Free Republic

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog, Have you ever come across someone on the Internet that you suspected was a paid government troll? Well, there is a very good chance that you were not imagining things. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now have solid proof that paid government trolls are using “psychology-based influence techniques” on social media websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Documents leaked by Snowden also reveal that government agents have been conducting denial-of-service attacks, flooding social media websites with thinly veiled propaganda and have been purposely attempting to warp public...

The Obama administration wants you to bring a side of healthcare politics to your family picnic this weekend. After ObamaCare’s big win at the Supreme Court last week, federal health officials are serving up some tips about talking to family members who may be less-than-enthused that ObamaCare is here to stay. “You should be prepared when Aunt Janine says something like, ‘Obamacare hasn’t helped anyone!’” a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services wrote in a blog post on Thursday. For instance, if your Uncle Ted starts calling Obamacare a train wreck, you should calmly explain that he’s...

A mock invasion of Sweden and Norway has been carried out by 33,000 Russian troops, a US security think tank has claimed. Tens of thousands of soldiers rehearsed a military takeover of Swedish and Norwegian territory near the Baltic Sea in March, security expert Edward Lucas said in a report for the US-based Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). The exercise also simulated the invasion of other areas including the Danish island of Bornholm, Finland's Swedish-speaking Åland islands, and northern Norway, according to the report, The Coming Storm.

Fresh off their biggest legal victory, gay rights supporters began to expand their efforts beyond same-sex marriage to a broad push to rewrite civil rights law and extend protections to other personal and financial actions. A liberal coalition spanning gay rights groups and traditional African-American leaders turned its attention to a new legislative bid to outlaw discrimination against homosexuals in employment, housing, financial dealings and other regular actions not protected under the Supreme Court's ruling declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right. "You can be married on Saturday, post your pictures on Instagram on Sunday and fired from your job on...

A search of APImages.com for “Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)93% ” no longer yields a handful of photos from photojournalist Charlie Neibergall wherein the barrel of a gun on a poster points to the U.S. Senator and presidential candidate’s head.(snip) UPDATE: AP Vice President and Director of Media Relations Paul Colford confirms that the news organization has decided to prevent future licensing of the photos showing guns pointed at Cruz. Breitbart News asked whether AP had encountered any outside pressure from politicians to remove the photos. Colford replied, “this was entirely an in-house decision.”

A search of APImages.com for “Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) ” no longer yields a handful of photos from photojournalist Charlie Neibergall wherein the barrel of a gun on a poster points to the U.S. Senator and presidential candidate’s head.A screenshot of the latest search results for Senator Cruz show nine photos from the “Celebrate the 2nd Amendment Event” in Iowa where he spoke on Saturday, June 20th, then photos begin from his appearance at the “Road to Majority” event in Washington, DC Thursday, June 18, 2015. The controversial gun poster images from the Iowa photo op are nowhere to be...

Russian propaganda kills. It kills reason and common sense but it also kills human beings. The tragic death of my father on 27 February was an act of political violence for which Russia’s state TV channels, among others, bear responsibility. For years, they stoked hatred towards him and other opposition figures, casting them as “national traitors”. Propaganda is not a crime, in and of itself: it is part of the furniture of the modern world. What is a crime is to use propaganda to incite people to break the law, employ violence or wage war. It was for these crimes...

The former head of Al Jazeera America's documentary unit announced a lawsuit against her former employer on Thursday, charging the American branch of the Qatar-based news network with a vitriolic bias against Israel, as well as discrimination against non-Arabs and women. Shannon High-Bassalik, who formerly worked with CNN, NBC and MSNBC, sued the company for discrimination after being fired in February only half way through her three-year contract, reports The Guardian. She charged the company with showing a blatant pro-Arab bias both in terms of employment and news coverage, with the most intense bias coming out against Israel. High-Bassalik said...

Anti-Semitic propaganda had a life-long effect on German children schooled during the Nazi period, leaving them far more likely to harbor negative views of Jews than those born earlier and later, according to a study published Monday. The findings indicate that attempts to influence public attitudes are most effective when they target young people, particularly if the message confirms existing beliefs, the authors said. Researchers from the United States and Switzerland examined surveys conducted in 1996 and 2006 that asked respondents about a range of issues, including their opinions of Jews. The polls, known as the German General Social Survey,...

RUSH: Let me get to this piece that I have been referencing for the first hour from the website the Federalist. "How to Escape the Age of Mass Delusion." Now, remember, I went searching for this because I was sent an e-mail from a Republican friend who thinks that the Republicans ought to drop the social issues stuff 'cause if they keep on they're gonna keep losing. I've always had a problem with that, and the headline of the story was: "Wall Street Is Getting Tired of Funding Socially Conservative Republicans Running for President." The problem that I have with...

Nearly 100 years ago, Walter Lippmann wrote about “the manufacture of consent” in his classic work, “Public Opinion.” On the heels of that book, Edward Bernays penned a little volume called “Propaganda,” in which he stated that an elite would always be responsible for making the public aware of “new ideas” which the public would then act upon as the elite nudged them into it. Related, but more in-depth is Jacques Ellul’s 1962 book, “Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.”

Reuters recently published the results of a study about children involving "weapons violence", though the term was used just short of the broadest possible context.   What was telling was the quote from the author of the study.  From whbl.com: “Millions of children are being exposed to violence involving weapons, and many of them are victimized by guns and knives, with an elevated risk of trauma and serious injury,” said lead study author Kimberly Mitchell, a scientist at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. The author is a highly educated woman.  It is hard...

[Snip] One of the best books that cracks the code on what we are living through was written by Dutch psychiatrist Joost A. M. Meerloo about 60 years ago. Mull over the first line of his book’s forward, and you will think he is writing about today: “This book attempts to depict the strange transformation of the free human mind into an automatically responding machine – a transformation which can be brought about by some of the cultural undercurrents in our present-day society as well as by deliberate experiments in the service of a political ideology.” That’s from “The Rape...

Bewildered in recent years by all the vitriolic hatred directed toward the U.S. from foreigners? Turns out it’s not all real. The propaganda machine of the Kremlin during Russia’s communist era, known as Pravda, has reinvented itself and is making a resurgence, this time through “Kremlin Trolls” who litter onine news sites and social media with Vladimir Putin’s agenda. Yesterday, in a huge expose, The New York Times labeled it “the biggest trolling operation in history … a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely...

When Lyudmila Savchuk heard about the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov earlier this year she was shocked and saddened. “I felt the bullets between my own shoulders,” she said, recalling how the Kremlin critic was gunned down near Moscow's Red Square in February. Yet within hours of Mr Nemtsov's death, Ms Savchuk and her colleagues were going online to pour bile on the former deputy prime minister and claim he was killed by his own friends rather than by government hitmen, as many suspect. “I was so upset that I almost gave myself away,” she said. “But I...

A day before being activated from the disabled list, Mets pitcher Dillon Gee was also activated as a promoter of Gun Violence Awareness Day, apparently without his knowledge. To show their support for "Wear Orange," an initiative of the Everytown for Gun Safety nonprofit co-founded by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Mets took a team photo Tuesday wearing orange shirts. The Mets became the first pro sports franchise to participate, but Gee was not pleased once he got more background on the campaign and took to Twitter to explain.

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog The guy who designed the Obama “Hope” poster is shocked that President Obama supports the same policies as Senator Obama In 2006, Senator Obama voted to extend the Patriot Act. In 2011, President Obama signed another extension of the Patriot Act.A few days ago, Shepard Fairey, the guy who designed the Obama “Hope” poster, said:“… drones and domestic spying are the last things I would have thought [he’d support]…”In other words, the guy who designed the Obama “Hope” poster is shocked that President Obama supports the same policies as Senator Obama.And that reminds me of this...

Classical economics went wrong at its first turn, say Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. Man is not homo economicus, the rationally calculating actor that the dismal scientists from Adam Smith down through Milton Friedman supposed our species to be. No, we are emotionally driven, contextually influenced, socially conditioned: Humans, not Econs. Sunstein and Thaler famously lay out their Human vs. Econ divide in Nudge, their 2008 bestseller that popularized a new sub-discipline, behavioral economics. Behavioral economists recognize that people make hasty decisions for non-rational reasons, relying on rules of thumb, heuristics, and past experiences that bias their judgment and prevent...

The street artist behind the iconic “Hope” poster of then-candidate Barack Obama says the president has let him down. In an interview with Esquire, Shepard Fairey said President Obama has not lived up to the expectations of the image that captured the verve behind Obama’s 2008 run. In fact, Fairey said, he’s “not even close.” “Obama has had a really tough time, but there have been a lot of things that he’s compromised on that I never would have expected. I mean, drones and domestic spying are the last things I would have thought [he’d support],” he told Esquire.

If there was any time for American consumers to feel good, it would be this moment. Job growth is brisk. Paychecks are finally nudging up. And a surprise drop in gas prices has given the average household an extra $700 a year. But six years after the end of the Great Recession, Americans are startlingly anxious about their economic prospects. They are sitting on their money in a way that suggests that the consumer psychology may have fundamentally changed, with people less willing to spend than they were during other periods of economic prosperity. Government data released Friday showed that...