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HOW BARACK OBAMA BUILT AN OMNIPOTENT THOUGHT-MACHINE, AND HOW IT WAS DESTROYED
Tablet ^ | 21 Dec, 2024 | David Samuels

Posted on 12/21/2024 6:19:10 AM PST by MtnClimber

If anyone in the future cares enough to write an authentic history of the 2024 presidential campaign, they might begin by noting that American politics exists downstream of American culture, which is a deep and broad river. Like any river, American culture follows a particular path, which has been reconfigured at key moments by new technologies. In turn, these technologies, which redefine both space and time—canals and lakes, the postal system, the telegraph, railroads, radio and later television, the internet, and most recently the networking of billions of people in real time on social media platforms—set the rules by which stories are communicated, audiences are configured, and individuals define themselves.

Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country’s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.

The time was ripe, in other words, for a cultural revolution—which would, according to the established patterns of American history, in turn generate a political one.

I first became interested in the role of digital technology in reshaping American politics a decade ago, when I reported on the selling of Barack Obama’s Iran deal for The New York Times Magazine. By the time I became interested in the subject, the outcome of Obama’s campaign to sell the deal, which had become the policy cornerstone of his second term in office, was a fait accompli. The Deal seemed odd to me, not only because American Jews were historically a key player in the Democratic Party—providing outsized numbers of voters, party organizers and publicists, in addition to huge tranches of funding for its campaigns—but because the Deal seemed to actively undermine the core assumptions of U.S. security architecture in the Middle East, whose goals were to ensure the steady flow of Middle Eastern oil to global markets while keeping U.S. troops out of the region. A Middle East in which the U.S. actively “balanced” a revisionist anti-American power like Iran against traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel seemed guaranteed to become a more volatile region that would require exactly the kinds of active U.S. military intervention that Obama claimed to want to avoid. Nor did turning over major shipping lanes to Iran and its network of regional terror armies seem like a recipe for the steady flow of oil to global markets that in turn helped ensure the ability of U.S. trading partners in Europe and Asia to continue to buy U.S.-made goods. Seen through the lens of conventional American geopolitics, the Iran deal made little sense.

In the course of my reporting, though, I began to see Obama’s plans for the Middle East not simply as a geopolitical maneuver, but as a device to remake the Democratic Party—which it would do in part by rewiring the machinery that produced what a brilliant young political theorist named Walter Lippmann once identified, in his 1921 book, as “public opinion.”

Lippmann was a progressive Harvard-educated technocrat who believed in engineering society from the top down, and who understood the role of elites in engineering social change to be both positive and inevitable. It was Lippman, not Noam Chomsky, who coined the phrase “manufacturing consent,” and in doing so created the framework in which the American governing class would understand both its larger social role and the particular tools at its disposal. “We are told about the world before we see it,” Lippmann wrote. “We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.” Or as he put it even more succinctly: “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.”

The collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid on which Lippmann’s assumptions rested, and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy—and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices—in new ways. In fact, as Obama’s chief speechwriter and national security aide Ben Rhodes, a fiction writer by vocation, argued to me more than once in our conversations, the collapse of the world of print left Obama with little choice but to forge a new reality online.

When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.

To my mind, the point of the story I was reporting, in addition to being an interesting exploration of how the tools of fiction writing could be applied to political messaging on social media as an element of statecraft, was twofold. First, it usefully warned of the potential distance between an underlying reality and an invented reality that could be successfully messaged and managed from the White House, which suggested a new potential for a large-scale disaster like the war in Iraq, which I—like Rhodes and Obama—had opposed from its beginning.

Second, I wanted to show how the new messaging machinery actually operated—my theory being that it was probably a bad idea to allow young White House aides with MFA degrees to create “public opinion” from their iPhones and laptops, and to then present the results of that process as something akin to the outcome of the familiar 20th-century processes of reporting and analysis that had been entrusted to the so-called “fourth estate,” a set of institutions that was in the process of becoming captive to political verticals, which were in turn largely controlled by corporate interests like large pharmaceutical companies and weapons-makers. Hillary Clinton would soon inherit the machinery that Obama and his aides had built along with the keys to the White House. What would she do with it?

What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled.

During the Trump years, Obama used the tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power center for himself, one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party that he succeeded in refashioning in his own image—and which, after Hillary’s loss, had officially supplanted the “centrist” Clinton neoliberal machine of the 1990s. The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP’s own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like “POC,” “MENA,” and “Latinx,” whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party’s new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party’s efforts at social transformation.....SNIP


TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: gaza; hamas; hezbollah; iran; israel; lebanon; marxism; ngos; obama; technology; waronterror; yemen
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To: MtnClimber

Even Axelrod didn’t like Obama very much. I don’t quite understand what these “permission structures” are and how they work, and from the article much of that machinery may still be in place. It is how Obama continued to dictate policy while Biden was in office, and is innately totalitarian. People following “voices” from unknown online sources what they should believe instead of what their own common sense and experience tells them is kind of spooky. No wonder society is going collectively insane.


21 posted on 12/21/2024 8:00:49 AM PST by virgil (The evil that men do lives after them )
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To: MtnClimber

Even Axelrod didn’t like Obama very much. I don’t quite understand what these “permission structures” are and how they work, and from the article much of that machinery may still be in place. It is how Obama continued to dictate policy while Biden was in office, and is innately totalitarian. People following “voices” from unknown online sources what they should believe instead of what their own common sense and experience tells them is kind of spooky. No wonder society is going collectively insane.


22 posted on 12/21/2024 8:00:49 AM PST by virgil (The evil that men do lives after them )
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To: The Great RJ

Obama is not blessed with a great intellect. His ability to talk ‘white’, his ‘cool’ charisma, and having caught the eye of the communist political science professors, is what launched him as the leftists trojan horse to fool the public.

I would like to know how many hours he trained on the teleprompter before giving that speech at the 04 DNC. His ability to swivel his head and body while leaving his eyes on a teleprompter took some serious practice. He was in a ‘locked-on’ mode. When that house rep shouted ‘you lie!’ at Obie during his SOTU speech, Obie took a minute to get back into his prompter ‘groove’.


23 posted on 12/21/2024 8:20:07 AM PST by Zuriel (Acts 2:38,39....Do you believe it?)
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To: MtnClimber

Obama did Nothing except acting...the script was written by our enemies


24 posted on 12/21/2024 8:22:13 AM PST by goodnesswins (Don’t be REALITY PHOBIC!)
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To: MtnClimber

Excellent and really looooong essay. I read the whole thing!

The summary, in a nutshell, is that we’ve been living a kind of “1984”,a manufactured and enforced delusional “reality” run by big brother Obama/Axelrod. (Though, I think he gives Obama too much credit).

And that Musk, Trump and Netanyahu have restored the “real” reality.

Thing is, big brother never goes away. Eternal vigilance is still the order of the day.


25 posted on 12/21/2024 8:42:48 AM PST by aquila48 (Do not let them make you "care" ! Guilting you is how they. control you. )
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To: cymbeline

Or in other words (and shorter), the medium is the message.


26 posted on 12/21/2024 8:47:12 AM PST by aquila48 (Do not let them make you "care" ! Guilting you is how they. control you. )
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To: MtnClimber

The source of their power is in my tagline.

They guilt trip you into going along with what they want. And if that doesn’t work on you, then they’ll make it a crime and sic the forces of order against you.


27 posted on 12/21/2024 8:57:58 AM PST by aquila48 (Do not let them make you "care" ! Guilting you is how they. control you. )
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To: aquila48

Yep, it is the never ending struggle between good and evil.


28 posted on 12/21/2024 9:06:25 AM PST by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: fuzzylogic
They would rather tear everything down and leave chaos for Trump rather than see him, or the American people, succeed.

100% correct. They proved that in 2008, and again in 2020.

29 posted on 12/21/2024 9:08:35 AM PST by SomeCallMeTim
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To: MtnClimber

This business of putting Barry up on a pedestal - as if he’s some sort of mastermind instead of just another useful idiot for Marxists - it’s getting so old.

The guy was just another puppet who checked some of the right boxes


30 posted on 12/21/2024 9:32:40 AM PST by enumerated (81 million votes my ass)
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To: marktwain
Samuels is unwilling to acknowledge how much the old media controlled the political environment before the digital age.

Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, .....

31 posted on 12/21/2024 9:41:34 AM PST by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: enumerated

Obama was pretty damned useful. He lies way better than most.

The point of this article, however, is that Obama’s “pedestal” has collapsed.


32 posted on 12/21/2024 9:51:15 AM PST by SomeCallMeTim
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To: aquila48

“Or in other words (and shorter), the medium is the message.”

Didn’t a famous thinker say that? Not rigorously true but makes a point.


33 posted on 12/21/2024 10:05:37 AM PST by cymbeline
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To: MtnClimber
HOW BARACK OBAMA BUILT AN OMNIPOTENT THOUGHT-MACHINE

Obama did it by getting the members of the National Endowment of the Arts to insert Obama's desired cultural changes into the plots of their movies and television shows.

Early in the Obama administration, they purposefully reached out to the "arts" community to intentionally insert leftist messages into the works that people will see. It was done to support Obama and his agenda.

It has since spread to the plots of all the major television shows. It's not a stretch to assume that it has leaked into the news propaganda shows, too.

It started with this [from the Wayback Machine]: (September 2009) EXPLOSIVE NEW AUDIO Reveals White House Using NEA to Push Partisan Agenda:


**NEA conference call full audio and transcript here**

Should the National Endowment for the Arts encourage artists to create art on issues being vehemently debated nationally?

That is the question that I set out to discuss a little over three weeks ago when I wrote an article on Big Hollywood entitled The National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?

The question still requires debate but the facts do not.

The NEA and the White House did encourage a handpicked, pro-Obama arts group to address politically controversial issues under contentious national debate. That fact is irrefutable.

yosi-obama-kzo
President Obama with the NEA’s Yosi Sergant

But some have claimed that the invite and passages, pulled from the conference call that inspired the article, were taken out of context. Context is what I intend to establish here.

On August 10th, the National Endowment for the Arts, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and the Corporation for National and Community Service hosted a conference call with a handpicked arts group. This arts group played a key role in Obama’s arts effort during his election campaign, as declared by the organizers of the call, and many on the call played a role in the now famous Obama Hope poster.

Much of the talk on the conference call was a build up to what the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was specifically asking of this group. In the following segment, Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, clearly identifies this arts group as a pro-Obama collective and warns them of some “specific asks” that will be delivered later in the meeting.

Buffy Wick
Buffy Wicks

Play Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Later in the call, “specific asks” were delivered by Yosi Sergant, then Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts. What were the “asks”? They were for this pro-Obama arts group to create art on several hotly debated political issues, including health care:

Untitled-1-1623
Yosi Sergant

Play Yosi Sergant, former Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

As someone that has been creating arts initiatives and marketing campaigns for over 14 years, I feel like I have a good sense as to how a pro-Obama arts group, when requested by the NEA to address politically contentious issues, could so easily turn very partisan.

Consider:

Three days after the conference call a coalition of arts groups, led by Americans for the Arts, a participant on the conference call per the meeting contact list and recipient of NEA grants, sent out a press release with the heading “Urgent Call to Congress for Healthcare Reform,” which called for the creation of “a health care reform bill that will create a public health insurance option.” Eleven days after the conference call, Rock the Vote, another participant on the call, announced a health care design contest. “We can’t stand by and listen to lies and deceit coming from those who are against reforming a broken system,” they stated in their announcement. “Enough is Enough. We need designs that tell the country YES WE CARE! Young people demand health care.”

These may both be coincidences and I am not suggesting that the NEA or these groups definitively violated the law in these efforts. That’s for others to discuss and investigate. As I’ve stated in various television interviews, the organizers never discussed any specific policies. However, as can be seen below in the exchange between Nell Abernathy of the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency, and Michael Skolnik, the third party moderator, the meeting seemed designed to deflect any questionable conversations to the “third party”, while keeping the issue of health care top-of-mind with the precision of a well positioned product placement.

OrganizingForHealthCare[1]

Play Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for Serve.Gov and Michael Skolnick, political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Debating the role of government is and has been the goal of bringing this conference call to light. The NEA tainted the creative process by encouraging the art community to address highly controversial political issues. ‘How?’ you may ask. The NEA is the largest single funder of the arts in the United States. This government agency has the power and ability to fund arts organizations and recently expressed a desire to return to funding individual artists, bringing more from the group into the pool of potential grantees.

The NEA did encourage a handpicked, pro-Obama arts group to address issues under contentious national debate. That fact is irrefutable.

This practice has never been the historical role of the NEA. The NEA’s role is to support excellence in the arts, to increase access to the arts, and to be a leader in arts education. Using the arts to address contentiously debated issues is political subversion. And the fact that the White House played a role in encouraging the arts to address contentious issues should also be considered a government overreach.

Many on the phone call may say and believe that this was a worthwhile effort. “What can be more inspiring then the NEA encouraging national service,” they may say. I would say that while it might sound like a noble cause, the big hand of government often enters the scene well manicured, but in times of desperation it all too often takes on the shape of a fist accessorized with brass knuckles.

And it appears that desperation may have been the impetus to the birth of this specific arts effort. This possibility reveals itself when we take a step back and view the environment at the time the invitation was distributed.

It was the beginning of August 2009, Congress was heading for a much-anticipated month-long recess after weeks of heated debate over health care legislation. At issue was President Obama’s desire for “universal health care” for all Americans, and he was losing that debate. The Administration attempted to push health care legislation through before the August recess, but the so-called Blue Dogs resisted the proposed public option.

After several grueling months of discussion, where the opposition accused the administration of creating death panels, inching the country closer to socialism, and desiring a single-payer system, the Democrats left for the August recess without a bill on the floor and a bit battered from their effort. The Democrats were presented with a daunting task – to face a public at town hall meetings that had gone nuclear. Each night a new incident of public outrage against the government takeover of health care was broadcast widely on cable news – each network painting the protesters as either a legitimate revolt against government growth, or the angry, uneducated, lunatic fringe.

Regardless of how this group was labeled, their mere existence pointed to one fact – the administration was losing the debate on health care reform.

It was in this environment that I received the invite from the National Endowment for the Arts to attend the August 10th conference call. When seeing that the NEA and the White House were inviting a group from the arts world to tackle health care, as well as energy and environment, it appeared to me as an attempt to create an environment amenable to the President’s positions on these efforts. Only after learning that this was the arts group that played a key role in getting the independent arts community behind then candidate Obama, was I convinced that this effort was unusual.

Michael Skolnik, the person asked by the NEA and the White House to help bring together this arts collective, defined the group and its goal in his opening statement. I think it is made pretty clear how this pro-Obama group would react to losing the healthcare debate if prodded to speak to that very issue:

b3_418729
Michael Skolnick

Play Michael Skolnick, political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I find it hard to believe that the very intelligent meeting organizers would think that this pro-Obama arts group would produce bipartisan art about health care at a time when the administration was losing a national debate on that very issue. As any parent can tell you, if you give your child a key to the candy drawer they’ll end up with a sugar high.

Were there artists on the call that would create imagery extolling the benefits of offshore drilling? Were there any musicians who’d drop an electro dance anthem warning of the Road to Serfdom that awaits us if we let government create universal health care? Or how about artists that would wheat paste posters throughout urban areas, featuring a miner named Cole entirely sanitized, sitting in a clean room with the subtitle “Clean Coal.” If this was truly a bipartisan effort, why was I not invited to any conference calls held after the publication of my initial article?

In their zeal to recapture the enthusiasm of the campaign, it appears the NEA overstepped its mandate and forgot its role to the arts, a community currently in dire straits. If this arts group should be rallying around anything, it should be to directly help the arts community. The NEA’s mere participation in a meeting of this nature has put them and those invited in murky waters.

Setting up a propaganda machine is a dangerous precedent. The creation of a machine to address any issues, even ones with noble intentions, can be wielded by the state to create a climate amenable to the policies of those in power. Does anyone believe that once these artists are in place and we move to the election cycle, that the art they create will be bipartisan?

While much of the phone call was spent explaining the general concept of United We Serve – to be expected when explaining the infrastructure and rational for any national initiative – when the time came to get specific on what the National Endowment for the Arts wanted this arts group to do, it was simple and concise – create art focused on four main issues, and the two at the top of the list, and most mentioned throughout the exchange, were health care and energy & environment.

1363702600_f4d433f0c2_o
Yosi Sergant

Play Yosi Sergant, former Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The National Endowment for the Arts needs to issue a statement with a bit more detail than the one issued at the time of Sergant’s reassignment. Not only have they not explained why Sergant was reassigned, their current statement is full of obvious contradictions and has only prompted more questions.

The NEA’s unattributed statement reads:

“On August tenth, the National Endowment for the Arts participated in a call with arts organizations to inform them of the president’s call to national service. The White House Office of Public Engagement also participated in the call, which provided information on how the Corporation for National and Community Service can assist groups interested in sponsoring service projects or having their members volunteer on other projects. This call was not a means to promote any legislative agenda and any suggestions to that end are simply false. The NEA regularly does outreach to various organizations to inform of the work we are doing and the resources available to them.”

By their own words and actions the NEA has attempted to distance the agency from the initiation of this meeting and have been outright dishonest in their role.

If the NEA has done nothing wrong, why have they been dishonest?

From their own words this effort was not something that the NEA regularly performed; otherwise their Communications Director wouldn’t have called this a “brand new conversation.”

As to the statement that the conference call was not a means to promote any legislative agenda, I believe the handpicked pro-Obama participants on the call and the vehemently debated issues that the NEA encouraged the group to address show clear intent on the part of the NEA. And that intent was to create art that aligned with the administration’s partisan agenda.

On September 4th I called the chairman of the NEA, Rocco Landesman, requesting a response to these inconsistencies as well as to request a statement from the NEA regarding their brand new arts efforts. As of the publishing of this article I have not received a response.

With each passing day, the National Endowment for the Arts’ credibility is tragically deteriorating. The only action that can restore its credibility is a full disclosure and accounting of the events that led to the launch of this arts effort, the rationale behind this new NEA function, and a clear explanation of the obvious contradictions in their statements related to this conference call.

I hope the NEA addresses this soon so that they can get back to their mandated artistic, not political, work.

MORE…


-PJ

34 posted on 12/21/2024 10:05:44 AM PST by Political Junkie Too ( * LAAP = Left-wing Activist Agitprop Press (formerly known as the MSM))
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To: fuzzylogic

Elon Musk buying Twitter really put a crack in the facade, but there’s more to do. I’ve been saying the democrat party is the worst influence on America right now. This article is worth another read.


35 posted on 12/21/2024 10:08:18 AM PST by virgil (The evil that men do lives after them )
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To: MtnClimber
From the TOS episode, "The Return of the Archcons".
36 posted on 12/21/2024 10:17:40 AM PST by OttawaFreeper ("The Gardens was founded by men-sportsmen-who fought for their country" Conn Smythe, 1966 )
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To: Political Junkie Too

Your comments are as good as the original article.


37 posted on 12/21/2024 10:43:01 AM PST by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: cymbeline

Marshall McLuhan...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message


38 posted on 12/21/2024 10:43:19 AM PST by aquila48 (Do not let them make you "care" ! Guilting you is how they. control you. )
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To: MtnClimber; Big Red Badger; sopo; cymbeline; aquila48
Good article - long but insightful.

As a therapist I was struck by his observation that "the effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create.The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia..."

It's the best explanation for the madness we've been seeing.

39 posted on 12/21/2024 11:41:38 AM PST by TexasKamaAina
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To: MtnClimber

Whole lot of words, to basically say, the created a propaganda machine that simply manufactured and reinforced lies..

And Trump/Musk and others saw through it and burned it to the ground.


40 posted on 12/21/2024 12:03:15 PM PST by HamiltonJay
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