monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I still haven't heard the media report on this - except for Fox. It's the biggest story in the history of the country. Watch what happens to KimDotCom and Hannity.

After posting the video, Kuhner repeatedly tweeted the clip at Donald Trump and conservative news outlets, alongside descriptions of Warren as a “phony Indian, a phony progressive & a phony senator,” who “made millions shilling for big banks, corporations & insurance giants” and “got rich by flipping homes, taking advantage of old ladies. She embodies crony capitalism.” Again, what was odd about the approach was not the revelation that conservatives hate, fear, and want to defeat Elizabeth Warren; it’s that they’re deploying a populist critique — one that questions, rather than emphasizes and makes a bogeyman of, her left bona fides — to do so.

By the end of the week, the Kuhner clip began to gain traction, and was posted at bigger and bigger conservative sites, including The Gateway Pundi, The Daily Caller, The Washington Times , Fox News, and The American Mirror, which was finally linked on Twitter by Drudge.

Most of the right’s coverage of Kuhner’s interaction with Warren described her as “frazzled” or “triggered,” claiming that she “scrambles” when confronted. None of that is true; the video shows her answering his charges cogently, pointing out that the kinds of economic policy she believes in — low college costs and higher wages — permitted her the degree of economic mobility she’s enjoyed. Nevertheless, the descriptive and highly gendered language used to frame the clip by the right closely echoes the popular portrayal of Hillary Clinton as spasmodic, easily rattled and high-strung, paving the way for fake news about Clinton’s ill health and mental fragility. “Fake Indian Elizabeth Warren is so easy to frazzle; all one has to do is call her out on her lies and hypocrisy and she loses her cool,” read the Gateway Pundit.

All this frothing might have stayed confined to the dark reaches of the right — in fact, Shareblue, the site whose 2016 purpose was the defense of Hillary Clinton but which David Brock has since described as “the Breitbart of the Left,” reframed the Kuhner clip as an example of Warren “destroy[ing]” a conservative radio host — had it not been for a mainstream media confluence.

The mainstreaming of this caricature of a woman, which appeals to America’s lizard-brain disdain for the hand-in-the-air Tracy Flicks of the world — the kind who take doggedly pragmatic paths to advancement, who’ll say anything to get ahead, who invite policy experts for dinners to learn what they don’t know in a manner that comes across as striving — manages to gently but efficiently discredit Warren both with a right wing that regards ambitious women as threatening and ugly, and a left who might view her reported approach as fake, compromised and emblematic of reviled Establishment mores. It’s a limber exertion.

But it’s worked before.

By midweek, right-wing super-PAC America Rising

the organization’s strategy here is especially clear in the wake of a story Terry Gross told just last week in her interview with Hillary Clinton around the publication of her memoir What Happened. On the Clinton episode of “Fresh Air,” Gross recalled how a portion of their 2015 conversation — about Clinton’s evolving position on gay rights — had gone viral, becoming a building block of the argument that Clinton has been insufficiently progressive throughout her career when it came to LGBTQ rights. As Gross pointed out to Clinton last week, that edited clip had exploded not because of LGBTQ activist reaction to it, but because America Rising had flagged it and pushed it out. The group “had it up before we even had it up on our website,” Gross told Clinton, marveling at how, “you were definitely going to be stronger on LGBTQ rights than anyone American Rising would likely support for president. So here was the right trying to turn your base against you, the right attacking you from the left.”


That conservative funders would try to work the same multi-tentacled magic on Warren, digging in years before a presidential threat even becomes flesh — Warren has so far said she will not run in 2020 — makes perfect sense, especially since portions of the left remain stuck in an acrid battle in the wake of the Clinton-Sanders fight of 2016.

Nor was this the first time that the mainstream press and the right wing have, perhaps unconsciously, mutually fed off of, and fed readers, similar and often gendered messages about Warren. Last year, the New York Times published a story about Warren, describing her as “imperious” and a “scold,” the latter of which would be echoed by Mike Huckabee in a February tweet. MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski described her in 2017 as “shrill” and “almost unhinged,” prefiguring the scrambling, frazzled, freaking-out headlines coming from the right this week.

“The irony is striking,” Jon Keller wrote in the Boston Globe back in February. “The leading female critic of the political Establishment is cast as a somewhat unhinged hypocrite by the right, a meme now being channeled by the left.”

And last week, as a few left-wing pundits, longtime critics of Clinton, weighed in in response to the Times — Chapo Trap House’s Felix Biederman tweeting on the subject of Warren’s meeting with the UBS banker and Dimon, “lol like the one thing she was supposed to be good on”; the politics reporter Libby Watson replying “she’s learning all the right lessons from Clinton 2016 I see” — it was hard not to feel like the marionettes were all playing their parts on the stage in Robert Mercer’s mind, and that it wasn’t just Warren who hadn’t learned any lessons from 2016.

12% of Sanders voters voted for Trump.

I was surprised too.

3) There is an identical precedent from 2008 where GOP operatives used the emerging social media universe (MySpace at the time) to forward a story that because Hillary had been cheated out of the nomination by Obama, that therefore thousands or millions of women were so angry that they were going to teach the corrupt Dem party a lesson and vote for McCain/Palin. This was the ClintonsForMcCain/Puma etc crowd.

If you don't know this history, for the love of god, get educated on it. Wikipedia has a rather good page on it HERE In 2008, I spent six months digging into this.

WHEN FACTS ARE NOT FACTS
BY THOMAS DRAKE, SCOTT RITTER, LISA LING, CIAN WESTMORELAND, PHILIP M. GIRALDI, AND JESSELYN RADACK
The recent article published on August 9, 2017, in The Nation by Patrick Lawrence leans heavily on a July 24, 2017, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) memo published by Consortiumnews.com and then picked up by several media outlets.

However, a number of VIPS members did not sign this problematic memo because of troubling questions about its conclusions, and others who did sign it have raised key concerns since its publication.

That the PUMA phenomenon had more of an organic existence, and involved an even greater number of sincerely angry women, than Blatham might have supposed, even aside from the ratfucking?

Nevermind that the editorial staff at a periodical most liberals have considered sacred text for years thought otherwise. It didn't suit what you want to believe and so the outliers must be right.

Trump's re-election effort will be the most vicious campaign you've ever seen

...Presidential re-election campaigns are referenda on the incumbent — most of the time, anyway. In 2004, George W. Bush succeeded in making the election mostly about his opponent, whom he and his party gutted with a hundred stilettos. Character assassination is the GOP specialty, particularly Trump's; you can bet that whoever the Democratic nominee is, they'll be the target of some of the most vicious personal attacks we've ever seen.