Mike

Random Thoughts

by

One, watching the rolling campaign of exploding Hez electronic devices I cannot help but think about the wisdom of checking the sourcing of critical components of civilian and military infrastructure. Given current Chinese military and strategic doctrine, I would think twice about using a Huawei broadband router.

Two, surprise, surprise, the Fed is going to do a rate cut. Who had that on their bingo card, less than 50 days before an election? Note that it won’t have much of an effect on the economy before November, but the news of the cut and the resulting short-term bump in the stock market will crowd out any negative news about the economy. Once again economic and fiscal policy yoked to short-term political objectives.

The story within the story is that the “best economy ever” needs to be goosed.

Three, one of the issues that’s driving the high-stakes nature of this election is something no one is talking about, control of the archives. Politicians and bureaucrats may lie to you, they may eventually destroy the records (see: Hillary and the Hard Drives), but what records do exist rest on some elements of truth. It is those elements that are keys to the kingdom of the Deep State.

You can think of the Kennedy Assassination files or stuff at Langley, but it could be even something as mundane as records at the State Dept. dealing with Iran or NAID and COVID. What were the Twitter Files but the release of archival material from the private side detailing government censorship? There’s a lot of stuff they really don’t want to see the light of day,

The counter-argument to this is that Trump was already president and nothing happened then, so why should we expect anything now? Yes, Trump is on his Revenge Tour, but things really escalated when RFK, Jr. endorsed him because it is this guy who has built his whole public persona on uncovering conspiracies.

Whatever Trump’s intent, the Deep State and DC in general see this as entering the Thunderdome part of the election, two enter but only one leaves.

You Don’t Hate the Media Enough (3): Chaffapalooza Edition

by

Wrapping up from Monday’s post

First, from the comments section, Nate Winchester writes:

I like to call the second method the “chaff” method (referencing missile defenses of planes). Especially since it’s pretty effective to throw up so much stuff people get too exhausted to ever bother seeking out the truth.

Chaff, that’s perfect and catchier than my term “diversion.” Thank you, Nate. Consider your idea stolen.

Second, regarding the media’s use of chaff, I cited a clip from NBC News which placed the second Trump assassination attempt within the context of “increasingly fierce rhetoric” by implicitly linking Republican claims about Haitians in Springfield to bomb threats in that city.

This is the classic “tomato, tomahto ploy” used to depict both sides as guilty of a misdeed (when only one is), so let’s just call the whole thing off. Except that on Monday, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine stated:

“Thirty-three threats; Thirty-three hoaxes,” Gov. Mike DeWine announced during a press conference. “I want to make that very, very clear. None of these had any validity at all.”

DeWine said during the press conference that many of the threats came from “overseas.”

“We have people unfortunately overseas who are taking these actions,” DeWine added. “Some of them are coming from one particular country.”

Overseas? Well now. I doubt there are many people overseas who are being incited by JD Vance to call in bomb threats, so what do you think is going on? DeWine used the term “many” and not “all”, but I bet the rest of them stemmed from the same information warfare campaign chaff dispenser, one that also has the dual purpose of depicting the average Trump voter as a “gap-toothed Cletus.”

As far as Lester Holt and NBC News goes, mission accomplished.

And… as far as the identity of that “one particular country,” does anybody know what Thierry Breton is up to these days or where he is? He’s all into misinformation, meddling in our elections, and I heard he’s got time on his hands. 

 
Third, I had the over/under of the Trump assassination story disappearing as Thursday. Well it looks the under was the way to go. Yesterday the top headlines on CNN, New York Times, and the Washington Post were P. Diddy, exploding pagers, and Kamala at NABJ. Well yes there is the NY Post and Fox, but only them. As for the through the day, a story or two about the near-assassination would emerge way down below the digital fold, like the body of a Mafia victim that briefly bobbed to the surface of the water before sinking forever into the deep.

You Don’t Hate the Media Enough (2)

by

Stories like the second Trump assassination attempt allow us to view the various media strategies of the Left unfolding in real-time. I alternate between horror and fascination, watching how the media tries to grapple with impossible stories and tries to gaslight us yet again. L’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.

We need to understand the framework in which the media operates. As a longtime mentor once said to me, the media reports stories, they don’t report events. Events are data, stories sell papers/ads/impressions. It seems at times most stories in the media fall into one of the two masterplots, stranger comes to town or hero goes on a journey.

Of course there is the (false) assumption that the story being told is an accurate portrayal of events. Forget bias and sleaziness, that assumption just fails as a matter of epistemology.

The story paradigm has two other aspects that are important. The first is that stories have a limited life span. Not only do stories get stale over time and fall out of the public’s consciousness, but stories can be replaced in that consciousness by newer stories. The second is that media stories for the Left are never about the story as much as they are about the story ending and its lessons for society as a whole: gun control, misogyny, Orange Man Bad. The media writes every story not just about the present, but based on the story’s past, for its future.

The media typically knows the story they want to write and they will then find the facts to back it up. A reporter or editor knows the right name in their Rolodex that will provide them with the pull quote they are looking for to justify their actions.

The second assassination attempt comes at an awkward time for the Left, so, clearly, they want it squelched. Going back to what I wrote about Audrey Hale, a smart media outlet which doesn’t mind acting as the PR firm for the Left can roll even with the worst of stories, if it understands that you don’t have to “defeat” a story on its merits if you understand how to manipulate its arc.

So we can expect the media to use two strategies.

The first is suppression. Unlike with the Audrey Hale story, with the second Trump assassination attempt there is no manifesto to suppress. And unlike Thomas Matthew Crooks the second shooter is alive. However, the media uses an important trick in how it gathers information. If it wants to speed up a story’s arc and keep the story alive with new revelations, it will deploy assets into the field and keep digging up new information — new, exciting stuff to write every day. It will then juice the story with the appropriate pull quote from an “expert” from the media Rolodex.

If the media wants to slow down a story it will rely on news releases, such as they are, from investigators or authorities. It’s that relationship with authority which determines where the story is going to go, and who is going to define the story — the media or the investigating authority?

A good example of this is a headline from last night’s Washington Post:



“Investigating” “Potential” “Attempt” “FBI”? This is the type of damage control verbiage a press agent would use for a client who got caught on the 2024 equivalent of Epstein Island (not that we would ever know). How much actual digging is the WPost going to do on this story — or are they just getting their pull quotes so that they can consider it case closed? Something to watch for, going forward.

Another example of this phenomenon was the “Cats of Springfield” story, which the media claimed had been debunked on the basis of a phone call to an official in Springfield. The right quote from the right authority and case closed. No media outlet actually went to Springfield and conducted an investigation. If anybody does get around to conducting an investigation, the results will come, much like the eventual revelation of Hale’s writings, too late.

It’s good DeSantis is going to launch his own investigation regarding the assassination attempt, because otherwise we would probably start getting results by next Christmas.

The second strategy is diversion to another story line, through the use of stray voltage or simply by putting up other dust to cloud the immediate picture and slow down the clean narrative of someone trying to kill the Republican nominee (again). In less than 12 hours after the aborted assassination attempt we had the following:

-There is the “Trump had it coming due to his rhetoric” narrative, which is the equivalent of the “short skirt” argument in a rape case. No word yet if the media will investigate itself for its own rhetoric calling Trump Hitler or a Caesar who would destroy the American Republic.

-There is the attempt to draw an equivalence between the assassination attempts and Vance’s rhetoric regarding Springfield narrative. You know where this is going, the “tomato” “tomahto” argument — so let’s just call the thing off.

-Then there is the pure stray voltage angle of this is an election campaign stories that are always just around the corner. I’m sure there will be a story coming soon, breathlessly reporting Kamala buying a bag of Doritos.

The over/under of this story disappearing without a trace, unless DeSantis or someone else can grab control, is this Thursday.

A Profile of a Killer, Part 2: Audrey Hale

by

Part 1 is located here

Anybody remember Audrey Hale? That’s okay if you don’t, few do. The story of Audrey Hale is not only one of a killer, but one whose background is inconvenient for people who have the ability to make people disappear from public view.

It’s been 1 ½ years since Hale, a transgender-identifying woman, entered the Covenant School in Nashville on March 27, 2023 and proceeded to slaughter six people, including three children, and only now are we finding out about any possible motive. Hale had attended Covenant, a private Christian school, some years earlier.

I am not a big believer in “hate crimes” as a legal term, but the basic facts of the incident, transgender-identifying woman hunting down and killing Christian children, had on the surface all the hallmarks of hate.

However, within a day after the slaughter, Audrey Hale started to disappear from public consciousness. This disappearance was a deliberate act in two parts.

The first part dealt with suppressing Hale’s writings, Hale left a manifesto of sorts in her car, clearly with the intention of its being discovered. She communicated with a friend via Instagram before the killings that “One day this will make more sense. I’ve left more than enough evidence behind.” However, federal and local law enforcement seized the material and refused to release its contents, initially citing that there was still an on-going investigation, the fear it would incite other violence, and later the reason given was due to a copyright claim by the parents (the government transferred the copyright to the materials to Hale’s family). No motive for her crimes was provided by law enforcement.

The contrast with a similar case is remarkable. In 2022 Payton Gendron, a white man, drove several hours to a supermarket in Buffalo and killed ten people, all black. Gendron left writings declaring his intent. By the evening of the shooting, local law enforcement had not only reviewed said material but announced to the public that it was “…racially motivated hate crime”. Needless to say, the story filled the media for weeks and Democrats made political bank on it.

Hale’s writings were finally released to the public September 2, 2024, not by the government, but rather by the Tennessee Star which had obtained her writings and other investigation documents from an unknown source. The editor-in-chief of the Star is still under the threat by I’Ashea Myles, the judge assigned to the case, of investigation by a special prosecutor.

Only the New York Post, a few local Tennessee outlets, and some conservative sites bothered to report on the release of Hale’s writings or their content. As Hillary Clinton might have said, it had become old news. Public attention is a fickle thing.

The second part dealt with what David Plouffe, part of the Obama brain trust, once called “stray voltage.” This is a deliberate method which creates controversy to spark attention, which in turn provokes conversation, and that conversation then embeds ideas into the public consciousness.

Three days after the shootings, a mob of several hundred demonstrators entered the Tennessee Capitol. Many of the demonstrators occupied the visitor galleries inside the House chamber, and working in concert with three Democratic legislators who had taken over the chamber’s well, yelled gun-control slogans and ground official business to a halt. That action, along with a larger gun-control demonstration outside and protesters wandering the Capitol, was all over the media.

Controversy, conversation, ideas. What was once a story about a transgender-identifying woman killing Christian children had, within 72 hours, become embedded in the public’s mind as a gun-control issue. Including the protesters outside, an estimated 1,000 people showed up at the Capitol on short notice. Nicely organized, from the protest itself to the narrative switcheroo.

Then there was more controversy. The Tennessee House voted to expel two of the three Democrats who had decided to take over the chamber’s floor. The two who were expelled were black, the one who escaped expulsion was white. All heck broke loose as the racial angle was exploited and inflamed by the Democrats with a visit from Kamala Harris and an invitation for the expelled legislators to come to the White House.

With that, the disappearance of Audrey Hale was complete, buried with a combination of information suppression and stray voltage.

So now after more than a year we can finally start to fill in aspects of Hale’s profile. The part of Hale’s writings that were published last week by the Tennessee Star does not paint a pretty picture. She had been planning the Covenant massacre for some time, was struggling with mental health issues and her gender identity, and was twice evaluated for commitment. You could see how a mentally-unstable, transgender-identifying woman killing children could create image problems.

So what are the larger implications of this story?

This is Information Warfare 101, where the Left understands that while they couldn’t erase the Covenant massacre from history, they could change the way in which it was told. Feed the news cycle with alternative narratives, delay or outright suppress inconvenient information, and wait until enough time passes. Switch topics, suppress, delay.

The story they were going to tell was going to be about racism, gun control… anything but the portrait of a crazed, transgender-identifying killer.

Hole in the Sky

by

A few thoughts on the 23rd anniversary of 9/11.

I heard the report on my car radio at 5:48 MST of a plane crashing into the North Tower. It wasn’t clear what was happening and I thought of the B-25 that became disoriented by the fog and crashed into the Empire State Building.

Just as I was entering the gym that morning, I saw on the TV in the lobby the plane hit the South Tower and I had a strange reaction which remains crystalline to this day. It wasn’t shock or horror, it was merely the thought, eerie in its calmness, of “They have come.”

A year-and-a-half before then I was in the DC area on business. I had hauled out a friend of mine as an advisor, he had a very creative and detailed mind when it came to operations.

We were standing on the platform of a Metro stop, waiting for the next train to arrive, when my friend turned to me and out-of-the-blue said “How long until someone drops a biological down here?” I thought of the Aum Shinrikyo nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway and the Oklahoma City Bombing, both in 1995. Then there was the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center where a bunch of Islamists tried to topple one tower into another. Mass casualty attacks done by amateurs. We hadn’t even heard from the professionals yet.

When I caught up with my friend a few months after 9/11, he said that when he saw the plane hit the South Tower the first thing he thought of was our conversation in DC.

The thing is that you really have to believe that you are on the side of good in order to perform that much evil.

I spent some time in New Jersey growing up, way out in the sticks. We were fascinated by New York City and as you drove toward it, from many miles away, the first you saw of it was the World Trade Center. A distant yet towering fixture, a welcoming beacon on the horizon that spoke of a larger, wondrous world underneath it.

Then a bunch of barbarians blew a hole in the sky.

Scott Johnson at Powerline has made it a tradition every September 11 to link to James Stewart’s 2002 New Yorker article, “The Real Heroes are Dead”, which depicts the life of Rick Rescorla from his battlefield exploits in Vietnam, to his later marriage, to his efforts on 9/11 where his foresight led to the saving of thousands of lives and ended with his death in the South Tower when he went back looking for stragglers.

Rescorla is not just a heroic figure, but a man who through his character gave hope to his comrades, his fellow man, and most importantly to his wife. An exemplar of what the Greeks would call “Andreia.”

The article formed the basis of Stewart’s book, Heart of a Solider. I have given copies of it to the young men in my family because he was the type of man that the young should aspire to emulate. The most fitting tribute in the article comes from Rescorla’s life-long friend and comrade Dan Hill, who when interviewed by Stewart and said:

There are certain men born in this world, and they’re supposed to die setting an example for the rest of the weak bastards we’re surrounded with.

However the most haunting quote comes from the book when Hill laments:

Somebody cautioned that if a person or thing means the world to you, and you lose that person or thing, then you have lost the world. I lost the world when Rick died.

I follow a certain custom on 9/11. I read Stewart’s article, meditate, and go to 6:30 Mass. I pray for the people who died on that day and especially those who felt the terror as the towers collapsed on top of them. I give thanks for those like the first responders, Rescorla, and the people on Flight 93 who possessed the courage to do what needed to be done.

I say an extra prayer for the “Jumpers”, those who were trapped in the World Trade Center by the flames and smoke and at the end could only choose how they were to die.

It’s a sin of course to think this way, especially in a church, but even now after so many years I cannot help but be possessed of rage.