I’d like to set the stage for this article by establishing my perspective. I’ve always been registered as an independent and never had much trust in either party. I often have voted third party, but in some cases I voted for a Democrat. I’ve never come close to voting for a Republican. This year, I’m currently still undecided on where my vote specifically goes, but the one thing I’m sure of is that it’s not going D.

The point of this writing is to cleanly explain why that is in a heavily cited, informational format that attempts to avoid petty insults and historical biases that Republicans have had for years (which I never really paid attention to in the past). It’s very difficult to find reliable information lately and the mainstream media isn’t helping much with that, so this summary helps my own thoughts and hopefully can help others.

I personally hadn’t thought that hard about the candidates until the campaigns really began humming along, freely available information leaked out about Hillary, and the media started acting the way they did. As a final caveat, I’m no fan of Trump, and I’m a firm believer that choosing not to vote for a major party is not a vote for ‘the other side’.

Wikileaks

To begin, we need to start with Wikileaks and deal with the smear campaign against them.

Wikileaks has been around for a decade. Many considered them heroes for the leaks about the Iraq war, torture, and Guantanamo Bay, exposing the crimes of Bush and Cheney. The entire concept behind Wikileaks is pretty simple – oppressive regimes naturally create opposition, and thus necessarily need to keep secrets from their populace. The problem these regimes have is that in order to keep these secrets hidden they need to communicate efficiently, and efficiency and secrecy are directly opposed since convoluted and encrypted communications necessarily take longer than simpler methods. This allows opposition to learn about the secrets, and Wikileaks provides a secure outlet for the information. Believe that or not, there’s so far been no evidence to dispute the DNC or Podesta emails. Wikileaks are not hackers, they’re reporters who release information. And, despite what’s been said lately, they are not partisan. They have a perfect record for authenticity, never has a document been discredited.

I realize that the above statement alone does not make a strong case. In response to that, firstly authenticity of emails can be verified. Secondly, a while ago the story broke that Hillary’s tech specialist in charge of her email server asked for information on Reddit how to strip out email IDs from an email archive, and he was told that it’s not possible and that it’s very illegal. If it could have been done, it would have been done. An additional external validation that the Podesta emails are valid came from someone who ‘hacked’ Podesta’s twitter account because he didn’t change his passwords from before the leaks and he had his username and password that he used on multiple accounts listed in an email. The ‘hacker’ wiped his Apple account, got into his Twitter, and supposedly cancelled a campaign bus on election day… all because this guy’s security awareness is non-existent. His password was Runner4567 and he didn’t use two-factor authentication on any account even after he knew his emails were leaked.

Julian Assange

Assange is the founder of Wikileaks and is considered by many to be one of the most important freedom fighters in the world. He was arrested in 2010 at the same time as the Afghanistan leaks. He was accused of rape by unknown accusers in Sweden who almost immediately withdrew the claim. He has not been charged, but Sweden still has requested his extradition for questioning, which many believe is a farce and that he would be sent to the US and tried in a kangaroo court for releasing classified documents. To avoid this, he acquired asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has been for the past 6 years.

In the past few weeks much has happened. In August a cat burglar attempted to enter the embassy. Bizarre accusations of internet ‘child grooming’ were being built by a fake dating website, seemingly in an attempt to find a way to legally extradite him, and internet sleuths blew the ‘case’ apart.

The Podesta leaks began and Ecuador cut off his internet, possibly to demonstrate that the leaks are not coming directly from Assange. Assange has not made contact for days, which is quite concerning especially as there were reports of heavily armed police outside the embassy. Many speculate he is dead or being tortured, but that is currently unknown. Regardless, it’s not going to stop the leaks, he’s had 6 years of captivity in the embassy to plan contingencies.

All of this appears to be an attempt to prevent the Clinton-related leaks.

When the internet was cut the Wikileaks Twitter account changed drastically in tone and seems to have stopped attempting to be neutral. This may be because Assange being cut off means a new person is running the account, it may be that the account has been compromised, or it may be that they’re getting heated because their goal is to oppose authoritarianism and despite the truth being out there, there is little action.

Russia allegations

The statement that 17 US intelligence agencies definitively claimed that Russia hacked Democratic emails that Hillary made at the third debate, and which has been repeated ad nauseum by people working for her, is patently false and based on a single statement by a single person; “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities. Some states have also recently seen scanning and probing of their election-related systems, which in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company. However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government”. This is certainly not a declarative statement. It doesn’t necessarily rule out Russian involvement, but there’s no evidence of that and it’s significantly more likely that an internal leak occurred. To make her statement even more absurd you can look at the 17 intelligence agencies she referred to, which includes the Coast Guard, DEA, and other agencies that would not be using resources to look into this matter.

Despite this, nearly every mainstream media outlet fact-checked this claim, and called it ‘true’. This segues cleanly into the next segment.

State influence on mainstream media

This topic in particular is the scariest of all in my eyes. This article summarizes a few of the most concerning emails from the early portions of the Podesta leak, including Politico sending articles to the campaign for approval, Donna Brazile leaking debate questions, and affirmations of commitment to Hillary. There are dozens (upon) dozens (more) emails that tell the same story. 65 journalists are implicated. There were hours and hours of coverage about the nasty language Trump used 11 years ago and barely seconds of Wikileaks coverage even after the 10th day of leaks. The media straight up refused to report on critical information about a candidate, and when they did sneak it in for a few minutes it was nearly always to push a narrative convenient to Clinton (Russia, alterations, etc.). Or, it directly refuted the claims of censorship even when a majority agrees that bias is happening. It was, and is, completely unbalanced. Politico is currently attempting to create false narratives citing “unknown sources” to handwave away damaging evidence and the media is running with convenient stories without fact checking them (Aaron Black will come into play later on).

Couple all this information with the fact that they’ve “all been quite content to demean the government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry”, and it paints the picture of the ruling party using the media to bludgeon low-information voters with untruth. They appear to be conspiring to shape the narrative in the eyes of a purposely uninformed electorate with an elaborate PSYOP. This is beginning to look a bit dystopian, the media appears to be in the ruling party’s pocket.

The campaign created the “Bernie Bros” narrative to politically weaponize social justice issues and I saw the fruits of that in multiple conversations with people in my everyday life. This narrative seemed ridiculous to Bernie himself and made very little sense, but Hillary’s media was happy to push the story in many forms and across every platform. Remember when Bernie’s tone was ‘problematic’? This was the beginning of the ‘misogyny’ smears that were eventually going to be levied against whoever was running on the other side. Then later on, they had the snark to release this, which I honestly thought was satire… why would you encourage a fallacious argument strategy that insults your own intelligence? I get the tongue-in-cheek nature, but there’s really no logic behind it other than snarkily pointing and laughing, it doesn’t fully make sense. It appears that they’re attempting to divide us among every demographic line possible for political gain.

Donna Brazile (current DNC chair) has perhaps become the poster child of the campaign’s dishonesty as she unconvincingly stammers while refusing to answer direct questions about evidence of her misconduct and instead repeats ‘Russia’, ‘stolen’, and ‘faked’ over and over. Let’s not forget the history of the DNC chair position: Tim Kaine stepped down to allow for Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to take over, Wasserman-Schultz then resigned after the shady DNC primary and was given an honorary chair position on Hillary’s campaign, and Donna Brazile was given the position.

It’s not limited to traditional media. The COO of Facebook offered to “help as I can”. Twitter has been censoring trends and banning/shadowbanning users. All discussion forums online have been overrun by Correct the Record, which I will get into in the next section. Google has been manipulating autofills and search results for months.

This is crazy, it’s collusion and dishonest persuasion. The media is acting as an arm of propaganda. They are downplaying the content of the email leaks and calling the emails both doctored and Russian-sourced. They are overreporting any dirt on Trump using poorly sourced accusations (perhaps unsurprisingly, using the same accusations as were levied against Assange), as planned with her campaign. CNN has ‘declared’ looking at wikileaks illegal and their hosts yell nonsense over conversation. This reminds me of Fox News from a few years ago, now it’s everyone, and they’re straight up saying saying that they’re on Hillary’s side. The first amendment is being stomped on, this looks to be state sponsored media rather than ‘freedom of the press’. They’re essentially gaslighting anyone who questions the narrative they’re creating.

This Intercept article really dug deeply into the disinformation machine, and I saw what they were talking about on my own personal feed.

A further ‘engineering’ approach is in evidence here, where the campaign discussed how they might lose the millennial vote but could get it back by buying celebrity endorsements as though millennials are brainless followers. They got Aziz Ansari to post a video and targeted dozens of other celebrities such as Jamie Foxx, Usher, and Nick Cannon. Of course, nobody discloses if there’s a kickback for the endorsements, but this to me appears to fall somewhere between normal campaign strategy and manipulation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the campaign was in communication with John Oliver, and an SNL writer suggested that we ‘Scarlet letter’ trump voters, which reminds one of a certain authoritarian star. I’m sure it’s just jokes, especially since snarkiness seems to be just as highly valued as evidence lately.

Correct the Record

Correct the Record is a PAC dedicated to astroturfing internet discussions “on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram” as they say on their own site. Essentially, they hire thousands of, as the Hillary campaign says, “nerd virgins” to redirect and disrupt the online narrative using techniques such as these. There are dozens of ‘roundup’ emails like this one where they discuss strategy. They have been known to pose as Sanders supporters and Trump supporters, and have compromised moderation of many political forums (particularly the main politics forum on Reddit and 4chan) to the point where speaking against the ‘accepted narrative’ leads to a ban and content is heavily manicured. There is no discussion once they take over, and the only way to prevent them from taking over a forum is to heavily censor them out… thus, they are destroying any online political discussion by cheapening it down to trolling, laughing, and finger pointing if they get a foothold or forcing moderators to censor out any opposing view which cheapens discussion significantly. It’s difficult to prove their existence, but this discussion gives a fairly even account of what they’ve accomplished.

It’s also been demonstrated that they run hundreds of twitter bot accounts to push trends such as #repealthe19th and KKK connections. You can see the same bots at work in those two images, in both cases those are tweets that are initiating the trend.

Why they chose such a 1984-esque name, I don’t know.

This technique is infuriating and serves as an additional example of a very broad attempt to fake the prevailing narrative. It fits in with the attempts to claim that the election is ‘already over’, as the media was complicit in with the California primary and is currently doing with early voting. At this point, who can trust the ‘prevailing’ narrative? It’s clearly been manufactured. Nobody has any idea how well either candidate is really doing.

PAC coordination/Inciting violence

The big legal story here is clear-cut violation of federal election law. The other story is the underhanded ways in which the Clinton team has attempted, and succeeded, in shaping public opinion.

James O’Keefe had an undercover team investigating Clinton PACs and recently began to release video evidence of wrongdoing. These videos were initially blacklisted from every TV news outlet and they were largely dismissed by the media via claims of ‘doctoring’ despite their containing long unedited shots of activists incriminating themselves and the firing of two of the main players, Scott Foval and Robert Creamer. The other line of attack is that O’Keefe is not trustworthy as his videos have been called into question before, which is a legitimate concern but it does not necessarily undermine the content of the videos themselves. The media has done their best to discredit these videos before anyone has even given them the time of day, but the views are in the multi-millions regardless.

The first video shows Scott Foval, working for a PAC called Americans United for Change, discussing in detail how he organizes plants to go into Trump rallies to PURPOSELY incite violence ON CAMERA, with the goal of making Trump supporters look unstable as a whole with the goal of saturating the media with a specific narrative. He even says they use mentally ill and homeless people to be disruptive. Other operatives were Aaron Black, who was the topic of the previously discussed Politico ‘story’, Robert Creamer (big kahuna at the PAC), and Zulema Rodriguez, who claims ownership of getting a Trump rally shut down in Chicago due to rioting (that injured two police officers) and the blocking of a highway in Arizona. Of course, it was reported that ‘protesters’ were the ones causing problems, not paid Clinton operatives.

A short release added to this, where they discussed planting women in the crowd directly behind Trump at a rally and trying to get men to physically attack them.

The second video is about vote rigging, and the criticisms of this one may be valid as some of the conversations are missing context. Still, it looks pretty bad.

The third one implicates Clinton and demonstrates a violation of federal election law (FEC 52 USC 30116: Limitations on contributions and expenditures), a felony that recently netted a GOP operative a 2 year sentence. The content that shows the violation is kind of silly, apparently Hillary was really enamored with the idea of using the phrase “Donald ducks his taxes” with duck costumes to manufacture a meme. She directly passed the request down to the PACs, which are not allowed to coordinate with her. Ignoring how terrible that pun was and that the idea didn’t stick at all… originally the idea was going to be run through the DNC, but Donna Brazile, the chair, worked with CNN, an associate of ABC, and was worried about copyright violation with Disney. Thus, they handed it off to Scott Foval at the “independent” AUFC PAC which was in clear violation of how PACs are allowed to operate.

There are several external validations for this information. One is that Zulema Rodriguez was paid by two different PACs and was on Hillary’s payroll, and the timing of travel payments fits with major events she took credit for. Zulema has been caught on video blocking the road in a rental car pretending to be a protestor in Arizona, even pretending to need medical attention to delay emergency workers. Zulema is credited with a photo of a ‘Donald Duck’ in Miami, which shows us that a paid operative took a picture of a paid operative and delivered it to a paid news organization to further build the story they want voters to believe. There’s more connections that have been dug up showing that it’s her in both videos as well, here’s an image that summarizes the above in a single jpg. Aaron Black can be seen posing as a protestor as well, and there’s pictures of Foval out there too. The first video discusses birddogging, a technique discussed in the Podesta leaks. Oh yeah, and Robert Creamer has visited the White House hundreds of times and met with Obama over 30 times, which you can look up yourself on a publicly available White House visitor database. Lastly, emails in the Podesta archives contain the exact wording of signs used in demonstrations carried out by PAC staffers.

So clearly, Hillary has attempted to shape the narrative on Trump by purposely starting fights and riots. So all of this vilification of Trump supporters out there grew from seeds in the Hillary campaign. Were there actually protesters, or were they all paid operatives? Are the crowds of Trump supporters really any more aggressive than any other large crowd, or was it all just stunts paid for by Hillary? If they’re buying agitators posing as Trump supporters, in what other circumstances are they paying plants to mislead us? We don’t know, but the narrative has already been written.

So, legal-wise there is video evidence that she illegally worked with PACs, and to add one more thing we have another video of a PAC coordinator admitting on live TV that he coordinated with Hillary, for some dumb reason.

Bribery/pay to play/Saudi connection

Of course, a lot of the above-mentioned narrative-building is to keep the focus off how Hillary has greased the political wheels and protected herself. I’ll keep this sort of catch-all section shorter because my main point was about how the campaign manipulated public opinion and thus, us.

We have hard evidence of a bribe offer to the FBI (and mention of ‘shadow government’) from the State Department and bribes given to high-ranking FBI officials during Hillary’s investigation. This seems to be linked to an email between high ranking campaign officials about how Obama lied to the press (which is a big story as of today) about Hillary’s emails, and on the same day Hillary ally Terry McCauliffe, governor of Virginia, met with the ‘2nd in command’ FBI agent who oversaw the Clinton case and offered financial support to his wife if she ran for office. Of course we also had Bill Clinton meeting with Loretta Lynch on the airplane right before the decision not to indict Hillary that had everyone up in arms. Then there was Morocco buying a personal appearance at a meeting for $12 million, which actually got some press. It seems the constant pressure is pushing some stories through.

If you go back a year to the Saudi cables where it was revealed that the Saudis bribe and threaten media worldwide to make Saudi Arabia look good, it seems the ruling regime in the US has adopted some of that playbook (and makes the film ‘The Network’ rather prophetic). This looks particularly bad when you consider that Saudi Arabia is the biggest donor to Hillary despite their incredibly poor treatment of women and gay people (e.g. throwing gay men off of roofs), meanwhile Hillary was working with the media to bash a ‘Trump bigotry’ narrative into our skulls. Furthermore, in an email Hillary sent, she stated that the Saudis and Qatar directly fund ISIS.

She also (privately) said in a Wall Street speech that a no-fly zone in Syria would kill a lot of civilians, but in the third debate she (publicly) said the exact opposite, and appears to be escalating towards war.

Conclusion

I didn’t even get into the DNC bias against Bernie and the exit poll data that strongly suggested fraud. That’s what got me so fired up in the first place, you could see the bias in the media even back then. We’re currently seeing early voting reports that election machines (that, perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, have ties to enormous donors) are changing votes from R to D. The media is trying to push the story that Texas is a swing state? Hm, that’s a lot of electoral college votes… would anyone believe it if Hillary won Texas, of all states? They tried to plaster Trump for saying he won’t necessarily accept the result of the election, and to be honest I have a hard time disagreeing with him there given all the reports coming out.

There’s a hell of a lot more to point out, but I’ve written enough and made my point: Hillary’s approach to this election scares the shit out of me. Orwell predicted the disinformation campaign, Huxley predicted that people wouldn’t be motivated to respond even when the information is freely available to them, and clearly some animals are more equal than others.

I above all don’t approve of the campaign’s manipulation of the populace to this extent, regardless of the supposed ends, and I suspect that the ends will be similar to the means. This looks like the dangerous USSR propaganda I grew up reading about in textbooks. It’s gross to me that a person who makes any statement against Hillary (let alone for Trump) gets attacked so viciously with the narratives that her campaign built via collusion with the media, paying people to incite violence, and aggressively bludgeoning us with their version of ‘reality’. I get that we’re all hyped up about this election and that there’s a lot at stake, but we can still respect each other enough to allow for conversation. I hate the idea of a Republican Supreme Court messing with Roe v. Wade, and it gives me great pause, but you have to consider the mass of other issues in play as well. It’s not unreasonable for somebody to vote against her because of her (private) support for the TPP, because they don’t believe she holds any of the opinions she claims to, because she appears to be in the pockets of oppressive Middle Eastern regimes and Wall Street, because healthcare costs are skyrocketing, because they fear unnecessary and costly war, or because it appears we the people are losing our country to consolidation of power and state-controlled media. Weighing all these options and coming out against Hillary doesn’t mean that you’re a pig who hates women. We can’t be that reductionist, and we can’t just hand-wave away hard information as ‘conspiracy theories’.

I want the truth to be valued, I want a more honest government and I want the law to apply to them. I want the people to be more than a marginalized cog in a global financial machine. This isn’t a normal election, much of the Republican establishment is quietly supporting the Democrat and the Bush family (dynasty?) is firmly behind Hillary. That’s a red flag for me right there as someone who has only ever voted D or third party and who has never identified with Republican values. This is establishment versus anti-establishment, and given all of the above, I see some value in breaking establishment continuity. I also greatly hope that a couple third parties will get enough of a percentage this year so that they can play a bigger role in future elections… and specifically 4 years from now regardless of what happens in this one.

I haven’t fully decided where my vote is going, in New York it probably doesn’t matter a whole lot, but it’s certainly not behind Hillary and her disinformation machine.