Attkisson: "Well-Funded Actors" Manipulating News; "Trust Your Cognitive Dissonance"

Posted By Ian Schwartz
On Date June 28, 2017

Attkisson: "Well-Funded Actors" Manipulating News; "Trust Your Cognitive Dissonance"

 

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson talked to FOX News' Shannon Bream about "transactional journalism" and how "well-funded actors" with "fake accounts" on social media try to manipulate news and the way we think. Attkisson's new book, The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote, focuses on reporters and news outlets "suspending the normal rules of journalism" that circulate news to make you think this is what everyone else is thinking.

"Trust your cognitive dissonance. Try to be aware you're being manipulated or at least someone may be trying," Attkisson advised.

"In general the journalists who have decided to take a stand against this president and announced in some instances that they're suspending the normal rules and procedures of journalism because they think this president is such a threat and in many instances they really believe that," Attkisson said Wednesday on FNC. "They are committed in some cases partisans, but just committed people who think they're doing the right thing. So I think you're going to get that sort of feeling from them. Also, they are also being cheered on by the people around them almost like a feeding frenzy with sharks. The people surrounding them are patting themselves on the back and saying, 'good jobs.'"

"If you listen to the players I interviewed in this book that operate in the smear universe they themselves will tell you -- this is kind of scary when you think about it -- virtually very image you run across whether it is in the news or social media or elsewhere and even the comedy shows, it's being put there, they say, for a purpose by somebody who wants you to think something that may not necessarily be a consensus at all or may not even be true. And there are well-funded actors that use fake accounts on social media or powers of persuasion and a ton of money to try to manipulate what you think. So when you see the common narratives circulating on news outlet after news outlet and social media that everybody thinks this or that and you're thinking, 'Really, because I don't think that.' Trust your cognitive dissonance. Try to be aware you're being manipulated or at least someone may be trying," Attkisson said.

More on Fake News with Klavan/Prager

[VIDEO] The mainstream media’s Leftist bias means it’s all fake news

Posted by Bookworm

Even if the MSM isn’t lying about the facts, it’s still purveying fake news because its Leftist values permeate everything from story placement to language.

PragerU is back with another of its excellent videos, this time about fake news. In it, Andrew Klavan offers his three-point rule of thumb for identifying the fake news that constantly spills from the mainstream media.

He makes an important point about fake news, which is that it’s no always about fake facts, which only occur some of the time. Instead, the real issue is that all of the time, every single time, the overwhelmingly Progressive atmosphere in which the mainstream media exists leaves reporters unable to avoid serious confirmation bias. This confirmation bias leads them to impose values on the facts, and these values are invariably hostile to conservatives and supportive of Progressives, no matter how badly those Progressives behave.

I agree with everything Klavan says. However, after you’ve watched the video, I’ll add one more thing I think he missed:

What Klavan missed is that there is a type of fake news that the media consistently uses that goes beyond what he identified. Klavan identified two primary tactics: (1) assigning relative values to stories (e.g., front or back page status) and (2) using emotionally colored adjectives (e.g., calling Tea Partiers racists or Occupy people heroes).

In addition to the above tactics, the mainstream media also perverts langauge itself to create out-and-out lies or, to use the modern term of art, fake news. To explain what I mean, lets turn to illegal entry into the country, which is framed (wrongly) as an “immigration” issue. And speaking of framing it as an immigration issue, conservatives, as they always do, have fallen into the Progressive nomenclature trap.

In the old days, when there was a societal consensus that it’s a bad thing for people to sneak into a sovereign country without that country’s permission, those sneaky people were called “illegal aliens,” which was a perfect descriptive term. They were here illegally and, being illegal, they could not be “immigrants.” In a sovereign nation with border control laws, an immigrant is someone whom the government welcomes into the country through its legal process; an alien is a non-citizen who has no right to be in the country.

Progressives, with their push to use newly arrived people, whether here illegally or not, as ballast for permanent Democrat party votes, fully understood the accurate import of the term “illegal alien.” That’s why they started calling those people “illegal immigrants.” Yeah, sure they’re illegal, but they’re still immigrants, just like all the rest of the teaming masses who arrived at Ellis Island legally and gazed up at the Statue of Liberty. (And to anyone wondering, Emma Lazarus’s nice poem at the statue’s base is not the law of the land. It’s just a nice poem that was written with one group especially in mind: those Jews who escaped the pogroms in Poland and Russia and came legally to America.)

By changing the language, Leftists shifted the argument from illegality to immigration. And once having down that, they used two tiers of guilt on Americans. Tier one is that we’re all descended from immigrants in one way or another, unless we’re Native Americans (who also immigrated here, albeit in prehistoric times). Who are we, then, to sneer at the latest crop of immigrants? Tier two is about those native Americans. Because we immigrated here illegally as to them, and stole their land, we have no moral standing to argue about the latest crop of illegal immigrants.

Once Progressives had milked the “immigrant” language shift dry, they attacked the illegality part. For some time now, those former “illegal immigrants” (who actually are “illegal aliens”) are referred to as “undocumented immigrants.” (And again, conservatives too often have blindly accepted this change in language.) With this new phrase, the subliminal message is that these people aren’t actually here illegally. They just forgot to do the paper work. It can happen to anybody.

I’ll add here, as I always do, something that’s important to the next part of my discussion: I am not anti-immigrant. As the child of immigrants, I’m not that hypocritical. I’m also fully aware that America’s vitality stems in significant part from the new blood constantly flowing in and revitalizing stultifying institutions. I’m also not racist. Provided that people newly arrived in America work hard, stay out of trouble with the law, and embrace American values (at least in the metaphorical town square), I couldn’t care less about race or country of origin.

What I am, rather than racist, is “values-ist.” If you come here and attempt to destroy American values, I don’t like you. Again, I don’t care where you’re from, what race you are, or what creed you espouse. I care deeply, though, when you attemptto force Americans to practice your faith, rather than accepting American pluralism. When Muslims take over New York streets, they’re forcing their faith on us. When Muslims successfully insist that stores selling sex appeal hire hijab wearing women, they’re forcing their faith on us. (I hate Abercrombie, but Progressive Supreme Court ruling notwithstanding, I believe it has a right to enforce an image. I would therefore also reject an Orthodox Jewish girl trying to force her way in — although the nice thing about Orthodox Jews is that they don’t do that kind of thing.  They understand the correct important of the First Amendment, which is their right to be left alone and not to be deprived of basic civil rights in their dealings with the government.) Values-ist, not racist or homophobic.

The Left doesn’t just lie by reclassifying a whole group of people who, by their daily existence in America, are an offense to law and order. They also lie by mis-describing those who say, as I do, that the issue is not immigration, but illegalimmigration.

A perfect example is a recent VICE news report (which is not available online) about conservative dissatisfaction with the progress President Trump has made so far in stopping illegal entry into the country. Of course, the VICE news baby reporter (the program is run like a bad high school program with a big budget) kept referring to “undocumented immigrants,” rather than “illegal aliens” (a term the baby reporter probably does not even know).

What was more insidious was that the same reporter kept calling people who oppose illegal entry into a sovereign country “anti-immigration,” often with the words “hardcore” or “extreme” appended. It is a dangerous example of fake news to mislabel people. Except for a fringe, most conservatives are pro-legal immigration. They also believe that a country that has lost control of its borders is no longer a country. And of course, they believe that the people should speak through their legislators about immigration policy, whether those people speak wisely or not. It’s not for the illegal aliens to decide who comes in.

Incidentally, as an example of the values infusing this fake news story, the reporter was also outraged that ICE no longer discriminates between violent illegal aliens and those who merely break some other laws. It doesn’t seem to occur to the VICE crew that, by breaking into a country illegally, these people are already criminals and should be deported.

Remy: People Will Die

Too Much "Death and Darkness from the LEFT

POSTED ON JUNE 29, 2017 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN DEMOCRATS, ECONOMY, HEALTH CARE

MILLIONS OF LIBERAL BRAIN CELLS HAVE DIED

I’ve commented before on the current Democratic talking point that “millions will die” if the Senate health care reform proposal is enacted, noting that I had missed this enormous mortality that must have been occurring just a few years ago before Obamacare was passed.

There is actually fairly robust econometric literature that establishes the proposition that “wealthier is healthier,” and hence that economic growth is the best general policy for improving both the health and well-being of everyone. So here’s a modest proposal for Republicans: henceforth, whenever Democrats propose a tax increase or job-killing regulation, just say: “Millions will die.”

Here’s Remy’s useful look at this preposterous state of affairs

Remy:People Will Die !

The Obamacare Enrollee Lie

RICK MANNING:

Missed It By That Much – The Obamacare Enrollee Lie.

Opponents of changes to the failing Obamacare system are using the fairy tale assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office to contend that millions will be left without health insurance coverage next year, when in fact as many as one million more will likely have insurance.
Incredibly, the CBO even goes so far as to guess that seven million people will flee the Obamacare exchange if they are not compelled to use it through the threat of a punitive tax for not having health insurance.
For once their number might inadvertently be right, since seven million people is also their overestimation of how many people are going to be in the exchange at the end of 2017.
Only in the crazy world of Washington, D.C. math could someone wildly overestimate the number of people to use a program, creating a political firestorm that millions will be harmed, and then through their dire predictions actually get the number of Obamacare exchange users back to the real numbers.

An honest press corps would have dug into these numbers weeks ago.
Anyway, do read the whole thing.

54Posted at 8:50 am by Stephen Green   

The face of FBI politics: Bureau boss McCabe under Hatch Act investigation

By John Solomon and Sara A. Carter

0

June 27, 2017 05:46 PM EDT

WATCH | Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe is being investigated by the Office of U.S. Special Counsel for violating The Hatch Act that prohibits FBI agents from campaigning in partisan races.

The Office of U.S. Special Counsel, the government’s main whistleblower agency, is investigating whether FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s activities supporting his wife Jill’s Democratic campaign for Virginia state senate in 2015 violated the Hatch Act’s prohibition against FBI agents campaigning in partisan races.

The agency’s probe was prompted by a complaint in April from a former FBI agent who forwarded social media photos showing McCabe wearing a T-shirt supporting his wife’s campaign during a public event and then posting a photo on social media urging voters to join him in voting for his wife.

“I am voting for Jill because she is the best wife ever,” McCabe put on a sign that he photographed himself holding. The photo was posted on her social media page a few days before the election, in response to Dr. Jill McCabe's plea to “help me win” by posting photos expressing reasons why voters should vote for her, according to the complaint.

Other social media photos in the complaint showed McCabe's minor daughter campaigning with her mother, wearing an FBI shirt, and McCabe voting with his wife at a polling station.

Look at the social media photos included in the Hatch Act complaint.

The Hatch Act prohibits FBI employees from engaging "in political activity in concert with a political party, a candidate for partisan political office, or a partisan political group."

It defines prohibited political activity as "any activity directed at the success or failure of a partisan group or candidate in a partisan election."

An ethics expert told Circa the photos raised legitimate questions about McCabe's compliance with the law.

OSC declined comment except to confirm the Hatch Act complaint was still active and under review. FBI officials and McCabe, through the FBI press office, declined comment.

The FBI has said previously McCabe consulted ethics experts to ensure he didn't do anything improper with his wife's campaign and that the agent didn't believe he had ever campaigned or helped his wife's election. That claim, however, is now being challenged by the former FBI agent's complaint.

Meanwhile, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s office released to Circa under the Freedom of Information Act documents showing McCabe attended a meeting with his wife and the governor on a Saturday in March 2015 specifically to discuss having Jill McCabe run for state Senate in Virginia as a Democrat.

"This is a candidate recruitment meeting. McCabe is seriously considering running against State Senator Dick Black. You have been asked to close the deal," the briefing memo for McAuliffe read.

Included in the governor's briefing package was a copy of McCabe's FBI biography. The biography made clear that Andrew McCabe was a senior executive who at the time oversaw the FBI’s Washington field office that among many tasks supervised investigations in northern Virginia.

At the time of the meeting, published reports indicate agents in the Washington field office were involved in both a probe of McAuliffe and of the governor’s close friend, Hillary Clinton’s and her private email account.

The Hatch Act poster hanging inside FBI offices to urge compliance clearly states that an FBI employee "may not knowingly solicit or discourage the political activity of any person with business before the agency."

FBI sources, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said agents were specifically concerned that McCabe's meeting with McAuliffe about supporting Jill McCabe's campaign constituted a solicitation of a person with business before the bureau.

Check out the Hatch Act poster advising FBI employees how to comply with the law.

McAuliffe’s office said Tuesday it could not immediately determine how it came it to possions of the McCabe FBI bio that was included in McAuliffe’s briefing book.

The meeting led to McAuliffe supporting Jill McCabe’s candidacy and ultimately sending her $700,000 in support, McAuliffe aides said.

The issue of whether McCabe took the necessary ethics precautions to avoid a conflict of interest is already being investigated by the Justice Department inspector general at the request of the Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA).

“While Mr. McCabe recused himself from public corruption cases in Virginia -- presumably including the reportedly ongoing investigation of Mr. McAuliffe regarding illegal campaign contributions -- he failed to recuse himself from the Clinton email investigation, despite the appearance of conflict created by his wife’s campaign accepting $700,000 from a close Clinton associate during the investigation,” Grassley wrote in seeking the IG probe.

Jill McCabe, a physician, lost a close race for a state Senate seat in northern Virginia in November 2015.

When questions first arose about the money Jill McCabe's campaign got from McAuliffe, the FBI insisted that Andrew McCabe never used his FBI role to aid her campaign and “did not participate in fundraising or support of any kind” for his wife’s political run.

Former Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz, who is suing the FBI and McCabe alleging sexual discrimination during her 16-year career, filed the complaint alleging the social media photos are evidence of possible Hatch Act violations.

The Hatch Act prohibits all federal employees from engaging in election activities during work hours. Most government workers are free, however, to campaign during their own private time.

But the law imposes a tough standard for FBI employees, prohibiting partisan campaigning at any time. FBI employees “may not campaign for or against candidates or otherwise engage in political activity in concert with a political party, a candidate for partisan political office, or a partisan political group,” the law states.

Gritz argued in her complaint to the OSC that the photos suggest McCabe violated that standard.

“As a former FBI agent, it is my understanding that we were held to a higher level with regard to the Hatch Act,” Gritz wrote in her OSC complaint. “While I’m filing this complaint, I am doing it due to the large number of current, former and retired FBI agents who know if they were acting such as McCabe we’d be already on leave without pay, under investigation and assured of being in violation. We are all under the impression that these are, in fact, violations.”

Richard Painter, the former chief ethics lawyer for the White House, said that the social media photos and the McAuliffe meeting documents raise serious questions because FBI and intelligence community officials must adhere to more stringent rules under the Hatch Act.

“What is not acceptable would be using the official position, in the government, particularly the official position in the FBI in order to further a political campaign, the political campaign of a spouse or anybody else,” Painter told Circa.

Painter said the “question is why are you sending your bio from the FBI? Are you trying to do that to influence the campaign or is this something somebody wants for informational purposes? But if you’re trying to use your position to get somebody to give money to a political campaign that is crossing the line.”

The Islamist Minotaur - VDH

The Islamist Minotaur

by Victor Davis Hanson

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Image credit: 

Barbara Kelley

According to Greek myth, the Athenian hero Theseus sailed to Crete to stop the tribute of seven Athenian men and seven women sent every nine years to the distant carnivorous Minotaur in his haunt within the labyrinth beneath the palace of Knossos on Crete.

In various versions of the prehistorical myth, the Athenian King Aegeus had conceded earlier to the attacking Cretan King Minos to surrender the youths as tribute to prevent a wider war. Then his heroic son Theseus came of age and volunteered to stop the scripted slaughter, sailing to Crete, where he slew the Minotaur. And that was that.

The idea of harvesting people as part of some strange protocol to preclude a wider, far more destructive war is to not unknown in both history and popular myth.

Many of the thousands of human victims sacrificed to the various hungry gods of the Aztecs such as Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca often were delivered as a sort of human tribute forced from neighboring conquered cities and tribes. The subdued assumed that paying the smaller human toll was cheaper than waging a far bloodier and likely futile revolt against the Aztec Empire—at least until the arrival of Hernan Cortes and his conquistadors in 1519, who found restive conquered peoples eager for revolt, largely on promises to overthrow the Aztecs and stop their collection of human tribute.  

A half-century ago, in the 1967 Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon,” the starship Enterprise visits an imaginary planet Eminiar II, that was engaged in an existential—but virtual—war with the neighboring planet Vendikar. To avoid full-scale Armageddon, both sides far earlier had agreed to wage a computer-simulated war, in which electronically projected losses were reified by ordering selected “fatalities” to report to “disintegration” chambers—TV-land’s version of the Minotaur myth—to avoid a larger (and real) war.  Captain Kirk plays a role somewhat analogous to Theseus and puts an end to the nightmarish nonsense.

Something akin to this trope is occurring in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States. From Fort Hood to Manchester, we are witnessing such human harvests around the Western world. The script goes like this: A Middle-Eastern Muslim resident alien of a Western country, or a second-generation citizen or subject of Middle Eastern descent, is “radicalized”—either by the local Islamist immigrant community or through Internet sermonizing. Then, out his own sense of failure or unhappiness in the West, the failed youth seeks some sort of Islamist transcendence in terrorizing the very hosts who had welcomed his parents or himself.

What follows is also predictable. The opportunistic terrorist picks a soft target—unaware partying youth in a nightclub or at a concert, unarmed police or soldiers, a Jewish center, throngs of holiday shoppers or celebrants, an office building or shopping center. He and other terrorists certainly have no desire or ability to storm NATO headquarters or an American Marine base. Next, he pulls out a gun or some sort of hand weapon such as a machete or hammer, and goes on a rampage, slaughtering the innocent and defenseless, often in iconic fashion, as if his savagery is designed to be disseminated through iPhone video propaganda. If well-organized, he rents a large van or truck to maximize his carnage by running down pedestrians.

Occasionally, the more emboldened and nihilist killers strap on suicide vests to up their death toll and terror. Amid the carnage, the Islamist terrorist chants some sort of allahu-akbar-like mantra, not too unlike the Aztec high priests’ incantations as they tore the living hearts out of their sacrificial victims on the high pyramids of Tenochtitlan. Law enforcement usually arrives too late to save the targeted victims, but sometimes in time to kill, wound, or apprehend a few of the terrorists.

The tragedy continues. We often learn that the supposedly “lone wolves” were in fact “known wolves” who previously had shown up on the radar of Western intelligence, but were not investigated for their unabashed jihadist activities—either due to Western political correctness and fears of charges of “Islamophobia,” or the inadequacy of Western intelligence resources to deal with the tens of thousands of radicalized Islamist youth who are potential human IEDs.

Political leaders then rush to condemn the murdering—at least sort of. Prime Ministers, presidents, elected representatives, Christian clergy, and public intellectuals deplore the violence, calling the serial killing “unacceptable” and “deplorable,” often adding stereotypical adverbs to describe their anguish like “cowardly.”

The tragic script continues. Almost immediately, there are solemn memorials for the fallen—heartfelt candlelight gatherings, church services, and tragic press stories of young lives snuffed out for nothing. Yet within a day or two, Western self-appointed leaders start issuing cautionary warnings to resist “Islamophobic” anger, which is soon contextualized as the real existential danger. The families and friends of the killers are interviewed and, confident in their exemption from any consequences, usually swear that they had no clue that there were jihadist killers living among them.

The more emboldened moralists lecture Western societies to be wary and not return to their recent illiberal past following 9/11, when intelligence services supposedly inordinately surveilled radical mosques and put suspected extremists on no-fly lists. Muslim-rights organizations then issue communiques citing “hate crimes” that are increasingly due to Islamophobic backlash.

Contemporary hot-button issues like immigration and gun control make their way into the conundrum—the Left usually arguing that proper gun control laws would have prevented the massacre. Progressives sometimes sermonize that terrorism is less deadly than bathtub or traffic accidents. They insist, that few of the Islamist killers are immigrants—thereby avoiding the thornier question of why second-generation immigrants are often prone to jihadist extremism, and the even more controversial issue of vetting incoming immigrants. Few reason that by placing restrictions on immigration from war-torn zones in the Middle East, it would be less likely that second-generation immigrants would one day turn to terrorism.

And next?

Within about a week, Westerners seem to return to “normal,” relieved that once again less than 50 or so innocents died from the latest attack in a world of over 1 billion people. No jet was hijacked; no skyscraper toppled. The Minotaur was satiated until the next tribute sacrifice in the labyrinth follows.

Jihadists know that Osama bin Laden’s only strategic mistake was killing too many all at once and thereby inciting a ferocious American response, rather than sticking to his previous, more limited, mode of attack on various embassies or docked warships. The point of an Al Qaeda or ISIS strategic plan is not to incite a unified and warlike Western response, but instead to slowly enervate the West—weakening it by demonstrating to the world that an exhausted, agnostic, and hedonistic Europe and North America either cannot or will not stop the serial harvesting of its own citizens, and thereby does not deserve its global preeminence and cultural hegemony that so often, Islamists allege, corrupt superior local mores and traditions.

Even the fact that Westerners welcome in immigrants whose children occasionally terrorize their new host nations is a powerful propaganda tool for the jihadists, again signifying the impotence of secular Western values to cope with such an asymmetrical but far more zealous opponent. What we consider sober and judicious probity, Islamists see as weak-horse excuses for an existential inability to articulate and defend our values. Radical Islamists gloat that an impotent West has been forced to concede, in amoral fashion, that it is willing to put up with frequent reaping of a few of its own rather than be stereotyped as illiberal on the global stage for taking the necessary measures to end the threat.

The harvesting then will continue until Islamists once again miscalculate, become too carnivorous, and spark an existential response that might entail targeted immigration bans on particular Middle East countries, an end to multicultural deference in favor of melting-pot assimilation, domestic surveillance of known Islamists, deportations, and World War-II like responses to centers of terror in the Middle East and their enablers and sponsors.

But for now, we are in a long war with our Islamist enemies and sadly shrug that a few among us will have to be episodically “disintegrated” to prevent unnecessary retaliatory violence—part of keeping a lid on a virtual war that we often deny even exists.