12-15-25 - 11am - Media Narratives

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Michael, let's pronounced gentle, not gentile. Don't make us goobers
look stupid.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Thank you, Na far Bays Morning, Dan Gong, Hey, Mike,
I've got to disagree with you in this sense. Everybody
keeps talking about radical Islam and how they want to
kill everybody. I disagree that is mainstream Islam. Radical Islam
are the ones that want to live in peace with

(00:27):
everybody else and not show their true colors.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
I think we're calling it wrong.

Speaker 4 (00:38):
Well, I think there I think there is. I can't
call it a sect, but I think there probably are
some Muslims who are not out to start a little
into fada. And they they they don't They're they're kind

(00:58):
of like this is this is touchy territory. I say,
they're kind of like nonpracticing Catholics or non practicing Jews
or non practicing Christians that well, well, I'll take this
little part, and I'll take this little part, and I'll
take this little part, and they don't take the whole part.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
But I think I.

Speaker 4 (01:16):
Think whether you are right or I'm right is immaterial.
What I do believe is that the radical Islamas are
the ones that are causing the problems those Muslims that
may live among us, that are not out to kill everybody,

(01:37):
are not the problem.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
It's the radicals.

Speaker 4 (01:42):
Elon must recently ask a question I think probably a
lot of Americans have been asking for years, and Republicans
used to be accused of this.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
All the time.

Speaker 4 (01:54):
I don't remember how long ago it was, but when
when Rush was on air, Rush Rush made a common
one time joking about how you know he'll get from
He called them seminar I think seminar callers, or he
get emails about you know, wow, you just get your
talking points from the Republican National Committee every day. Well,
if you ever listen to Rush, you knew that he,

(02:17):
of anyone, never took talking points. That was all original Rush.
And I've gotten the same accusation before, all you're just
you know, on a text message ocause, Oh you're just
you're just mouthing the Trump talking points or whatever. No, actually,
there's a lot of things about Trump that Trump does
that I disagree with, and some of the ways that

(02:38):
he actually behaves or says that I disagree with. So no,
I don't get In fact, I pretty much severed my
relationships with what I would call the so called muggety
MUCKs of the Republican Party A long time ago, a
long long time ago. If you heard the first hour
of this program today in which I hopefully have disrated

(03:01):
the Douglas County commissioners and the Douglas County George Brockler
of the DA down there, and the Douglas County sheriff,
and you will say I'm just a mouthpiece for Republicans.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
You got to go listen to that and then come
back talk to me again.

Speaker 4 (03:18):
Anyway, Musk was reacting to a familiar spectacle within minutes
or hours of any event, leading Democrats, left leaning pundits,
and of course the cabal. But I repeat myself, suddenly
begin using the same phrase, the same framing, sometimes almost
exactly the same sentence on TV on X, all across

(03:38):
the interwebs, and the pattern becomes so obvious that it's
kind of a dark joke. For those of us who
are steeped in all of this. We all see the copies.
The question is whether there is in fact a script. Well,
there is not a single e mail from you know,

(04:01):
the great Oz behind the curtain, but something that's actually
more durable and more effective. It's a layered system of lists,
war rooms, donor funded messaging shops, informal chat networks that
all work together as an organism, kind of a distributed

(04:24):
pollup bureau for the left. I want to trace the
history of that system and describe its current machinery. And
then let's answer elon Musk question as precisely as a
public record might allow.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
And the picture emerges, not of some.

Speaker 4 (04:44):
Spontaneous hang u a second, not as let me turn
that off now you can turn it back on. Not
as some sort of spontaneous consensus. It's actually a deliberate coordination.
Here's a montage as an example. You may have heard this.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Before our latest possibility, Treasure Valley.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
Communities, deal Past West Crucius Communities, Eastern Iwish Communities, Mister communities.

Speaker 5 (05:12):
We're extremely proud of the quality Dallas journalism that CBS
four news produces.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
But we are.

Speaker 5 (05:24):
Sharing of bias and false.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
Dangerous democracy.

Speaker 4 (05:49):
Now you mean you mean we call that from the
Sinclair television group in which somebody captured everybody saying all
the same thing.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
So let's start with.

Speaker 4 (05:59):
That from a president might warn of a border emergency,
and within hours the Democrats will declare that it's a
manufacture crisis. So a state titens its voting rules, those
same politicians, that same cabal will then denounce that as
voter suppression or Jim Crow two point zh. Remember that

(06:22):
a republican appointment or a publican policy gets announced and
suddenly everything is a what a threat to democracy? These
phrases are not inevitable descriptions of the facts. Those phrases
are chosen there, they're tested in front of groups, and

(06:43):
then they get distributed. The oddity is not the party
uses slogans. Every party has a slogan. Is that the
slogans appear simultaneously everywhere at the same time, all the
way from Senate leadership to cable anchors to mid level influencers.
And it's all with lightning speed and of course uniformity.

(07:04):
If you ask how that became possible, you go back.
This will really take you back. Remember list serves that
took place back in the early two thousands. It was
basic technology, private email list, but the social innovation of
that private those private email lists list serves was new.
I'm still a member of several list serves, yes, primarily

(07:27):
about economies. Then a small group of progressive strategists and
writers realized they could take that what used to be
informal chatter and turn that into a discipline, backroom operation.
The early Townhouse List on the left, it gathered liberal bloggers, activists,
media figures into a single confidential thread where those stories

(07:50):
could be pitched, spins could be tested, responses coordinated, and
do all of that before any of it went public.
That listablished a pattern. It established a private room where
partisans could plan the next day's narrative while the public
imagine they were watching all these independent.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
Minds at work. Why I heard I saw it.

Speaker 4 (08:12):
On Facebook, I saw it over on Next, I saw
it on Channel nine, I saw on the Denver compost.
The model reached its most famous and probably infamous, when
we discovered the journal List. Remember the journal List. That
was a private Google group created by Ezra kleimb back
in seven for about four hundred left leaning journalists, academics,

(08:32):
and policy professionals. Its state of purpose was to discuss
politics in the media, but the practical effect was, as
we found out by the leaked emails, was to shape
the messaging in ways that helped democrats and her Republican machem.

Speaker 5 (08:51):
In regard to this Australia shooting many many years ago.
They of course had their gun buy back, But here's
my question, why the heck would you have a mandatory
gun buy back only to allow people to get licensed
to buy weapons.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
Especially terrorists.

Speaker 5 (09:12):
It's insane, yes it is.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
But they're hunting.

Speaker 4 (09:21):
Rifles, very different, very different assault weapons, right, They're not
assault weapons.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
They're they're hunting rifles fully semi automatic. Yes, and by
the way, there are level action shotguns. You saw that
text too. What you saw that text too, Back to the.

Speaker 4 (09:45):
Back to the narratives and how they you know, the
talking points, how they get you know, established, so this
journal list gets exposed. Yes, the left was as embarrassed
as the left can get, which is not very much.
But they at least shut down the list. But shutting
down the list doesn't mean that they didn't keep doing

(10:05):
what the list does. They just migrated and then something.
You wonder why I refer to Well, there's many reasons.
But one of many reasons why I refer to the
Cabal as the Cabal, that unholy alliance of the bruising
elite tech giants and the dominant media.

Speaker 1 (10:28):
Well, they have a.

Speaker 4 (10:30):
Smaller group that replaced the journal list called the Cabalist
c ABA lid the cabal list that started to take shape,
and then all the progressive activists built even wider networks
Game Changer Saloon that's a closed Google group of more

(10:51):
than a thousand writers, operaties, and organizers community organizers. Remember
how obamamus so proud he was a commune unity organizer
that always scared the crap out of me every time
he talked about his community organizing days. Because those nngos,
those non government organizations that do all the community organizing,

(11:14):
are paid for by you and me through our tax dollars,
and they work against our interests. So that group mixed
journalists from you know, CNN or the network's reuters, all
the major online newspapers with staff from Union's environmental groups,
planned parenthood. They shared talking points, they tested narratives, They

(11:36):
warned everybody you know, Oh, it was like Skull and
Bones at Yale. Don't you dare ever talk about this
first rule of fight club. You don't talk about fight club.
And so you end up with the result that is
an informal but very powerful alignment mechanism. Advocacy professionals supplied
the red meat, the journalists and the commentators supplied the

(11:58):
megaphone and the light house. When it's controlled by the
Democrats and the Democrat National Committee could then count on
a friendly public sphere. Why we can just depend on
them to defend us. Over time, that improvised architecture actually

(12:18):
became real institutions. David Brock formed Media Matters for America,
which started out as a so called watchdog to you know,
monitor conservative media, and it still plays that role, but
it's also developed a second face that is a lot
less visible to the public. It has not to be

(12:39):
confused with Al Sharpton, but it has something called its
Action Network and a project called Message Matters. It sends
out it literally sends out daily talking point memos. No,
not to the general public, you can't get onto it,
but to thousands of Democrat aligned progressive talk show hosts

(13:02):
and progressive influencers. So, for example, when a scandal threatened
the Justice Department over the seizures of the reporter's phone records,
they sent a memo out providing all of the lines
to defend the administration and to downplay the danger.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
The memo was in the newspaper article. It was a script.

Speaker 4 (13:22):
Crafted so that a sympathetic coast or a columnist or
any sort of surrogate out there speaking on behalf of
the administration would use the same arguments, even the same
phrasing when they appeared on air. It's The Center for
American Progress, run by Clinton Friends, plays a parallel role

(13:49):
at the level of forget the day to day.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
Minutia of whatever the issue of the day is.

Speaker 4 (13:55):
The Center for American Progress plays a similar role for
the day to day, you know, rapid responses at the
level of ideas. At a more strategic level, it started
out in think tank for you know, they'd issue policy papers,
they'd hire fellows, but it also ran what was called

(14:16):
Progressive Media. That was literally the name of it, Progressing Media.
That group had daily phone calls, they circulated the message
of the day, They coordinated language across left leaning groups,
and so the public facing blog of Progressing Media and
the newsletters that was just the tip of the spear.

(14:36):
That was just for you to you know, if you
got if you're able to get on that list, you
just solve that. But behind that tip of the spear
was a routine in which Democrat campaigns. The Center for
American Progress staff and all of the allied media, which
is pretty much to say, everybody except say Fox News

(14:59):
or o An or you know newsmas. They agreed on
how to describe, how to describe events, and how the
pillory their opponents. Internal emails were later discovered that revealed
close coordination between the Center for the American Progress and
the Clinton campaigns. I mentioned they were friends. It simply

(15:22):
confirmed what had long been visible to anybody who's paying attention.
The lines between the Democrat Party, the think tanks, and
the media were ports, and the messaging flowed freely among them.
And then by the mid twenty twenties of mid twenty tens,
that messaging ecosystem had grown, actually grown a backbone, and

(15:44):
at the core were party institutions like the Democrat National
Committee's Communications shop. They ran the original war room, and
the explicit mandate was to drive a unified daily message.
And then armed around that core were all the allied
organizations media matters, and all of those were all aligned

(16:08):
with them, all doing exactly the same thing, spreading the
same messy.

Speaker 3 (16:13):
Good morning, Michael and Dragon. Michael, welcome back to the
Land of the Living. Hope you had a good time
in Montucky On Friday, the rest of us normal Americans
had to work. And you know, despite it not being
calderon Friday, I still had a good time. It was
a good show and welcome back.

Speaker 4 (16:31):
I want you to know that I worked on Friday,
family like sharing an airbnb in Missoula, Montana, suffering through
because we had to be there early two hours of
an actual graduation ceremony, plus you know, an hour beforehand,

(16:54):
and then the time you know, the photos and everything afterwards,
and then the graduation party and then dinner.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
It was work. It was real work. The only thing
good about it was anything about red Beard once and
I didn't think about you will.

Speaker 4 (17:17):
You know, as I as I sat holding forth in
the living room of the airbnb, I thought to myself, well,
at least dragging red Beard's not here, missus. Red Beard
could have been there and that would have lied in
the party yet but probably yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
Yeah. In twenty twenty five.

Speaker 4 (17:33):
Earlier this year, the Democrat National committeelaunched something called It's
a live Daily Blueprint. That's the name of Daily Blueprint.
They lost it from their war room. It's a short
broadcast and it's designed to set the message every single.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
Day Monday through Friday.

Speaker 4 (17:53):
So that's actually formalizing what had already been happening in
those private email and those lists serves for years. It
provides the central guidance for an entire political ecosystem, and
for the Democrats, that ecosystem includes not only the party's infrastructure,

(18:14):
but the country's dominant newsrooms. Let me repeat that, the
country's dominant root newsrooms think ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MS
Now or MS Yesterday, whatever they call the stupid thing.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
That's part of the ecosystem.

Speaker 4 (18:32):
So if you and I do mean you or a
family member or anybody else or friends are watching ABC, CBS, NBC,
MS NOW, MS Yesterday or CNN, you're getting fed. But
the Democrat National Committee wants you to hear, almost down
to the very words that they use. Now you think, oh,

(18:58):
but Michael, Republicans do the same thing. I challenge you
to prove it, because on the Republican side of the
political spectrum, the road is it's uphill, it's fragmented, it'sn't
about as good a shape as Colorado's highways and roads
and bridges. We didn't even have a megaphone effect. There's

(19:19):
no megaphone effects of institutionally aligned media. Even Fox News
isn't on the reservation. Now you overlay that Democrat funal
machinery with the communication tools.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
Of the last decade.

Speaker 4 (19:33):
You got slacked, you got Signal, wattsapp, whatever encrypted direct
messaging services they're using, and now you've got something as
even more nimble. Journal list back in the odds taught
us one lesson really clearly written records can lead.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
So the response was not to abandon the coordination.

Speaker 4 (19:56):
Instead they moved it into channels that are harder to subpoena,
harder to search, even harder to find. Or if you
do find them and you want to somehow you're involved
in some sort of litigation and you want a subpoena,
well good luck with that, because it's encrypted and they're
going to protect those platforms are going to protect their users.

(20:17):
Reporters get embedded with Democrat campaign trade and they trade
text with staff in real time influence what's stay in
good standing, get folded into the group chats where the
staff share, oh, it's on background. When you do something
on background, which I've been doing recently.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
Four of all places.

Speaker 4 (20:41):
CNN, CNN has a particular reporter that's been writing some
stories about some things, and I've been providing some background.
And I do that so that he has what, from
my perspective, is the framing that he needs to understand
about what's going on with something within homeland security. I

(21:03):
don't make any bones about it, but I make sure
it's off the record, because I don't want to be
quoted in any of the stories. Well influencers who want
to stay in good I don't scar. I don't care
about staying good standing with CNN. I don't give two hoots.
I just this guy reached out to me and asked, hey,
would you provide some background? Yeah, and be happy to
provide you some background in the hopes that it might

(21:25):
influence a little objectivity. And what his reporting is so far,
it's mixed mixed bag.

Speaker 1 (21:32):
Think about do you.

Speaker 4 (21:32):
Remember when the Biden White House invited all the tick
talkers to a special briefing on the war in Ukraine
and the increase in gas prices. That wasn't a subtle message.
They were deputizing them as an arm of the White
House communications shop. Here's what you should say about putin.
Here's how you should explain energy prices. Think of it

(21:55):
as a press briefing plus direct distribution network. That's exactly
what it is, and the role of the White House
itself deserves emphasis. You know, during the debate over the
Iran nuclear Deal, Deputy National Security Advisor Band Roads openly
described building an echo chamber, so his team would feed

(22:17):
narratives and talking points to all the sympathetic experts and
reporters who would then echo those talking points and op
eds in television segments and think tank reports, and then
the administration would then point to that chorus as evidence
of consensus or how right they were. Oh, look, such
and such think tank says exactly what we've been saying,

(22:38):
so we must be right on point. I would say.
The key sentence in my description was that outside voices
were saying things that validated what we had given them
to say. The White House was telling them say this,
and then the White House would say, see, it validates

(23:00):
what we've been telling you. You can replace the words
Iranian deal with any initiative, whatever it is, climate, healthcare,
voting rules, and now you've got the template for modern
progressive messaging. The government writes the sheet music, and all
the friendly institutions the media play it back, and then
the unsuspecting public has assured, oh, we're hearing spontaneous symphony music.

(23:26):
Now you know, you're in the bull craft that they've
all designed and they want you to hear. So if
you are listening, if your primary source of the news
comes from the cabal again, the dominant media NBCCBS, ABC
or any of the cables I don't I'll include Fox
and that too, then you're just hearing what they want

(23:49):
you to hear, which means omission and co mission, and
sometimes the cooperation is pretty comical. I'll give you an
example in Brazil. She was a CNN contributor, she became
the Democrat National Committee chair. She was feeding the primary
debate questions to the Clinton campaign in advanced Now, that's

(24:12):
crossing an ethical line so clear that even CNN cannot
ignore it, so they had to get rid of her.
But the deeper lesson was not that one person cheated.
It was that a senior party insider felt entirely at
home using what's supposedly is a neutral news platform to
give a candidate an advantage. The wall, or if you

(24:37):
think there's a wall between Democrat strategy and media coverage,
that wall is, well, it might be framed up. There's
no drywall on it. It hasn't been painted, it hasn't
been sealed. It's just a bunch of two before's. It's
got a giant hole so that outsiders can see right

(24:59):
in the c exactly what it is that they're supposed.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
To be saying.

Speaker 4 (25:03):
Now, if you step back in the details, you'll see,
if you do a thirty thousand foot out of body experience,
you'll see there's a pattern. There are three concentric circles
that answer Elon Musk's hey, who sends them in these
instructions question? Remember that's how we started the segment. Now
Elon Musk is almost Joe Rogan, and they say who

(25:25):
sends these instructions? Out at the center, you got small
group of party leaders, primarily the Democrat leader's communications staff,
so it'll be like Chuck Schumer's staff, the Keen Jeffrey's staff,
and if they control the White House, it would be
the White House Comms office. Then you got the senior

(25:45):
strategists at places like the Center for American Progress or
Media Matters. They decide the themes. The themes have to
serve the party's interests in any given day. They decide
which story to elevate, which scandal to bury, what phrases
tested well in the focus groups. Slightly further out, as
you keep looking at the pattern or all the institutional nodes.

(26:07):
You got the Democrat National Committee's war room, you got
media matters, list operations, you got American bridges research shops.
You got the progressive donor consortia that tie all the
funding to message discipline. They convert themes into lines for
the consumers, those not very discerning consumers, and news they

(26:29):
write them memos, they can pile the fact sheets, they
produce the talking points, and all that gets circulated every
single morning. Now let's go even further out. There's an
outer ring too. It's kind of like Saturn. Now you
got an outer ring. You have the elected Democrats, you
have their staffers, you have the cable host you have
the op ed writers, you have the hosts of the podcast.
You got the social media influencers. And a lot of

(26:50):
them are not given marketing orders in any formal sense.
They just sign up for the lists, or they just
sit in on the calls, or they join the signal chats, WhatsApp,
and so they absorb the norms because the ecosystem filters
out all the noise to the norms that they want
to be broadcast. They don't break ranks, they don't contradict

(27:15):
the narrative. They simply amplify the line of the day.
And then when you do that, if you're an influencer,
you're a podcast host, whatever it is, you're even a
network host, you get rewarded. What's important to all of
those people, access and also positive coverage. If you get

(27:36):
positive coverage of you know, XYZ podcasts, that helps build
your numbers. And if you're monetizing your podcast now you're
increasing your numbers, you're increasing your dollar value. So the
result is that a phrase, just a simple phrase, can
move from an internal memo written by some you know,

(27:56):
junior staffers, some stupid think tank, to the mouth of
the US senator and it goes from the mouth of
US senator to the cairn of the cable show in
less than twenty four hours.

Speaker 1 (28:08):
And now you've got the narrative.

Speaker 4 (28:13):
The cynics might object with this story that this segment
makes too much of coordination and too little of genuine
ideological agreement. Now, perhaps every Democrat calls the same law
voter suppression because they might truly believe that's what it is.
And maybe every stupid cable anchor describes a border emergency

(28:36):
as a manufactured crisis because they read the same data.
I'll grant you there might be a little truth from that,
But then you have to recognize that there's a shared worldview,
and a shared worldview makes certain framings just seem natural.
Yet the timing, verbatim repetition, and now we know the

(29:00):
documented existence of organized messaging hubs makes it implausible to
treat that as coincidence. If you see identical language appearing
in one thousand miles at one time, and you know
there are central institutions that are tasked with producing and
distributing that language, the more reasonable explanation has to be

(29:21):
it's not mass telepathy. It's a functioning microsystem. It's a
functioning organism. It is the cabal at work. Now there's
another objection worth confronting. Why should a conservative care if
the other side has built a more professional communications machine

(29:42):
than conservatives have? After all, Republicans actually envy the discipline
that I just described for you. I don't think there's
an easy answer, because a democratic republic does not forbid
parties from arguing strategically. But there are two dangers that
ought to concern you. The first is the collapse of
any meaningful distinction between news and spin, news and opinion.

(30:10):
And I've always criticized Fox News for this. You look
at Fox News, are you watching a news hour or
are you watching an opinion hour? And oftentimes it'll be
a news hour, but they infuse it with opinion because
they'll bring on a guest. Oh, we're talking today about
X y.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
Z that happened.

Speaker 4 (30:29):
There was a car wreck on fifth and main Street. Well,
let's bring in an expert to give us their opinion
about why there was an accident on mainland fifth Avenue.
That's where it becomes almost indiscernible between the news and
the opinion. And when the journalists see themselves as part
of a messaging team. When those private lists that I

(30:50):
described are used to coordinate political attacks rather than to, oh,
I don't know, test an argument or to share information
or debate an issue, then we start to there's the
benefit of independent scrutiny. There's the point that I think
the one place where you can honestly get independent scrutiny
conservative talk radio. No I will admit, freely admit not

(31:14):
all conservative talk radio, because many conservatives just well they
just they take the cough medicine, they take the dope,
and they just repeat whatever they hear.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
You won't hear that.

Speaker 4 (31:27):
Here, the press becomes an extension of one party's communications office.
And then there's another danger, a manufactured consensus. If donors
think tanks, party officials, the media can create an echo
chamber and then point to that echo chamber that everybody
agrees that. If you're a dissenting citizen, if you're a

(31:48):
dissenting host like I usually am, you can become more
easily marginalized and people will call you a crank.

Speaker 1 (31:56):
Or an extremist.

Speaker 4 (31:57):
You how many times I get called an extremist on
a tech do you how many times I get emails
about it, I'm just an extremist or I'm just a
mouthpiece for Donald Trump. That tells me two things. Why
you never listened to the program or if you did,
you listened to about five minutes of it where I
might happen to agree with something, and you miss all
the segments where like the first hour of I just
excoriated the Douglas County Republican Party and the leadership in

(32:19):
the Douglas County government. In principle, the cure for this
kind of propaganda is more speech, not less. And I
think conservatives should build their own shops, and some do exist,
but we ought to be honest about what is happening.
It's not paranoid to say that Democrats and their allies

(32:42):
actually coordinate their messages and indiscriminate listening and non discerning,
discerning consumers of news think, oh, then that must be
the truth. Guess what it's not.