Cosmic Brownie Bites
The Shut Up and Remain Ignorant edition: mechanisms used to keep you fat, dumb, and happy
What’s our government up to, lurking in the shadows? Here are two examples.
The Cat’s Meow
An idea that began with de-radicalizing at-risk youth from being recruited by ISIS has turned into a domestic manipulation of kids to discourage them from questioning government edicts while demonizing freedom of speech.
The Global Engagement Center (GEC), a U.S. State Department agency, has developed online games that will be used against interests within the borders of the United States and the United Kingdom. Obtained by American First Legal and reviewed and published by the Foundation for Freedom Online, an internal State Department memo—circulated on October 31, 2022—details game development and testing that “inoculates” users to information coming from certain sectors—primarily right-leaning news and social media sites.
The Global Engagement Center’s mission statement reads like something out of Orwell’s 1984 (ironically, they use 1984 as one of the tools that the right uses as a basis of conspiracy theories aimed at spreading disinformation).
Core Mission: To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.
The focus is foreign, they say, until, well, it’s not.
The game detailed is called Cat Park. In Cat Park, kids are sucked into an imaginary situation where a city government is building a park for cats to frolic with other cats. A group forms to oppose the plan and encourages people, in this imaginary setting, to join in the effort to spread disinformation about the park. The seditious group claims that the park is built for only the upperclass and wealthy cat owners and encourages its followers to engage in social media disinformation to create conspiracy theories to quash the government’s plans. As kids delve further into the game, it is discovered that contrary to the conspiracy theories, the park is actually built for all of the people. The game player realizes the pain their advocacy has created and must repent through apologies and all of the other groveling that is expected of the non-woke.
At least two games were tested on over 400,000 users, primarily in the U.K., and found to be effective in helping children “realize” that right-wing information is actually disinformation. The whole exercise is based upon research developed by the University of Cambridge termed “inoculation theory”.
“Much as vaccinations work by exposing subjects to an innocuous strain of a virus in order to trigger an immune response”, the GEC memo says, “empirical studies indicate that the controlled experience of responding to disinformation through a game can build cognitive resistance to disinformation in the real world. This concept is also known as 'pre-bunking.'”
Cat Park was developed in a cooperative effort between GEC and Cambridge. Cambridge's Social Decision-Making Lab research into “Inoculation Science” has focused upon how to target conservatives, Climate Change! deniers, vaccine skeptics, and election deniers.
Guarding the News
A company called NewsGuard lurks around the internet determining the truthfulness and woke-ness of websites and stories. It delivers a color-coded rating for stories and news sites—green (good), red (bad), and yellow (satire)—which is amusing because most leftists lack a sense of humor and cannot comprehend satire. The company is manned by tons of “trained” journalists who monitor websites for their truthfulness and/or mis- and disinformation.
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, wrote about his run-in with NewsGuard and their questioning of his story concerning U.S. biolabs in Ukraine.
The alleged “fact checker’s” [at NewsGuard] claim that I made a false and unsupported claim is incorrect for two reasons. One is the fact that a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency produced official US government documents that state that the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a component of the U.S. Department of Defense, funded anthrax laboratory activities in a Ukrainian biolab in 2018. The US government’s records also show over $11 million in funding for the Ukraine biolabs program in 2019.
What makes this company different than any of the other self-anointed “arbiters of truth” such as Snoops? They are fact checkers for hire and their clients are considered their partners. In the above example, Roberts’ information was based upon a FOIA release by an agency within the Department of Defense. Who is a “partner” with NewsGuard?
The Department of Defense.
Does the DoD use companies like NewsGuard to discredit those who uncover their questionable deeds? That’s rhetorical, by the way.
Beside the DoD, partners include The Department of State, the World Health Organization, Microsoft and Bing, the National Security Innovation Network (DoD), Avaaz (a globalist NGO), The German Marshall Fund of the United States (a scary looking think tank at Harvard), and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (UK).
NewsGuard enlists an advisory board, that is claimed to have no real advisory responsibilities. This board is comprised of former governmental elites from both parties and CIA/U.S. intelligence agency heads. Here are a few from the company’s website:
Don Baer served as White House Communications Director during the Clinton administration and is former chairman of Burson, Cohn & Wolfe.
Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education during the Obama Administration and the former chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, serves as managing partner at Emerson Collective.
(Ret.) General Michael Hayden is former Director of the CIA, former Director of the National Security Agency, and former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence.
Elise Jordan is a political analyst for NBC News and a former speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Tom Ridge served as the first Secretary of Homeland Security, in the George W. Bush administration.
Richard Stengel is former editor of Time magazine and former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy during the Obama administration. He is the author of “Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It.”
Jimmy Wales is the co-founder of Wikipedia.
The moral of this story is that fact-checkers are not fact-checkers. They are the mis-and disinformation gurus and they expect you to believe them because, well, they’re fact-checkers.
Caveat emptor
Buyer beware. That used to be the default setting in our society: we are all responsible adults and we all have freedom of thought and choice based upon that thought. If something seems too good to be true, it usually is. I’ve always said that if it’s something too hard to walk away from, walk away from it—at least until you have more information in which to make a better, educated decision. (Thus why we protect children from life-changing decisions, because they can’t always walk away.)
But now people want to be inoculated against falsehoods and misinformation and they are willing to turn this over to governmental and, when that pesky U.S. Constitution gets in the way, creepy little companies who are more than willing to lie, cheat, and steal to persuade you to believe one lie over massive truth.
It always goes back to the whole disinformation/misinformation charade: Who determines what is and isn’t dis- and misinformation?
The final answer should be you!