The framing and manipulation employed by many of these current “news” networks is reminiscent of the worst yellow journalism and propaganda in human history. Stefan Molyneux looks at a CNN smear piece negatively framing James O’Keefe and President Donald Trump and exposes the manipulation and falsehood employed to taint the “news” story itself. American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake Newshttp://www.fdrurl.com/american-pravdaArticle: http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/12/media/james-okeefe-trump-obama-columbia-records/index.htmlYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
It is an incredible remote control attempt to hijack your brain and your nervous system to turn you into a remotely programmed and controlled reaction bot to follow a particular political narrative.
And it's really, really important to be aware of how these fishhooks into your mind are baited and planted, because I think it's really, really important that we work to maintain our capacity for free will.
A free will is like an athletic skill or a musical ability.
It is something that is earned through practice and through repetition.
It is not necessarily innate to us all.
It is like learning a foreign language sometimes.
These days in a highly programmed environmental influence society, you know, where everyone says, or everyone on the left at least says, it is your environment that programs who you are.
And then, of course, the left, by saying it's your environment that programs who you are, then try to be that environment that programs who you are.
And when you surrender to or you are infected by a particular set of political programming, you lose your capacity to choose.
And we see this happening.
Of course, the whole point is to bypass your rational thirst for reason and evidence and have you simply...
Be a positive and negative stimuli pursuer, right?
So you get programmed to react negatively to certain stimuli and you get programmed to react positively to other stimuli and then you simply become a mouse avoiding electricity and pursuing cheese in a maze designed by others.
You lose your capacity for free will and choice and therefore negotiation.
And so I sort of came across a pretty juicy example of political propaganda that I wanted to help you sort of understand or help you go through.
Of all places, from CNN, whatever next.
Now, this is related to James O'Keefe's new book, American Profit.
I will put the link to that below.
You should really check it out.
It's very, very good. And so the title...
James O'Keefe says Trump asked him to go on birther-linked mission.
Now, it starts like this.
Donald Trump in 2013 asked James O'Keefe, the controversial conservative filmmaker, if he could get inside Columbia University and obtain President Obama's sealed college records, according to a passage in O'Keefe's forthcoming book, a copy of which was reviewed by CNN. Okay.
So, let's just start with the paragraph, right?
So, it starts with Donald Trump, and of course it's CNN, so they know their audience, so you're automatically on a negative slide.
Ask James O'Keefe, how is James O'Keefe described?
The controversial, conservative filmmaker.
Controversial, of course, means that people don't like him.
And in the world of the CNN audience, to not be liked is to be wrong.
To be unpopular, to be controversial, is to be wrong.
Controversial means, of course, you have offended people, you have upset people.
And in the girly leftist world, to upset people means that you are in the wrong.
You have not been sensitive to other people's feelings.
You have not nurtured their creative potential.
You have not allowed them to have their voice.
And you have caused them to become white-lipped, upset people, forced to retreat to hug rooms and watch puppy videos.
So, controversial.
Conservative, of course. You have to say conservative to film and filmmaker.
Now, a filmmaker is a very interesting way of putting it because maker means that you are creating something to make a film.
James Cameron is a filmmaker.
Ridley Scott is a filmmaker.
So that implies fiction.
That implies, of course, editing.
That implies entertainment.
So filmmaker rather than, say, documentarian or a journalist or reporter.
So, controversial conservative filmmaker, you've been perfectly framed to have a negative reaction to everything else.
Now, if you could, get inside Columbia University and obtain President Obama's sealed college records.
Now, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know the protocol with this.
I'm not much of a court toady, but he's not president anymore.
This is 2018, so hasn't been president for quite a while.
And so do you say ex-president or, right?
So here's what's interesting.
So you just have Donald Trump.
And then it's President Obama.
Again, this is framing, right?
Donald Trump, the private citizen.
Now, of course, he was a private citizen in 2013.
But you could say, President Donald Trump, back in 2013, asked, right?
Because if you're going to call President Obama, now that he's not been in power, still President Obama, you don't call him ex-president or former President Obama, you President Obama.
So you're quite comfortable talking people's, using people's titles out of Immediate timeline context.
So, why would it not be current President Donald Trump?
In 2013, us, right?
No, you would say President Obama and Donald Trump.
So, according to a passage in O'Keefe's forthcoming book, So, a copy of which was reviewed by CNN. Now that's interesting, because I would assume that this copy was sent to CNN. A copy of which was reviewed, or a copy of which was sent to CNN. See, if you say sent to CNN, which I assume is the accurate...
Way of putting it, then O'Keefe sounds like he wants to participate.
He is sending stuff to review and he sounds more friendly.
He's giving a gift and would like to participate.
A copy of which was reviewed by CNN like they, I don't know, pillaged it from James O'Keefe's trench coat pockets or something like that.
And this is interesting too, sealed college records.
Now, for those who don't know, and there's a couple of books on this topic that are very interesting, the amount of fog covering Obama's early years, particularly, I mean, you can't find out about his college transcripts, you can't find out about his thesis very easily, I mean, it's kind of all gone missing.
And that's a very interesting question.
If you're voting for somebody who's going to have massive power over you, wouldn't it be good to know what their marks were in school?
Wouldn't it be good to know what their thesis was, who shaped their thinking, what courses they took, and all this?
This is the big question which any intelligent person who was not biased would ask and say, well, why were these college records sealed?
Of course, the answer is that there's something in those college records that the American people would not like.
And I think I know what it is.
I'm going to conjecture in a moment or two.
So, the article goes on to say, O'Keefe, a guerrilla filmmaker whom critics have decried for his tactics and who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for entering federal property in 2010 under false pretenses.
So, again, it's not subtle.
It's really not subtle at all.
O'Keefe, a guerrilla filmmaker.
Huh. A guerrilla filmmaker.
Who critics have decried for his tactics.
See, now you're only talking about his critics.
And what is the nature of that criticism?
It doesn't matter. What are the tactics that are decried?
What has he done that is false?
What has he done that is wrong?
Well, no. Nothing is said at all, right?
And you can see this in the way, and this is taking sort of an extreme counterexample, But when Nelson Mandela was alive, he wasn't introduced as Nelson Mandela, former communist who spent decades in prison for his ties to terrorism.
He was never a freedom fighter.
It's the way Che Guevara is not a psychopath who murdered children.
It is not introduced to a revolutionary guard, whatever, right?
So how people are described.
Now, when you trust people, you give them the facts.
When you want to control people, you give them shade, right?
You shade things.
You don't allow the facts to speak for themselves.
You simply provide judgments about the facts without providing the facts themselves, right?
So guerrilla filmmaker.
Guerrilla is, of course, a war term, right?
If you're a guerrilla in combat, then you are a particular kind of...
Non-state actor, cover yourself in leaves and shoot civilians.
That's a negative. And again, here we have filmmaker.
Now, pointing a camera at people surreptitiously and recording what they say in a legal manner, that's not making a film.
That is recording something.
Right? So, they did not refer to Billy Bush when he, back in the day, I think it was 2005, when there was this hot mic recording of Trump.
The Access Hollywood stuff.
They did not refer to him as a guerrilla filmmaker or anything like that.
And then they didn't point out every negative thing about him before going on.
See, we don't actually have any facts here yet, right?
We don't have any facts.
And so, whom critics have decried for his tactics.
Tactics. See, tactics is interesting.
Because tactics is like manipulation.
And of course, this is all projection.
When you hear the word tactics, you know, if you want to win a particular war, you might take particular tactics.
It's a fairly dishonest word in many ways.
Like manipulation is kind of a dishonest word in many ways.
So what are his tactics?
His tactics are either he himself or people who work for him.
Get into conversations with people about important topics and record them in a perfectly legal manner.
And then release it.
So what are the tactics?
While I think a story is important, I'm going to get somebody on the record describing what's happening.
And what?
How is that a tactic? I mean, I don't...
And the other thing you'll hear, of course, selectively edited.
This is what you hear. Like, of course things are selectively edited.
Of course things are selectively edited.
I mean, good lord, can you imagine Avatar running 19 hours?
I'm sure some of you could.
But everything's edited.
I mean, when you're in a conversation with someone, if you're recording them for this kind of purpose, then there's going to be a whole bunch of stuff.
Oh, they're talking to the waiter.
Is that interesting? Oh, they're checking their phone.
Is that... Of course you're going to have to edit stuff.
Selectively edited is interesting, but James, of course, does not, you know, I killed John Bonet or John Bonet's kid or whatever, right?
I mean, he doesn't take words and put them together.
It's just he takes out the stuff that's extraneous so that you can focus on the stuff that it's not.
I mean, what's interesting is that if you write for these kinds of outlets, then what happens is you produce a draft.
And your editor goes over it and marks it up and so on, and then you rewrite it and you rewrite it again and so on.
So all of these articles are selectively edited.
I mean, does this mean that they're all fake?
Ah, those videos are selectively edited.
Well, everything on the web that's of any decency is selectively edited, except for my spontaneous videos, which are great.
But... And then, of course, they talk about him pled guilty to misdemeanor for entering federal property in 2010 under false pretenses.
And, um, yes.
And what does that have to do with the question of his meeting with Trump?
Right? I mean, they don't say, Hillary Clinton, who was investigated for over a year by the FBI for how, all right, they just, right, so it seems a little bit more important than what happened.
So, anyway, they say O'Keefe writes, in American Pravd of My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News, that during a meeting in New York City, Trump complimented his Acorn sting videos.
Mmm, sting videos.
And they give a quote, that pimp and hooker thing you did, wow!
Alright, so, the Acorn thing, you probably know all about it, so I won't go into that.
Sting videos.
Now, sting, of course, being, for anybody who's not a fan of the police, a negative word, or I guess likes Bill Bob Hagen's sword.
Anyway, let me focus.
See? Not selectively edited.
And that's what you get when you don't selectively edit.
So a sting video is considered to be, like, it's somewhat close to entrapment.
It's like, so again, it's negative, right?
That Pempernocker thing you did, wow.
As opposed to...
What actually happened out of the Acorn videos that he did, which was basically Acorn was defunded and shut down because of a variety of things that came out.
And that was a very, very big deal.
Very big deal. But O'Keefe writes, Trump was, Trump, quote, was a man with a plan, end quote, end quote, did not agree to this meeting to sing my praises.
What was Trump's plan?
According to O'Keefe, Trump, quote, suspected Obama had presented himself as a foreign student on application materials to ease his way into New York's Columbia University, maybe even Harvard too, and perhaps picked up a few scholarships along the way.
Now, that's important, right?
I think I'm one of the back of...
His books, or something he wrote, Obama was described as having come from, I think, born in Kenya, right?
So I think the woman who wrote it said, oh, it was just a, I made a mistake or whatever.
But it's an interesting question.
Now, we certainly, if you look at Focahontas, right, I mean, Elizabeth Warren, where she says, well, I had high cheekbones, and therefore I had Native American ancestry, and therefore, you know, until she got tenure, she checked off that she was a visible minority, and then This blonde, what is she, blue-eyed?
Something like that. I mean, magically, did not need to check that anymore.
And that's pretty horrible stuff.
Like, if you imitate an ethnic origin minority in order to gain and game the system, that's pretty ugly behavior.
So that actually would be...
Quite important. Is it impossible?
I don't know. Certainly not impossible.
But so anyway, that's and O'Keefe said, you know, that's not, you know, I'm not really a private eye.
He considered himself and his colleagues to be journalists, not private eyes.
And that did not seem to deter Trump.
At the end of the meeting, O'Keefe wrote, quote, Trump shook my hand, encouraged me to keep up the good work, and half-whispered, do Colombia.
Okay, so, gosh, the guy who's a billionaire and massive TV star and became president of the United States on his very first try against 17 very skilled and supported candidates.
Boy, he's a little persistent.
Shocking. Shocking.
Ah, so Trump's desire for these records would likely have had its roots in his obsession with Obama's birth certificate.
Ah, well, I'm not sure about that.
See, now we're just in the realm of rank speculation.
Would likely have had its roots in his obsession with Obama's birth certificate.
Obsession. And this again is just, and it's funny because it's a false conspiracy theory that Obama was born outside the US. See, a conspiracy theory, I mean, a conspiracy theory is just information that, what has yet to be verified by Infowars, I think.
Sometimes it feels that way.
But a conspiracy theory is, you know, making connections where no easy and evident connections exist.
And it doesn't mean it's false, it just means that, you know, So what's interesting is that they're complaining about conspiracy theories at the same time that they're hiving a conspiracy theory here.
Trump's desire for these records would likely have had its roots in his obsession with Obama's birth certificate.
Well, that's interesting.
That's interesting.
The birther controversy was not necessarily birthed by Hillary Clinton's campaign, but Hillary Clinton's campaign certainly did make use of it during her struggle against him politically.
So, again, that's not mentioned, of course, here.
Several of the many varying and often contradictory threads of the conspiracy theory centered on Obama's records from Columbia, where he completed his bachelor's degree in 1983.
Some of the conspiracy theorists believed, without evidence, that there would have been something suspicious in his records from that period.
So what does this have to do with his birth certificate?
I mean, it's not even subtle, right?
So, yeah, he wants to know about Colombia because of his obsession that Obama was born outside the U.S. But this is all stuff from Colombia where Obama completed his bachelor's degree in 1983, so what would that have to do with his birth certificate whatsoever?
And of course, the answer is that if it's possible and if it did happen that Obama claimed to be born in Kenya in order to get scholarships, that would be hideous and that would have most likely cost him his political career.
Kind of important. You know, that's kind of important.
And, of course, he released his birth certificate to, of course, cries of relief and suspicion that it was doctored, but nonetheless, Obama did release his long-form birth certificate, so why not release his Columbia records?
Why? I mean, this is stuff he did as an adult.
He's asking people to give him control over significant portions of the U.S. economy and so on.
And why not just release his Columbia records then?
Why wouldn't he have done that? You know, because it's funny because on the left they say, well, Trump should release his tax returns because he should have...
If you haven't done anything wrong, there's nothing to hide.
That's what the left over said. Release your tax returns.
Release your tax returns, right?
Donald's ducking his taxes.
Worst political thing ever.
But then when people say, well, you're asking me to vote on this guy, why wouldn't you release stuff he did as an adult that's directly relevant?
Because it's to do with his political theories, his political development, what he believes.
So why wouldn't you release all of these records?
And the fact that they weren't released, I mean, it's far more relevant than taxes.
Everybody knows that Donald Trump is a wealthy guy, so it doesn't really matter.
People know his approximate net worth.
They know his business holdings. They know just about everything.
Why wouldn't Obama have released taxes?
His university records, his intellectual development.
This is very important stuff.
And you know, the interesting thing too, I mean, he's admitted to using drugs, I think marijuana, cocaine, and so on.
And of course, they will introduce James O'Keefe.
Oh, he had this pled guilty to this misdemeanor.
And they didn't get mad at the people who released the Pentagon Papers, though.
But So they get mad.
But they don't say, well, you know, ex-President Obama, former drug user.
It's how it's all framed.
It's really, really important to understand just how all of this works.
And, of course, now, it's, oh, Trump wanted O'Keefe to go in and steal these records illegally.
And it's like, that's not.
No, he didn't. So the guy who was in the meeting, Sam Noonberg, He stressed repeatedly he did not believe during the meeting that Trump was asking O'Keefe to commit a crime.
He said, I recall that the Columbia records were brought up, Nudenberg told CNN. I in no way recall Trump asking James to do something illegal.
He did not ask him to go in there and break in and get the records.
He said Trump was saying something along the lines of, try to find somebody you can talk to that's saying, we are hiding the records, something along those lines.
But of course, they put that down at the bottom.
And it's the old thing, like...
He did not believe that Trump was asking O'Keefe to commit a crime.
Right? See, he did not believe that Trump was asking O'Keefe to commit a crime.
So, it's just a belief.
He could have been asking. You understand how all of this works, right?
And you put that down at the bottom, of course, right?
So I won't go through the whole thing, but it's really, really important to understand that, you know, what's going on in these is very nefarious.
It's very nefarious. It's framing, it's programming, it's a neuro-linguistic takeover.
They're attempting to hijack.
Your brain, they're attempting to invade and take over your dopamine system.
They're attempting to hijack your nervous system so that you hear O'Keefe negative response.
You know, it's like when Trump is dark.
He's very dark. It's dark, right?
It's attempting to, not an argument, it's not an argument, of course, right?
And, you know, you could say, you could frame this, of course, entirely differently.
You know, President Trump asked for information about Barack Obama that has been hidden from the American public.
He wanted to find ways to get information that he felt was essential for people to understand Obama and his history.
I mean, you could frame it any way you want.
But the fact that it's consistently framed this way, it's just not news, right?
It's not even fake news.
Now, fake news is a pretty nice way of putting it.
It's not fake news at all.
It's real propaganda, and that is a really grave danger.
Thanks so much. By the way, of course, Happy New Year.
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