The Fake News

There’s not much new under the sun. Governments have been putting out propaganda to fool the public since the first guy figured out he could order some other guys to stack one rock on another. The trick is for the people in charge to appear to believe their own bravo sierra, but not actually believe it. If a ruler begins to think he is actually a god, for example, he is going to start making terrible errors. He needs the people to think he is a god, but he has to know he is a man and vulnerable to all the same defects as any other man.

Put another way, rulers must never get high off their own supply. A good example of this is the agit-prop about the Russians hacking the election. Polling shows that close to 60% of the public thinks the “Russians hacked us” stories are ridiculous. About 20% seem to think it happened and matters. That 20% is most assuredly the back benchers from the Cult of Modern Liberalism. That would not be a big deal, except the news media and the White House, at least for a few more weeks, are run by these people.

The result is the Obama White House is getting pressure from their toadies in the press to do something about the Russian hacking that never actually happened.

Over the past four months, American intelligence agencies and aides to President Obama assembled a menu of options to respond to Russia’s hacking during the election, ranging from the obvious — exposing President Vladimir V. Putin’s financial ties to oligarchs — to the innovative, including manipulating the computer code that Russia uses in designing its cyberweapons.

But while Mr. Obama vowed on Friday to “send a clear message to Russia” as both a punishment and a deterrent, some of the options were rejected as ineffective, others as too risky. If the choices had been better, one of the aides involved in the debate noted recently, the president would have acted by now.

The options are risky because the White House knows the hacking story was made up to pacify the lunatics. They also know the Russians know it was made up. Creating a diplomatic crisis over something both sides know is a fiction – and a ridiculous one at that – is very dangerous. The Russians will assume there must be some other reason for the move. Once countries are left to guess about motives, things can spiral out of control quickly. Thus the White House has to just make a show of it, but not actually do anything.

The “Russians hacked us” stuff does show how the Left is expert at narrative management. They can easily retrofit the past, even the very recent past, into the official story line. If necessary, they will rewrite the narrative on the fly. You see that in this section of the linked story.

Mr. Obama is the president who, in his first year in office, reached for some of the most sophisticated cyberweapons on earth to blow up parts of Iran’s nuclear facilities. Now, at the end of his presidency, he has run headlong into a different challenge in the cyberwarfare arena.

The president has reached two conclusions, senior officials report: The only thing worse than not using a weapon is using it ineffectively. And if he does choose to retaliate, he has insisted on maintaining what is known as “escalation dominance,” the ability to ensure you can end a conflict on your terms.

Obama did nothing of the sort. It was the Israelis who sabotaged the Iranian reactors with malicious code. In fact, the US intelligence community was as baffled as everyone else about how the Israelis pulled off one of the great cyberwarfare capers of all time. But, that does not serve the narrative so the past will now be restated. The new past is Obama opened a desk drawer and pulled out a “cyber weapon” to deploy against the Iranians, like the Bond villain often does when he thinks he finally has Bond trapped.

Of course, the bigger problem here is that running endless fake news stories erodes public trust in the media and their government supervisors. Fifty years ago, people could suspect something was bullshit, but proving it was often impossible. Today, there is too much information and too many ways to disseminate it. This stuff is quickly exposed and the public becomes more skeptical, as well as better able to spot the lie. That’s why only nut jobs believe the Russian hacking stuff.

Russian hackers are real. So are Ukrainian hackers and Chinese hackers and Nigerian princess looking for your bank account number. The great threat to network security, however, is not a secret team of super villains writing malicious code. The broken window is the old guy, who is uncomfortable with technology, using “pass123” as his password. John Podesta was not hacked. He had a childishly simple password and he left it lying around for people to see.

According to research, 4% of people use “123456” as their password. Cracking that is not hacking. It is guessing. According to the revelations in WikiLeaks, the people working for Team Clinton at State shared passwords with one another. That means one person leaving the door open exposes everyone, which is what happened in every conceivable way. The reason all of this private information ended up in the public during the campaign is the people producing it are morons and should never be trusted to keep secrets.

That’s ultimately the real news behind the fake news. A skeptical public was presented evidence that confirmed their skepticism. The attempts to retroactively discredit these revelations is only reinforcing the general sense that the mainstream media cannot be trusted. Trust in major media is at all time lows and their audience is dissipating as people seek out alternatives. There’s nothing mysterious about it. As the gatekeepers lose control of the gates, the public learns the truth about what lies beyond the gates.

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teapartydoc
Member
7 years ago

I recently posted comment quoting Tocqueville and the shrillness of the press just before it is silenced. Something caught my eye in Michael Grant’s Fall of the Roman Empire today. Reviewing the Theodosian Code of the fifth century he points out that the repetitive wordy overlegislation with much talk about the ignorance of citizens prone to be deceived by evil is an indication that the rules being promulgated were being ignored with impunity. Since there was no press and no armies of SJW’s back then to act on behalf of the oppressive global powers in Rome and Constantinople, the government… Read more »

Fred
Member
7 years ago

“The only thing worse than not using a weapon is using it ineffectively.”

The most dangerous sentence ever uttered.

Ps. barry hussein didn’t say it, It was written for him by some of the most dangerous people to humanity.

Nice article.

Guest
Guest
7 years ago

A proper response by the Trump organization is to announce publicly tomorrow that the American public deserves complete transparency on this issue and thus the contents of the report(s), the supporting evidence, and the author(s) of the reports will be made public by the Trump administration as soon as possible after the inauguration, and to the extent possible within the confines of the law. At present time there is precisely zero evidence in the public domain indicating that the DNC was hacked by the Russians or anyone else for that matter, or that the Podesta emails were obtained by means… Read more »

Rurik
Member
Reply to  Guest
7 years ago

Onother measure which should be taken in behalf of open information is immediately lifting the sequestration and declassifying all the personal records previously placed on Barky’s mysterious records.

Karl Hungus
Karl Hungus
7 years ago

The only people now paying attention to CBS, the NYT, etc are the mentally ill hard core. Now that their grip on the mainstream citizenry has been broken, their revenue streams are going to dry up quickly and they will die off within the next few years. But not before providing us with lots of enjoyable schadenfreude!

Doug
Doug
Reply to  Karl Hungus
7 years ago

It is the power money behind the legacy media that has enabled it to exist as total loss entities, profit to those bankrolling what is social engineering portals is the gain. TV isn’t called “programming” for nothing. What we are deluded with is fake, that’s the object. Nothing fake about the existence of the legacy media or it’s social engineering. Adam Wieshaupt had a germane observation. See if it ring any bells with you guys: “Monetary and sex bribery was to be used to obtain control of men already in high places in the various levels of all governments and… Read more »

notsothoreau
notsothoreau
7 years ago

I like General Sherman’s take on this:
“If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast. ”

For reasons I don’t understand, my husband still watches CBS news and the Sunday political shows. The mendacity is astounding. And I have to explain to him, from my reading on the “fake news” sites, why everything they say is BS. They never seem to explain how the Russians kept Hillary from campaigning in Wisconsin.

TWS
TWS
7 years ago

Why are ‘our betters’ shouting squirrel about this when we have verified proof of actual electoral fraud by democrats? Everywhere that democrats control voting districts we know they cheat. Every time we check we find more fraud. That is the real story.

Dorf
Dorf
Reply to  TWS
7 years ago

And you don’t even need to turn over the rocks. eg. Detroit precincts with more votes than voters.

SamlAdams
SamlAdams
7 years ago

Spot on about the false narrative that there is a crack team of Russian hackers sitting in the basement night and day toiling away to steal our secrets. For the most part the car was left in the driveway with the windows down and the keys in the ignition. Back when the Hillary’s server story broke I happened to be in Palo Alto with my old firm’s CISO for a meeting with one of our IT vendors–ironically to discuss security issues attendant to a switch from on-prem installation to private cloud. New info on the config of her server set… Read more »

Member
7 years ago

Example from a Politico story today referring to Trump:

“a man who cozied up to white nationalist and anti-Semitic groups.”

BillH
BillH
7 years ago

Can you imagine what the next four years would have been like if this hack-prone crowd had won the election and migrated to the White House with HRC. Disasterville for sure. Them as get hacked deserve it. Trouble is, a lot of others get hurt when the hackee is high up the totem pole.

Chuckie
Chuckie
Reply to  BillH
7 years ago

More Clinton roadkill. Anyone who touches the Clintons becomes tainted or destroyed eventually. Lawyers get rich, people get ruined. Lots of dead people in their wake.

Doug
Doug
Reply to  BillH
7 years ago

How about if you imagine what the next four years, maybe for the foreseeable future if us dirt people stand together in solidarity and freedom, are going to be like with all the pent up economic energy and motive power that has been purposefully repressed for their evil agenda by the corrupt leftist regime running things since 2007 is released?

meema
Member
7 years ago

I’m still baffled – just trying to get this straight in my head: The DNC was hacked by Russians who were attempting to sway the election yet no one has claimed the hacking changed anything except opinion because of the rampant unethical and perhaps even criminal activities that were revealed, not to mention the incompetence of the DNC email users. Right? Is this classic shoot the messenger? New lib definition of the word ‘hacked’ : mean/evil racist vast right wing conspiracy to invade and expose private emails …and it’s really really not fair and bad and I think I need… Read more »

LetsPlay
LetsPlay
Member
Reply to  meema
7 years ago

That is, if you assume the Russians were behind the attack.

RedFred
RedFred
Reply to  meema
7 years ago

Putin’s New, Evil, Diabolical Plot : ” TELL AMERICANS THE TRUTH ABOUT THEIR GOVERNMENT ! “

Member
7 years ago

A post like this demands the following response:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6iW-8xPw3k

I stand by what I said the day after the election. The biggest victims of Fake News were the people who were told Hillary Clinton was competent to become President, and that she would win.

LetsPlay
LetsPlay
Member
Reply to  hokkoda
7 years ago

Sorry Hokkoda but you misapply the term “victim” to those people. They were just stupid to fall in line for such BS. If they didn’t have the intelligence to figure it out for themselves or the individuality to stand against the popular meme, that is on them. They are only victims of their own stupidity. Not of any “fake” news. They swallowed that “hook. line and sinker.”

Member
7 years ago

The current buzz phrase is “fake news”, something of a tautology if ever there was one. When, pray tell, has “news” not been faked? Certainly not in the preceding century and in all likelihood not at any time in recorded history, as our host agrees.No government anywhere is concerned with the well-being of its citizenry beyond what it deems necessary to maintain social order among consumers; its main concern is the advancement of the interests of its financial sponsors and by default their own. The internet and alternative news sources are all that stands between citizenries and the mass media… Read more »

LetsPlay
LetsPlay
Member
Reply to  Montefrio
7 years ago

Any move? Might that include turning over control of the internet functions the US had domain of to the pukes in the EU, the UN and other controlling interests? How about the FCC and their protection of “free” speech at the behest of the media giants and government? I don’t see any “drastic” measures happening to rebel against these actions so they will not stand. I am hoping that part of Trump’s “renegotiation” of all things past includes things like internet control. Obama sure did his best to cramp our style on the First Amendment. I hope it comes back… Read more »

Christopher S. Johns
Christopher S. Johns
7 years ago

The claim that the Russian government, at the highest levels, carried out a “hack” of the Democratic Party so as to assist Donald Trump, a veritable Nazi, to become President, is both a very serious charge and the type of story line peddled by Hollywood hacks like Aaron Sorkin. To the extent that this is a serious charge, providing abundant evidence of its veracity is absolutely mandatory – and the fact that there is none whatsoever provides a clue as to its truthfulness. But when viewed as a kind of entertainment crafted to appeal to the victimization fantasies of the… Read more »

Dorf
Dorf
Reply to  Christopher S. Johns
7 years ago

Come to your senses man. It is the seriousness of the charge not the veracity. Where have you been the last 40 years?

Christopher S. Johns
Christopher S. Johns
Reply to  Dorf
7 years ago

Fuck you Dorf, and don’t condescend to me just because you’re a moron who has difficulties with reading comprehension.

LetsPlay
LetsPlay
Member
Reply to  Christopher S. Johns
7 years ago

Well Christopher, I didn’t take Dorf’s comment at condescending. Rather, it reminded me of the scene in the movie “G.I. Jane” where Demi Moore tell Olivia De Havilland something to the effect of “You taught me Senator that all it takes is an accusation in this town.” Just seems to me that your point is that the ability of the MSM to make an accusation and make it stick has worn a bit thin. People aren’t buying it any longer (except the usual suspects). What Dorf misses is that, yes, this has worked for the last 40 years but not… Read more »

Dorf
Dorf
Reply to  LetsPlay
7 years ago

I didn’t miss anything, the ‘hole simply doesn’t understand parody.

alzaebo
alzaebo
Reply to  Christopher S. Johns
7 years ago

Don’t cry, Princess, please don’t cry.
I hate it when you cry.

Al from da Nort
Al from da Nort
7 years ago

Spot on Z Man: Particularly about the dangers of accusing someone who can actually fight back, unlike the usual Clinton deflection practices. Apparently few of the Cloud Media have any clue about how security works in general much less network security in particular. Otherwise they’d know how stupid this controversy makes them look.

OTOH, many people apparently share this weakness or else they’d never file their taxes electronically, given what we know about the IRS repeated security breaches.

Jim in Brooksville
Jim in Brooksville
7 years ago

Imagine how the “historians” will describe this election in their unending attempts to dumb down our youth. This will be described as the election stolen by the Russians with the help of the FBI. And the only reason that the eminently qualified woman was not elected was sexism and lingering racism. Yes, finally the outdated electoral college will be disbanded and the candidate with the most votes will become president. Only then, will justice prevail as our undocumented citizen’s votes will at last be counted.

Doug
Doug
7 years ago

Anyone here have the sense all this false flag crap, false narratives, false crisis as a means, that seem just too convienient, the the false narratives that are so blatantly, so obviously contrived, and so yesterday? All I know for certain and I can only speak for myself, these faithless representatives of both political parties must be vanquished, that without these faithless elected, and especially, unelected mind you representatives, none of the things going down that undermine and threaten our will as dirt people, and our prosperity, our true system of republican form of government, would be taking place if… Read more »

Monty James
Monty James
7 years ago

Here’s a little fake news, apparently 4 Trump supporters are supposed to have attacked 15 to 20 anti racism activists in New York City:

http://tinyurl.com/jdffpvh

SamlAdams
SamlAdams
Reply to  Monty James
7 years ago

It seems a little improbable. However, there are enough of these little foul mouthed types running around NYC who have a lot of tough shit to say, but don’t think through the range of consequences. And 5 on 20 actually might be a fair fight considering most have zero experience with sudden and aggressive violence. But let’s see if their story holds up. The accusation that some were police will get this extra investigative scrutiny….

Doug
Doug
Reply to  SamlAdams
7 years ago

Sam, hows this grab you on that note. Closely scrutinize this popular vote map. It’s stunner. See the Percentage Voting color scale? Look closely, even where the leftist gerrymandering took place, she barely broached 55% voting margin. And the voting districts where she attains 80% and higher, I’ll bet a left nut many are precincts where the vote rig was in, aside from majority truly mental case leftward population, which we now know is an almost none existent percentage of American’s, only made to look like a majority mob by the fake stream media. What’s it look like, about 5%… Read more »

Member
7 years ago

Do you think we were behind the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey?

Karl Hungus
Karl Hungus
Reply to  TempoNick
7 years ago

Obama’s WH only kills American ambassadors!

teapartydoc
Member
Reply to  Karl Hungus
7 years ago

….Aaand we have a winner!

Doug
Doug
Reply to  Karl Hungus
7 years ago

Thats the sublime comment of the month.
Z’s blog allows you to give only one thumbs up.

Chiron
Chiron
Reply to  Karl Hungus
7 years ago

Funny and clever, but the Turkish Deep State is very close linked to the American Deep State, Just look Fethullah Gulen and his charter school business in the US, all funded by public money.

Member
Reply to  Chiron
7 years ago

I’m not talking about the Turkish deep state, I am talking about the goofballs in our government who are on friendly terms with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic State. The timing between Obama’s retaliation threat and the asassination is a bit too coincidental, don’t you think? And we all know that there is no such thing as coincidence. I wouldn’t put it past any of the evil psychopaths in our government who run foreign policy to pull something like this. And Putin will retaliate if this is indeed what happened. If I were Barry and I had anything to… Read more »

Rurik
Member
Reply to  TempoNick
7 years ago

I have heard repeated reports that John Brennan, CIA Director converted to Islam when he was in Saudi Arabia, and is known for his ruthlessness. And I think it credible that Barky might be happy to leave the incoming president with a newly begun war to knacker him from the beginning of his term. Democrats do have a tradition of planting traps for their Republican successors.

Chuckie
Chuckie
Reply to  TempoNick
7 years ago

Hope not. This is a very dangerous time and neolibcons/establishment are pulling out all the stops to start a conflict with Russia or China or Iran before Obummer leaves WH while at the same time trying to cause a constitutional crisis and delegitimize PE Trump before he’s even sworn in. May God and the good people in our security forces protect Trump. We need him or else, as he said, we won’t have a country. Russia and Turkey will hopefully not allow this act to sabotage their relations, imperfect as they are. The Western/Gulf-backed jihadi terrorists may be out of… Read more »

LetsPlay
LetsPlay
Member
Reply to  Chuckie
7 years ago

Don’t be fooled, Erdogen and Turkey are Muslim and want a return of the Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire. I wouldn’t put it past him to be setting fires while pointing fingers. I don’t trust him … at all.

Paul Bonneau
Paul Bonneau
7 years ago

Yep, you put your finger on it. Here’s something on similar lines…

http://strike-the-root.com/to-manage-and-steer-peons

Jim Gates
7 years ago

Most importantly in this conversation, the Russians didn’t hack the election. At most they hacked Hillary’s email server and exposed what she and her cronies were up to and what they thought. More likely they just went and looked at her server after others had already gained access.

According to Wiki, A security hacker is someone who seeks to breach defenses and exploit weaknesses in a computer system or network. I guess an unsecured email server can be considered a weak system…