One of the puppeteers
There’s this billionaire guy called Robert Mercer, who gave a lot of cash to Trump as well as other Republicans and right-wing causes.
Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.
It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.
So that’s how Breitbart happened. I had wondered.
But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)
Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercer’s money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.
Psyops. We’ve all taken the bait, and their real plan is something quite other and concealed. They’re going to replace us all with electronic rabbits, or something.
Hey, what’s wrong with model trains? I mean, if only he spent *all* his money on that, and spent all his time working on it, he wouldn’t be causing trouble elsewhere, would he?
Well, given that Herr Bäbyführer talks with Alex Jones on the phone and gives press releases to InfoWars, is it really do surprising that he’d embark on conspiracy-level shit with shadowy figures?
“We can address villages or apartment blocks in a targeted way. Even individuals.”
“Trump’s striking inconsistencies, his much-criticized fickleness, and the resulting array of contradictory messages, suddenly turned out to be his great asset: a different message for every voter. The notion that Trump acted like a perfectly opportunistic algorithm following audience reactions is something the mathematician Cathy O’Neil observed in August 2016.”
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/big-data-cambridge-analytica-brexit-trump
The OCEAN dimensions of personality evolved from Jung’s 4 quadrant ‘theory’ (extraverted-introverted, thinking-feeling) and took an analytical turn with Eysenck where the 4 dimensions became principal components (eigenvectors of correlation matrix dominating components of personality along the axes of the quadrants). As the article says with the internet and sites like Facebook Big Data became available and the application could target individual voters.
Does Mercer believe the crap he’s peddling or is it just a cynical rearguard action against the inevitable changing of ways? He’s not going to be around for the knock-on effects of anthropogenic climate change and his wealth will give him a small measure of protection against some of its immediate consequences. Humans have a hard time envisioning fates beyond their own personal horizon, and for sociopaths it’s going to be irrelevant anyhow.
It’s one thing to manipulate and herd people as if they’re sheep (does he see himself as wise shepherd or a clever wolf?), but is he going to run psyops against the laws of physics? Like the old commercial said “You can’t fool Mother Nature.”
I meet an amazingly large and scary number of people who think humans are not bound by the laws of physics or of nature. We have a brain, we can outthink mindless natural processes, and manipulate them to bow to our stronger will.
I invite anyone who has ever said that to consider the exact effect we have had in stopping hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc – which is exactly none. The best we can do is hide from them or move out of their path. We can warn about them, but survival depends at least in part on citizens heeding the warning.
Dealing with global warming will be much bigger, because it won’t just whip through and then dissipate. It is here for the long haul, and we are not as smart as we think we are. People like Mercer are gambling with the only livable planet we have access to, and expecting that in the end, they will not be the ones that are losing. The biggest losers will be the poor countries, followed by the poor people in the rich countries.
Who needs Putin to corrupt the flow of information in the United States? We have Murdoch, Ailes, 40 years of hate-radio, tabloid TV…
Probably more than three puppeteers: Ethnos, Patheticos, Arachnid, Alt-Bannan and many more.
Iknklast @ #5
I think this is part of the now/later, near/far limitations on our concern and perception. At best we leverage knowledge of the laws of physics and nature to game the system. People might think that rockets, airplanes and zeppelins “defy gravity” but they’re not. People who think they do are stuck in the wrong bit of Clarke’s Third Law (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic), where they think it IS magic. Reduction in education standards and critical thinking is only going to make this worse.
The deliberate rejection of reason and knowledge in particular areas that might seem esoteric, harmless and disconnected (climate change denial, Holocaust denial, anti-evolutionism, birtherism, the anti-vax movement, moon landing “hoax” believers, etc.) erodes the belief in a shared reality that is in fact real. I think it also erodes our ability to act in meaningful and effective ways to address real problems and issues. It’s a growing, corrosive pall of ignorance operating along multiple paths and axes. Trump’s success is surely a symptom of its spread. We can hope this represents a high water mark at the turn of the tide rather than just another point in a descent into further darkness.
The problem with having a dim or incompetent puppet is that it becomes obvious that someone else must actually be in charge. This seemed pretty clear with Reagan, Bush II and now in spades with Trump.
And I once thought Reagan was as bad as it could get….