Roasting the Press Episode 59 for Sunday, February 16th, 2025
Local Activists, Gather 2030 and How Disinformation Derails Community Planning + Sheryl Crow Sells her Tesla: Blames Musk, Trump and what DOGE Found + Activist Mad at Not Getting USAID.
Local Activists, Gather 2030 and How Disinformation Derails Community Planning
We start tonight’s program with the February 16th, 2025 Gather 2030 post, “The Disruptor Playbook: How Disinformation Derails Movements.”
The post notes that:
Every movement that challenges power will eventually face internal disruption—not just from obvious opposition, but from those claiming to be allies.
These individuals position themselves as whistleblowers or investigators, yet their primary function isn’t to inform—it’s to divide, distract, and discredit.
Instead of building anything, they make sure that no one else does either.
This isn’t new. Historically, successful movements have been undermined by internal actors who use paranoia, infighting, and disinformation to prevent momentum.
These tactics aren’t random—they are highly refined psychological operations designed to keep people spinning their wheels instead of achieving results.
The piece lists different ways movements can be destroyed internally and externally. They include:
Information Overload: These are massive Telegram feeds or hundreds of daily emails on just as many topics or some other firehose of information with thousands of links and stories on so many topics so as to overwhelm the ability of any single individual’s ability to keep up with the flow of information, much less assess the data.
Most of the information doesn’t include arguments or a train of evidence or even a listing of where the original data originated, so the information is hard to verify.
Over time, it’s easy to lose track of the useful information or understand the context of what’s going on.
Guilt by Association: Not so long ago, if you were a journalist and interviewed Hitler, Stalin or Mao, you’d be on the shortlist to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize or some other journalism award.
Nowadays, you’re a Nazi or a communist or a fascist because you associated with the “bad guys” and entertained their ideas, even if you only spoke with them or researched the topic for background information.
Not everyone is a Nazi or a Communist even if they’re categorized as such. In the US, the Democrats often demonize the Republicans and in Canada, the Liberals demonize the Conservatives.
At the local level, calls for “sustainable development,” whatever that means, generally act as the divide separating the “righteous” from the sinners, no matter which side of the divide the acolytes profess to be.
Guilt by association often starts out as a response to information overload in an attempt to manage the flow of information but often devolves into the next item on this list.
“Purity” Tests: A demand for “universal advocacy.” It’s the claim that, if you don’t assist the cause in the way the recognized leaders require, then you’re one of the bad guys.
It starts out as simple request for “organization,” which is a reasonable thing to do with groups of people tackling large projects.
But when the leaders begins to demand compliance in actions, perhaps by insisting that the solution is a question on “my way or the highway,” or an insistence that “you’re either for us or against us,” then you know there’s a problem.
Co-opting Language for Deception: Disruptors use the same language as real activists for the same reasons, in order to build trust.
But talk about sovereignty, decentralization, and self-governance—while working to discredit grassroots efforts actually doing the work. Some of the best social media rants favoring community activism originate with well funded international non-governments organizations who favor community activism, but only if the local activists follow the centrally developed future plans without question.
That’s why those co-opting the language of the actual community activists critique their opponents but never offer up suggestions for improvement. The real plan was developed years ago somewhere else and isn’t open for debate.
The critiques slowdown everything, if only because the perfect is always the enemy of the good or the “actionable.” And this brings us to…
No “Call to Action: Keeping people distracted by ranting for hours, listing endless enemies, and demanding that people “wake up,” but never providing a practical path forward, is what the failing legacy media and local disrupters intent on forcing an external solution on a local population, do best.
The strategy is intended to confuse and frighten but never inform. Our role in their eyes is to sit back and watch, never to act and especially never to disagree.
This limits the grassroots activities of individuals who often know more about the situation on the ground than the academics and authorities in their ivory towers.
The author of the piece is Maggie Hope Braun, who’s also the editor of the Gather 2030 Substack. According to Braun, the solution to globalism is “localism.”
Braun is a community activist and advocate; helping local communities reclaim power from global climate organizations like Local Goverments for Sustainability (ICLEI, originally the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) an international non-governmental organization that promotes what they call “sustainable development,” which seems to mostly require deindustrialization and centralized, top down control over all facets of community living..
Braun is also the founder of KICLEI Canada, an organization attempting to “Kicking International Councils out of Local Environmental Issues.”
If you’re involved in local politics or a community activist or just believe that you and your neighbors should be involved in making decisions affecting the community, you might want to give her a call.
Sheryl Crow Sells her Tesla: Blames Musk, Trump and what DOGE Found.
One of the more absurd pieces of propaganda this week is the February 15th, 2025 Sheryl Crow on Instagram post, “My parents always said… you are who you hang out with,” where the singer announced that she’s sold her Tesla electric car and contributed the money received from the sale to embattled NPR, which isn’t getting funding from USAID any longer.
Secret and illegal USAID funding for NPR, part of a massive worldwide multi-billion dollar media campaign by US intelligence agencies and “deep state” players to “control the public narrative,” by blocking and/or demonizing Republican and independent viewpoints, was uncovered by the Federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), let by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, in January 2025.
As outlined in the February 10th, 2025 Zero Hedge post, “USAID Funded Massive 'News' Platform, Extending 'Censorship Industrial Complex' To Billions Worldwide,” the funds were stolen from legitimate foreign aid and government funding to prop up far-left corporate media outlets like NPR, Politico and the BBC with taxpayer funds.
In total, USAID funneled “half a billion dollars to a secretive non-governmental organization operating a global news propaganda matrix.”
According to Zero Hedge:
USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, "Internews Network" (IN), which has "worked with" 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and "training" over 9000 journalists (2023 figures).
Crow’s Instagram post was almost immediately picked up by legacy media outlets like Billboard, Salon, USA Today and others, who promoted her action as a protest against Elon Musk, Donald Trump and what DOGE found at USAID.
But others weren’t quite so favorable in their assessments.
The February 15th, 2025 Infowars post, “Sheryl Crow Sells Her Tesla To Fund NPR — FCC’s Carr Hilariously Responds,” asked Crow if “her” version of the truth is a “taxpayer-funded censorship blob pushing misinformation and disinformation campaigns about anything that is optically displeasing to the federal bureaucracy?”
The Infowars post also quoted Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr who responded to Crow’s Instagram post by noted that:
I know celebrities are hesitant to weigh in on hot-button issues, so I appreciate Sheryl Crow making an argument here—not through words alone, but through her actions—that Congress should not force taxpayers to subsidize NPR.
The propaganda will likely continue on for the next little while, at least until charges are laid.
The ruling Republicans are intent on highlighting the obvious malfeasance going on at USAID, while the Democrats are keen to ignore the malfeasance while focusing on the good works and foreign aid the agency is supposed to be funding.
Even if it isn’t.
Activist Mad at Not Getting USAID
And finally tonight, here’s the February 15th, 2025 Mongo Minds on Bitchute post, “She Must Get USAID and Now She Mad.”
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