The Return Of The More Effective Evil
If The Choice Is Between Biden and Trump, The Demise Of America Is Certain
Photo by Brian Wertheim on Unsplash
It would be hard to pinpoint exactly when America’s final descent into total corruption and darkness began, but it might be a safe bet to assume the origins were in the great lie disseminated in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.
That lie was perpetrated by losing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who, driven by a lust for power, ego, and extreme narcissism, decided to pull the trigger launching the greatest deception since the time of Senator Joeseph McCarthy, by claiming Donald Trump was allied with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russia, the Democrats and compliant corporate media claimed, had “hacked” our election, implying that, somehow, the American voter had been led astray through the massive supernatural power of Russia, wrapping its evil, sinuous tentacles around the minds of American voters through social media like Facebook. It was as if the functioning part of the brain that controls the decision-making processes, particularly voting, had been subverted by a horrible, alien force. It (Russia) had conquered America and the world!
This dubious and entirely ludicrous assertion, was, in fact, a lie, a deception perpetrated by government agencies that was amplified continuously by various media and political personalities, and became gospel to Democrats, who were more than willing to infantilize and disrespect the intelligence and common sense of their voting constituency.
Thus, the great “hybrid war” began its first battle in the unseen territory of cyberspace. The concept wasn’t new and was soon to be appropriated by NATO, a military alliance that should have ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead, NATO is stronger than ever and has endorsed the concept as a military strategy.
By definition: Hybrid warfare is a theory of military strategy, first proposed by Frank Hoffman,[1] which employs political warfare and blends conventional warfare, irregular warfare, and cyberwarfare[2] [3] with other influencing methods, such as fake news,[4] diplomacy, lawfare and foreign electoral intervention.[5][6]
What began, then, as an ideological battle of opinion on social media, the last frontier of true freedom, has evolved into a war against the individual, the central premise being you can’t be trusted with your own autonomy, thoughts, or decisions. Don’t believe your eyes and ears. It’s literally a war against your individuality.
Perhaps the most incisive, revelatory article available on the topic, IMHO, was written just last month by Jacob Siegel, journalist and editor for the online publication The Scroll. It’s long, dense, and full of detail, almost too much to absorb, but it paints a horrifying picture of the new reality: America, and by implication, the global population, are victims, manipulated dupes of the “Hoax Of The Century.”
It is, in essence, taking the wild accusations and insidious deceptions of Senator Joeseph McCarthy and turning them into a science. (albeit a science with “military applications”.)
If Hillary Clinton was the trigger, former President Obama provided the ammunition that launched the assault:
“In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.
Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops.
The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call “cognitive hacking. The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war—an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace—the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens.
Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a “whole of society” effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.”
What seems obvious is that the “disinformation war” isn’t as much an evolution as it is a strategic plan that has unfolded over many years, creeping along stealthily to take us all by surprise.
I can’t recall specifically, I think it was on the excellent “Useful Idiots” podcast, hosted by journalists Katie Halper and Aaron Mate, that I first heard the term “the more effective evil”.
A guest was being asked about the poor choices American voters are always given, which ends up, inevitably, as a “choice” between “evil and the lesser evil”. In this context, the GOP was the evil, and the Democrats the lesser evil. The guest interjected and said he believed the Democrats weren’t actually the “lesser” evil, but in fact, the more effective evil.
If you believe in a better world, free of war, free from the constraints of greed-driven capitalism, a world where health and income equality are prioritized, where citizens don’t have to live in fear of losing their jobs, homes, or income, you won’t find that world in the actions of The Republican or Democratic party.
The bad news of this past week: The Democrats, inexplicably, have decided to double down and wholly endorse the reelection of Joe Biden, all under the shadow of Republicans, at least at this juncture, standing behind Donald Trump. It’s the nightmare “choices” of 2020 being replayed in slow motion in an (only politically) declared “post-COVID” world. Haven’t we seen this movie, and didn’t it suck on the first viewing?
Well, to be fair, it’s not EXACTLY the same.
This time, the censorship and disinformation warfare have ramped up to levels previously unseen.
Stellar journalists like Matt Taibbi, who has called out the fusion of government alphabet agencies and social media, resulting in pure censorship of viable accounts, opinions, and information on Twitter, have been intimidated, threatened, and marginalized, and in the case of Taibbi, threatened with the fate suffered by Julian Assange by no less than a non-voting member of Congress.
Another revered journalist, Seymour Hersh, widely respected in the pre-disinformation war era when it was safe to practice actual journalism, has had his integrity discredited by his former employer, the New York Times, as well as legacy corporate media. They continue to actively ignore his reporting asserting that, in fact, it was Joe Biden and Norway who engineered the bombing of the Nordstream pipeline. In the 2023 reality of countering disinformation, corporate media no longer disseminate “news” they are handed scripted talking points. In Hersh’s case, this is the Times dutifully repeating a CIA cover story that has no basis in common sense or reality.
It seems almost inconceivable, and to Democrats heretical, but the recent firing of Tucker Carlson, Fox News most popular host, silenced one of the few voices who spoke truth to power. In questioning narratives about Syria, Ukraine, and the Hunter Biden laptop story, Carlson won the respect of other left-leaning “outsider” journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Mate.
The critical point is that the disinformation war is NOT about ideology, it’s about silencing anyone who seeks truth and counters official narratives of the “uni party.
”
While no one with any sanity would truly believe that Donald Trump is the antidote to this tendency toward totalitarianism, it should be noted that Trump was, and remains, a casualty of the disinformation war. That is not to say he is a victim in the helpless sense. As Journalist Jacob Siegel notes from the above-referenced article:
“Two days after Trump took office, a smirking Senator Chuck Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that it was “really dumb” of the new president to get on the bad side of the security agencies that were supposed to work for him: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.”
Trump had used sites like Twitter to bypass his party’s elites and connect directly with his supporters. Therefore, to cripple the new president and ensure that no one like him could ever come to power again, the intel agencies had to break the independence of the social media platforms. Conveniently, it was the same lesson that many intelligence and defense officials had drawn from the ISIS and Russian campaigns of 2014—namely, that social media was too powerful to be left outside of state control—only applied to domestic politics, which meant the agencies would now have help from politicians who stood to benefit from the effort.
In a technical or structural sense, the censorship regime’s aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That’s why the authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter Biden’s laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. Disinformation, now and for all time, is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system.”
Joe Biden’s abysmal record (and by default his fellow Democratic legislators) has been, thanks to this new control over social media, effectively scrubbed clean.
None of his campaign promises have been fulfilled: no minimum wage, income inequality at record levels, no actual healthcare, and escalation of the proxy war in Ukraine, (while sending US taxpayer money to Zelensky, and military generals in Ukraine despite clear evidence that money is being embezzled,) turning his back on the poisoning of American citizens after busting a strike and rail contract demanding safer railroad practices, the list is endless.
What is clear is that, despite attempts by hidden hand government agencies to cover over criminality, Biden and his son Hunter, with other possible familial actors, have been engaging in financial, possibly criminal actions, on an international level, all while pointing to the unsympathetic figure of Donald Trump, an easy target. The media and the Biden administration lied, and government agencies, in concert with cooperative social media, told the public that the true story was, of course, Russian disinformation. All to ensure a Biden victory in 2020.
It seems clear, in a point emphasized by Jacob Siegel that America has reached that dark place:
“Of course there are violent extremists in America, as there have always been. However, if anything, the problem is less severe now than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when political violence was more common. Exaggerated claims about a new breed of domestic extremism so dangerous it cannot be handled through existing laws, including domestic terrorism statutes, is itself a product of the U.S.-led information war, which has effaced the difference between speech and action.
“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots. They start with words,” Clint Watts proclaimed in 2017 when he testified before Congress. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations.”