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I don’t know if this is interesting at all but I’ve got a little while before school pickup so I’m gonna share a little intel I’ve learned since being on the Twitternet.
As Rolling Stone accurately reported, I am what’s known as a “Twitter rando.”
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As Rolling Stone accurately reported, I am what’s known as a “Twitter rando.”
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I had no prior background in politics, journalism or the media. I’m not a politico or reporter.
I’m a dude nursing the last of a well-earned flip-flop tan writing stuff on The Twitter Machine.
I arrived at Twitter connectionless to all things politics.
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I’m a dude nursing the last of a well-earned flip-flop tan writing stuff on The Twitter Machine.
I arrived at Twitter connectionless to all things politics.
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As my audience started to grow though, a surreal thing started happening.
If I was publicly venting frustration about a prominent person in the news, people would seek me out to tell me things.
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If I was publicly venting frustration about a prominent person in the news, people would seek me out to tell me things.
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The first thing I learned from that was:
When people are frustrated, they talk.
Specifically, they talk to people who are on record in public on a topic - but they do so only in private.
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When people are frustrated, they talk.
Specifically, they talk to people who are on record in public on a topic - but they do so only in private.
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For some it’s because they just want to vent to a kindred spirit.
For others it’s because they can’t or won’t go on record themselves but want to add what they know to someone else’s body of information.
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For others it’s because they can’t or won’t go on record themselves but want to add what they know to someone else’s body of information.
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When I was dissing Avenatti against a storm of backlash, I got an inbox full of personal stories of dealings with him, info about him, etc.
That phenomenon repeats nearly anytime I’m on record with frustrations about a known figure. Kavanaugh, Barr, Mueller, whoever.
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That phenomenon repeats nearly anytime I’m on record with frustrations about a known figure. Kavanaugh, Barr, Mueller, whoever.
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One thing us public folk don’t really get is that there are no secrets in politics.
For every leak, there are 100 people who knew.
Information flows. There is just an unspoken set of rules insiders follow.
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For every leak, there are 100 people who knew.
Information flows. There is just an unspoken set of rules insiders follow.
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The first is that anything shared privately stays private.
It has no public use.
It becomes just the soft intelligence that informs your thinking without ever being even tacitly reference-able.
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It has no public use.
It becomes just the soft intelligence that informs your thinking without ever being even tacitly reference-able.
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The second is that facts are conveyed as facts; opinions are conveyed as opinions.
When someone in the know is stating something from knowledge they tend to merely lay it out there in declarative statements. “_____ did that because of ____.”
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When someone in the know is stating something from knowledge they tend to merely lay it out there in declarative statements. “_____ did that because of ____.”
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When they’re connecting dots or offering their own conclusions, they speak in a way that makes that clear.
It is not hard to tell the difference.
“Here’s why that happened...” doesn’t sound at all like “Here’s what I think is happening...”.
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It is not hard to tell the difference.
“Here’s why that happened...” doesn’t sound at all like “Here’s what I think is happening...”.
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Also, it’s sort of softly understood to not ask someone confiding in you who their sources are.
If their sources are NOT part of their obvious circles, they might say so.
An attorney doesn’t need to say they heard something from people in the legal community though. Duh.
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If their sources are NOT part of their obvious circles, they might say so.
An attorney doesn’t need to say they heard something from people in the legal community though. Duh.
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Information just flows in an informal network of trust.
The public may not hear all of that information (or hear it for awhile) but you can still get a sense of it by paying attention.
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The public may not hear all of that information (or hear it for awhile) but you can still get a sense of it by paying attention.
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Take the Nancy Pelosi / impeachment issue.
I have known that she opposed impeachment since long before the Mueller report even dropped.
It was not close to a secret.
The reasons were well known and well understood. I heard them multiple times from multiple people.
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I have known that she opposed impeachment since long before the Mueller report even dropped.
It was not close to a secret.
The reasons were well known and well understood. I heard them multiple times from multiple people.
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The kinds of people who would have also heard all that and been free to touch on it in public are:
- ex-insiders
- trustworthy political journalists
- respected pundits and analysts
They’d be free to touch on the topic w/o breaking confidences or the soft code so to speak.
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- ex-insiders
- trustworthy political journalists
- respected pundits and analysts
They’d be free to touch on the topic w/o breaking confidences or the soft code so to speak.
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If you want to see through the spin to get a glimpse of the knowledge floating around the info networks, pay attention to people who are coldly fact-based:
Former prosecutors, ex-intel, ex-military, etc.
They generally don’t guess. They don’t present theories as facts.
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Former prosecutors, ex-intel, ex-military, etc.
They generally don’t guess. They don’t present theories as facts.
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Anyway, this is getting long and boring but here are some key points from this ramble:
1) People who really have secret inside sources would never tell you that.
2) Conversely, people telling ya they have an inside source are usually either amateurs or liars.
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1) People who really have secret inside sources would never tell you that.
2) Conversely, people telling ya they have an inside source are usually either amateurs or liars.
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3) When a whole bunch of people who would logically be well-connected to the soft information network are all saying the same things, believe them.
They might have all heard different parts of a larger story but they all generally get the plot.
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They might have all heard different parts of a larger story but they all generally get the plot.
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Us couch folk just watching the television box don’t really get a glimpse of this but there truly are no secrets in politics.
There are just a lot of people good at managing information and sharing it discretely.
Look for the measured voices. Their words say the most.
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There are just a lot of people good at managing information and sharing it discretely.
Look for the measured voices. Their words say the most.
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