Can the media beclown itself any more than it already has? How loud does it have to keep saying the quiet part loud until everyone hears what it is?

Jeff Bezos’ social justice government rag, the Washington Post, would like to test that theory, declaring, “Researchers say the online feedback loop between Trump, high-profile influencers and rank-and-file followers is more dangerous than Russian disinformation.”

Good news. They’ve stopped pretending it’s the Russians. Bad news, they’ve stopped pretending that they’re out to do anything more than silence the opposition.

The invention of “disinformation” as a political crime and call for censorship has matured enough that the media can stop pretending it’s about the Russians.

It’s about silencing and eliminating the opposition.

The results though are both grim and hilarious, like North Korean propaganda.

Trump “is also aided by a vital feedback loop — often discussed but poorly understood — among the president, high-profile influencers and rank-and-file followers that both push messages in his direction and promote every online utterance,” the Bezos paper claims.

President Trump’s popularity is “poorly understood”? He tweets stuff and it gets retweeted. Let’s get some researchers on this right away.

“His feedback loop, according to several new and forthcoming studies, has become a leading threat to the integrity of political debate in the United States, with an impact that to date appears far more damaging than the efforts of Russian operatives or other foreign adversaries.”

Political debate is a threat to… political debate. The only way we can protect political debate is by suppressing it. And only when all opposition has been eliminated will our political debate be a secure safe space to discuss how high taxes should be, how many race riots are too many, and how we need to ban all cars.

Caroline Glick’s Latma brilliantly captured this dynamic in which media leftists who claim to want democracy are its most vicious enemies demanding that democracy must be eliminated to protect democracy. (Hebrew with English subtitles.)

 

The Washington Post is cluelessly echoing it while wrapping the whole thing in the Orwellian frame of “researchers” and “experts”. But it’s also increasingly saying the quiet part out loud, which is that political dissent is a threat and must be suppressed.

“Trump is hands down the most significant accelerant and amplifier for disinformation in the election,” said Graham Brookie, director and managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a branch of the prominent nonpartisan think tank that is a leading source of research on foreign and domestic disinformation. “The scale and scope of domestic disinformation is far greater than anything a foreign adversary could ever do to us.”

Out, claiming we need to censor because of the Russians. In, claiming that the political opposition is so dangerous it must be censored.