What Liberals Won’t Tell You. What Conservatives Don’t Know.
Asymmetric Media and the 800 lb. Guerilla in the Room
Martin Higgins / March 5th, 2012
This presentation is not a halftime talk. I’m not a coach, and you’re not a football team.
It’s also not a motivational speech meant to inspire you to reach your potential. I’ll leave that to Tony Robbins and Dr. Phil.
The next 45 minutes is an intensive look at our American Media Wars, the shadow wars where our side is woefully under-equipped, unaware of the rules of engagement, and intimidated by years of conditioning.
Recently, and by that, I mean during the past four years or so, Communication has undergone a lightning-fast evolution. The result is a huge chasm that divides “Us and Them.”
What are my credentials? My qualifications to expound on messages, meaning, audience interaction, public perceptions, persuasion, and storytelling? Decades of writing, producing, and directing radio, television, film theatre, and videos for broadcast networks, corporate giants, and my own artistic goals.
In that environment, either I created effective communications in every medium or acquiesced to taking a desk job and biding my time toward retirement.
I was also a working stand-up comedian during that time, using the gladiatorial environment of comedy clubs to refine my instincts and toughen my skin.
My greatest strength is observing, analyzing, and commenting on every bit of information I am exposed to. Thyis is a talent rarely found in the Halls of Academia where conformity – Leftist conformity – is rewarded, and independent thought is graded C-minus and marginalized.
What is effective communication other than knowing who the audience members are, how they interpret words and images, what they are willing to listen to, and how to tell them what you know in a way that is both enlightening and entertaining?
Priests and ministers do it every day and for an hour on Sundays. Garrison Keillor did it on the radio. Billy Mays did it on TV in 30 seconds. Sideshow pitchmen have worked it down to a routine, and politicians – note I place them near Carny barkers on this list – most politicians learn how to enlighten and entertain in order to deceive the public and garner power. The present administration has made incessant lying into an Art Form. An Art I despise.
So, here’s what I want to run by you. You, who may be as outraged as I am by the hideousness of “The Political Machine That Ate Chicago” and now has its fangs around Liberty’s neck.
We are engaged in an Asymmetrical War with the Left. They are using the electronic tools, social networking techniques, and messaging trends of – I almost said “today,” but I assure you that rather than being on the leading edge of communication innovation, they are the innovators; they control the 2012 battlefield. They – as Sun Tzu suggested – occupy the high ground.
While we, like Revolutionary British Troops, enter the fray in tight rank and file relying on long-useless tactics and battle sensibilities, literally stacked like cordwood with a soldier’s heart a sniper’s target, standing precisely thirty inches away from the next target.
Like it or not, the Left has adopted the battle savvy of the Minutemen: blend into the environment, strike from many scattered positions, improvise operations to devastate the enemy physically and emotionally. And, as you may already know, the Minutemen weren’t schooled in European military training. They learned their irregular, guerilla war tactics during The Indian Wars and – as skirmishers and sharpshooters – they were invaluable to the Continental Army.
I wish I could say that America had learned to employ the Minuteman’s highly mobile, rapidly-deployed force approach before the rise of the Green Berets, paramilitary SWAT teams, and, of late, Seal Team 6 operations. But, as a sergeant serving in Vietnam, I saw the Viet Cong use Minuteman Tactics to hamstring us for more than a decade and kill nearly 60,000 Americans.
Here, in our Media War, we are surrounded by sharpshooters and skirmishers.
And we had better learn to fight on their turf, by their rules or march in Old Media rank-and-file to our death.
Two points I need to clarify here:
First, when I say them, I am referring to the New Democrat, The Socialist, and The Progressive. In fact, all those names are convenient camouflage labels for the America haters who have controlled the majority of voters through fear, lies, and extortion. They may say, “We love America!” but they are referring to the America they wish to impose on us. A horror-show travesty of freedom and liberty – where freedom is doled out to enlist more subversives, and liberty is the right to do as they tell you. Fall outside those strictures, and you find yourself at war with the government.
Second, I was in a meeting with a dozen or so eager, well-meaning people who understood that they were out of touch with new communication and messaging techniques. After I explained Saul Alinsky’s power tactics – which include deception, coercion, ridicule, threats, and marginalization – one of the women said, “Well, that’s EXACTLY what I won’t do. I won’t become like them. We are better than that.” Better? Sure. A better person enslaved by gangsters. Sorry, that’s not me.
You see, in Chicago, where our current political infection was germinated, either you acquiesce to the Machine, or you live in fear of it. That’s what’s being built right now in Washington; law by law, regulation by regulation, fear by fear. And those who succumb to the fears either join The Machine or pull the covers over their head and wait for the knock on their door.
Back to the Media war… the Ground War is being fought with websites, blogs, text messages, Facebook and Twitter barrages, and targeted email blasts; the Air War is Cable and Network Television, where even the wildly outnumbered Fox News is derided as being Hate Television and a propaganda arm of the GOP. As if the GOP even had a leadership coherent enough to generate a list of talking points.
The Psychological War has been deeply entrenched and waged covertly for over a half-century. By the late ’60s radical activists have been infiltrating education, the media, the arts – especially Hollywood, local governments, state and federal bureaucracies and judiciaries, churches, social organizations, and unions. Now, firmly ensconced, they dictate what is or isn’t Politically Correct. Political Correctness is a behavior-control concept created by Stalin to identify enemies and target them for elimination.
Since my grammar school days, entrusted to no-nonsense Dominican nuns – I have been told that America was “lucky” because we have never had a war on our soil. Today, I would replace “lucky” with “unfortunate.” We, unfortunately, are far removed from the suffering and sacrifice brought on by physical war. We are not inoculated against a dictator's brutality or a vanquisher's inhuman whims. So we schedule our lives as if we were not engaged in a life-or-death struggle – gotta’ see that new movie, let’s spend a weekend up in the mountains, kid’s soccer game on Saturday, aerate the lawn, watch Dancing with the Stars – and go to bed each night expecting the next day to be no different than the last. We’re locked into a social and political time warp where nothing changes fast enough to attract our attention or cause us to cry out, “What the hell is going on?”
But every now and again, a bit of the deception gets noticed. It’s all about the details until they form a mosaic, a larger view of what’s happening.
For instance, Franklin Delano Roosevelt smoked cigarettes. That is a fact. But if you look at new versions of historic photos of him, the cigarettes have been Photoshopped out. You’ll see him like this (holding hand near face, pinching nothing) as if he had caught a fly in mid-air with his mouth half-open, waiting to do what? Pop it in? Give it a stern talking-to? He smoked. But THEY want to erase the past and ensure that your children don’t see the original photo and think, “Smoking’s cool!”
Or…
(continued)
It’s also not a motivational speech meant to inspire you to reach your potential. I’ll leave that to Tony Robbins and Dr. Phil.
The next 45 minutes is an intensive look at our American Media Wars, the shadow wars where our side is woefully under-equipped, unaware of the rules of engagement, and intimidated by years of conditioning.
Recently, and by that, I mean during the past four years or so, Communication has undergone a lightning-fast evolution. The result is a huge chasm that divides “Us and Them.”
What are my credentials? My qualifications to expound on messages, meaning, audience interaction, public perceptions, persuasion, and storytelling? Decades of writing, producing, and directing radio, television, film theatre, and videos for broadcast networks, corporate giants, and my own artistic goals.
In that environment, either I created effective communications in every medium or acquiesced to taking a desk job and biding my time toward retirement.
I was also a working stand-up comedian during that time, using the gladiatorial environment of comedy clubs to refine my instincts and toughen my skin.
My greatest strength is observing, analyzing, and commenting on every bit of information I am exposed to. Thyis is a talent rarely found in the Halls of Academia where conformity – Leftist conformity – is rewarded, and independent thought is graded C-minus and marginalized.
What is effective communication other than knowing who the audience members are, how they interpret words and images, what they are willing to listen to, and how to tell them what you know in a way that is both enlightening and entertaining?
Priests and ministers do it every day and for an hour on Sundays. Garrison Keillor did it on the radio. Billy Mays did it on TV in 30 seconds. Sideshow pitchmen have worked it down to a routine, and politicians – note I place them near Carny barkers on this list – most politicians learn how to enlighten and entertain in order to deceive the public and garner power. The present administration has made incessant lying into an Art Form. An Art I despise.
So, here’s what I want to run by you. You, who may be as outraged as I am by the hideousness of “The Political Machine That Ate Chicago” and now has its fangs around Liberty’s neck.
We are engaged in an Asymmetrical War with the Left. They are using the electronic tools, social networking techniques, and messaging trends of – I almost said “today,” but I assure you that rather than being on the leading edge of communication innovation, they are the innovators; they control the 2012 battlefield. They – as Sun Tzu suggested – occupy the high ground.
While we, like Revolutionary British Troops, enter the fray in tight rank and file relying on long-useless tactics and battle sensibilities, literally stacked like cordwood with a soldier’s heart a sniper’s target, standing precisely thirty inches away from the next target.
Like it or not, the Left has adopted the battle savvy of the Minutemen: blend into the environment, strike from many scattered positions, improvise operations to devastate the enemy physically and emotionally. And, as you may already know, the Minutemen weren’t schooled in European military training. They learned their irregular, guerilla war tactics during The Indian Wars and – as skirmishers and sharpshooters – they were invaluable to the Continental Army.
I wish I could say that America had learned to employ the Minuteman’s highly mobile, rapidly-deployed force approach before the rise of the Green Berets, paramilitary SWAT teams, and, of late, Seal Team 6 operations. But, as a sergeant serving in Vietnam, I saw the Viet Cong use Minuteman Tactics to hamstring us for more than a decade and kill nearly 60,000 Americans.
Here, in our Media War, we are surrounded by sharpshooters and skirmishers.
And we had better learn to fight on their turf, by their rules or march in Old Media rank-and-file to our death.
Two points I need to clarify here:
First, when I say them, I am referring to the New Democrat, The Socialist, and The Progressive. In fact, all those names are convenient camouflage labels for the America haters who have controlled the majority of voters through fear, lies, and extortion. They may say, “We love America!” but they are referring to the America they wish to impose on us. A horror-show travesty of freedom and liberty – where freedom is doled out to enlist more subversives, and liberty is the right to do as they tell you. Fall outside those strictures, and you find yourself at war with the government.
Second, I was in a meeting with a dozen or so eager, well-meaning people who understood that they were out of touch with new communication and messaging techniques. After I explained Saul Alinsky’s power tactics – which include deception, coercion, ridicule, threats, and marginalization – one of the women said, “Well, that’s EXACTLY what I won’t do. I won’t become like them. We are better than that.” Better? Sure. A better person enslaved by gangsters. Sorry, that’s not me.
You see, in Chicago, where our current political infection was germinated, either you acquiesce to the Machine, or you live in fear of it. That’s what’s being built right now in Washington; law by law, regulation by regulation, fear by fear. And those who succumb to the fears either join The Machine or pull the covers over their head and wait for the knock on their door.
Back to the Media war… the Ground War is being fought with websites, blogs, text messages, Facebook and Twitter barrages, and targeted email blasts; the Air War is Cable and Network Television, where even the wildly outnumbered Fox News is derided as being Hate Television and a propaganda arm of the GOP. As if the GOP even had a leadership coherent enough to generate a list of talking points.
The Psychological War has been deeply entrenched and waged covertly for over a half-century. By the late ’60s radical activists have been infiltrating education, the media, the arts – especially Hollywood, local governments, state and federal bureaucracies and judiciaries, churches, social organizations, and unions. Now, firmly ensconced, they dictate what is or isn’t Politically Correct. Political Correctness is a behavior-control concept created by Stalin to identify enemies and target them for elimination.
Since my grammar school days, entrusted to no-nonsense Dominican nuns – I have been told that America was “lucky” because we have never had a war on our soil. Today, I would replace “lucky” with “unfortunate.” We, unfortunately, are far removed from the suffering and sacrifice brought on by physical war. We are not inoculated against a dictator's brutality or a vanquisher's inhuman whims. So we schedule our lives as if we were not engaged in a life-or-death struggle – gotta’ see that new movie, let’s spend a weekend up in the mountains, kid’s soccer game on Saturday, aerate the lawn, watch Dancing with the Stars – and go to bed each night expecting the next day to be no different than the last. We’re locked into a social and political time warp where nothing changes fast enough to attract our attention or cause us to cry out, “What the hell is going on?”
But every now and again, a bit of the deception gets noticed. It’s all about the details until they form a mosaic, a larger view of what’s happening.
For instance, Franklin Delano Roosevelt smoked cigarettes. That is a fact. But if you look at new versions of historic photos of him, the cigarettes have been Photoshopped out. You’ll see him like this (holding hand near face, pinching nothing) as if he had caught a fly in mid-air with his mouth half-open, waiting to do what? Pop it in? Give it a stern talking-to? He smoked. But THEY want to erase the past and ensure that your children don’t see the original photo and think, “Smoking’s cool!”
Or…
(continued)