Bots Amongst Us
"He is trying to tell us to believe what he and his advisors say rather than what our eyes tell us." - George Orwell
It’s Memorial Day Weekend.
Flags are reportedly at half-mast over the White House to commemorate the nearly 100,000 victims of the ongoing pandemic.
Our illegitimate president is allegedly golfing.
I saw a report from M.I.T. stating that supposedly one half of all the accounts on Twitter that are demanding the country reopen are bots. In other words, fake. Russian or North Korean or Iranian. It doesn’t matter.
Did you notice how every one of my declarations included a caveat? Reportedly? Allegedly? Supposedly?
It is precisely where the conservative party in our country has been driving us. It has long been their goal to bend reality to fit their purposes whether it is climate change denial, weapons of mass destruction, the danger of smoking or the systemic threat of the pandemic.
They want us to question our own reality. This is a Karl Rove quote. He was George W. Bush’s attack dog.
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The idea of bending a populace’s perceptions on a grand scale may have been born during the PSYOPS programs (Psychological Operations) developed in the first World War. The podcast, Drilled, discusses the role the military PSYOPS graduates played when they brought their skills to public relations and marketing campaigns after the war. The principles they applied to weaken the enemy internally during the war were the same principles they used to sell you everything from pesticides and detergents to the notion that nicotine was not addictive.
“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democratic senator from New York who died in 2003, must be spinning like a top in his grave. America’s conservative party has reached their end-game.
Meanwhile, the current administration would take umbrage to Moynihan’s meme-convenient declaration. From their first day fucking up the federal government they argued over crowd size for the presidential inauguration and a government spokesperson used the Orwellian term, “Alternative facts.” Essentially arguing that their reality, their opinion, was indeed equal to facts.
And, so, here we are.
While the so-called president does everything in his power to downplay, delegitimize and deny the reality of our current predicament, he orders American flags at half mast to honor coronavirus victims.
And then goes golfing for the first time since the pandemic emerged on U.S. soil.
And then social media erupts with reopen the country arguments and memes while we learn that fifty per cent of them are probably “angry” bots or trolls, according to the usually reliable Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The information and the disinformation and the misinformation are overwhelming us. I think it is meant to cause “analysis paralysis”. I think it is meant to make us not know what to think. I think, as a propaganda tool, it is working brilliantly on a decent percentage of our population who want to be told what to think, don’t want to spend too much time thinking about it and are inclined to believe the worse.
Every day what we believe is being exfoliated by a firehose of information. True. False. Ambiguous. Ambivalent.
I have mentioned the documentary - The Brainwashing of My Dad - more than once. (SPOILER ALERT!) It seems very fitting to bring it up again in this context.
This woman’s father was your average good guy dad in the 70s. She believed him to be a do-gooder and inclined to vote in favor of progressive issues. She left home in the 80s and sometime during that time period, her dad started to turn sour on the federal government. And then hate radio arrived in the form of Rush Limbaugh and others.
By the time “Fair and Balanced” Fox News cable channel got underway in the 90s, her dad was primed to be outraged. According to her mom, her father watched nothing but Fox News. He seethed about the government but he also had transmogrified into someone who would fit the description, “irascible”. Not easy to deal with under any circumstances. Disagreeable.
I wrote on a social media post this morning that, in regards to the pandemic, tensions could be lowered hundreds of degrees if our illegitimate president, along with his own personal propaganda news channel, Fox News, would take the systemic threat of the virus seriously, report on it accurately and calmly urge citizens to suffer temporary inconveniences for the greater good.
Of course, the odds of that happening are the same as me throwing a no-hitter for the Seattle Mariners in the deciding game of the World Series.
Because - remarkably - in The Brainwashing of My Dad once the steady diet of hate talk, bogus breaking news and conspiracy theories were excised from Dad’s daily regimen, (with credit partially due to her mom who had been distraught by his behavior for over a decade), he defaulted to the father she remembered him being in the 70s.
Open to conversations. Not irascible. Docile as can be as if the anger and rage had burned out.
Or, maybe it was the dementia.
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Here is Wanda Sykes’ Twitter remark on Biden’s most recent interview gaffe:
Also, no mask? No problem for this guy.
