Roasting the Press Episode 52 for Sunday, December 15th, 2024
Rumble, the Republicans and Operation Mockingbird; The Canada Post Strike is a Psyop & Moments which Woke Up Millions
Rumble, the Republicans and Operation Mockingbird
We should pay attention to the media empire in Donald Trump’s back pocket, at least according to the December 5th, 2024 Bug Eyed and Shameless on Substack post, “The Rumble White House.”
Written by legacy media stalwart and regular Toronto Star contributor Justin Ling, it’s the story of a band of Canadian entrepreneurs “running Donald Trump’s propaganda network from a spacious office” in Florida.
According to the post:
Rumble owes an enormous debt to the Trump ticket and his network of deep-pocket supporters. And Trump, in turn, is relying on Rumble to host the very foundations of its media machine.
It has been a century since America has seen such an incestuous relationship between power and media. We’ve certainly never seen it on this scale. The conflicts of interest and risks to democracy are enormous, and it should make us properly freaked out.
Ling obviously isn’t aware of the ongoing incestuous connections between media and US intelligence agencies going back to WW2.
Over the last fifteen years, the Democratic Party in general and the Clinton/Obama/Biden White Houses in particular have built long-term connections between legacy media outlets, big tech firms and alphabet intelligence agencies intended to facilitate the distribution of government propaganda.
Those connections, as outlined in Molly Ziegler Hemingway’s 2022 book, “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech and the Democrats Seized our Elections,” are affecting US politics to this day.
The obvious elephant in the room during discussions of this nature is Operation Mockingbird, the long-term clandestine program of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early years of the Cold War to manipulate domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes.
CIA media and advocacy group influence was exposed in an April 1967 Ramparts article which reported that the National Student Association, a confederation of US based college and university student governments in operation from 1947 to 1978. received funding from the CIA in order to influence public policy in directions favorable to US government interests.
The story gained public notoriety via the February 16th, 1967 New York Times post, “Ramparts Says C.I.A. Received Student Report; Magazine Declares Agency Turned Group It Financed Into an 'Arm of Policy.'“
In 1975, the Church Committee, more formally known as the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities uncovered abuses by the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), who cultivated connections with journalists and civic groups intended to infiltrate newsrooms and manipulate American media coverage.
As outlined in the December 1st, 2024 All That’s Interesting post, “What Is Operation Mockingbird, The CIA’s Alleged Program That Infiltrated America’s Top News Organizations?,” the relationship between the press and the US intelligence community began in WW2 “when journalists formed close relationships with members of the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA.”
Know one really knows if the program ever shut down.
And while current legacy media outlets call the information uncovered during the Church Committee hearings “alleged,” media outlets covering the topic at the time the malfeasance was uncovered were pretty unequivocal about what had actually happened.
Despite its bias and knowledge gaps, the Bug Eyed and Shameless article is a useful overview of Rumble, initially a Canadian based startup which became a media distribution powerhouse and publisher in only a dozen years and currently provides large scale online distribution for conservative content creators, gamers, conspiracy theorists, Q-Anon commentators and members of the Republican Party.
According to the Bug Eyed and Shameless post:
Rumble has become the media platform of import amongst Republicans in Trump’s orbit, a mission-aligned technological giant which literally hosts Trump’s media architecture. It supports its own star system, paying out sizeable amounts of cash to figures who have been otherwise disqualified from even conservative venues like Fox News.
What’s more, it fosters an ecosystem of message testing and work-shopping, giving outside figures like Steve Bannon a way to directly shape policy and planning.
Ling calls this “the height of hypocrisy” in his article, but he’s mistaken.
Co-opting media outlets for political purposes is standard operating procedure for US politicians and government autocrats intent on getting their message out.
The Canada Post Strike is a Psyop
It’s worth noting the December 13th, 2024 CBC News post, “Labour minister asks Canada Industrial Relations Board to step into Canada Post contract dispute,” its bias and how the story sets up a false narrative of the strike action being an actual negotiation between Canada Post senior management and Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) negotiators., formally acting for union members.
The Canadian Industrial Relations Board (CIRB), the body the CBC pitches as being an appropriate independent arbitrator or mediator of the current strike, is actually a Federal government department.
Since Canada Post is a crown corporation of the Federal government, and the CIRB is a Federal government department, the ability of the CIRB to act independently of the Federal government during the present union negotiations cannot be guaranteed.
The CBC story leads the viewer to understand that a third party neutral body, the CIRB, is kindly assisting the dispute.
This is a fraudulent narrative in the CBC story.
Of course, the CBC is also a crown corporation, beholding to the Federal government for billions of dollars in annual funding, and hardly an unbiased observer in this matter.
Taken together, the current Canada Post strike seems to be a psyop, intended to show decisive and evenhanded government action to end the strike but in actuality hiding the weak position Canada Post employees currently find themselves in.
For this piece, we also reference the official Canada Post website and the December 4th, 2024 Ontario Securities Commission post, “Communication with Beneficial Owners of Securities of a Reporting Issuer to send certain proxy-related materials during a postal strike.”
Moments which Woke Up Millions
And finally tonight, here’s an oldie but a goodie, the December 14th, 2024 Mongo Minds on Bitchute post, “Moments Like This Woke Millions Up.”
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