Guest post by Ted Malloch

It should be transparently clear now just how this machine, the Deep State, operated in a calculated orchestration to subvert the presidency of Donald Trump.

And the lengths and depths the media stooped to intentionally distort this story for ratings—whether through viewership, clicks, likes or shares—which translated into more ad revenue.

And yet as we’ve seen through this complicated, tangled story—a story that is truly stranger than fiction, because much of it is—the media is just one of the many cogs in this machine that is capable of taking a seedling of information, and through a game of telephone, sow that seed into a great, big Redwood of a story: we could call, Red November.

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In the time it takes to fire off 140 characters, a personal opinion can begin trending in the morning—with pundits and reporters across the globe quoting a tweet, using it as a crutch to prop up their story—and by nightfall we’ve spun an opinion, one person’s perspective into a shared, collective stance.

And like that, an untruth becomes a truth because the media knows it’s what their audience wants to hear.

It’s become a mutual, symbiotic relationship that deepens our cultural and political echo chambers for the worse.

Replete with headlines that are about as subtle as a jackhammer and with advertisements longer than actual news clip, the media—like the hand that feeds the fish—treats us as such.

With each flake they drop, we swarm to the surface like piranhas, and ask for more.

And like moths drawn to the light, the media and government uses their headlines and warped stories like torches to keep us distracted, when the real fire, a bigger blaze, is burning in the distance.

This game of telephone used to be a linear line of communication, a one-way conversation from supplier to consumer.

Yet, with the rise of social media platforms, that linear line has spread laterally and another cog has been added to this machine: the public.

Despite what these talking heads want us to believe, things haven’t gotten worse, the technology is just getting better.

Now, the ones who once had the last word in this conversation, no longer do.

As we’ve seen with the #MeToo movement, which began out of the disturbing revelations, centered around one Hollywood mogul: Harvey Weinstein.

News spread quickly because of this heightened technology.

Through social media platforms that allow the individual user to control the direction of content and the news, a deeply hidden truth that had intentionally been buried was suddenly exposed.

And yet, as the movement grew, it became bloated once the media stuck its ugly, money grubbing nose in when the feminist website Babe, recklessly published an article with a headline that readied the reader for the worst: “I went out on a date with Aziz Ansari and it turned out to be the worst night of my life.”

Like everyone else in America, we clicked.

Unsurprisingly, the article was a cheap, failed attempt to compare unwanted sexual advances with an all-too-familiar bad date.

And just like that, the movement buckled under its own weight and became too big to support itself.

The New York Times reported that the article was, “Arguably the worst thing that has happened to the #MeToo movement since it began.

It transformed what ought to be a movement for women’s empowerment into an emblem for female helplessness.

No one in their right mind would argue against the bravery of this movement and its importance for sparking social change.

Yet, it also speaks even louder on behalf of the media’s overt desperation for our attention, so they sensationalize and exploit a seedling of an idea into a Redwood that can’t support itself.

This is exactly how the spy, Christopher Steele’s dossier, a work of unverified salacious gossip, was able to spread like wildfire through Washington D.C., and with the orchestrated help of members of this Deep State, an untruth became a truth and one headline above them all blared across the nation: Trump was guilty of treason for collaborating with Russians.

Yet, we’re missing one piece: the proof or even a whisper of truth.

Both Senator John McCain and David Kramer, the former State Department official who met with Christopher Steele to receive the dossier, pleaded the Fifth when questioned by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to avoid revealing Steele’s sources.

Their silence speaks volumes.

Yet now it is all exposed as a political gambit and an “insurance policy” to stop or depose Trump.

And yet, while this story continues to unfold and more layers are added, this whole Trump-Russia story will surely implode on itself as the net is widened and is wildly misconstruing the definition of collusion.

Through his misguided investigation, along with the media’s blatant disregard for journalism, we see a carefully designed plot that begins with Christopher Steele and runs through the FBI, CIA, and NSA all in attempt to subvert the Trump’s presidency.

To be sure, this isn’t the sounding of the alarms.

There is a silver lining here with all this misinformation being passed around: the credibility of the mainstream media and of our governmental agencies has been tested.

Now, the public is becoming more attuned to the lies, manipulation, and distortion being pitched.

An unintended consequence of the media’s reckless abandonment of their journalist duties is a shift in autonomy: the onus is on us— the consumers of information.

We are the ones who are now tasked to sift through the white noise and decide what is worth listening to.

We are the ones who are now tasked to listen to wildly different perspectives on the same story.

And we already have and will continue to become savvier.

We’ll continue to become more astute listeners and discerners for the truth.

We’ll be able to look past the headlines that blare, the six-second sound bytes that yell in our faces, and click bait articles that masquerade themselves as truth.

Yet, as we’ve witnessed in the past, the ones who are smart enough to listen aren’t usually the ones doing the talking.

In what has become the age of shouting, perhaps what we need most is a whisper of truth.

Ted Malloch is the author of The Plot to Destroy Trump