Dialectical Lemonade: The MAGA Hat Kids

Like everyone else who listens to any amount of mainstream media on a regular basis, I heard the story of the racist kids from Kentucky wearing Make America Great Again hats and taunting a tribal elder in DC at the Women’s March. I tuned it out as a psyop immediately for numerous reasons. With stories like this I am often reminded of the scene in The Mission where the cardinal, about to order devastation upon the Indians in Paraguay, is rightly troubled by what he is set to do. His aide tries to comfort him by saying, “The world is thus, Your Excellency.” The cardinal replies, “Thus have we made the world.” Reports of obnoxious and overtly racist kids crashing the Women’s March wearing MAGA hats and attacking Native Americans are meant to convince us, “The world is thus.” I see how inorganically these incidents (to the extent they are ever accurately reported) have emerged and I think, “Thus have we made the world–are we making the world.” And I refuse to participate by engaging in the dialectical bait even intellectually. But the story did end up engaging me in the end….

At first the dialectic was “privileged white racist Trump supporting teenage boys menace peaceful Native American elder engaging in a call to prayer.” Not much of a dialectic really–who’s on the other side of that? The boys are not sympathetic–a dialectic has to have adherents on both sides to drive toward a pre-planned solution. (The dialectic is simply understood as Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis or Problem-Reaction-Solution.) This wasn’t really a dialectic, just another pulse in the “Trump’s America Is a Racist America” meme. But then something strange happened. As other videos emerged, it became clear that the story offered by the Native American, Nathan Phillips, and his supporters, was false, and the media had accepted their narrative of this out-of-context moment with very little to go on but bias. No matter…as Saul Alinsky advised, if your original goal isn’t achieved, take the outcome as it is and turn it toward your own interests anyway. That is, you get lemons? Make lemonade.

And so it was done…

To Burn or Not To Burn: Podcast of December 3, 2016 Show

CLICK HERE FOR EPISODE 14 OF THE PROPAGANDA REPORT/MONICA PEREZ SHOW I hadn’t heard this before – the caller with the flag lore was repeating an urban legend! (h/t AG) https://t.co/uHqtuMddsu — Monica Perez (@MonicaPerezShow) December 4, 2016 Some articles of interest from the week with excerpts…. Hampshire College Draws Protests Over Removal of U.S. (more…)

Teeing It Up for the Censorship President

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When I first read about the Total Information Awareness program on Wikipedia, I was shocked by the creepy logo. Wikipedia has since removed the logo, but fortunately, I had it. (Sometimes when I see such blatant symbolism like this I wonder if they’re just messing with us.)

Recently, President Obama said he wanted a truthiness test for information. (To hear it, click the link and go to chronomark 1:00:00 and listen for about four and a half minutes.) I believe he was focusing on scientific information (climate change in particular, of course), but he made an interesting analogy with the news media.

We are going to have to rebuild, within this wild, wild west of information flow, some sort of curating function…

It used to be there were three television stations, and Walter Cronkite was there…generally people trusted a basic body of information…

There has to be some sort of way we can sort through information that passes some sort of truthiness test.

This wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds out of context (almost!), but I recalled his words while reading the newspaper today and it made me think Obama was revealing a broader mindset that is about to be rolled out.

The first article I read was about a recent appearance by Melania Trump during which she, no doubt sweetly and innocently (I mean that, I’m not being sarcastic),

lamented an increasingly coarse culture in which users of social media, especially children, belittle each other.

“Our culture has gotten too mean and too tough, especially to children and teenagers,” Mrs. Trump said. “We have to find a better way to talk to each other, to disagree with each other, to respect each other.”

bn-eb793_vernon_e_20140812180258I didn’t think too much about Melania’s comments and didn’t put them together with Obama’s until later, when

Parallel Construction (new glossary entry)

Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel—or separate—evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to conceal how the investigation actually began. In August 2013, a report by Reuters revealed that the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration advises DEA agents to practice parallel construction when creating (more…)

The Propaganda Report, Episode 4: Strategy of Tension

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz_oGSbpWk0

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The Propaganda Report Episode 4 on iTunesThe Propaganda Report Episode 4 on iTunes

Show Notes with references and links from this week’s episode….

The Orlando Agenda (propaganda report)

Today’s Wall Street Journal lays out our marching orders in the wake of Orlando: The article… After Orlando, a Long War To stop future terrorist attacks, we need solutions from all sides: better security and surveillance at home, a vigorous fight abroad and the support of Muslim moderates everywhere The author: Max Boot, a senior (more…)

“100% of the Constitution 100% of the time” – Gotta love TMOT!

Libertarians might balk at this statement. After all, the Constitution gives the federal government the right to steal (Taxation is Theft!) and kill, and failed to restrain that government from overstepping the boundaries set up to contain those powers. As an anarcho-capitalist, I have concluded that no piece of paper can contain an entity that (more…)

Church v. State

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All government authority derives from our right to self-defense. Anything we authorize our government to do by force of arms must be something that can be justified as self-defense. Legislating morality, or using the force of government to control the private behavior of others, does not fall into that category. I have many calls challenging me on this, so I think it’s worth clarifying.

One point that is often made is that all laws, even those forbidding rape and murder, legislate morality, but that’s not true. Yes, rape and murder are immoral, but that is not why they are illegal.