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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsEncourage Dem investigators to ask Cohen and Nunberg about talk radio/Russia
Democratic investigators need to be encouraged to use those public hearings coming up to ask about the use of talk radio by Trump, if they were using it to coordinate with the Russians, and if Trump was paying Limbaugh and or Hannity for helping him in the primaries and now for defending him as he undermines democracy.
MSNBC guests have been asking the question — how did the Kremlin troll farms coordinate with the Trump campaign? Who was the go-between?
If you’re going to use Kremlin social media troll operations to beat the Republican establishment candidates in the primaries, and eventually the Dem candidate, it wouldn’t make sense to use a bunch of Russian hipsters to make things up.
With Facebook and Twitter etc. they had their targets. What they needed was messaging content. And they needed to coordinate content with the Trump campaign without direct communication.
In a Washington Post piece a Russian talked about working for a trolling operation in late 2014.
You got a list of topics to write about.
Talk radio would make an excellent go-between. Its a ubiquitous loud coordinated messaging juggernaut in at least 40 states with 80 senators, available nearly all day long. Why not piggyback years of existing divisive racist propaganda and lies?
Reporter Gabriel Sherman and Trump operative Sam Nunberg are regular guests on the cable shows and may know the answer if asked the right questions.
And Cohen might also know. It sounds like Nunberg did most of the work and passed it on. Cohen might know who got copies and in what form. Democratic investigators need to ask them.
From “Operation Trump”, by Gabriel Sherman April 3, 2016:
Throughout 2014, the three (Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and Sam Nunberg) fed Trump strategy memos and political intelligence. “I listened to thousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” Nunberg recalled. What those reports said was that the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues including immigration, Obamacare, and Common Core. While Jeb Bush talked about crossing the border as an “act of love,” Trump was thinking about how high to build his wall. “We either have borders or we don’t,” Trump told the faithful who flocked to the annual CPAC conference in 2014.
Nunberg was there but if he won’t say, Sherman may have relevant information from his interview that he may have left out. They need to be asked specifically about the role of talk radio.
If the Trump city boys wanted to connect with the base why not just use Fox, which is the cartoon Cliff Notes for talk radio? Or Limbaugh’s sanitized transcriptions, which are provided as a guide for the rest of the Republican talkers, Fox blowhards, and many Republican politicians? That would be a lot easier and cheaper for cheapskate Trump.
Unlike Fox ‘News’, talk radio would help Russians coordinate social media messaging to specific state and local issues.
Which talk show hosts did Nunberg listen to? Were those in states targeted by the Kremlin?
And who paid Nunberg to listen to all that radio? Did Trump pay with campaign funds? Laundered money?
Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi, and Randy Credico involved in the Wikileaks business are all talk radio veterans. And Roger Stone goes way back with Paul Manafort. Corsi’s swiftboat campaign vs John Kerry relied heavily on months of talk radio repetition. According to Jeffrey Toobin in a 6/2/2008 New Yorker piece on Roger Stone, “The Dirty Trickster”, Stone was using talk radio way back in 2000.
Stone decided to concentrate at first on “the atmospherics,” as he put it, which in Miami means radio. Several Spanish-language stations in the city devoted themselves entirely to talk about politics; no print or television outlets could match their influence. The most powerful of these was Radio Mambi, a fifty-thousand-watt station, whose principal owner and on-air voice was Armando Perez-Roura, a Cuban exile who was known as the Cuban-American community’s Rush Limbaugh.
snip
“The idea we were putting out there was that this was a left-wing power grab by Gore, the same way Fidel Castro did it in Cuba. We were very explicitly drawing that analogy.”
But maybe the Kremlin wasn’t a passive user. Even better if you could feed the talk radio gods.
All they had to do was figure out how to feed Limbaugh and they could control a lot of messaging on 1500 radio stations.
Limbaugh is 100% Trump along with Hannity. Limbaugh attacked Rubio and Bush in the primaries, while making excuses for Trump.
Limbaugh, the guy who is always downplaying the political cost to Republicans of shutting down government, might as well be working for Putin today as he gets credit for making sure Trump doesn’t back down. He’s showing who’s really in charge.
He just pushed Trump into a government shutdown.
Cohen was Trump’s main bagman. Did that include paying any talk radio gods? Hannity was involved with Cohen in some real estate deals that were, maybe wrongly, assumed to be related to paying off a mistress. Trump and Limbaugh have had dinners, golf, etc.
Unfortunately that’s the kind of thing Democrats are completely ignorant of and it may not get asked and answered.
Does Putin have kompromat on Limbaugh, like from when he visited the Dominican Republic in 2007, known then for its sex industry, and got caught at the airport with someone else’s jug of prescription viagra?
That was around when Breitbart started competing with MIC- friendly Drudge as a conduit to talk radio.
2008 Palin
The possibility of Putin using talk radio, the only unique Republican advantage, goes back at least to 2008 when Manafort was McCain campaign cochair. McCain was thinking about Pawlenty and even Lieberman. Limbaugh wouldn’t support McCain, a looming disaster for the GOP convention. Minutes before the start of the Limbaugh show on the Friday before the GOP convention McCain publicly chose Palin and Limbaugh used the announcement to finally support McCain. Did he have prior knowledge of it? At that time Alaska Gov Palin was being courted by Russians re oil and gas.
Steve Schmidt could also be asked about that. He feels responsible for convincing McCain to pick Palin but Russian Paul Manafort was there too. Schmidt could have been the last straw.
2009 Climategate from Russian-hacked emails
In 2009 Limbaugh started the “Climategate” hoax based on Russian-hacked emails, a development timed to sabotage Obama at the Copenhagen climate talks. Every year we delay on global warming is worth billions to Putin, not just the Kochs.
2011 Defaulting on the Debt
In 2011 Limbaugh spent 2 months trying to get Republicans to force the US to default, something Putin would enjoy more that any US billionaire.
There are many other RW talk radio campaigns the last ten years that would have benefited the Kremlin.
2012 Benghazi
Many of the Trump/Russian-related material used in trolling re Hillary Clinton came out of the 2012 Benghazi ‘embassy’ attack. Talk radio did the heavy lifting repetition re emails, etc. that ties into all this crap we’re dealing with now.
One of the lies talk radio spread required head of PR for the US marines to make a public rebuttal. It was all over national and local talk radio — that Obama and Clinton had prohibited US marines guarding US embassies from carrying live ammo. They were basically encouraging attacks on US embassies. Did that come from the Drudge report, or the Russians?
The entire Hillary email issue related to her using a private server because she knew republicans would try to get her private emails and leak selected items to Limbaugh etc.
Kremlin callers?
Calls to national talkers can reach millions.
Since Republican radio has been shown to use paid callers, why not Kremlin callers instead of Heritage Foundation callers? Automated call screening software might be programmed to advance calls from GOP think tanks. That might be easy to hack but it wouldn’t be a surprise to find out that a Russian company makes good call screening software at a great price…..
Callers play an important part in keeping local talk radio hosts in line with Limbaugh, prompting topics, and suggesting lies, scandals, and violence.
Kremlin emailers?
And the other day the local blowhard read an email from a ‘listener’ who cheered the shutdown, saying government workers were lazy scammers.
How many other local blowhards in states all over the country read the same email, and did it come from the White House, a GOP think tank, or maybe even the Kremlin.
That is the problem of ignoring RW radio.
NOW
The main defense of Trump on the new allegations that the FBI was investigating him will happen on talk radio led by Limbaugh. The groundwork attack on the “deep state” has already been laid down in the base and started right after inauguration — all this was anticipated and the base has been inoculated and supplied with ammunition for denial.
xxxxx
From republiconradio.org here’s what the US Army Psyops Manual says about what makes radio unique for propaganda (Psychological Operations Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures 12/2003 - available online):
Repetition is necessary for oral learning; therefore, key themes, phrases, or slogans should be repeated to ensure the TA (target audience)gets the desired message.
Talk radio is much better than TV, print, and internet for doing just that, to an often captive audience.
Emotional Power: A skilled radio announcer can exert tremendous influence on the listener simply with pitch, resonance, inflection, or timing.
The emotional tone conveyed by the voice may influence the listener more than the logic of arguments.
Limbaugh would call it part of his "talent on loan from god", or royal, unchallenged, I’m-never-wrong (and-my-call-screener-will-see-to-that) certitude.
Wide coverage: Radio programs can reach members of large and varied audiences simultaneously.
That is especially useful in national news events and emergencies, especially when internet access is reduced.
Speed: Radio programs can be quickly prepared for broadcast. Speed is important when attempting to capitalize on targets of opportunity.
Perfect for spinning and distorting breaking news.
Ease of perception: Radio requires little or no effort to visualize the radio message. Illiteracy does not prevent the listener from forming his individual image as he listens.
Perfect for 10’s of millions of Americans working, driving, and doing chores.
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hedda_foil
(16,375 posts)certainot
(9,090 posts)
global1
(25,253 posts)that information that aided Trump was passed along to the American People in plain sight. They used conservative radio shows and hosts to pass on the propaganda to the people.
An interesting exercise is to analyze Limbaugh's, Hannity's and other conservative radio host to see just how many of the points the Psyops Manual a particular radio show would hit.
1. Repetition is necessary for oral learning; therefore, key themes, phrases, or slogans should be repeated to ensure the TA (target audience)gets the desired message.
On a given day or week - analyze the conservative radio shows to see if they are using the same phrases and slogans and count the repetition of these phrases and slogans.
2. Emotional Power: A skilled radio announcer can exert tremendous influence on the listener simply with pitch, resonance, inflection, or timing.
The emotional tone conveyed by the voice may influence the listener more than the logic of arguments.
In those same radio shows track the pitch, resonance, inflection and timing of the conservative radio host.
3. Wide coverage: Radio programs can reach members of large and varied audiences simultaneously. That is especially useful in national news events and emergencies, especially when internet access is reduced.
This one is easy to track by just knowing the coverage area of a particular conservative radio show. [Note: as an aside - while driving across the U.S. one time I notice that the same conservative radio show was on more than one channel at the same time. It was like the people of the area were being brainwashed.
4. Speed: Radio programs can be quickly prepared for broadcast. Speed is important when attempting to capitalize on targets of opportunity.
Analyze a particular conservative radio show program to determine how fast a particular story - after it would hit national news - would turn up with counter talking points on a conservative radio show/station.
5. Ease of perception: Radio requires little or no effort to visualize the radio message. Illiteracy does not prevent the listener from forming his individual image as he listens.
This goes without saying. People are easily swayed by the spoken word - particularly when it comes from the mouth of one of their favorite radio host.
Social Media - is used much the same way and people become more invested in social media - because of their ability to respond to posts or their ability to contribute their own thoughts.
So bottom line - I've always heard that somebody in the U.S. must be passing information to the Russian hackers to use to target voters and voting blocks to help Trump and hurt Hillary. From reading the OP here - it looks like this was all happening in plain sight - right in front of our eyes - and was so ubiquitous that we couldn't see what was happening to us as it was happening.
Still - somebody provided the talking points to the conservative radio hosts for them to use in their shows.
certainot
(9,090 posts)analyzing it just got a lot easier though with artificial intelligence-enhanced transcription
2) the voice - the authoritarians are addicted to certainty/confidence and avoid uncertainty/doubt etc certainty is more important than truth
4) all it takes is a phone call during a show or an email the blowhard can read - like i just heard. the think talks have people sitting around spinning everything they want and within a few minutes they can get it on most any station in the country, wherever they want
5) their favorite host and every other blowhard in the county or the state, reinforcing each other
as far as the talking points origins, i suspect a combination of sources and maybe russian-inspired breitbart was used to compete with MIC drudge for general content but all the kremlin hadd to do to sneak in on limbaugh was feed him some breaks and tips he liked or that increased his predictive credibility and he's be hooked on that source.
all the other hosts are stuck following limbaugh, with the dittoheads keeping them all in line with little substantive variation
Hermit-The-Prog
(33,349 posts)This might be of interest:
Guns and religion: How American conservatives grew closer to Putin’s Russia
By Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger
April 30, 2017
[ ... ]
A significant shift has been underway in recent years across the Republican right.
On issues including gun rights, terrorism and same-sex marriage, many leading advocates on the right who grew frustrated with their country’s leftward tilt under President Barack Obama have forged ties with well-connected Russians and come to see that country’s authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin, as a potential ally.
[ ... ]
At least one connection came about thanks to a conservative Nashville lawyer named G. Kline Preston IV, who had done business in Russia for years.
Preston said that in 2011 he introduced David Keene, then the NRA’s president, to a Russian senator, Alexander Torshin, a member of Putin’s party who later became a top official at the Russian central bank. Keene had been a stalwart on the right, a past chairman of the American Conservative Union who was the NRA’s president from 2011 to 2013.
[ ... ]
Butina founded a group called the Right to Bear Arms, and in 2013 she and Torshin invited Keene and other U.S. gun advocates to its annual meeting in Moscow.
The event, where about 200 people gathered at Moscow’s convention center, included a fashion show in which models donned “concealed carry” garments with built-in pockets for weapons.
One American participant, Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, recalled that Torshin and Butina took him and his wife out for dinner and gave them gifts that displayed research into their interests — exotic fabric for Gottlieb’s wife, a needlepoint enthusiast, and for Gottlieb, commemorative stamps that Torshin received as a member of the Russian legislature.
[ ... ]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-republican-right-found-allies-in-russia/2017/04/30/e2d83ff6-29d3-11e7-a616-d7c8a68c1a66_story.html?utm_term=.eb5a46595d3d
certainot
(9,090 posts)and it wasn't all business but with putin de-democratizing it got more appealing to political american right. i'll bet the kremlin's been working them a long time and that would familiarize them with rw radio, its gods (oh, hey we've got this guy named rush limbaugh), and its success in fooling liberals