Since correctly explaining Russian active measures in the 2016 campaign in December of that year, giant corporations have paid authors to write hundreds of defamatory articles about me and a few of my colleagues. While their outlets blathered about Ivanka’s moderating influence, Wisconsin, or Trump becoming presidential, a few of us with real professional credentials have done the work our Fourth Estate should be doing: quality research and analysis that is actually predictive of events to come. And for our free or drastically underpaid efforts for more than two years, they have attacked us.
One of the terms used over and over again in dozens if not hundreds of articles is “grifter.” Some articles use it to accuse actual patriots of seeking fame from this nightmare. Others single out, for example, Dr. John Schindler and I for having private channels on Twitter, free of bots, trolls, and other harassers. For using a subscription model, major media compares us to criminals lifting wallets.
They are, to a person, projecting. They and the major corporations paying for their labor are the grifters, hustlers making a fortune off of a political catastrophe they created and then punching down at individuals for years. They are the frauds and the liars, the people pushing misinformation, disinformation, and libel for billions in revenue. And perhaps this reality is why they are targeting us.
Let’s take Time, owned now by tech billionaire Marc Benioff. The digital version of Time recently published “The Mueller Probe Made Them Famous. They Plan to Keep Cashing In,” by Vera Bergengruen. The article’s bent, like so many others following almost the exact same template, is that Dr. Schindler and I – career intelligence professionals on Twitter fighting the kind of disinformation peddled by the corporate media – are somehow raking in untold fortunes.
I don’t care to know much about Ms. Bergengruen other than that she was recently working for Buzzfeed, an outlet that’s taken on $400 million from NBC/Universal. Aside from Buzzfeed’s penchant for employing authors that sleep with Senate staffers for leads and publishing defense information illegally, her particular contributions have been exceptional forecasts such as “The More the U.S. Pressures Ecuador to Kick Assange Out of Its Embassy, the Less Likely It Is to Happen.” Forget for a second the propagandistic framework that the U.S. enforcing its laws in connection to espionage is aggression, this is journalistic pablum that in addition to being misleading – also turned out to be completely wrong. This is what Mr. Benioff is financing.
It takes a lot of goddamned chutzpah to work for billionaires and organizations that make billions in subscription and ad revenue and defame some individual who makes a minute fraction of that money for the exact same activity, only delivering information that isn’t completely unprofessional and wrong. It is strange, these people seem to have no problem with Patreon or the new YouTube subscriber feature, or the one Facebook is working on – just the Twitter versions used by a couple people who understand law enforcement and national security matters.
Perhaps that’s a clue as to why their grift goes much deeper. Take for example today’s MSNBC program showing the “Time 100,” featuring Jared Kushner being given a national platform to deny the Mueller Report’s conclusions on Russian interference. Both of Ms. Bergengruen’s recent employers are making hundreds of thousands in ad revenue during the commercials to let a treasonous Jersey Mobster lie to a national audience about the attack on our democracy. They are, in this tasteless spectacle, tainting future jury pools, spreading Russian disinformation, and sucking in money. And every one involved is making salaries – the host, the producers, the technical staff – every one of them profiting off a continued assault on the truth.
And then Time, this author, and the hundreds of subservient copycats have the temerity to make accusations that other people are war profiteers while they run PR for organized crime figures who have been trying to sell Western Democracy to foreign enemies.
The truth is, there are tons of grifters misleading the public. Huge organizations that push a Queens Mobster into the White House, allow guests with upcoming legal charges to speak to future jurors, hire hosts with no knowledge of much anything and invite guests who misstate their credentials. Then they use those billions in assets to attack private citizens. Are they afraid we’re going to take their audiences by actually providing quality information? Are they part of a larger conspiracy orchestrated by giant sums of dark money?
I don’t care. They are a cancer on this democracy, enemies of truth and clear thinking – and a bunch of well-financed bullies. They’re grifters. After two years of Trump, we should be getting good at identifying them.