bard who was paid to write it

it’s a funny thing about manipulative skullduggery: when you engage in it as a core practice, you tend to presume that everyone around you is doing it too. you assume there are no “grass roots” movements just pay for play astroturf and machination. nothing baffles a liar like an honest man.

perhaps this is why so many in government these days are so prone to accusing others of meddling with media and elections and public sentiment and being in the pay of everyone from the russians to the koch brothers:

because all their own influence and impact are bought with dirty gold.

judical watch, who has done just astonishing amounts of great work all covid by using FOIA to get a look behind the curtains of some truly recalcitrant wizards has struck another mother lode of deceitful nastiness.

let’s look:

this story is disturbing. perhaps even more so is the deafening silence of legacy outlets on this topic. gee, i wonder why?

One document in the released records was entitled, “PEC (Public Education Campaign) Plan April 19 – May 31 2021” and featured all the following bullet points and more:

These documents confirm what many of us have long suspected: That HHS and CDC paid stand-up comedians to mock the unvaccinated in their comedy routines. Screen writers and production companies were also bribed to push vaccine propaganda in their episodes, and social media influencers were paid off to pimp the untested jabs.

Part of the Covid-19 stimulus push included a cool $1 billion to the CDC for propaganda payoffs and bribes. They used this money to flood tech platforms, Hollywood writers and influencers with dark money, and in return they had to sell their soul by promoting the mRNA jabs.

so, y’all getting that? the CDC got a frosty billion in psyop slushfunding.

that sudden eruption of late night talk show vaccine pushing and unvaxxed vilification and ridicule?

the fawning dances and talking point purity festivals?

your tax dollars bought it.

same energy

none of this was marked as marketing or even as official. it was disguised as groundswell to make you think it was what the cool kids were into.

it’s “buy my new tequila” brand ambassador sponsorship with bottle babes.

you can read piles more HERE where judical watch links to the whole FOIA trove.

it’s so bottomlessly cynical and nasty. pay particular note to the “custom partnerships with social media” and the algo manipulation.

this is rapidly becoming everything. it’s all make believe groups and actors masquerading as something societal.

check out this new ploy:

these are people whose brand is so stained they need to invent fake local papers to launder it.

charming.

Democratic operatives are flooding battleground states with more than 50 supposedly local media outlets that are really designed to promote liberal candidates, according to a bombshell investigation by Axios.

One man linked to the scheme is David Brock, the one-time conservative journalist who did a 180-degree turn and founded Media Matters For America, the controversial nonprofit that attacks conservative news sites. Axios’ investigative reporters Lachlan Markay and Thomas Wheatley say the operation uses a “patina of independent local news content designed to put a sheen of original reporting on partisan messaging.”

The 51 pop-up sites have names such as the Milwaukee Metro Times, Macomb Digest, Mecklenburg Herald, and the Tri-City Record, and are aimed at key swing states Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, according to the report.

they are sprinkling in just enough seeming local news to pass cursory inspection, but these sites are basically PAC’s masquerading as down home reporters from the neighborhood.

the cast of characters is entirely predictable.

Local Report has a relationship with The American Independent (TAI), whose current president is Matt Fuehrmeyer. Fuehrmeyer was a former senior aide at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and aide to the late former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Many of the articles appearing on Local Report sites are written by a half-dozen writers who work for the Washington-based TAI, which was founded by Brock. Jessica McCreight, a former Obama administration operative, who serves as the American Independent’s executive editor, told Axios that American Independent and the Local Report have a partnership and “co-publishing agreement.” She claimed the sites are legitimate local news outlets.

adding to the fun, there seems to be no ad model attached to these sites. their funding is clearly from elsewhere.

huh.

there is a propaganda tactic called tinselling where you just inundate a populace with so much fake data and false claims that they wind up with no idea what to believe. you exhaust them chasing down and refuting lie after lie after lie. maybe you’ve seen this movie before…

the net effect is a sort of hall of mirrors. people have no idea what to trust. it’s a powerful short term tactic but, especially in the internet age, it tends to backfire. bigly.

and this is how you can tell that our would be overlords are not actually terribly smart: these cut rate supervillains are unmaking the very firmament of their own power.

a loss of trust in everything is anathema to technocratic rule. “trust the experts” is supposed to be doctrine; instead it becomes a punchline.

you lose control of the narrative and those who oppose it gain stature and audiences.

your slurs become badges of honor and authenticity.

this is a political tribe that has blown it so badly that all they have left is the one move look ahead lie. this is “burning the roof to heat the house” level stuff and the contagion is like measles because while people may not know what to trust, they do know one thing: anyone who will lie to you about one big thing will lie to you about another.

and all the threads get pulled.

“what else have you been misleading me on?” becomes the question of the hour. each new institution that gets caught telling porkie pies indicts the next one. once you realize that the CDC and FDA are completely politically captured and corrupt, it’s a small jump to “wait, the Fed is too?”

seeing the true colors of the department of education and the modeling of the department of health leads to pointy questions about the EPA and IPCC.

and the grant of the nobel prize in economics to “helicopter” ben bernanke for his work on banks and the groundbreaking discovery that “money printer go BRRRRR”

just leads to more laughter, distrust, and, of course, malign creativity.

all over the world, the trust bubble is bursting.

i was chatting with gatopal™ jeffrey tucker whose brownstone institute has become such a powerful force for sense and sanity about this. as a sort of passing remark (referring to the econ nobel), he said:

“God like we needed another huge and once respected thing completely discredited.”

but one might well make the opposite argument. to my mind, this is precisely what we need. (fwiw, i think jeff believes this too, his off the cuff reaction just provides a useful foil)

the outlines of the so called “deep state” that was sold as a conspiracy and the internationalist cabals and their cardigan clad conspirators all came into sharp relief during covid. it's not hidden anymore. the idea of entrenched constituencies that seek power and are out to get you so they can get theirs is now mainstream and the speed and scale of the ruin they have caused is just too big to hide.

this is like a replay of the late 70's at 100X scale and 10X speed

some might argue that this might be a deliberate manifesting of the alinsky playbook to sabotage everything creating crisis after crisis until the world demands saving and will accede to your new order if it means an end to the madness. you break markets, economies, and societies and them blame them for the failure so that the demos clamors for your firm hand in charge.

but if that’s the game, they blew it. does anyone outside the 25% mired in tribal echo chambers have even a soupcon of confidence in these yo-yo’s?

the success of this play hinges upon trust in technocracy and in elites.

it requires faith in “smart people making smart choices for us and leading us to the greater good” and in the idea that such is even possible.

yeah, pull my other paw. it plays jingle bells.

most of the world does not need another look down that road to know that it’s one they’d prefer to leave untraveled.

and these guys just keep digging the hole they will wind up buried in so long as we retain our sense and our nerve.

so do not mourn the bursting of the institutional trust bubble.

relish it.

this assumed “authority” was never real and always fraught.

perhaps embrace another ethos instead.

and let’s go find our own way.

without them.