How the Media frames a story determines the narrative more so than the story itself. Remember a couple months ago when the big story was the indictment of 13 employees at a Russian click bait advertising company for interfering with our election and helping elect Trump? It's said they did this by posting ineffective memes, forming facebook pages on all sides of all issues and putting together protests and rallies with turnouts in the single digits? Russia Russia Russia was the lead story everywhere, every day... see Russia did it.
Well now with the Cambridge Analytica story they actually found a company that data trolled and stole the information of as many as 230 million Americans. They engaged in election meddling and actually worked for Trump while being funded by rich Trump supporter Richard Mercer. The story goes that they had been working on a program to come up with talking points that would incite and motivate voters on the alt-right by knowing just what buttons to push. They started doing this in 2014, before Trump had even announced he would be running.The Guardian newspaper interviewed whistleblower Christopher Wylie for its article The Cambridge Analytica Files I made Steve Bannon's Psychological warfare tool': meet the data war whistleblower
From the article:
In 2014, Steve Bannon – then executive chairman of the “alt-right” news network Breitbart – was Wylie’s boss. And Robert Mercer, the secretive US hedge-fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica’s investor. And the idea they bought into was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology – “information operations” – then turn it on the US electorate.
By that time, Steve Bannon had become Trump’s chief strategist. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, had won contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out. “It’s insane,” he told me one night. “The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids.”
He ended up showing me a tranche of documents that laid out the secret workings behind Cambridge Analytica. And in the months following publication of my article in May (2017), it was revealed that the company had “reached out” to WikiLeaks to help distribute Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails in 2016. And then we watched as it became a subject of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian collusion in the US election
Notice the way a corporate malfeasance was immediately spun into the Russiagate narrative and included in the Meuller investigation? But Cambridge Analytica was not a Russian company, it was a London based company under the direction of the American alt-right and funded by a secretive Republican billionaire donor. It's not a foreign government attempting to disrupt or have an influence on our election. This story is about a criminal enterprise, hired by the billionaire class to elect a puppet that would do anything they wanted to further entrench the oligarchy, get more money into the military-industrial complex, cut taxes for the rich and deregulate business. They found their liar with so little knowledge of how things or even the world works that they wouldn't ever have to worry about his opinions getting in the way of their agenda.Nobody will ever know how effectively this targeted psychological warfare influenced who people voted for, but it certainly helped to motivate conservatives to vote. While they also helped to distribute the wikileaks emails which showed that the party had rigged the primaries for her against Bernie Sanders and that on issue after issue she said one thing while championed very different positions. They were distributing this largely to people who already didnt like her on the right. In the meantime it was progressive activists, journalists and groups that distributed this information to the progressive left.
Furthermore there has never been any proof that Russia even had a role in providing this information as none has ever been provided, while Wikileaks has stated that the information was provided by an individual and not a state actor. Former intelligence agents who specialized in information technology have stated definitively that the metadata proves the information had to have been acquired as a leak from someone at the DNC server not a hack as the transfer speeds could only have been reached on a transfer to an external drive and were way outside of speeds possible over the internet (ruling out a hack)
Remember the rich and corporations would have won with either Clinton or Trump. With Hillary they would have gotten incremental change in their direction, but no resistance party, while with Trump they got big bold action to further rig the system and economy for them but a resistance. The people behind hiring Cambridge Analytica wanted more than to simply keep the oligarchy in place, their goal went further to further divide people around issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. They wanted a puppet who they could direct not just to a conservative economic agenda, but could manipulate into validating the narratives of the alt-right along the way.
So Trump was their guy. Now all they had to do is get him past the 2nd most unpopular and mistrusted person to ever run for President. What a gift they got after she was caught cheating and insulting half her potential base. Over the years she has been one of the people most associated with the free trade agreements that destroyed labor in the US, outsourced countless millions of jobs, crushed and stagnated wages for those lucky enough to still have jobs and sent one of the most reliable voting blocks of the Democratic base (labor) looking for a new home for their votes. This was a golden opportunity to get the most unelectable person ever to run into office if they could simply motivate their base and convince enough of the labor vote to come with them. The Midwest states that decided the election seemed to prove that labor was indeed still hostile toward the Clintons and the Trump talking points against the TPP would show enough of a contrast. Alas the unelectable was suddenly electable, not because people loved or believed in him, but because he ran against someone more disliked and distrusted by labor than him.
It was all lined up... she was incapable of holding the labor vote because of a lifetime of globalism and anti-labor policies. She then cheated and insulted millennials calling them baristas living in their parent's basement (a reality given she had helped to rig the economy against their generation). Then as the progressive left had finally started talking about policy, she ran the campaign most devoid of policy in recorded history, giving people no reasons to vote for her, instead focusing her campaign on insulting and bullying everyone to vote for her because of her gender and accusing anyone who wouldn't blindly follow her a sexist and misogynist.
Remember she ran this campaign at a time when people were talking more about issues and policy than they had in decades. When you are someone like Hillary with speeches that don't match your record or policy positions, all this talk of policy from the voters on the left was not helpful for her. Try as they did, her supporters within the media and the Democratic party structure couldn't simply write it all off as Bernie and his supporters being mean to Hillary or perpetuating right-wing smears against her. It was her record and lies on full display as progressive activists discussed her record and the revelations shown in wikileaks. The alt-right was talking to their voters and the progressive left was talking to its voters, and for both social media was the primary platform since the corporate media was protecting the oligarchy on both sides of the aisle through omission.
Russiagate was born at first to discredit the verifiably authentic emails that were being leaked confirming that Hillary was every bit as dishonest and hypocritical as they already believed (lets face it, those who are still with her, simply don't want to admit that they have spent more than 25 years supporting and gushing over the Clintons and no amount of facts was going to change that). After the election, they went back to the Russiagate narrative because there was an even bigger catch to be had... censoring social media and the internet using Russian election meddling as justification. Remember social media and the internet are where both the progressive left and the alt-right communicate with those friendly to their agendas. The corporate elite have shut down any channels we use to communicate with and inform each other. If they fail then its only a matter of time before the people reclaim the government, democracy, and the economy which has enslaved most of the poor and middle class for the past 40 years.
So taking a long view of the 2016 campaign with all the post-election twists and turns, its clear that Trump would not have won against Sanders or any Democrat or lefty with a record of fighting on issues like the rigged economy, pro-labor, environmental regulation or any policies that uplifted the poor and middle class, provided more opportunity and increased their quality of life. It took somebody as disliked and distrusted as Hillary Clinton, with a record of placing the wants of her donors ahead of the needs of the voters. No matter how motivated Cambridge Analytica got the alt-right, their games were not working on the left and left-leaning voting blocks and they didn't need to. We were talking to each other, talking about her record and talking about how she had cheated us and sharing facts which reminded us who she is and that she has never cared about us or the issues we told her were important to us. Hillary was maybe the only one who could have helped create the perfect storm of circumstances to get Trump elected.
Comedian and progressive journalist Lee Camp from Redacted Tonight on the RT America network talks about not only the many ways in which our system has been corrupted but also breaks down the Cambridge Analytica story. It is a story he first started talking about over a year ago, while the mainstream media now pretends it's breaking news and attempt to reframe it to fit the "Russia is hacking our democracy" narrative rather than what it truly is, corporate corruption manipulating voters to fall in line.
We can still win this battle. But nobody ever said it would be easy or that the rich and powerful who have had their boots on our throats for more than 40 years would give up power easily. Register to vote, demand that each candidate both tell you and show you who they are and what they will fight for, then vote for someone who earned your vote. When people talk about and show you election fraud, don't dismiss them as conspiracy theorists, let them show you and if you are convinced fight for justice, fight for democracy... fight against corruption, even when the networks, cable news, and the legacy publications tell you there is nothing to see here. Remember they are owned by the very people who risk losing power and the economy back to you.
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