12/25/2020 / By Ethan Huff
Fareed Zakaria, a columnist at The Washington Post, penned an opinion piece recently that reignites Russian collusion conspiracy theories against President Donald Trump and his followers.
According to Zakaria, Russia is to blame for the SolarWinds Orion hack that resulted in the nationwide shutdown of government computer systems that were suspected of being hacked.
Just like the mainstream media has been parroting ever since 2016, the Kremlin broke into our national infrastructure to manipulate the system against Democrats, and now it is going to “take years to know for certain which networks the Russians control and which ones they just occupy.”
It is a whole new Cold War, Zakaria suggests, though this one involves “hybrid warfare” where Vladimir Putin and his goons are spreading “chaos among [their] adversaries.”
“The United States will have to fortify its digital infrastructure and respond more robustly to the Kremlin’s mounting cyberattacks,” Zakaria maintains.
Even more of a threat than cyberattacks, though, are the “insidious Russian efforts at disinformation,” Zakaria says. These efforts have “helped to reshape the information environment worldwide.”
Two scholars from at Rand Corp., Zakaria notes, wrote a paper in 2016 that describes Russia’s alleged “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model. This model uses social media and other “prevailing technologies” to blast the public with lies using “high numbers of channels and messages,” and is driven by “a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”
For the past four years, the Post and others have been hammering home their own “firehose of falsehood” about Russian interference in the 2016 election, which has long been debunked. And yet the Post has not ceased in reiterating this falsehood in an attempt to take down the Trump administration.
Now that Trump is on the way out, or so it would appear, the Post is once again ramping up the anti-Russia rhetoric, completely ignoring the communist Chinese infiltration into our nation’s institutions and infrastructure.
According to Zakaria, Russia’s method of disinformation “closely resembles Trump’s own propaganda strategy,” which he says involves the issuance of “a blizzard of messages, using every medium he can find.”
Even though the Post itself accepted cash from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), presumably to publish pro-communism falsehoods, Zakaria is focused on the Russia bogeyman, which is always behind every bad thing that happens on a national scale.
The only thing Zakaria appears to have gotten right is that Trump did change his tune on a number of important issues after winning the 2016 election, despite saying the exact opposite while on the campaign trail.
“He never worries about consistency, asking only that you remember his most recent claims,” Zakaria writes about Trump.
“When campaigning in 2016 he argued that the unemployment rate was a hoax, that the Federal Reserve was keeping interest rates dangerously low and that the stock market was a bubble about to burst. Once he entered the White House, he soon said the opposite about all three. If you bombard people in the present, few have time to dwell on the past.”
At the same time, Zakaria implies that everything Trump says is false, including allegations of election fraud, when the evidence is profuse enough to suggest that election fraud did, in fact, occur – and it occurred on a wide scale.
“It’s the same propaganda model used by every lying politician and government agency the world over,” noted one Post commenter about how Zakaria’s claims about Russia and Trump also apply to China and the Democrats.
“Repetition, fearmongering about Russia, insinuating a link where none exists – this piece is propaganda.”
To keep up with the latest news about mainstream media disinformation and propaganda, be sure to check out Propaganda.news.
Sources for this article include:
Tagged Under:
China, conspiracy theory, cyberweapons, disinformation, hack, hybrid warfare, Kremlin, mainstream media, propaganda, Russia, Washington Post
This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author
COPYRIGHT © 2017 JOURNALISM NEWS