You be the judge if the tools of a tyrant are pervasive in our once more united states.
The impermeable veil that separated fact from fiction is now porous and in danger of disappearing entirely.
Arguments are only as strong as the underlying facts we know to be true, and, our Chief Executive’s subalterns insist there is such a thing as “alternative facts.”
The “known” credibility of a person or entity is fatally defective if instead a poseur, a counterfeit voice, pretends that they are that person or entity we have trusted when, in fact and truth, they are not that person or entity.
We believe we know if we are being fooled but that’s hardly credible when we have been so thoroughly manipulated by info-age bots (ro-bot apps), traveling at the speed of electrons, programmed to mislead us.
On Facebook and Twitter, members freely disclose all manner of information, in a trusting manner and to an extent that Jefferson could never have imagined.
A Russian troll factory in St. Petersburg, Russia created false opinion makers on Facebook and Twitter, also bogus Facebook members to roam and troll among us as if they were legit, incendiary memes and false opinions to distribute as well among the unaware.
Christopher Wylie, a former data scientist, at Cambridge Analytica, out of Great Britain, confirms that Cambridge Analytica was created by presidential campaign supporters and associates of Mr. Donald Trump. Steve Bannon, of the alt-right, one of those campaign supporters, set out to create a psychological warfare tool for the presidential election. Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund billionaire, invested in Cambridge Analytica.
Aleksandr Kogan, a researcher at Cambridge University, collected the information of 50 million Facebook members, using a trap app, a personality quiz that covertly accessed members’ personal information who took the quiz, thereby enabling Kogan to corral the personal information of friends of the quizzed members.
Wylie, become a whistleblower, recently said that the personal data collected by Kogan made it possible to create an “information cocoon” to change personal perceptions of American voters.
Wylie said, “This is based on an idea called ‘informational dominance,’ which is the idea that if you can capture every channel of information around a person and then inject content around them, you can change their perception of what’s actually happening.”
In a recent NBC Interview, Wylie said, that they were exploring the “mental vulnerabilities of people” by “creating a web of disinformation online so people start going down the rabbit hole of clicking on blogs, websites, etc., that make them think things are happening that may not be.”
E.C. Fuller foresaw a time when the weapons of propaganda would become the corruption of human reason, the dimming of the human intellect and the disintegration of the moral and spiritual life of a nation.
A despot in formation in a gaol, Adolph Hitler, wrote of propaganda. He insisted that it must be directed not to the elites but to the masses, to the emotions and not to one’s reason, confined to a few essentials, often repeated, in a one-sided argument, while never admitting that one might be wrong. This propaganda must pursue personalities, take advantage of existing controversies, never use abstracts like “patriotism,” make attacks concrete, and combine social and selfish elements.
Lenin also praised “psychological warfare [and] …the disintegration of the moral and spiritual fibre of one nation by the will of another ….”
Putin has shown himself an eager pupil of Lenin’s propaganda, seeking to destroy this nation’s will.
We must, however, resist the Russian state’s propaganda and its enablers among us, and reaffirm this nation’s original promise, if we hope to survive as a Republic.
The Russian’s pernicious propaganda campaign squarely hit its mark, and we must combat both the enemy without and the one within.