We hear a lot about the dangers of misinformation from the MSM, the government, and the Left (but I repeat myself).
We are warned in stentorian tones about how foreign actors and White supremacist domestic traitors are trying to destroy America and replace it with a Right-wing racistsexisthomophobicantidemocratic Red Hat brigade that is itching to place liberal women, racial minorities, and the alphabet crowd into concentration camps.
It is, of course, mostly BS. Real misinformation exists, but the most prolific purveyors are the Establishment propagandists.
Some of the worst offenders are neither politicians nor MSM journalists, but former intelligence “community” types who are perfectly willing to spout and spread lies with the goal of keeping the credulous white-collar Elite in a permanent state of agitation.
I ran across a great example doing my morning reading.
Musk – the owner of this platform with the largest following on Twitter – is boosting an enduring Russian propaganda & disinformation campaign into nearly all Twitter feeds tonight. pic.twitter.com/9G4lQpiKAU
— Clint Watts (@selectedwisdom) December 27, 2022
Watts, as you can see, is implying (as have many other Left-misinformers) that Elon Musk is doing the Russians’ PR work for them. I will have more on that in a bit, but first let’s examine who Watts himself is.
Watts is a national security analyst of some note, and a contributor to MSNBC. His Wikipedia page is filled with glowing praise (probably mostly written by his own PR people):
Clint Watts is a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University and a Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow.[4] He previously was an infantry officer in the United States Army,[5][6] and was the Executive Officer of the Combating Terrorism Center at United States Military Academy at West Point (CTC).[7][8] He became a Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation where he served on the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF).[2][9] He has consulted for the FBI Counterterrorism Division (CTD) and FBI National Security Branch (NSB).[10]
Watts has given expert testimony to the U.S. Congress multiple times, including: to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on April 5, 2016, about the ISIS‘s November 2015 Paris attacks and the 2016 Brussels bombings,[11] to the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs about ISIS after the Orlando nightclub shooting,[12] to the Senate Intelligence Committee about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections in a widely reported March 30, 2017 public hearing,[13][14] and before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Cybersecurity on April 27, 2017, about Russian black propaganda.[15][16]
His testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian cyberwarfare tactics made multiple headlines,[13] with Slate calling him “Testifier Extraordinaire” and the star of the hearing.[3] Afterwards, CNN profiled him in a piece where they reported he himself was targeted by Russian information warfare after he documented Internet troll techniques.[2] His comment of “follow the trail of dead Russians” was seen as particularly noteworthy by CBS News, Salon, and The American Interest.[17][18][19]
His credentials, as you can see, are impeccable for such a role. JTTF, FBI, West Point, think tanks. He is the very model of a clean cut intelligence guy whom you should trust. He knows his stuff.
His stuff, though, is propaganda, not analysis or giving you the full picture. In fact, his stuff is promoting BS.
The thread in which this tweet appeared is filled both by him and his cronies/supporters with all sorts of insinuations about Musk and other supposed Putin cronies undermining the interests of the United States, and it boils down to this: he is trying to convince you of a falsehood, as have many other prominent Left-accounts on Twitter (many of whom have been invited to the White House).
Buddy buddy… musk has a long history of trolling Medevdev. You are spreading missinformation but not updating your tweet to full context as shown here. Hopefully you will fix this missinformation pic.twitter.com/tXRr0nEWQ4
— im_doing_the_best@this (@de_doing) December 27, 2022
Hmm. Maybe this changes things a bit? And it is not exactly difficult for an FBI/JTTF/National Security expert/Think Tanker to know that Musk was making fun of Medvedev. And even more ridiculous was the fact that Medvedev himself was having some fun at American columnists who make absurd predictions all the time.
So Medvedev was making fun of our absurd MSM, and Elon Musk was laughing at how absurd everything in the thread was. Pretty sure that even Medvedev doesn’t actually foresee a California exit from the US and a new Texas/Mexico Republic. Certainly nobody else takes that seriously. It is absurd.
This is Musk spreading Russian propaganda? Watts was implying it, and if you look at all the responses from prominent Left-twitter accounts they amplified the message and outright asserted that Musk was doing the Kremlin’s bidding. All based upon a combination of flimsy, contradictory evidence combined with impeccable credentials. Since Watts, an impeccably credentialed national security expert asserts it, it could be true. Probably is!
Here are some of the tweets from Medvedev’s thread, just to show you how clearly and intentionally absurd they are:
6. War will break out between France and the Fourth Reich. Europe will be divided, Poland repartitioned in the process
7. Northern Ireland will separate from the UK and join the Republic of Ireland
— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) December 26, 2022
9. All the largest stock markets and financial activity will leave the US and Europe and move to Asia
— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) December 26, 2022
Season greetings to you all, Anglo-Saxon friends, and their happily oinking piglets!
— Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) December 26, 2022
This is serious Russian propaganda? Clearly not. And Musk’s response makes it clear that every bit of it was absurd in his own eyes. If anything, were this Medvedev thread meant to be serious, Musk’s response was to make fun of it.
Aaron Rupar–a favorite of Left Twitter picked up and amplified Watt’s propaganda (the Musk/Putin supposed connection has been floating around Left-Twitter for months):
Musk denied a report he spoke recently with Putin but admitted he did so last year. His credibility to be honest about what they talked about is not super high. pic.twitter.com/blf0LLR2Qf
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 27, 2022
Not so sure about that. I’d point you to the 2016 election
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 27, 2022
NeverTrumpers, too, are pushing the same idea along with other MSM commentators, all with the intent of smearing Musk with the excrement of appearing to support Putin, despite precisely zero evidence. As you may recall, one of the pillars of Ukraine’s 21st century warfare against Russia is Musk’s Starlink internet, which is used in all aspects of the war. The recent boat drones that attacked Sevastopol, for instance, were guided through Starlink connections.
Musk has done more to help Ukraine than any private individual or company–you think all those defense contractors making artillery shells, anti-aircraft missiles, anti-tank weapons, etc are donating their weapons to Ukraine? Yet because Musk has argued (along with lots of national security analysts) that there should be a negotiated solution to the war he is a Russian stooge?
Do people think the war ends when Ukrainian troops take the Kremlin?
From Fiona Hill in September pic.twitter.com/eowMnhVfIx
— Republicans against Trumpism (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 27, 2022
This is 100% misinformation, and more importantly it is coordinated misinformation. It is the intelligence community, our government (the president himself suggested that Musk is a national security threat), federal law enforcement, the MSM, and Leftist propagandists all working together to push a false narrative that undermines Musk, because Musk has gone off the reservation.
I could find you thousands of examples of prominent people with millions of followers all pushing this narrative that not only is false but they know to be false. Journalists, think tankers, IC shills. It is coordinated, and Musk is hardly the only victim. The American people are, ultimately, because they are being lied to in order to deprive them of the truth.
The scandals revealed in the Twitter files are merely the tip of the iceberg. Where are the Facebook files? The Google files? The Apple files? The MSM files? How many lies are fed to us every day, shaping our view of the world?
Add them all up, and you get The Narrative™. It is constructed. It is woven together by a network of conscious propagandists and their followers who are either too lazy to check or too indifferent to the truth. These are the people who fed you the Steele Dossier, denied the Hunter Biden laptop’s authenticity, and who skew everything to fit a coherent but distorted reality.
Sorting out facts from fiction become nearly impossible because discerning facts from fiction is difficult–and those who question the Narrative wind up looking like conspiracy theorists.
But in some cases it is so blindingly obvious that it is difficult to ignore. Our FBI/Counter-terrorism/think tank/MSNBC contributor knows he is spreading a lie. Many of the people spreading it know it too. And countless others simply swallow the lie because it fits their priors.
Elon Musk isn’t infallible. But he also isn’t a Russian stooge. He is being attacked for being one precisely because he is no Leftist stooge either.
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