Day: August 6, 2020

Flooding the zone with shit

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Flooding the zone with shit

Observers of the current chaos in the US, UK, Brazil and elsewhere often ask why the populist leaders, Trump, Johnson and Bolsonaro, behave so ineptly. Why do so many people follow leaders with no discernible plan or competence? The reason, as the journalist Jay Rosen has explained, is that the plan is to have no plan. Rather, the leaders promote massive confusion about who is responsible for Covid-19 and the economic and social situation, fixing blame on ‘leftists’, the press, China, or some other foreign element; imposing tariffs that will disadvantage their own populations; withdrawing from the World Health Organisation … and so on. The aim, in the words of Steve Bannon, is to ‘flood the zone with shit’, overwhelming the media and the population with disinformation, distraction, and denial. Out of this chaos will step the saviour strong man, as Trump stepped out of the clouds of tear gas released on his own people to hold up a bible in front of the White House church.

Facebook as an American geopolitical weapon

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Facebook as an American geopolitical weapon

What made this so obvious was the glaring double standard that’s guiding Facebook’s takedown of Maffick. On prodding from a U.S. government-funded thinktank, it suddenly demanded transparency for Pages run by a media company funded by Russia (and then shut them down with no warning). Yet Facebook continues to allow the U.S. government and powerful U.S. corporations to operate their Pages without hinderance — even when these Pages are obviously set up by lobby groups and government initiatives to covertly manipulate people and influence democracy. 

Which Pages? Well, just from the ones that I’ve come across in my reporting over the years, they include those run by old spook-spinoffs like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Tor Project, as well as corporate propaganda groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cato Institute — just to name two out of many similar outfits trying to influence Americans on behalf of their donors.