Journalists, Mass Casualties, and the Echo Chamber
If you carry an Obama therapy doll, you're not part of the 'Resistance'
When you read news about the war in Israel — the demands for a cease fire in Gaza, Iran’s recent drone and missile attack, and Joe Biden’s attempts to hinder Israel’s response — remember this: Democrats have admitted to building an echo chamber of “arms control experts” and “know-nothing journalists” who collaborate to sell government policy to the American public. And although that policy may contain some truth, it is built on a fundamental lie — which means it is nothing more than propaganda.
This article focuses on one particular echo chamber that feeds us lies about Iran. But there are other echo chambers, too, including one for Trump-Russia Collusion, one for COVID-19, another for the U.S.-Mexico Border, and yet another for the Biden Family Business. Some journalists are beginning to openly admit they have been willing participants in those echo chambers. And they always pay a price for that admission — because speaking the truth must always be punished or the echo chamber collapses.
Powerful people build propaganda echo machines because they are effective. They are effective because the vast majority of American citizens live in one of two camps: a) they care only about current events; or b) they don’t care at all about current events.
In both cases, most of us don’t — or can’t — remember what happened only 10 years ago. But what happened in the past (10, 100, or 1,000 years ago) is the foundation of the present, and the echo chamber built in 2013 by Barack Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes — “the Boy Wonder of the Obama White House” — is the foundation of the all the mainstream news you hear today.
The Lie
The lie presented to America by Obama was that a “moderate” Iran that wanted peace could be willed into existence by Obama’s negotiators. All they had to do was encourage Iran’s better angels, and the regime that demanded “death to America” and “death to Israel” would join the “community of nations” that seek peace and tolerance.
Obama and Rhodes piled a selection of truths on top of that fundamental lie and sold the wobbling gob as the Iran Deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
A simple search will provide all the truths about the deal you can swallow. But none of those matter when the foundation is false.
If you believe that foundation is true, you should reflect on the fact that two days ago — on Tax Day, April 15, 2024 — American supporters of Hamas (an Islamic terror proxy for Iran) chanted “death to America” and “death to Israel” in cities across America. These Americans are not chanting death slogans because Trump abandoned the JCPOA. They’re chanting death slogans because, like Iran’s terror regime, they hate America and Israel.
The Echo
The irony of quoting the echo chamber about “death to America” is not lost on me, but it is possible to discern the truth even when being bombarded by lies; and that’s mostly what this essay is about, anyway. An ancient truth is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and a thoroughly modern truth is that a very squeaky number of Americans actively want death to America.
Journalism has always been a sort of echo chamber because reporters have always fed “anonymous” government sources to the public. The evil genius of Obama’s echo chamber architect was recognizing that American journalism is no longer led by seasoned skeptics who strive to be objective.
Instead, the Obama White House cultivated hundreds of ignorant young reporters who don’t try to be objective because they were taught at university that objectivity doesn’t exist.
“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. They literally know nothing,” Rhodes said out loud in 2016. “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington” and “they call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo.”
Which brings us to the other side of the echo chamber: the experts. Handpicked and briefed by the administration, they became sources for hundreds of reporters who simply repeated what the experts said. And thus, our mainstream stenographers validated the administration’s foreign policy for Congress and the public.
The irony lost on most journalists — who by and large are literally in love with Obama — is that Obama and his chief advisors hold most journalists in utter contempt. Not only did Obama know they were ignorant, but he weaponized that ignorance to sell a vision of “arms control” in a foreign country that is animated by a vision of death to America.
In case you don’t know how many journalists literally love Obama, I’ll remind you of what Jill Abramson, the New York Times executive editor from 2011-2014, wrote in 2018:
“It’s easy to look at what’s happening in Washington DC and despair. That’s why I carry a little plastic Obama doll in my purse. I pull him out every now and then to remind myself that the United States had a progressive, African American president until very recently. Some people find this strange, but you have to take comfort where you can find it in Donald Trump’s America.”
In 2008, San Francisco columnist Mark Morford wrote (emphasis in the original) that Obama is “a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”
In light of such worship — whether Obama was their god or merely their hero — it’s not surprising that a) so many journalists eagerly regurgitated whatever Ben Rhodes fed them; and b) so many Americans eagerly gobbled up the vomit.
The Casualties
Various regimes throughout history have built echo chambers. Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese emperors, Inca emperors, Roman Caesars, European kings — and many others — said they were literally gods to be worshipped.
Echo chambers can form even when a leader does not claim godhood, as we see in modern Islamic theocracies, communist dictatorships, and — with the proper incentives — in some democratic republics.
If it is bad when The People are compelled by a god-emperor to believe in the echo for religious reasons, is it somehow better when the chamber is intentionally constructed for secular political purposes?
History demonstrates that the penalty for rejecting the echo can be severe, that the chamber around the throne naturally grows stronger, that future occupants find such power increasingly attractive … and eventually that “deniers” deserve cruel and unusual punishments. If left in place long enough, the echo chambers inevitably cause their inhabitants to inflict mass casualties on The People they once claimed to represent.
It should trouble everyone that America has a secular echo chamber which supports one political party’s narrative. It should be doubly troubling that one half of the chamber is occupied by “card-carrying journalists” who claim a unique Constitutional privilege they deny to the rest of us. And it should be even more troubling that the echo chamber was built by a president whose believers assign him “powerful luminosity” and a “unique high-vibration integrity.”
But most troubling is the fact that the American echo chamber is not troubling at all to the kinds of people who carry Barack Obama therapy dolls in their purses and run the largest media empires in human history.
Postscript
If you’re paying attention today, you’ve heard “U.S. officials” say that “Iran sought mass casualties in Israel strike.” And you’ve also heard “senior administration officials” reaffirm America’s “ironclad commitment” to Israel. Believe whatever you want about whatever government policy you want. But understand that the White House has an echo chamber and it has “force multipliers” — people standing at briefing podiums telling their “compadres” what to report.
In the Obama administration, a woman named Tanya Somanader (age 31) was the “director of digital response for the White House Office of Digital Strategy.” And Somanader said journalist Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor was “my RSS feed” — “she would just find everything and retweet it.”
Also serving Obama was Robert Malley, who, along with Secretary of State John Kerry, was formally negotiating with the Iranians. Malley’s father was born in Cairo and “proudly provided a platform for Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat” back in the day. Malley went on to become Joe Biden’s envoy to Iran, and in 2023 he had his security clearance suspended because two of his aides had been handpicked by the Iranian Foreign Ministry in their quest to build “a network of influential overseas academics and researchers” called “the Iran Experts Initiative.”
The echo chamber, part and parcel of theocratic and totalitarian regimes, is essentially a false reality. As noted by Vaclav Havel, the Czech poet and dissident who was imprisoned by Communists and eventually elected president of the Czech Republic, such regimes are captive to their own lies. In order to continue their existence, they must falsify everything.
They falsify the past
They falsify the present
They falsify the future
They falsify statistics
They pretend to respect human rights
They pretend to persecute no one
They pretend to fear nothing
They pretend to pretend nothing
Resist. Unless, of course, you carry an Obama therapy doll.
I'm thinking of taking up voodoo. They play with dolls too. Difference is, it's comforting knowing the effigy is providing some much needed amusement as the personal counterpart suffers numerous acts of pain and discomfort. Sounds like the perfect way to pass the time with an Obama doll!
This religious hierarchy formed in the Clinton years, when access to information (sacraments) was denied to anybody who dared apostasy in their reportage. And it was easy, after all, to put aside notions of "journalistic ethics" when you could be part of a Winning Team for A Cause. Today we have government-ordained cardinals and bishops dictating canon to the elects (reporters) who dutifully promote the one true faith. They even carry idols in their purses!