David Samuels: Barack Obama Created and Maintains an Echo Chamber Messaging System That Deranges and Perverts People's Thinking Every Day

David Samuels is the reporter who interviewed Obama's mental twin Ben Rhodes about Rhodes' creation of "echo chambers" to push the Iran deal and convince people that they were all wrong to think of the extremist Islamist terror state as a threat. In fact, Iran was and is a great Partner in Peace (TM) to the American people!

This is the interview that elicited Ben Rhodes' perfect explanation of how easy it is to change "elite" media opinion overnight -- "they literally know nothing," Rhodes said, so it is very easy to fill their heads with your propaganda. My own elaboration on that: Dummies and ignoramuses often know they're dumb and ignorant, and wish not to be. So if you give them some easy-to-understand (but completely false) slogans to fill that void, they will Seize and Pounce on those slogans uncritically. They felt intellectually empty and socially awkward; now you've empowered them with easy-to-understand propaganda that makes them feel In the Know and Part of the In Crowd.

Because you're providing them a huge service -- you're allowing them to no longer feel stupid and ignorant. And they will reward you by repeating your mantras and propagandas with the fervor of a cultist.

David Samuels now revisits those "echo chambers" deranging American thought and manufacturing "public opinion" out of nothing.

The whole article is worth reading. It's terrific.

I'll just excerpt the conclusory parts. But he builds up to this by noting, for example, how American "elite" opinion turned on Iran overnight.

How did that happen? How did the so-called "elites" go to bed knowing that Iran was a jihadist terror state one night and wake up the next morning knowing with even more passion that Iran was a friend to the United States and an important Partner in Peace (TM)?

So, as I said, read the whole thing over the weekend, but for now, here are the money paragraphs.

He describes this as a revolution in communications -- specifically the communication of mass propaganda -- as important as any of the major developments in mass media, like the telegraph or even the printing press.

The collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid on which Lippmann's assumptions rested, and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy--and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices--in new ways. In fact, as Obama's chief speechwriter and national security aide Ben Rhodes, a fiction writer by vocation, argued to me more than once in our conversations, the collapse of the world of print left Obama with little choice but to forge a new reality online.

When I wrote about Rhodes' ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term "echo chambers" to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of "public opinion" they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true "reflection" of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.

...

What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama's successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled.

During the Trump years, Obama used the tools of the digital age to craft an entirely new type of power center for himself, one that revolved around his unique position as the titular, though pointedly never-named, head of a Democratic Party that he succeeded in refashioning in his own image--and which, after Hillary's loss, had officially supplanted the "centrist" Clinton neoliberal machine of the 1990s. The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP's own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like "POC," "MENA," and "Latinx," whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party's new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party's efforts at social transformation.

It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party's new form of power. But control over digital platforms, and what appeared on those platforms, was a key element in signaling and exercising that power. The Hunter Biden laptop story, in which party operatives shanghaied 51 former high U.S. government intelligence and security officials to sign a letter that all but declared the laptop to be a fake, and part of a Russian disinformation plot--when most of those officials had very strong reasons to know or believe that the laptop and its contents were real--showed how the system worked. That letter was then used as the basis for restricting and banning factual reports about the laptop and its contents from digital platforms, with the implication that allowing readers to access those reports might be the basis for a future accusation of a crime. None of this censorship was official, of course: Trump was in the White House, not Obama or Biden. What that demonstrated was that the real power, including the power to control functions of the state, lay elsewhere.

Even more unusual, and alarming, was what followed Trump's defeat in 2020. With the Democrats back in power, the new messaging apparatus could now formally include not just social and institutional pressure but the enforcement arms of the federal bureaucracy, from the Justice Department to the FBI to the SEC. As the machine ramped up, censoring dissenting opinions on everything from COVID, to DEI programs, to police conduct, to the prevalence and the effects of hormone therapies and surgeries on youth, large numbers of people began feeling pressured by an external force that they couldn't always name; even greater numbers of people fell silent. In effect, large-scale changes in American mores and behavior were being legislated outside the familiar institutions and processes of representative democracy, through top-down social pressure machinery backed in many cases by the threat of law enforcement or federal action, in what soon became known as a "whole of society" effort.

At every turn over the next four years, it was like a fever was spreading, and no one was immune. Spouses, children, colleagues, and supervisors at work began reciting, with the force of true believers, slogans they had only learned last week, and that they were very often powerless to provide the slightest real-world evidence for. These sudden, sometimes overnight, appearances of beliefs, phrases, tics, looked a lot like the mass social contagions of the 1950s--one episode after another of rapid-onset political enlightenment replacing the appearance of dance crazes or Hula-Hoops.

Just as in those commercially fed crazes, there was nothing accidental, mystical or organic about these new thought-viruses. Catchphrases like "defund the police," "structural racism," "white privilege," "children don't belong in cages," "assigned gender" or "stop the genocide in Gaza" would emerge and marinate in meme-generating pools like the academy or activist organizations, and then jump the fence--or be fed--into niche groups and threads on Twitter or Reddit. If they gained traction in those spaces, they would be adopted by constituencies and players higher up in the Democratic Party hierarchy, who used their control of larger messaging verticals on social media platforms to advance or suppress stories around these topics and phrases, and who would then treat these formerly fringe positions as public markers for what all "decent people" must universally believe; those who objected or stood in the way were portrayed as troglodytes and bigots. From there, causes could be messaged into reality by state and federal bureaucrats, NGOs, and large corporations, who flew banners, put signs on their bathrooms, gave new days off from work, and brought in freshly minted consultants to provide "trainings" for workers--all without any kind of formal legislative process or vote or backing by any significant number of voters.

What mattered here was no longer Lippmann's version of "public opinion," rooted in the mass audiences of radio and later television, which was assumed to correlate to the current or future preferences of large numbers of voters--thereby assuring, on a metaphoric level at least, the continuation of 19th-century ideas of American democracy, with its deliberate balance of popular and representational elements in turn mirroring the thrust of the Founders' design. Rather, the newly minted digital variant of "public opinion" was rooted in the algorithms that determine how fads spread on social media, in which mass multiplied by speed equals momentum--speed being the key variable. The result was a fast-moving mirror world that necessarily privileges the opinions and beliefs of the self-appointed vanguard who control the machinery, and could therefore generate the velocity required to change the appearance of "what people believe" overnight.

The unspoken agreements that obscured the way this social messaging apparatus worked--including Obama's role in directing the entire system from above--and how it came to supplant the normal relationships between public opinion and legislative process that generations of Americans had learned from their 20th-century poli-sci textbooks, made it easy to dismiss anyone who suggested that Joe Biden was visibly senile; that the American system of government, including its constitutional protections for individual liberties and its historical system of checks and balances, was going off the rails; that there was something visibly unhealthy about the merger of monopoly tech companies and national security agencies with the press that threatened the ability of Americans to speak and think freely; or that America's large cultural systems, from education, to science and medicine, to the production of movies and books, were all visibly failing, as they fell under the control of this new apparatus. Millions of Americans began feeling increasingly exhausted by the effort involved in maintaining parallel thought-worlds in which they expressed degrees of fealty to the new order in the hope of keeping their jobs and avoiding being singled out for ostracism and punishment, while at the same time being privately baffled or aghast by the absence of any persuasive logic behind the changes they saw--from the breakdown of law and order in major cities, to the fentanyl epidemic, to the surge of perhaps 20 million unvetted illegal immigrants across the U.S. border, to widespread gender dysphoria among teenage girls, to sudden and shocking declines in public health, life expectancy, and birth rates.

Until the fever broke.

He then talks about Obama's role in this. Obama was not the creator of this system of public derangement -- he was the first product it sold.

The originator of this new style of Astroturf propaganda was Obama's mentor, the creepy David Axelrod. The neomarxist social media monopolies just allowed him to bring it to planetary scale through the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence.

Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays

In August of 2020, Democrats told us Biden's brain was working fine and Trump was an insurrectionist Hitler.

Both claims were absurd.

Now we have the WSJ reporting that Biden was mentally disabled from day one of his administration, and the same Democrats are now claiming Trump is puppet of Elon Musk.

I'm sure everyone remembers the infestation of Astroturf propaganda deception agents who flooded the comments here in 2007-2008. All of these paid deceivers commented with the same script: "I'm a Concerned Christian Conservative who has voted Republican my entire life, but I see Obama as a different kind of Democrat who reflects true Christian Conservative values..."

For years and years we used to sockpuppet "Concerned Christian Conservative" comments.

posted by Ace at 02:17 PM

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