Foxes are known as tricksters through myth, lore and legend over the ages, all over the world. Foxes can be tricksters for both playful fun and for survival. And under the “it takes one to know one” idiom foxes can quickly spot magicians and their tricks.
And magicians can quickly spot other tricksters. A name synonymous with Magic, Harry Houdini, spent the final years of his life campaigning against fraudulent psychics and fortune tellers. Spiritualists and mediums had devotees and public supporters, including many powerful and influential leaders. Mary Lincoln even held seances in the White House. Seances continued in the White House even into the Coolidge administration. A medical doctor who created the character of Sherlock Holmes was a leading Spiritualist.
Houdini went after mediums and Spiritualists with all of his conviction and time, even helped focus the attention of Congress on them, believing they were dangerous frauds, preying on vulnerable people. He wrote a pamphlet, Houdini Exposes the Tricks, and said, “the more highly educated a man is along certain lines, the easier he is to dupe,” and “It takes a flim-flammer to catch a flim-flammer.” Houdini was a trickster. Who spotted the tricks.
Freedom Fox studied under one of the best tricksters in the United States, perhaps the world. Linguistic trickery. Propaganda in the media trickery. Highly trained and educated in communications, political science, social and behavioral science. Narrative crafting. Illusions spun by words and symbols, appeals to known human psychological traits. Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Jamieson is a purveyor of government-sanctioned mis- and disinformation. One of the authors and propagators of the Russia! Russia! Russia! 2016 election interference stories.
You’ll find her work and expertise on display at the center of the national news stories, with a strong focus on science reporting:
“Kathleen Hall Jamieson is a communications scholar recognized for her work debunking misinformation about science, politics and policy and her studies of the effects of political advertising, debates, news and US presidential campaigns. She has focused as well on identifying ways of overcoming biased processing of science knowledge and improving the integrity of scientific publications.”
“Kathleen Hall Jamieson is interested in the ways that the language, content, format, structure and framing of messages affect attitudes and behavior.”
“Jamieson also has shown that the conventionalized structures of scientific reporting and the resulting news coverage of it can mislead the public about the nature of scientific practice, open science to compelling but unwarranted criticism, and undermine trust in science.”
Or what passes as science reporting today. Because while Jamieson is a co-founder of FactCheck.org and SciCheck.org, she is a skilled practitioner of linguistic trickery, psychological manipulation and coercion, behavioral science-informed deceptive messaging, aka propaganda herself. She is a master propagandist. With a very keen eye and understanding of the art and science of propaganda. And her position in academia as Director of U Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center and on national boards does not make her a mere observer and analyst of the art and science of information illusions. She crafts it, propagates it, and assists the censorship of information that challenges her propaganda.
“Kathleen Hall Jamieson employs rhetorical analysis, surveys, and experiments to understand campaign communication, the science of science communication, and ways to blunt misinformation and conspiracy theories.”
Jamieson is on the front lines of “combating misinformation.” And though she’s not as bad as many who favor full censorship of social media (or at least wasn’t in 2020, times change quickly these days) she favored flagging social media [what about Big Media, alternative media?] to debunk what is identified as misinformation:
“So the question becomes, who do you trust to decide what constitutes misinformation? When it comes to political speech [what about health speech?], I’d prefer not to have the decision on who gets access to speech that reaches the public be in the hands of some corporate entity. I’d be much more comfortable with the idea that the corporate entity [what about government itself?] incentivizes a process by which there is aggressive fact-checking of everything that is on its site, and people are able to see the fact-checking as they see the content.”
Jamieson taught Freedom Fox a lot about her field long before she held these positions. Teaching a trickster the tricks of the magic of deception and manipulating minds of an entire population through coordinated mass media campaigns. To change beliefs, ideas, values…and votes. Linguistic and symbolic mind tricks wielded by those who imagine themselves a sophisticated ruling elite. Sorcerers in service to would-be kings and tyrants. Modern day Merlins and Rasputin’s.
Freedom Fox didn’t go on to become a propaganda magician after learning from Jamieson. Learning how magic tricks are done doesn’t make one a skilled magician, that would take lots and lots of practice to go with it. But a trickster knows how to spot the tricks of another trickster better than most, especially when they’ve seen many of the tricks from the eyes of a magician before.
A great resource is online that helps others learn how to spot the tricks, too. Behavioral Scientist and communications expert David Charalambous from the UK has put together a tremendous resource for learning the magician’s tricks (5:00). He founded ReachingPeople.net which has a library of videos and tools that teach how our minds work in ways that skilled propagandists like Jamieson exploit to produce the type of mass transformation of society that we’ve experienced since 2020. He also has a YouTube Channel. And most importantly, he gives very useful information we need to help us reach minds of our friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, community that have been subjected to the most sophisticated psychological global operation ever deployed on humanity.
How to Awaken Your Friends and Family (21:38)
World Council for Health - Challenging the Narrative (1:20:29)
He has a video summary (14:42) of the UK's MINDSPACE document which is the behavioral science template for a national psychological manipulation and coercion strategic plan to help the UK government get more compliance with their laws, rules, mandates and objectives using psychological trickery.
Some selected videos from the library:
The Top 6 Tools of Manipulation Used by the Media (4:13)
Full Magician’s Tricks video (34:34)
How a Movement is Hijacked (29:12)
Perception (37:56)
Navigating Resistance (39:18)
Weapons of Mass Communication (42:43)
Powerful Messaging Template (51:51)
Don’t Get Angry, Get Effective (30:59)
How Do People Sleepwalk Into Control (25:15)
How the Public Are Programmed (15:59)
How the Public Are Programmed, Part 2 (22:28)
How the Public Are Programmed, Part 3 Tel-Lie-Vision (20:28)
How the So-Called “Elites” Influence the World, Part 1 (19:52)
These are great videos to help teach you the tricks that the elite magicians practice on the masses today in order to make them more compliant and obedient. They would rather we possess “internal discipline” of “doing the right thing” that authorities tell us we must do instead of having to be “disciplined” by police force as discussed in The Devious Use of Infectious Disease to Transform a Society was done in Maoist China. Making us all believe it is wrong to question authority, no matter how wrong it is or how bad the results are, for us, our communities, our society, blind obedience as a virtuous act. Psychological magician’s tricks deployed to Manufacture Consent to Totalitarianism.
Freedom Fox knows that time is not on our side. We can’t just wait for people to wake up on their own. It’s simply not happening quickly enough that way. Many still cling to falsehoods, just wanting to move on without learning the truth. We must engage them in ways that they will hear us, that we can reach them, avoiding conflict with the spell-breaking tools and methods Charalambous describes. Now. Not tomorrow. We’ve been reminded of how vulnerable our constitutional freedoms are since 2020, and the words of Ronald Reagan in his famous 1964 speech ring as true now as they rang six decades ago. Truer. We need to break the sorcerer’s spells so our fellow citizens choose wisely in this time for choosing.
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream…It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men [and foxes!] were free.”
Ronald Reagan
Knowing the tricks is one thing. It will take lots of practice, practice, practice to get good enough at them to help the many people of the world break the spell they are still under. There are more of us in the masses than there are of an “elite.” We just have to be like Houdini and help more people we care about come out from under the spells of sorcerers like Jamieson. And a practiced trickster like Charalambous to help teach the tricks to others when the world is under the spell of magicians. Who Foxes know.
Good stuff!
I've been wondering of late whether Reagan was a test subject for what aluminum does to the brain...
Thanks for these links and good points!
I agree about time and the lack of it-- it feels like we must step up our efforts to sound the alarm.
(And-- plurals do not get apostrophes, I'm a compulsive editor... Merlins, many of him; Merlin's, something belonging to Merlin.)
Excellent post FF, thank you.