Tag: PSYOP

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First Amendment rights international affairs national politics & policies

TikTok Smoke But No Gun?

China, Tik Tok, social media, brainwashing, PSYOP, spying

I’d like to ban the Communist Party — in China. But TikTok — here?

The app’s possible use as spyware and worse by Chinese Communist Party operatives should be investigated thoroughly.

“Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government,” explains The New York Times. “They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations.”

This concerns me enough to not be on TikTok, but while we smell smoke, I see no smoking gun.

And banning Tik Tok has every appearance of doing what the CCP would do — and did with Facebook and YouTube and X (formerly known as Prince — er, Twitter). Not to mention being unconstitutional.

The TikTok ban that passed the House last week — with only 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans voting No — if passed by the Senate and signed by the President, would set up another level of surveillance and Internet control that would be used against American citizens beyond users of this social media video-sharing platform.

It comes down to good ends not justifying evil means, in this case an all-out government attack upon freedom of speech and press.

There are things the federal government could do — and already has done — to limit TikTok’s influence. Last year, the U.S. (along with Canada) banned it from all government devices. 

This didn’t even require an act of Congress. Arguably, Trump could have done this with Facebook and Twitter on federal government devices when it became clear that these platforms were being used to orchestrate partisan speech control.

And, of course, a general social cause against TikTok could be engaged without threat of force. Political leaders owe it to the people to speak out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies social media

A Package Deal

Tik Tok, app, China, censorship

Suppose suggested legislation outlaws both murder and walking. How could you oppose it? Are you, a dedicated perambulator-peripatetic, also a murder-supporter?

Obviously, this would be an attempt to foist a package deal consisting of unrelated or mutually contradictory elements.

Consider a more true-to-life example.

In the Wall Street Journal, Philip Hamburger argues that a congressional bill targeting TikTok would do much more than counter Chinazi spying on Americans (“The TikTok Bill Is a Sneak Attack on Free Speech”).

If curbing or even outlawing TikTok were the sole focus, one could argue the merits of the legislation given what is known about the company’s collecting of data and its relationship with the Chinese government. There’s no free-speech protection of foreign espionage.

However, as Hamburger points out, the bill gives the federal government “sweeping power over communications” and could be used to stifle speech protected by the Constitution.

The proposed statute would allow the Department of Commerce to undertake open-ended mitigation of “undue or unacceptable” risk regarded as arising from use of communications technology in which any entity subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary “has any interest.”

This is very vague and very all-encompassing. The legislation thus confers power over domestic communication companies “that could be used to extort their cooperation in censorship.”

Attempts to resist such “mitigation” or censorship would risk administrative fines of $250,000, criminal penalties of $1 million, two decades in prison. For supporting freedom of speech?

Please walk away from this, Congress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people

X Lives Matter

mind control, PSYOP

I don’t usually comment on fashion. But at a recent show in Paris, this rather famous rapper who calls himself Ye but who used to call himself Kanye West sported newly designed black-and-white T-shirts with the slogan “White Lives Matter” on the back. Squarely in the territory of ideological fashion, I can comment without too much embarrassment.

There was some furor. 

It is unfashionable, politically, for anyone — even a black man, or especially a famous black man — to admit the obvious truth that “White Lives Matter.”

It appears that chic faux-lib’rals regard the slogan “Black Lives Matter” as some sort of trademark that precludes extension to other races. Only people of color may use an “X Lives Matter” kind of branding.

Idiotic. And racist. But ABC News laid out the case as if it were clearly established truth: “The [White Lives Matter] phrase has been described by the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center as a white supremacist hate slogan that originated in 2015 as a racist response to the civil rights movement Black Lives Matter.”

And yet a statement like “White Lives Matter” or “Human Lives Matter” can only be hate speech if you think one usage defines words forever.

Which of course is precisely what some are trying to establish here.

Why? Well, the better to engage in angry, hateful ideological pseudo-discourse: shaming; marginalizing; de-humanizing.

Ye also posed with Candace Owens, a conservative commentator for The Daily Wire, wearing those shirts, and that, too, really annoyed people.

Not that it should. Ye was once married to a white woman, and Candace is married to a white man. They are making a commonsense point here: if you can’t say your spouse matters, what kind of spouse are you? And if you cannot extrapolate that mattering principle more generally, what kind of human are you?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability defense & war general freedom social media

Pentagon Personae

social media, PSYOP, spying, CIA, FBI, NSA, China

We think of Facebook and Twitter as platforms for you and me and our fellow citizens to share information and opinions and photos and just plain fun.

But our government agencies are also on those platforms, secretly as well as openly.

And not just for fun and games.

It’s a serious information war out there — with mis- and dis- elements, too — and Facebook and Twitter may be in over their heads.

“The takedowns in recent years by Twitter and Facebook of more than 150 bogus personas and media sites created in the United States,” wrote Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post in mid-September, “was disclosed last month by internet researchers Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. While the researchers did not attribute the sham accounts to the U.S. military, two officials familiar with the matter said that U.S. Central Command is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny.”

Ms. Nakashima’s report begins with the big news: “Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, last week instructed the military commands that engage in psychological operations online to provide a full accounting of their activities by next month,” and we are told of a “sweeping audit” to probe how the Pentagon “conducts clandestine information warfare.”

This is largely in response to Facebook and Twitter identifying and removing “fake accounts suspected of being run by the U.S. military in violation of the platforms’ rules.”

Social media companies took down actual U.S. military psy-op accounts. But it is worth noting that the report does not mention Facebook or Twitter taking down foreign equivalents, though that has happened in the past.

It might be time to reconsider all government activity in social media.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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folly insider corruption national politics & policies

Vax Con?

con job, con, sting, covid

Is the mRNA “vaccine” push a “con job”?

“‘Confidence games’ (or ‘cons’)” are, according to scholars Barak Orbach and Lindsey Huang,* “a distinctive species of fraudulent conduct” perpetrated “to further voluntary exchanges that are not mutually beneficial.”

In their paper, Orbach and Huang list a number of typical cons, noting that many “cons succeed by inducing judgment errors — chiefly, errors arising from imperfect information and cognitive biases.”

This is not an extended analysis of how a major con could be pulled off, but inducing a “mass formation psychosis,” which I’ve talked about before, is key. Government lockdowns and mask mandates have been very effective in creating pandemic hysteria, leading to government vaccination mandates. 

But perhaps it is how government officials deal with data that we most clearly see the confidence game aspect. 

The province of Alberta has just been caught using misdirection and disinformation to keep up the fear levels, distracting us from considering the negative impact of the vaxxes. Government officials “claim very impressive vaccine effectiveness by following the fraudulent standard set by the drug manufacturers in the pantomime clinical trials,” as the Metatron Substack page explains, “to ignore the adverse outcomes in the first two weeks post administration.”

The beneficial effects of the vaxxes, we are told, take a fortnight to go into effect. But when governments place all hospitalizations and deaths for those 14 days under the rubric of “unvaccinated,” they misinform — effectively burying negative side-effects of the promoted therapeutic. And the switcheroo is not insignificant: Alberta had counted more than half of its vaccinated deaths as unvaccinated.

Tellingly, the province took off its website the data that showed all this.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Con Men and Their Enablers: The Anatomy of Confidence Games,” 85 Social Research 795 (2018), Arizona Legal Studies Discussion Paper No. 18-27).

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Cosmic or Merely Comic?

Jussie Smollett, woke, victim, progressivism

A number of important criminal trials are bunching up together at the moment. The Rittenhouse acquittal came first, but the Coffee and Arbery verdicts, along with it, also qualified as major milestones. Looming over our heads is perhaps the headiest of all, the Ghislaine Maxwell honey pot case. But for the wildest comedy, there’s Jussie Smollett’s.

The story is such a travesty it is hard not to laugh — especially if you have heard comedian Dave Chappelle’s bit about “the French actor, Juicy Smolliet.”

Eddie Scarry, writing in The Federalist, provides a less humorous take: “Smollett wasn’t engaging in a hoax. He was perpetuating a scam and that scam has a name. It’s called ‘social justice.’”

Scarry makes a case for Smollett’s rationality: “It’s not like Smollett is a demonstrable sociopath who told an aimless lie about being attacked by Trump supporters in 2019 for the sake of it.” When he hired two Nigerians to fake a racist, homophobic attack on him, he did so with a purpose: to parlay rampant “woke” sentiment to gain fame and fortune. “This is what our entire culture is teaching now — that the quickest way to advance is to claim victimhood on account of race, sex, or sexual identity — ideally, some combination of all three.”

While the scam element is obvious in Smollett’s greed, social justice itself is not a scam. It is an ideology of constant revolution, always to re-make the world over to correct for cosmic injustices.

And it’s more: Social justice is open-source psychological warfare. It doesn’t need centralized control — though it has some, in the form of the insider elitists — because its strength comes from the distributed acceptance and performances of its hapless criminal pushers.

Thankfully, comic criminality may undermine its allure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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