by Jeff Childers
At first, it just seemed like they are losing their damned minds, but something more sinister developed as I looked into this story. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a cover-page, top-of-website story —not an op-ed— headlined, “Trump, Preparing to Challenge the Results, Puts His 2020 Playbook Into Action.” Before we even begin, note that after getting through the overlong story, readers discover (1) Trump has never said he was “preparing to challenge the results,” (2) there is no actual “playbook,” and (3) the Times’ editors all identify as infant armadillos. Not house trained. (Eww.)
The Times even made up a detailed, lengthy, step-by-step “playbook” that they then attributed to Trump for overturning the election. Except Trump didn’t write the playbook, never wrote one, nor did Rudi Giuliani, Elon Musk, RFK, or Hitler. The Times wrote the playbook. In its ominous subheadline, the Times warned its terrified readers, “Step by step, Donald J. Trump and his allies are following the strategies that caused chaos four years ago.”
Remember that line. We’ll come back to it.
Readers dumb enough to invest any time in this “article” (don’t) quickly discover the whole thing is a Trump-deranged, speculative, liberal mushroom hallucination. It even described literal playbook steps (“Step 1—Claim Victory”) as if it had received some leaked memorandum. But it turns out they made the whole thing up. The unscripted narrative, or “preemptive framing,” pushed to its readers just before Election Day, is: ho hum, Trump ALWAYS claims he lost because of cheating.
Considered through the lens of our working hypothesis that during the pandemic, the deep state wholly or partly captured corporate media (for national security), this story looks nothing like news. It looks everything like classic propaganda. You could easily imagine airplanes dropping this same story on enemy troops as leaflets.
It also looks just like a diabolical, Obama-style “permission structure,” intended to reach Times readers before Election Day, and to teach them to close their minds and refuse to consider any claim of cheating by Republicans, however compelling. They’re simply not allowed to consider that cheating might have happened, regardless of the evidence. For them, the safest thing to do is not even listen to the evidence. They’re supposed to remind each other, listening to that nonsense is just playing right into his hands.
Proving the piece was written by clever psychologists instead of reporters, the story bizarrely connects —in advance!— any and all claims of cheating in the election to the worst day in the nation’s history, a date that will live in liberal infamy, the mythical destroyer of democracy, the carefully crafted psychological trigger called January The Sixth:
Let’s not pass over that ridiculous but insidious passage too quickly. Consider the nefarious message: January 6th has never ended. It’s like that hallway in horror movies where the doomed protagonist starts walking and then the hallway just keeps getting longer and longer and stretching further and further away until madness! Except within the Times’ narrative frame, the hallway is January 6th, and it’s packed with jeering protestors wearing MAGA hats and they are all icky and middle class.
The story’s comments section was disabled, preserving the purity of the propaganda dose and making sure it wouldn’t accidentally be diluted by pesky questions or folks pointing out the obvious problems. In other words, not ruined by free speech.
There’s no good explanation for why the Times would do this if it were operating as a true news corporation, if it weren’t hollowed out by security state operatives. Even if something like this hysterial fantasy were appropriate to be published at all, this propaganda piece should have run in the opinion section. They are spending reputation coins like a 12-year-old at an arcade. This story is reputationally expensive, it erodes the Times’ prestige as a serious news player and reinforces skeptical stereotypes about its bias.
Why would the editors fritter away their dwindling supply of goodwill on a non-story like this?
Maybe they’re not. Maybe someone else is spending the Times’ goodwill. Consider the possibility that during the pandemic, the government’s security apparatus assumed control of corporate and social media, for national security. After all, at the time they were facing all kinds of scary things like: rampant misinformation! social unrest! opportunistic foreign adversaries! election interference! and more!
Does anyone doubt this? Does anyone seriously claim the government did NOT micromanage the media during the pandemic?
Now the question now: when did the government let go? Put another way, did the government ever release its tight media control? Or are there new post-pandemic departments of government-employed writers feeding demented propaganda pieces to papers like the Times for national security? Why? To maintain narrative stability. To prevent riots, enemy interference, domestic terrorism, and what have you.
But how well is the government’s skeletal hand guiding its media victims? Not well. Axios, two weeks ago:
It’s the cordyceps fungus all over again, and it’s killing the host. Media has been hollowed out by increasingly desperate national security state working overtime like swarms of zombified ants to stabilize the narrative. That’s why we get ridiculous, WWII-style, over-the-top propaganda like this stupid, commentless NYT article.
Remember: this kind of thing only works in the dark. They can’t survive any transparency. So shine some light on it. Call it out when it happens.
Some of you will inevitably focus on the other implication of this story, that the deep state clearly expects Trump to lose again, and they obviously expect the circumstances to be highly suspicious again. I don’t doubt they think that, or at least are working toward that result. We are, in fact, in a war. Battles over the election security are happening at many different levels, some seen, some unseen.
We should only focus on what we can control. Don’t get distracted. Vote and nag others to go vote.
And remember, Christians, Jesus commanded us to not worry. Secular folks, it’s time to whip out your copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
Well, no, the effort that led to January 6th never ended because that effort was led by Pelosi, Democrats and the FBI. They STILL have the will to incite violence and coup in order to overthrow the will of the people.
At least if anyone had any lingering doubts that the leftist media propaganda machine was not existing solely for the purpose of protecting, defending and promoting Democrats and the Democrat party, THAT doubt should be totally erased. The NYT HAS no more reputation, except as a propaganda tentacle of the DNC. The “government” doesn’t control the media, the left does. It simply also controls the government at this time. If Trump wins, the media will, once again, be AGAINST the government, but always against The People.
The New York Slimes has been printing Lies and Fake News they covered up for Stalin Hitler Castro, the Viet Cong and are behind this 1619 Project. No one should ever bother to read this Leftists Rag anymore