Propaganda, Gaslighting, and the Fall of the Fourth Estate

Today we take a look at how the alphabet agencies are still using their mouthpieces in the press to gaslight you with a barrage of sensational headlines and creatively written fictional op-eds disguised as legitimate news more openly now than even during the height of Operation Mockingbird.

Way back on December 13, 2020, the CIA's favorite outlet, Jeff Bezos' Washington Post, ran a baseless piece titled "Russian government hackers are behind a broad espionage campaign that has compromised U.S. agencies, including Treasury and Commerce". It was a long winded tale about the now infamous SolarWinds hack which claimed, without any details, proof, or evidence, that the CIA's longtime (and likely nonexistent) Russian boogeymen, APT29/Cozy Bear, were responsible for that attack. 

Forget the fact that nothing obtained in the SolarWinds hack would have benefitted Russia directly; or the fact that it bore more hallmarks of a classic longterm Chinese data collection operation (not coincidentally, they were cleared without investigation barely a month after the installation of Joe Biden, the friendliest American "leader" toward the CCP since Slick Willie Clinton); or the fact that just weeks prior, the ODNI was "actively investigating attempts" by "Iranian hackers" to "infiltrate our election systems".

Nope. We are supposed to forget about all other possibilities and probabilities and maintain our focus on the unfounded Russian operatives narrative. "That's our story, and we're sticking to it," the rest of the legacy media echo in unison, following WaPo's lead whilst bellowing out the CIA's concocted fairy tale of Russian espionage - the same concocted fairy tale they've been force feeding the American citizenry for decades.

For months since that initial accusation was printed in December, we've been bombarded on a near daily basis with story after story of hack after hack, all emanating from the same sources at that same propaganda outlet. From the Microsoft Exchange breach, to the leaking of 533 million facebook users' data, to the JBS Meat Packing ransomware attack, to my personal - and most implausible - favorite: the FBI's "remarkable recovery" of "untraceable" cryptocurrency used in the conveniently timed alleged ransomware attack that shut down a large section of the Colonial Gas Pipeline back in June (right before the summer travel season).

All of this is designed to condition and preprogram us to simply accept, based on unproven allegations and public accusations of unnamed liars in both government and media, the story they want you to believe rather than investigating to report the facts. Often times it serves a dual purpose: not only is it used to pound a particular lie into our subconscious as if it were actually true, but it also is used to prime us for upcoming - and equally unbelievable - works of fan fiction from psychotic ideologues posing as journalists.

That brings us to todays piece in the Daily Mail by Andrew Court (ironically fitting surname given the content of the op-ed masquerading as a news report) titled, "Did SolarWinds hackers steal Trump court documents? Russians accessed email accounts of 27 top federal prosecutors including in NY where Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell are being probed".

Without getting too deep into the weeds, let me explain the absurdity and rabid nature of these blue checked sociopaths.

[It should be noted here that the Southern District of New York has already been granted access to the infamous Trump tax returns for their open investigation(s), and to their credit have not leaked so much as a decimal point in a line item. Yet.]

Not 24 hours before this article was released online, the DOJ released a statement proclaiming some sort of alternate legal reality wherein the IRS would be free to relinquish President Trump's tax records to Congress for another pointless and expensive fishing expedition on the taxpayer dime (because obviously they've already solved all of the legitimate issues this nation is facing, and they have nothing better to do with their time and our money).

You may notice a conflagration of propaganda here, and one could hardly be blamed for laughing until they puke.

After 6 solid years of thoroughly debunked Russian collusion nonsense, here we are again, with the mad dog media attempting to link Trump to "muh Russians", this time through a laughable accusation that for some mysterious, unknown reason, these infamous "Russian hackers" who seem to have access to every deep, dark corner of the interwebs, have "hacked" into the email accounts of some 27 Federal Prosecutors who just happen to have access to the Trump materials that have yet to be leaked but are likely to be handed over soon to Congress - to be leaked, of course.

This, my friends, is what the CIA coined during the Church Committee hearings as "plausible deniability".

But back to the media's use of frontloading and gaslighting. Your eyes may not have noticed, but your brain did. Not only are they conflating unfounded but oft-repeated assumptions with a preconstructed narrative much more suited for a Hollywood screenplay than a "news outlet"; they are also flat out lying about the "hacking" of these 27 prosecutors.

Let me explain.

Hacking is the forcibly gained entry into a secure network or server, often times facilitated by unknown backdoors in the code or undiscovered zero day exploits.

What happened to these prosecutors, who are now trying to wipe the egg from their collective faces, is known as a phishing expedition. 

In a phishing expedition, a target is sent a message (most often by email) from a malicious source disguised and posing as an official contact and/or site, often very convincingly. The goal of such an effort is to gain access to the target's personal information and accounts voluntarily; there is no need for or use of forcible intrusion in such an attack.

Long story short: The CIA wants us to believe that unnamed Russian hackers executed a successful phishing attack that required zero hacking skills and a sixth grader could have orchestrated against 27 technologically illiterate Federal prosecutors in an effort to obtain useless information that our government is planning to leak to the public themselves in what we can expect will be yet another wild-eyed, mouth foaming, contortion of facts conflated with more "trust me, bro"-sourced fallacies, while the media eagerly and salaciously insults our intelligence with story after story (not investigation after investigation, mind you)...because Orange Man Bad.

Just an afterthougt: Has anyone bothered to open an investigation into the over-the-top obvious money laundering operation being publicly perpetrated and openly flaunted through Hunter Biden's inexperienced, overpriced, private and anonymouse "art sales"?
No?
I didn't think I'd overlooked what should be the most explosive story of political corruption so far this decade. 
The Fourth Estate is truly dead.