Thread by @JoshJPhilipp

Thread:

It's time we talked about Chaos Operations.

... and how legacy news outlets and political actors use them to control people.

Column here: theepochtimes.com/how-legacy-new…

In just two years of the Trump presidency, the terrorist group ISIS has been nearly eliminated, black and Hispanic unemployment have reached all-time lows, the economy is growing at a rate deemed impossible under the Obama administration ... (1)

... American manufacturing is returning, the United States has become the world’s largest crude oil producer, and there are a whole array of other successes too long to list here. (2)

Despite these successes, the Trump administration has been under constant attack by a collective of legacy news outlets, political actors, and policy-focused front organizations that have created a constant picture of chaos in the United States and in the White House. (3)

The narratives used to discredit Trump have been debunked one after the next. Criticisms of “antisemitism” were turned around to expose antisemitism among leftist politicians and news outlets, the “Trump-Russia” scandal has transformed into the “Spygate”, etc. (4)

In the latest chapter of these chaos operations, House Democrats are voting to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for his refusal to not release the fully unredacted report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller. (5)

Barr was not required to release even the information he did, and cannot release the redacted parts because they relate to grand jury information on ongoing cases. (6)

But what’s important to remember here is that none of this matters.

This is not about Barr, or about the Mueller report, or about foreign influence in the elections.

This is about a political faction desperately trying to hold power. (7)

Their only hope to hold power is to cripple the Trump presidency as much as possible, while controlling public perceptions enough to flip the coming 2020 elections. Understand this, and everything you’re witnessing will make sense. (8)

For them, facts don’t matter. The issues don’t matter. What we’re witnessing is just a chaos operation—the purpose is to manufacture an illusion of chaos.

There are several tactics at play, and by understanding their mechanisms we can see the sleight of hand at work. (9)

Some extra info on political uses of chaos: (10) theepochtimes.com/the-nature-of-…

A major tool in this is the “above and below” tactic. This works through manufactured crisis and response, then of subversion through the Hegelian Dialectic process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis to control the direction of a process set in motion. (11)

The “below” part works through manufactured incidents and protests, which the “above” can react to. Groups on the ground (below) create an incident, media (above) amplifies the incidents to create public demand (below), which political factions (above) can react to. (12)

This process creates a feedback loop, where reactions from politicians give fuel for more news stories, which further agitate public opinion—which political groups can again respond to. (13)

When the process reaches a boiling point, and when public demand is strong enough, the political factions orchestrating the illusion can use it to justify political intervention through policy. (14)

We recently witnessed this tactic used to manufacture the Trump-Russia scandal:

The Hillary campaign and Democratic National Committee (DNC) financed the creation of opposition research under Fusion GPS ... (15)

... The opposition research took the form of the now-debunked Steele Dossier, which political operatives distributed to news outlets and spread throughout the U.S. government. (16)

... The Steele Dossier was used by news outlets and political operatives to claim Trump had colluded with Russia.

This started waves of public panic, which these same political operatives used to call for investigations into Trump and later to undermine his presidency. (17)

The above and below tactic comes from communist movements. It was described in 1957 by Czech Communist Party theoretician Jan Kozak, as a method for small groups to gain power by agitating society from two directions—one faction in government and another on the streets. (18)

“One way to exert ‘pressure from below,’ as Kozak explained, was to fill the streets with rioters, strikers and protesters, thus creating the illusion of a widespread clamor for change from the grassroots,” states “The Shadow Party” by David Horowitz and Richard Poe. (19)

“Radicals in the government would then exert ‘pressure from above,’ enacting new laws on the pretext of appeasing the protesters in the street—even though the protesters (or at least their leaders) were themselves part of the plot.” (20)

“The majority of the people would have no idea what was going on,” it states. “Squeezed from ‘above’ and ‘below,’ most would sink into apathy and despair, believing they were hopelessly outnumbered by the radicals—even though they were not.” (21)

Through this method, it says, a small radical group can “impose its will” on a majority of people who are politically moderate, “even under a democratic, parliamentary system.” (22)

When Mueller completed his investigations into Trump-Russia collusion, Barr concluded that there was no obstruction and no collusion.

And you can't obstruct if there was no crime. (23)

The Mueller report also showed there was never any evidence that Trump colluded with Russia, which should have raised questions on how the investigation was launched in the first place. (24)

Yet, rather than admit to the public they lied for close to two years, the legacy news outlets and political operatives behind this manufactured scandal merely created a new scandal—going after Barr for contempt for not publicly releasing information from an investigation. (25)

This of course won’t go anywhere. Barr is prohibited by law from disclosing Grand Jury testimony, and wasn’t required to declassify the Mueller report in the first place. But again, the surface issue is not the purpose. (26)

What’s at play is merely a perception management campaign for incident response. (27)

The incident is the Mueller report showing that news outlets and politicians lied to the public.

The perception management campaign is to ensure their close to two years of spreading disinformation to agitate public emotion doesn’t turn the public against them. (28)

They needed a way to keep some credibility as their narrative crumbled, and to maintain the emotions they’ve instilled in their base.

Their attacks on Barr are meant to divert public attention and emotion, in order to maintain the public outrage they helped sow. (29)

This public outrage is strategically important for the left’s political power. Socialism is dependent on having a group that the public is told to hate, and to struggle against. (30)

When it comes to social issues, part of the purpose of agitation propaganda is to create emotional memory—to cause people to react to set issues with emotion, rather than logic. (31) theepochtimes.com/emotion-over-l…

The agitator will then direct this rage by latching it onto social issues, which can be used to form policy.

Then, any attack on the social issue becomes a trigger for the emotional memory. (32)

Through this, people are rendered incapable of rational thought. They become unable to look at factual information and come to reasonable conclusions ... (33)

... Like Pavlov’s Dogs trained to salivate at the sounds of bells, they are conditioned to go into a frothing rage when hearing anything that contradicts the false narratives they’ve been fed. (34)

After the public has been emotionally agitated, systems are then established to maintain the false narratives that created the agitation—lest the truth render people rational. (35)

This takes the form of political correctness and political labels to launch attacks on people who go against the narratives. This is enforced by all the main players of the political faction—including by celebrities, politicians, internet platforms, and legacy news outlets. (36)

If a person posts a tweet that goes against a narrative, they can be banned from Twitter, as we saw with actor James Woods. Woods tweeted, “If you try to kill the king, you best not miss. #HangThemAll” (37)

Woods's tweet was clearly a commentary on the effort to delegitimize Trump’s presidency with the Russia collusion story, and the perception that the political scandal could constitute treason. (38)

If a person makes a public act that catches the leftist outrage, he or she risks having leftist politicians and news outlets publicly defaming them in order to destroy their reputations and personal lives, as we saw with Nick Sandmann. (39)

Under the now disproven Trump-Russia scandal, for example, outlets that questioned the narrative were accused of spreading fake news. (40)

The same applied to outlets that reported on “Spygate,” where the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign. Even though Spygate can now be verified, it is still described on Wikipedia as a “conspiracy theory by Donald Trump.” (41)

This acts as a form of political terrorism. By attacking people at any level of society—from celebrities to high school kids—the left sends the message that anybody can be publicly destroyed. (42)

This terrorism is meant to silence people, and to force them to fall in line.

Under political terrorism, people become too afraid to voice questions of established narratives, or to publicly oppose political issues. (43)

These tactics again pull from communist systems. Mao Zedong framed this concept of “political correctness” in 1967, with the idea that anyone who supports the communist political policies are politically correct, and anyone who opposes them should be attacked. (44)

We also saw it with the Marxist idea of “ideology” where anything that stands against it is viewed as opposition to be destroyed by any means. (45)

Former Polish Minister of Education Ryszard Legutko described the effect of this belief in his book “The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies.” (46)

Under communism, these types of political attacks “practically put an end to any form of intellectual argumentation. No one argued, but either accused someone of ideological treason or defended himself against such a charge.” (47)

/End/