Living, as we do, in an increasingly low trust society, the rational consumer of information (and especially news) takes very little at face value.  Its hard to know, in fact, just what to make of many news stories until you have some idea what the answer is to the Two Questions:

  • Who wants me to believe this?
  • Why do they want me to believe this?

According to the Law, “Meaning comes from context.”  And without the Two Questions, crucial context is lost.

We know, thanks to Mr. Musk, that the commanding heights of the information creation and distribution system (call it the infosphere) are controlled to a shocking degree by a handful of big corporations, working hand in glove with the government (mainly, I believe, federal law enforcement (DOJ/FBI) and the three letter agencies of the defense and intelligence world).

Pointing to Journolist 2.0 and its corporate and government minders is barely a beginning to answering the first question, though.  Within the sprawling coterie that controls the establishment infosphere there are factions, oh yes there are, so the first question can’t be answered beyond a very general “them” until you begin to suss out which faction is pushing a given narrative.

The “why” is often not hard at all to figure out – it’s usually pretty apparent what the agenda is that a given story (or lack thereof) is intended to advance.  That said, false flags are hardly unknown and without the “who”, it can be hard to be sure of the “why”.

We have also seen that the critical part of controlling the infosphere is not so much shaping what is reported, but deciding what is not.  Hunter Biden’s laptop?  The January 6 tapes?  Both stories that a decade or two ago would have been massive, leading to, at a minimum, the end of multiple careers and perhaps some name brand People Who Matter going to jail.  These days, though?  Mentioned only in passing, and then only to sneer at the rubes on the fringes who believe “conspiracy theories”.  The “why” of burying both these stories seems pretty apparent – both struck at the root of major factions of our Ruling Class.

After Hunter’s laptop broke cover, almost immediately 51 spooks released a letter pooh-poohing it as Russian disinformation.  The first question isn’t fully answered by saying the “who” is “51 spooks”.  It was obviously coordinated – who coordinated it?  Lo and behold, we have recently learned it was none other than Anthony Blinken, Biden’s campaign manager at the time and now a notably inept Secretary of State.  That one was actually pretty unusual, as it is very rare to have a name of a first mover.

The letter from the 51 spooks is very similar to the announcement the morning after Election Day 2020 that it was the cleanest, fairest election in history.  Nobody batted an eye at the fact that nobody could possibly know that, first thing Wednesday morning.

So, the January 6 tapes.  They were released by the Red wing of the Uniparty (see above re: factions), a brief excerpt was aired once, and then . . . poof.  Disappeared.  Who is responsible for this story being buried?  Fox News, obviously, killed the story.  But Fox News greenlit it first, so somebody else moved to kill it (and moved fast and hard).  Who, exactly?  That remains unknown.

There is another question out there on this video.  McCarthy released it only to Fox, and then didn’t say a word or do anything, as far as I know, when Fox buried them.  Why not?  Why not release them more broadly?  What looks like a fairly straightforward answer to the Two Questions (McCarthy, in the library, with a candlestick, I mean, to embarrass a rival faction and push back on their Reichstag Fire narrative) suddenly becomes murky.

A more recent example caught my eye.  Out of nowhere, there were multiple stories about people shooting innocent (as far as we know, but, what do we know?) people who accidentally came on their property.  Allofasudden, it was literally one such story a day.  Where did that come from?

Now, journalists are, by and large, lazy and not very smart.  Typical people, really, despite their pretensions.  And there’s something people do that I think is related to confirmation bias and our wiring to find patterns.  Ever notice that when you buy a new car, you starting seeing that model of car everywhere?  Something like this can explain why stories seem to come in bunches – one nutty old geezer perforates somebody who came to his door by accident, and the story breaks cover.  When it happens again, it’s going to register on journalists in a way it wouldn’t have before.  After a couple of these stories pop above the horizon of the infosphere, every journalist and infosphere operative is sensitized to them. So there is a potential innocent explanation.

But there still remain unanswered questions.  Why did the first story break cover?  Who decided to  highlight, across the nation, these stories?  And why?  This kind of story has come up before, but always as a one-off.  The daily barrage of these stories in recent weeks stinks of coordinated campaign.

The “why” of these stories is to make gun owners look like deranged lunatics (always a favorite) and to undercut the legitimacy of self-defense, the castle doctrine and stand your ground in particular.  While this op aligns easily with the ruling class’s hostility to guns, “all of, you know, them” is not a very satisfactory “who”.

The difficulty is getting more specific than a very general “who”.  It’s vanishingly rare to have a name, like Blinken, attached to an infosphere op.  And even then, there is a mob of people who have to go along to make it a successful op.  There’s the rub – there isn’t a shadowy group pulling strings from some undersea lair.  Rather, there is an entire ruling class thoroughly indoctrinated and in a hermetically sealed bubble of values and information.  One bird doesn’t make the flock fly over there, instead of over here; one fish doesn’t make the school swim over there, etc.  The ruling class’s confirmation bias is constantly self-reinforcing because of the infosphere bubble they inhabit – it’s a self-licking ice cream cone.  Combine that with a certain vague class consciousness, the ubiquity of a shared quasi-religious model driving moral righteousness (wokism and greenism being the Current Day creeds), and very little prompting is needed.  Once the “why” of an op is apparent and is aligned with the ruling class values, then the op runs itself.

Note how the successful mainstream ops confirm the priors of the ruling class.  You, too, my dissident friends, have priors as well  Because you want to believe something that confirms your priors, you will be tempted to skip past the Two Questions.  Even outside the mainstream infosphere, people are pushing narratives for their own reasons.  None of us are immune from selection bias and confirmation bias.  Perhaps the easiest way to see this is with anonymously sourced stories – when they something we don’t like, they are easy to dismiss because their sourcing is garbage.  But when they say something we do like, how often do we dismiss them because their sourcing is just as garbage as the stories we don’t like?

There’s no magic bullet – we are in the hall of mirrors.  In some ways, trying to parse the infosphere is like running a counterespionage operation.   The best we can do is navigate between the Scylla of credulity, and the Charybdis of paranoia.  The silver lining,  I suppose, is that the need to ask the Two Questions has become painfully apparent over the last few years, and its better to know much of what you see is manufactured for someone else’s ends than to be an unwitting pawn.