Disinformation campaigns and how the rise of Nationalism and fascism have been organised.
I’ve spent a while finding connections, noticing associations, and drawing parallels with the way the right-wing Nationalists have been organising themselves.
Collating information that I have read and connecting it.
“It’s easier to fool people than convince them they have been fooled.” (Mark Twain)
In 2017, Steve Bannon (U.S. fascist Trump ex-advisor right-wing ideologue and Boris Johnson’s speech writer) asked Nigel Farage to be part of a “convening authority” to “knit together a populist nationalist movement around the world.”
Bannon met with France’s Marie La Pen, antisemite Hungarian leader Victor Orban, Modi, Orban, Sisi, Duterte, Boris Johnson, Bolsonaro, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, and Polish PM Mateusz Morawiecki.
This is TransNationalism
The rise of the far-right: The far-right movement has been organising for some time now and interfering in the politics of other countries. This is evidenced in our own nation by figures like Netanyahu, Trump, and Putin, along with the friend of eugenicist and elitist Dominic Cummings, who also has direct connections with right-wing U.S. Republican businessmen and think tanks.
This is
Transnationalism. Wealthy Thatcherites like Farage and his buddies are trying to colonise us here in Britain. They’re calling it ‘sovereignty!’
Farage took Trump’s (Bannon’s) advice to work with Boris Johnson.
We know anyhow Farage chose his class over his ‘politics,’ Farage's surrender to the Tory Party proved what has always been that he is a Thatcherite Right wing ‘reformed’ ‘deformed’ Tory.... who represents the rich.
Dominic Cummings’s bosses, Matthew and Sarah Elliott, were/are very close friends of Candace Owens and George Farmer of Far Right Turning Point.
Patel, Baker, Farage, Delingpole, and Jacob Rees-Mogg are also involved. These Tory MPs support a new branch of a ‘sinister’ right-wing U.S. group that is creating a watchlist of “leftist” university professors, which has drawn comparisons to McCarthyism.
It says it espouses “freedom, free markets and limited government” and runs events sponsored by the National Rifle Association. Farmer is engaged to Turning Point USA communications director Ms Owens, a high-profile supporter of the U.S. president and critic of the Black Lives Matter movement,
Former international development secretary Priti Patel said the group represented a “new generation” of Conservative values,
Other members include BeLeave and BrexitCentral founder Darren Grimes, who was fined £20,000 for breaking EU referendum spending laws last year.”
Scary stuff? Interesting connections
See the link here. Imprisoned or not, there is no doubt Steve Bannon is still there somewhere.
Steve Bannon is/was the ideologue and spokesman of the conservative rich and tight-fisted aristocratic fascist and racist elite, financially powerful gentry, directly has connections with right-wing U.S. Republican businessmen and think tanks.
Bannon and U.S. ultra-conservatives aimed at Pope Francis
The pontiff had expressed support for migrants and the poor while warning against nationalism and unfettered capitalism.
Since becoming Pope in 2013, Francis has consistently emphasised the type of “America First” nationalism championed by Bannon.
A few years ago, Bannon won a battle with Italy’s culture ministry to establish a right-wing Catholic political academy in Italy.
But while they still enjoyed support from Italian right-wing politicians such as former interior minister Matteo Salvini, Bannon and Harnwell lost key supporters within the Church.
Steve Bannon, a Catholic, was helping to craft the curriculum for a leadership course aimed at right-wing Catholic activists.
As well as other marginalised groups, including the poor and gay people. Pope Francis has also defended diversity.
Bannon alleges that Francis has mismanaged numerous sex abuse scandals roiling the Church and says the Pope is not treating the issue seriously enough.
Bannon had found an ideological ally in conservative Cardinal Raymond Burke, a former archbishop of St. Louis who was demoted by Francis and has supported calls for the Pope’s resignation.
Other American theologians have openly attacked Francis for “devaluing the church’s doctrines.”
According to Massimo Faggioli, a liberal professor of theology at Villanova University, the centre of the anti-Francis backlash is in the U.S.
John Carr, director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown, said this reformist impulse has rankled church traditionalists. Accustomed to favourable treatment from the Vatican, many American Catholics saw themselves sidelined by Francis’ progressive agenda.
“If you’re an archbishop living in a big house with a big car, and he says you need to have the smell of the sheep, that’s threatening,” Carr added. “Pope Francis looks at the world from the bottom up and from the outside in. If you’re on top, if you’re an insider in the Church, in the economy, in politics, he can threaten you.”
Robert Sirico, the founder of the Acton Institute, a Michigan-based think tank, considers Francis sympathetic to socialism.
“His dominant understanding of business is selfish and doing things to benefit only themselves rather than the poor,” said Sirico, who met Francis in 2013.
The Acton Institute’s mission is to integrate free market principles with Christian theology, and Sirico disagrees with the Pope on issues such as welfare, taxation, and climate change.
Bannon described his project as “an academy that brings the best thinkers together” to train “modern gladiators.”
Other connections.
I noticed that a few years ago, certain populist politicians like Bolsanaro and Nigel Farage had started to smear ‘education’ and insightful learning—enlightenment and knowledge.
FARAGE also dislikes the ‘arts’ as Steve Bannon and Trump dislike Education and Culture; they see it as ‘Liberal Elite.’
The rise of Insular nationalism cuts people off from other cultures. Culture wars have been declared (Steve Bannon.)
Dumbing down is part of that cultural war that’s going on.
“A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times a few years ago. “There are casualties in war.” That says a lot!
As with the rise of the Nazis, there’s a frightening mixture of gullibility and cynicism.
When people are lied to, they choose to believe it.
When a lie is debunked, they claim they’d known all along.
And would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
Hannah Arendt wrote this about the most successful totalitarian leaders.
The onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing; think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
Much of American media and press on this side of the Fox News darkness does not dare to call out a fascist. That is partly out of knee-jerk complicity with the culture of leadership and celebrity worship. But not forgetting that in the 1930’s tax-dodging Millionaire press baron Lord Rothmeres Daily Mail supported the blackshirts, Mussolini and Hitler. Which explains the paper’s Xenophobic stance today.
The right-wing press takes an active political position.
Owned by tax dodging millionaire Nationalists, the Express, The Sun, the Daily Mail, whose side of the truth do you think they report from? They take a political position, and they take the side of the wealthy.
In an essay on
Press freedom is a hero of mine. Tom Paine warned against the view “common with printers, especially of newspapers, ‘that those who own and operate a press are automatically entitled “to have more privileges than other people.’”
These newspapers are grooming our citizens, Xenophobes and racists, Waiting to get your Morning Murdochs before deciding which direction your anger will be heading in.
In certain Newspapers….We are taught to believe it is US against THEM.
But We are also THEM.
Those Newspaper Barons ‘whose journalists call those Communist nurses and Fire-fighters ‘benefit scroungers.’
Wealthy businessmen are terrorised by the idea of Black and white and refugees, all peoples uniting together.
Us, people have been infantilised. We have become used to having every opinion handed to them without needing to think about it.
I can’t trust newspapers owned by millionaires who
Live abroad.
These newspaper owners should be required to account for their wealth to their readers and explain how they avoid paying wealth tax and how that affects their political bias and distorted spin on news stories.
GB ‘news’ – "It says it all. Tory mouthpiece: Everyone is singing from the same song sheet.’ They already share a pre-approved opinion. It's not a news channel. There’s little debate, just Tory Nationalists patting each other on the back—those who already agree with one another.
For GB News, losing profit isn’t always reaped in the form of money but power, forming opinions, capturing minds, and propaganda—shaping policy. This reinforces the view that GB News is also a political project, not a commercial one—a Nationalist Tory mouthpiece for propaganda.
We don’t like to bring up the ‘awkward’ subject of human rights and free speech unless it’s about China—not the Saudi Kingdom, since they are our ‘friends’ who buy UK-manufactured weapons—not Israeli nuclear whistleblower Vanunu or Assange.
And yet not the Chinese—the benevolent Chinese government—when they’re waving money at Tory ministers-
Only 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust mainstream media—while 91 per cent turn to the president for “accurate information.
This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable,
something Trump himself seems to understand.
Remember, he told a crowd in 2018,
“What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
Then, during his first election, candidates were looking to plant a negative story about an opponent,
By working through a third-party consulting firm, they could pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites.
Recalling Cambridge Analytica and our referendum.
When the opportunist Boris Johnson (the man for whom Steve Bannon wrote his speech) Johnson wrote two articles, one for and one against Brexit!
According to #CambridgeAnalytica whistleblower @chrisinsilico, in 2015, he was tasked by Steve Bannon to build a psychological warfare tool designed to use big data & social media to drive open cracks in societies and hollow out democracies.
Cambridge Analytica.
The military contractor
that once used digital psyops to target terrorist groups and drug cartels…
And to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts…circulated disinformation in South America to turn drug dealers against their bosses.
An ex-director of research at Cambridge Analytica says, “With the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibit specific psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking.”
Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalisation, Steve Bannon was able to invert that, essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.
Inflating false narratives further like Chinese whispers till the disinformation blitz succeeds in demonising our community spokespeople and politicians
A wave of viral lies and conspiracy theories pushed by hard-line activists.
Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica who later testified about the company to Congress, told us that.
“With the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited specific psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking.
“Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalisation, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,” Wylie said. “We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.”
A group of former Cambridge Analytica employees have formed a new firm that, according to the Associated Press, is/was working with the recent Trump campaign.
However, the firm has denied this, and a campaign spokesperson declined to comment.
But there were micro-targeted ads. We are already discovering how simple it is to wage an untraceable whisper campaign via text.
What’s notable about this effort is not that it aims to expose media bias; conservatives have been complaining—with some merit—about a liberal slant in the press for decades.
However, in the Trump era, a significant shift has taken place. Instead of trying to reform the press or critique its coverage, today’s most influential conservatives want to wreck the mainstream media.
Everything now is about the weaponisation of information. It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world.
I had to read the next bit twice to understand the idea. You can skip ahead if you want.
‘Relativism (the doctrine that knowledge, truth, and morality are understood in relation to culture, society, or historical context and are not absolute.)
Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that facts in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed, holds that there are no absolute facts regarding norms of belief, justification, or rationality and that there are only relative ones.
Descriptive relativism seeks to describe the differences among cultures and people without evaluation, while normative relativism evaluates the morality or truthfulness of views within a given framework.
Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better.
Back to that Steve Bannon's quote:
“A culture war is a war.”
They want to jam the signals, sow confusion-weaponise information, create false consensus, spread disinformation, and rewrite the Bible in a Tory version.
Bryan Lanza,
Someone who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and still serves as a White House surrogate told us plainly that: He sees no possibility of Americans establishing a common set of facts from which to conduct the big debates of this year’s election.
To sell Trump’s Republican narrative louder than the media.
Polls have consistently shown that Americans from all political backgrounds trust local news more than national media.”
Lanza said before the recent US. election (ejection)
“If the campaign has its way, that trust will likely be eroded by November. We can build up and fight with the local newspapers to exploit the credibility of local journalism.”
So, over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like The Arizona Monitor and The Kalamazoo Times began popping up.
At first glance, they looked like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But if you look closer, you’ll find that there were often no mastheads, few, if any, bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them were organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belonged to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which a conservative activist in Illinois manages.
Readers were not informed that these sites had political agendas, which is exactly what made them valuable to Trump’s campaign.
Republican candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent could pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm - instead of paying the sites directly candidates were able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they filed expenditures to the Federal Election Commission.
Even if the stories didn’t fool savvy, astute readers, the headlines were convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails.
In the previous US election, after the first round of exit polls was released, a mysteriously sourced video surfaces purporting to show undocumented immigrants at the ballot box!
Then Trump began retweeting rumours of voter fraud
and suggested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should be dispatched to polling stations. Cries of “Are illegals stealing the election?”
These cyber militias were used In Mexico when supporters of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto created “sock puppet” accounts. To pose as protesters and sabotage the opposition movement.
In Azerbaijan, a pro-government youth group
waged coordinated harassment campaigns against journalists, flooding their Twitter feeds with graphic threats and insults.
They can simulate false consensus, derail sincere debate, and hound people from the public square.
During one five-week period that year, bots accounted for roughly 20 percent of all tweets posted about the 2016 election. X (Twitter) is already infested with bots designed to boost Trump’s reelection prospects. Hey presto!
Regardless of where they’re coming from, they have tremendous potential to divide, radicalise, and stoke hatred that lasts long after the votes are cast.
Rob Flaherty, who served as the digital director for Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign in Texas, told us, “Twitter in 2020 is a 'hall of mirrors.”
He said one mysterious account started a viral rumour that the gunman who killed seven people in Odessa, Texas, a few summers ago had a Beto bumper sticker on his car.
Another masqueraded as an O’Rourke supporter and hurled racist invective at a journalist.
Some of these tactics echoed in 2016, when Russian agitators posed as Bernie Sanders supporters and stirred up anger toward Hillary Clinton, using bots, troll farms, and deep-fakes.
In the previous election campaign
A website resembling an official Biden campaign page appeared on the internet.
It emphasised elements of the candidate’s legislative record likely to hurt him in the Democratic primary opposition to same-sex marriage, support for the Iraq War—and featured video clips of his awkward encounters with women.
The site rapidly became one of the most visited Biden-related sites on the web. It was designed by a Trump consultant.
To prevent a similar disruption in a previous Indonesian presidential election, a coalition of journalists from over two dozen top Indonesian news outlets worked together to identify and debunk hoaxes before gaining online traction.
Over time, alertness to the prevalence of propaganda can curdle into paranoia.
Russian operatives have been known to encourage such anxiety by spreading rumours that exaggerate their influence.
Eventually, the fear of covert propaganda inflicts as much damage as the propaganda itself.
Once you internalise the possibility that you’re being manipulated by some hidden hand, nothing can be trusted. Every dissenting voice on Twitter becomes a Russian bot, every uncomfortable headline is a false flag, and every political development is part of an ever-deepening conspiracy. By the time the information ecosystem collapses under the weight of all this cynicism, you’ll have become too vigilant to notice that the disinformation-ists have won.
I can imagine that at the next U.S. rigged election, after a flurry of lies, half-lies, rigged election, they’ll be installing Trump again. The votes won’t have even been counted yet, much of the country will be ready to throw out the result. When Trump and Musk, personality cultists have been hypnotised into believing whatever their leader says. Because the voters didn’t care if Trump “fabricates a little bit.”
Or they say, “Trump won because he said things no other politician would say.”
Or, “Trump tells you what you want to hear, And I don’t know if it’s true or not—but it sounds good, so f*ck it.”
This brings us back to what political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote, which I quoted earlier:
“When people are lied to, they choose to believe it.
When a lie is debunked, they claim they’d known all along.”
The only place Trump built a wall was in the minds of his voters.
Holding up books he’s never read, only the past is his to rearrange, with only the ability to shape our future out of play dough. He is probably trying to uninvent the wheel, often blaming others for voter fraud or cheating simply because he was losing.
He was not going to concede. He was trying to incite a war. He is the political equivalent of a spousal abuser - never more dangerous than when the relationship is ending.
What Trump can’t have, he will destroy.
He is gaslighting, using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying. Trump seeks to sow seeds of doubt, delegitimise the truth, and often dismisses and discredits a target, a journalist, or any opposition to himself.
Now, here we are wondering if the spell can be broken.
Can the truth still triumph over lies,
Will someday everything go back to ‘normal.’
We will be asking: “Who is the puppeteer behind the puppeteer?!”
Remember when Trump and his lawyer Giuliani were accusing dead people of voting for Democrat Biden? Were they going to interview all the dead people? For a while, I thought we were reaching the point where dystopian novels would seem hopeful... But there would be no one left to read them.
Propaganda has always been with us; it has become more sophisticated.
We can observe the deployment of politicised X (Twitter) bots in the U.S., now owned and utilised by the misinformed disinformation oligarch Elon Musk.
Musk's support of fascism closely resembles that of car manufacturer and anti-Semite Henry Ford.
In 1918, Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America. In 1938, Ford received an award from the Nazi regime called the ‘Grand Cross of the German Eagle.’ Ford’s writing very much inspired Hitler. Hitler was very aware of Henry Ford and Henry Ford’s writings and praised them. He turned to the same documents. There’s a common thread.
Henry Ford's screeds against Jewish people became so well-known at home and abroad that he is the only American whom Adolf Hitler compliments by name in Mein Kampf.
Ford’s name even came up during the Nuremberg trials when Baldur von Schirach, a former Reich youth leader of the National Socialist German Students League, described his radicalization.“The decisive antisemitic book which I read at that time and the book which influenced my comrades…was Henry Ford’s book, The International Jew,”
In 1938, Ford received an award from the Nazi regime called the ‘Grand Cross of the German Eagle.’
The Close ties between US businessmen and bankers and their German counterparts had been forged in the years before Hitler’s rise to power.
US loans by the Morgan and Chase banking interests propped up the faltering German economy after the 20s. IBM, General Motors, antisemite racist Henry Ford motors, Farben, Du Pont, and Standard Oil all helped the trains to Auschwitz run on time!
When you follow the money, you realise where big businesses’ sympathies and interests lie. Arms manufacturers profit most. It all concerns power and what money can buy and afford to pay for…Power and putting the puppets and people they want into power. Corporations are happy with fascists in power for feeding the Hungry working people…benefitting the homeless, no…just tax cuts and profits for themselves…the rich. US private companies benefitted from fascism.
The only side capitalism is on is the side of profit- no loyalties or patriotism-they did business with Fascists. The nazis greatly supported German capitalists, and upon taking power, the Nazis began an economic process of transferring state-owned property into the hands of the capitalist class; Hitler was certainly not at all against capitalists owning most of the German economy and profiting from it.
(See my previous post for more about this topic)
Back to Trump And Bannon,
Here is the info war in practice.
The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have reportedly gathered an average of 3,000 data points on each American voter.
They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak and tailor their messages based on gender, geography, and whether the recipient owns a gun or watches the Golf Channel.
I recall Hungarian president Victor Orban, who just had a meeting with Trump. Orban was praised by Netanyahu, who called him “a true friend of Israel,” and not long ago Orban had lauded Hungary’s WWII leader, Miklos Horthy, referring to him as an “exceptional statesman.” Horthy was an ally of Hitler, and his regime collaborated with the Nazis.
I remember when we had no condemnation from Jewish Zionist establishment organisations regarding the Boris Johnson-Orban meeting; they should have done so, as it seems they, too, can’t bring themselves to condemn pro-Israel anti-Semites.
I vividly recall interesting slants here. The UK press on socialist Jeremy Corbyn was called:
“Rabid anti-Semite!” The UK press on the rabid anti-Semite Viktor Orbán: “Controversial populist.” This provides more evidence that those who weaponised anti-Semitism aren’t genuinely concerned about anti-Semitism. Cosying up to a genuine anti-Semite like Viktor Orbán is perfectly acceptable for Zionists.
Johnson was rolling out the red carpet for Viktor Orbán. These two illiberal nationalists were hoarding power by taking away power from the courts.
We knew the constant attacks on Jeremy Corbyn while he was leader of Labour were never really about Anti-semitism. More It was ‘Anti Socialism.’
Only those safe from fascism and its practices are likely to think that there might be a benefit in exchanging ideas with fascists.
In Steve Bannon’s Donald Trump’s case, that domain is nativist and white. Presently, their ideas are inflicted upon people of colour and immigrants, who do not experience them as ideas but as violence.
Do I seem to have an overactive imagination? If I say: They will create a fake newsreel, a commercial that intersperses footage of migrants with clips of a convicted police killer. It ends with an urgent call to action: to stop the aliens. Vote conservative Republican. Then, troops will be dispatched to the border, insisting that the operation is necessary to keep our country safe—but then, within weeks, the troops will quietly be called back, the “crisis” having ‘apparently’ ended once the votes have been cast.
We will militarise other borders to pick up a few extra seats in the local elections when the PM or president’s re-election is at stake.
Overactive imagination? No!
There’s fake populism—some who believe that ignorance is an endearing quality—like the uneducated skeptic who provides visceral sensation instead of critical perspective, setting things ‘right’ with their fists and sympathising with the weak but aligning with the strong and wealthy.
Someone who politicises and mobilises ignorance-who expresses the sentiments of working people but is devoid of any real political substance.
Class is the populist’s bogeyman—they’re often nationalists—and they have never told a lie that they haven't told themselves first.
Examples include Steve Bannon, Farage, and Tommy Robinson, elitists with financial backing.
Intellectuals separate their hateful rhetoric and divorce their ideas from the fascist practices through which they actualised with brutality.
I grew up with ignorant working class racists at school...just because they were ‘working class’ racists didn’t make their racism more ‘authentic’....or their ignorance more acceptable than middle class racists or aristocratic wealthy racists and xenophobes.
We are not always successfully lumped into a homogenous mass of voters. We have our interests, background stories, worries, desires, and so on.
Globalisation, global markets, and other countries, as well as powerful colonial governments and their ideologies, interfere in the politics of other nations. This is evident in our own politics, with figures like Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, Steve Bannon, and the Saudis, to whom British manufacturers sell arms.
Countering digital propaganda is a full-time job; isn’t that why some of us are here?
Think of outfoxing Fox- Fox news!
The practice of fascism (Bannon and company) goes beyond its ideas, which is why those affected and diminished by it are not particularly interested in a marketplace of ideas where fascists have prime purchasing power.
Suppose Bannon—the ideologue and spokesman of the conservative wealthy and miserly, aristocratic, fascist, and racist elite—is relevant at all. In that case, it is not as a thinker but as a (former) executive who has worked to construct the Trumpist edifice of power that cages children and is dismantling mechanisms of democracy.
Perhaps the key to not getting fooled or getting over it is intellectual humility. If someone doesn’t have that, they have a tough time overcoming brainwashing.